Blood and Iron Read online

  “Closest part of the Confederate States, anyhow, not that that’s saying much,” Dr. O’Doull replied.

  Charles said nothing, which was not surprising. Georges said nothing, which was an astonishment. Both young men puffed happy clouds. So did Lucien. He could not recall the last time he’d been more content, at least outside the marriage bed.

  And then another astonishment took place: Nicole came out of the kitchen, followed by Marie and Susanne and Denise and Jeanne. Galtier did not find that an astonishment of the pleasant sort; custom was that the women let their menfolk linger over liquor and tobacco. He reckoned that a good custom, one in no need of breaking. “What’s this?” he asked. “A parade?”

  “No, cher papa, only something I have to tell you—something I have to tell everyone,” Nicole said. “Everyone except Leonard, that is, for he knows.” Even by the ruddy light of kerosene lamps, Lucien could see her blush. He knew then what was coming, knew it before she spoke: “Cher papa, cher maman, you will be grandparents next year.”

  “A grandfather?” Lucien exclaimed. Even knowing what was coming, he found himself surprised. But I am too young to be a grandfather! he wanted to cry. Foolishness, of course: if he had a married daughter, he was not too young to be a grandfather. Still, he felt as if he were.

  He looked down at his hands, gnarled and scarred and callused by years of farm work, tanned by the sun when there was sun, roughened by the wind and the snow. They were not the hands of a man too young to be a grandfather.

  From them, he looked to Marie. She, without any possible doubt, was too young to be a grandmother. But her beaming face said she didn’t think so. It also said she looked forward to the role.

  “What of me?” Georges said with fine mock anger. “I will be an uncle next year, but do you say one word about that? No! You leave it to me to figure out for myself. Is that fair? Is that just?”

  Nicole said, “What you will be next year is what you are this year and what you have always been: a nuisance.”

  “Thank you.” Georges nodded, as at a great compliment.

  “We’ll be aunts,” Susanne and Denise and Jeanne chorused. Jeanne, who was the youngest of them, added, “I can’t wait!”

  “You’ll have to,” Nicole said. “I am not ready to have the baby just yet.”

  Lucien got up from his chair and embraced his daughter. “Congratulations,” he said. “May all be well. May all be well with you always.” He let her go and shook his son-in-law’s hand. “Who would have thought I would have a grandchild named O’Doull?”

  The young doctor’s eyes twinkled. “See what you get for letting your daughter go to work in the American hospital?”

  “At the time,” Galtier said gravely, “I did not think that a good idea. Perhaps I was right.” Leonard O’Doull just grinned at him. He had to wait for Nicole to let out an irate squawk before he could go on, “Perhaps, too, I was wrong. But only perhaps, mind you.” Someone—he did not see who—had filled his glass with applejack again. If it was full, it needed emptying. Before the war, he’d never imagined a half-American grandchild. Now, though, he discovered he liked the idea.

  Jonathan Moss sat in a coffeehouse not far outside the Northwestern University campus. A breeze from Lake Michigan ruffled his light brown hair. An internal breeze ruffled his thoughts.

  “What’s the matter, Johnny my boy?” asked his companion at the table, a curly-haired fellow named Fred Sandburg. “You look like you’ve got bullets whizzing past your head again.”

  Sandburg had served on the Roanoke front in Virginia, helping to take the riverside town of Big Lick and the nearby iron mines away from the Confederate States. That had been some of the worst fighting of the whole war. He knew all about bullets flying past his head. He had a Purple Heart with an oak-leaf cluster to show how much he knew.

  He knew more about it than did Jonathan Moss, and Moss would have been the first to admit as much. He’d been a flier up in Ontario through the fighting, and never had been shot. When the war was new, he’d thought of himself as a cavalier, meeting other cavaliers in single combat. Three years of flying had convinced him he was as much a gear in a killing machine as an infantryman in the mud. Only the pay and the view and the hours were better.

  Moss sipped at his coffee. Conversation buzzed in the background. It was the sort of coffeehouse where vast issues were hashed out and settled every day: the nature of the universe, the effect of the war on the history of the world, whether the waitress would go home with the college kid who’d propositioned her. Vast issues whirled through Moss’ head, too.

  “I’m trying to sort out whether I really give a damn about studying the law,” he said.

  “Ah,” said Sandburg, who was also in law school. “You finished your first year before the war started, same as I did, right?”

  “You know I did,” Moss answered. “Then, it seemed important. Now…I have a tough time caring now. I guess the war made me look at the scale of things differently, if you know what I mean. I mean, in the big picture, what difference does it make whether or not I hang out my shingle and start drafting wills for wheat traders with more money than sense?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t make any difference in the big picture,” his friend said. “It sure as hell does make a difference in the way your life goes. Don’t you care about that? Me, I want to be in a spot where nobody can make me pick up a Springfield for the rest of my days.”

  “Something to that, no doubt about it,” Moss admitted. He finished his coffee and waved to the waitress for another cup. Had she said she would go home with the student or she wouldn’t? Try as he would, Moss couldn’t tell. “But I have trouble giving a damn. I have trouble giving a damn about almost everything.”

  “Aha!” Fred Sandburg stabbed out a forefinger. He would make a formidable attorney: he listened. “Almost everything, eh? All right, Johnny my boy, what do you give a damn about?”

  Suddenly, Moss wished the coffee the waitress brought were whiskey. In the officers’ clubs during the war, he’d had plenty of high-proof lubrication against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He’d needed it, too. He needed it now, needed it and didn’t have it. At last, slowly, he said, “Up in Ontario, in Canada, there was this girl, this woman…” He ran out of steam.

  “Oho!” Sandburg laid that forefinger by the side of his nose. “Was she pretty? Was she built?” His hands described an hourglass in the air.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Moss answered, a puzzled tone in his voice: he wasn’t really quite sure. “She was…interesting.” He nodded. That was the right word. He repeated it: “Interesting.”

  “Hell with whether she was interesting,” said Sandburg, a relentlessly practical man. “Was she interested?”

  “In me?” Moss laughed. “Only to spit in my eye. Her name’s Laura Secord. She’s somehow related to the original who had the same name a hundred years ago, and played Paul Revere against the USA in the War of 1812. She hates Americans. She told me where to head in I don’t know how many times. Besides,” he added morosely, “she’s got a husband.”

  “Oh, bully.” Fred Sandburg made silent, sardonic clapping motions. “You sure know how to pick ’em, don’t you?”

  “Sure do,” Moss said. “Last time I saw her was just after the Canucks surrendered. I drove over from Orangeville, where our last aerodrome was, back to this little town called Arthur, where it had been. She was keeping a farm going there. She didn’t know whether her husband was alive or dead. She hadn’t heard from him in a long time—he was in the Canadian Army. But everything would be ready for him if he came down the road.”

  “So if she was keeping the home fires burning for him, what did she say to you?” Sandburg asked.

  Moss’ face heated at the memory. “She told me she never wanted to set eyes on me again. She told me she wished the Canucks had shot me down. She told me she wished her husband had fired the bullet that shot me down. She told me she hoped the train I took back to the USA went
off the rails and smashed to bits. After that, she got angry.”

  Fred Sandburg stared, then started to guffaw. “And you call this broad interesting? Jesus Christ, Johnny my boy, you can go down to New Mexico and marry a rattlesnake and do it cheaper. You’ll live happier, too.”

  “Maybe,” Moss said. “Probably, even.” His grin lifted up only one corner of his mouth, making it more grimace than smile. “But I can’t get her out of my mind.”

  Sandburg was just warming to his theme: “Or you could take to drinking absinthe to forget, or smoking cigarettes doped with opium or hashish. Then if she ever saw you again, she’d take pity on you because you were so pale and wasted and decadent-looking, and clutch you to her bosom.” He leaned forward and made as if to clutch Moss to his bosom.

  “Funny,” Moss said, evading him. “Funny like a crutch.” With so many veterans on one crutch or two these days, the cliché had taken on fresh life.

  “All right, all right,” Sandburg said. “But what are you going to do, moon about this woman the rest of your life? When you have grandchildren, you can talk about her the way fishermen go on: the one that got away. You’re probably better off, you know. You’re almost sure to be better off.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Moss said. “I’ve been telling myself the same thing ever since I got back to the States. Trouble is, I can’t make myself believe it.”

  “What are you going to do, then? Head back up to wherever it was in Canada you said she lived?” Sandburg shook his head. “That sounds like an awful lot of trouble to go through to have some girl tell you to go to hell twice.” He glanced over toward the waitress, a pert brunette. “She’ll probably tell you to go to hell right here. And if she doesn’t, what does this Canuck gal have that she’s missing? They’re all the same when the lamp goes out.”

  “I never thought so,” Moss said. He’d never thought of going back to Arthur, Ontario, again, either, not seriously. In musing tones, he went on, “Maybe I should. I’d get her out of my system, anyhow.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Sandburg raised his coffee mug in salute. “The hell with courses. The hell with examinations. If you can only see this woman who hates your guts one more time, you’ll die happy. I expect they’ll make a moving picture about it, and every organ player in the country can milk the minor chords for all they’re worth.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Moss said. But the more his friend ridiculed the idea, the more it appealed to him. If he felt like going up to Ontario, he could do that, provided the occupation authorities didn’t give him any trouble. Had he not come from a family with money, he wouldn’t have been studying law at Northwestern in the first place. Leaving for a semester wouldn’t be hard.

  He wondered what his parents would say. Variations on the theme of You’re out of your mind occurred to him. Maybe he’d be wiser just to tell them he was going up to visit someone he’d met during the war, without going into too many details. They might think he meant an Army buddy. He’d have a lot less to explain afterwards if he came home unsuccessful.

  He was not a fool. I’m not a fool except about this, he thought. No matter how foolish he was when he thought about Laura Secord, he understood the odds weren’t in his favor. The odds weren’t always in his favor when he played poker, either. Of course, he generally lost money when he played poker, which meant he didn’t play it very often.

  “Come on,” Sandburg said after a look at his pocket watch. “We’ve got Bricker’s lecture on courtroom defense and cross-examination tactics to go to, and he’s worth listening to. Besides, he hasn’t lost a case in years, and if that doesn’t prove he knows what he’s talking about, I don’t know what would.”

  Moss laid a quarter on the table to cover his two cups of coffee. The waitress brought back fifteen cents’ change; he left her a nickel tip. As he was heading out the door, he said, “I’m glad we’re not down at Clemson or one of those other Confederate universities. If we were, we’d be paying five bucks for coffee, not five cents.”

  “Yeah, but we’d be somewhere close to millionaires—in Confederate dollars, anyhow,” Fred Sandburg said. He shook his head. “Before the war, their dollar was at par with ours. God only knows when it will be again.”

  “They’re giving us their specie and letting the printing presses run for themselves,” Moss said. “You let that go on for a while and pretty soon you take five pounds of bills to the grocery store and trade ’em for five pounds of beans.”

  “Either that or the bills start getting crowded on account of all the extra zeros they have to put on each one,” Sandburg agreed. He checked his watch again. “Come on. Shake a leg. We’re going to be late.”

  By shaking a leg, they got to Swift Hall on time. Moss liked the campus, with its buildings scattered among emerald-green lawns and the deeper tone of trees. Lake Michigan beyond could almost have been the sea.

  As Fred Sandburg had said, Professor Bricker was an impressive lecturer. Not only was he a strikingly handsome man, with broad shoulders and a thick head of black hair, he also had a deep and musical voice and a presence an actor might have envied. Moss could see how juries would believe anything he said; no wonder he’d been a burr under the saddle of local district attorneys for years.

  And yet, however fine a lecturer Bricker was, Jonathan Moss had trouble paying attention to him today. His thoughts kept wandering up to Canada, wondering what Laura Secord was doing, wondering what she would say when she saw him again.

  He would find out. No doubt that was stupid. He recognized as much. But he was sure—almost sure—he’d do it anyway.

  Anne Colleton’s broker looked like the very unhappy man he was. “It was good of you to come up to Columbia when I asked,” he said. “I do appreciate it, believe me. I wanted to tell you in person that, as of August first, I shall no longer be able to represent you.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Whitson,” Anne said, not altogether truthfully. “Are you retiring altogether from your profession?” Whitson was not a young man, but not so old as that, either.

  “Yes, and not voluntarily,” he answered, his voice bitter. “As of that date, I shall be declaring bankruptcy to protect myself from my creditors. I doubt very much whether you or anyone else would have any use for a bankrupt broker.”

  “I’m sorry to hear of your misfortune.” But Anne could not resist getting in a shot of her own: “You might have done better if you’d invested along the lines I chose—the lines about which you had some unkind things to say when I presented them to you.”

  “Go ahead—rub it in,” Whitson muttered. Anne did not dislike him enough to do any more gloating, so she pretended not to hear. He went on, “I must admit, your ideas proved sounder than mine. I am, as I say, bankrupt, with holdings in worthless stocks. Your financial position is not as it was before the war—”

  “Whose is, in the Confederate States?” Anne asked harshly.

  “Not many folks’, I’ll tell you that,” the broker said. “But you are merely poorer than you were. In the CSA, and especially here in South Carolina, that’s an impressive accomplishment. Most plantation owners have long since gone belly up. You’re still in the fight.”

  “Who else is?” Anne asked, interested in the competition.

  “Importers,” Whitson answered. “Steel men. Petroleum men in Texas and Louisiana—they’re thriving, because Sequoyah’s gone. Some of the Sonoran copper kings: the ones whose mines the Yankees didn’t reach. But anybody who grew anything with Negro labor—cotton, tobacco, rice, sugarcane, indigo—has troubles the way a stray dog has fleas.”

  “Can’t trust ’em, not any more,” Anne said. “That’s never going to be the same again. That’s why I’ve still got Marshlands like a millstone around my neck. Who would want the place now? What would anyone do with it if he bought it?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Whitson said, “but I don’t know what that proves, either.” His mouth tightened to a thin, pale line. “The ideas I have had haven’t been
good ones.”

  “The whole country is having a rough time,” Anne said with more sympathy than she’d thought she would show. “It’s hard for anyone to prosper. We need to put some heart back into ourselves, but I don’t know how.”

  “This inflation is eating us out of house and home,” the broker said. “Before long, everybody will be a millionaire and everybody will be broke.”

  I told you so trembled on the edge of being spoken, but Anne held her tongue. She had told Whitson so, and he hadn’t listened, and now he was paying the price. Because she’d converted her holdings into currencies that still meant something in terms of gold, she’d come through pretty well. When the upturn finally arrived, she would be rich again—if she could wait long enough.

  Whitson said, “If you like, Miss Colleton, I can recommend a new broker for you. I know several very able men who—”

  Anne got to her feet. “No, thank you. I hope you will forgive me for saying so, but your recommendation does not strike me as the ideal warrant for a man’s quality.”

  Whitson bit his lip. “I deserve that.”

  “Maybe you’ll have better luck in times to come. I hope you do,” Anne said, telling more of the truth than not—she had nothing personal against the luckless broker. “I see you have all my papers here. Please give them to me now.”

  “Very well.” Whitson sighed as he handed them to her. “I should have been listening to your investment advice, not the other way round. The world has turned upside down since the end of the war.”

  “Since the beginning of the war,” Anne said. “But you’re right. The Confederate States were on top, and now we’re on the bottom. Some people are going to be content to stay on the bottom, too. Some are going to try to see how to get back on top again. What will you do, Mr. Whitson?”