American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold Read online

  “Disgraceful,” her mother said grimly. Maude McGregor’s skirt came down to her ankle, as her skirts had done for as long as Mary could remember. But this woman showed off half her legs, or so it seemed.

  “If it’s the style, Ma—” Julia began, her voice hesitant.

  “No.” Her mother hesitated not at all. “I don’t care what the style is. No decent woman would wear anything like that. No daughter of mine will.” Several women in Rosenfeld wore dresses and skirts that short. Were they all scarlet? Mary didn’t know, but she wouldn’t have been surprised.

  Her mother had to pull off the main street to find a place to hitch the wagon. As Maude McGregor got down to give the horse the feed bag, Mary pointed to a signboard plastered to a wall. “Ma, what’s a Bijou?” She knew she was probably mispronouncing the unfamiliar word.

  “It’s a motion-picture house,” her mother answered after reading some of the small print under the big name.

  “A motion-picture house? In Rosenfeld?” Mary and Julia exclaimed together. Julia went on, “This is the big city,” while Mary asked, “Can we go see something, Ma? Can we, please?” She knew she sounded like a wheedling little girl, but she couldn’t help it.

  “I don’t know.” Here her mother wavered, where she’d been very sure about skirts. “The flyer says it costs a quarter each to get in, and seventy-five cents is a lot of money.”

  “We’d only do it once, Ma. It’s not like we come here every day,” Mary said, wheedling harder than ever.

  Julia added, “It’s a new business in town. It’s not like those start up every day, either.”

  “Well—all right,” Maude McGregor said. Mary clapped her hands. “But only this once, understand? You pester me about it every time we come to town and you’ll find out your backsides aren’t too big to switch.”

  “We promise, Ma,” Mary and Julia chorused. They looked at each other and winked. They’d won! That didn’t happen very often.

  A line snaked toward the Bijou’s box office. A lot of the people in the line were American soldiers. Mary ignored them. The soldiers ignored her, too, though they plainly noticed her older sister and her mother. Julia and Maude McGregor paid no attention to the men in green-gray.

  Three quarters slapped down on the counter. Mary heard her mother sigh. The fellow behind the counter peeled three tickets off an enormous roll and handed them to her mother. Another young man at the door importantly tore the tickets in two. Inside the theater, the smell of buttered popcorn almost drove Mary mad. Along with the popcorn, the girl behind the counter sold lemonade and more different kinds of candy than Henry Gibbon carried in his general store.

  Maude McGregor led Mary and Julia past such temptations and into the theater itself. Both her daughters let out pitiful, piteous sighs. She took no notice of them. She was made of stern stuff.

  The maroon velvet chairs inside the theater swung down when you put your weight on them. That proved entertaining enough to take Mary’s mind off candy, at least for a little while. A couple of rows in front of her, a little boy bounced up and down, up and down, up and down. She wanted to spank him. Before too long, his father did.

  Without warning, the lights went dim. A man at a piano—a man Mary hadn’t noticed up till then—began to play melodramatic music. The curtains slid back from an enormous screen. Some sort of machine behind her began making noise: the projector. Then the screen filled with light, and she forgot everything else.

  “It’s . . . photographs come to life,” she whispered to Julia. Her sister nodded, but never took her eyes away from the screen. Mary didn’t, either. Those enormous, moving black-and-white people up there held her mesmerized.

  NEWS OF THE WORLD, a headline read, briefly interrupting the motion. Then she saw a man in a silly uniform and an even sillier hat waving to soldiers marching past. KAISER WILHELM REVIEWS TROOPS RETURNING FROM OCCUPIED PARTS OF FRANCE, another headline explained.

  Swarthy men, many of them wearing big black mustaches, fired rifles and machine guns at one another in a country that looked dry and hot. SCENES FROM THE CIVIL WAR IN THE EMPIRE OF MEXICO, the caption said. Mary stared, entranced. She’d never been farther from the farm than Rosenfeld, but here was the whole world in front of her eyes.

  Two men in suits crossed a bridge from opposite sides and shook hands. That was labeled, PRESIDENT OF USA, PREMIER OF QUEBEC MEET IN FRIENDSHIP. All of a sudden, Mary wasn’t so sure she wanted the whole world in front of her eyes.

  And then she saw ruined city blocks, explosions, diving aeroplanes with machine guns blazing, glum survivors, grim prisoners with hands in the air, overturned motorcars and dead bodies lying in the street, and other bodies swinging from a gallows. SCENES FROM THE REBELLION IN CANADA, the explanatory sign said. She hadn’t seen much war. It had swept through Rosenfeld and stayed to the north. And she’d only been a little girl then. She gulped. This was what she wanted, was it?

  Not even the main feature, a melodrama with a car chase, a chase through and on top of the cars of a train, and an astonishingly handsome leading man who wed the astonishingly beautiful leading lady and gave her a tender kiss just before the lights came back up, could take all those images of devastation out of her mind.

  “That’s what they’re doing to our country,” she said as she and her mother and sister filed out of the theater. “They want us to know it, too.”

  “They want us to be afraid,” Julia said.

  “They know how to get what they want, too,” Maude McGregor said grimly. “Come on. Let’s buy what we need and get back to the farm.”

  They were on their way to Henry Gibbon’s general store when Mary saw a SCENE FROM THE REBELLION IN CANADA that wasn’t what the Americans who’d made and approved the moving picture had in mind. Through the streets of Rosenfeld came a column of prisoners, on their way to the train station from God only knew where. They were scrawny and hollow-eyed and wore only rags. They must have been some of the last men captured, for most of the rebels had given up weeks, even a couple of months, before. The McGregors bathed once a week or so, like most farm families; Mary was used to strong odors. The stench that came from the prisoners made her stomach want to turn over.

  One of the men started to sing “God Save the King.” An American guard in green-gray hit him in the head with a rifle butt. Blood streamed down his face. The guard laughed. The prisoner stumbled on. Tears stung Mary’s eyes. She didn’t let them fall. She kept her face still and vowed . . . remembrance.

  Abner Dowling looked down at what had been a plate of ham and fried potatoes. “By God, that was good,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” said his adjutant, a dapper young captain named Angelo Toricelli. He had only about half of Dowling’s girth, but he’d worked similar execution on a beefsteak and a couple of baked spuds.

  “Nothing wrong with the way the Mormons cook,” Dowling said, blotting his lips on his napkin.

  “No, sir,” Captain Toricelli agreed.

  Having spent a lot of time as an adjutant, Dowling recognized the younger man’s resigned tone, though he was resolved not to do so much to deserve resigned agreement as his own cross, General Custer, had done. Thinking of a cross made him suspect he knew what was bothering Toricelli. “Does it bother you that I eat so much, Captain?”

  One of Toricelli’s eyebrows twitched in surprise. “Not . . . really, sir,” he said after a moment. “It’s none of my business. I would never ask anyone to be anything he’s not.”

  “Interesting way to put it,” Dowling remarked. Then he laughed, which set several of his chins jiggling. Laugh or not, though, he changed the subject: “How do you like being a gentile in Utah? Me, I think it’s pretty funny.”

  “The Mormons can say we’re gentiles,” Toricelli answered. “You can go around saying all sorts of things. That doesn’t mean they’re true.”

  “I suppose not.” Dowling left a silver dollar on the table to cover their meals. He got to his feet. So did Toricelli, who hurried to open the r
estaurant’s front door for him. That was one of the things adjutants were for, as Dowling knew only too well.

  “Pretty day,” Toricelli remarked as they came out onto the street.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Dowling said. Spring was in the air. Snow had retreated up the slopes of the Wasatch Mountains to the east. Sea gulls wheeled overhead, which Dowling never failed to find strange so far inland. And, as always, sounds of building filled the air.

  Salt Lake City had surrendered to U.S. forces nine years before. Dowling had seen photographs of it just after the Mormon rebels finally yielded to superior force. They’d fought till they couldn’t fight any more. The city had looked more like the mountains of the moon than anything that sprang from human hands and minds. Hardly one stone remained atop another. The Mormons had simmered resentfully under the harsh treatment they’d got from U.S. authorities ever since the Second Mexican War. When they rose during the Great War, they’d done a lot more than simmer.

  Now . . . Now, on the outside, everything here seemed calm. Salt Lake City—and Provo to the south and Ogden to the north—were three of the newest, shiniest towns in the USA. Most of the rubble had been cleared away. Most of the Mormons who’d survived the uprising were getting on with their lives. On the surface, Utah seemed much like any other state. When Dowling’s train first brought him to Salt Lake City, he’d wondered if his presence, if the U.S. Army’s presence, was necessary.

  He’d been here more than a year now. He no longer wondered. As he and Toricelli walked east along South Temple Street towards Army headquarters, no fewer than three people—two men and a woman—shouted “Murderer!” at them: one from a second-story window, one from behind them, and one from a passing Ford.

  Toricelli eyed the motorcar as it sped away, then muttered something pungent that might not have been English under his breath. “I wasn’t able to read the license plate,” he said. “If I had, we could have tracked that son of a bitch down.”

  “What difference does it make?” Dowling said. “They all feel that way about us. One more, one less—so what?”

  “It makes a lot of difference, sir,” his adjutant said earnestly. “Yes, they’re going to hate us, but they need to fear us, too. Otherwise, they start up again, and we did all that for nothing.” To show what he meant by that, he waved across South Temple Street to Temple Square.

  No rebuilding there. By order of the military administration, the Mormon Tabernacle and the Temple and the other great buildings of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints remained as they had fallen during the Federal conquest of Salt Lake City: another reminder to the locals of the cost of rising against the United States. Rattlesnakes dwelt among the tumbled stones. They were the least the occupiers had to worry about.

  Colonel Dowling murmured a few lines from Shelley:

  ” ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

  Nothing besides remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

  Angelo Toricelli gave him a quizzical look. “I’ve heard other officers recite that poem, sir.”

  “Have you? Well, I’m not surprised,” Dowling said. Even fallen, the gray granite Temple inspired awe. A gilded copper statue of the angel Moroni had topped the tallest spire, which the Mormons had used as an observation post till U.S. artillery knocked it down. No American soldiers had ever found a trace of that statue. Persistent rumor said the Mormons had spirited away its wreckage and venerated it as a holy relic, as the Crusaders had venerated pieces of the True Cross. Dowling didn’t know about that. He did know there was an enormous reward for information leading to the capture of the statue, or of any significant part of it. No one had ever collected. No one had ever tried to collect.

  At the corner of Temple and Main, Captain Toricelli said, “You want to be careful crossing, sir. For some reason or other, Mormons in motorcars have a devil of a time seeing soldiers.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed that,” Dowling agreed. His hand fell to the grip of the .45 on his hip. Most places, an officer’s pistol was a formality almost as archaic as a sword. Even more than in occupied Canada, Dowling felt the need for a weapon here.

  Soldiers in machine-gun emplacements protected by reinforced concrete and barbed wire surrounded U.S. Army headquarters in Salt Lake City. Sentries carefully checked Dowling and Toricelli’s identification cards. They’d discovered the unfortunate consequences of not checking such things. The Mormons had Army uniforms they’d taken during the Great War, and some of them would kill even at the cost of their own lives. Not much news of such assassinations had got out of Utah, but that made them no less real.

  “Oh—Colonel Dowling,” a soldier said as Dowling walked down the hall to his office. “General Pershing is looking for you, sir.”

  “Is he? Well, he’s just about to find me, then.” Dowling turned to his adjutant. “I’ll see you in a while, Captain.”

  “Of course, sir,” Angelo Toricelli said. “I have a couple of reports to keep me busy.”

  “If you can’t stay busy in Utah, something’s wrong with you,” Dowling agreed. And off he went to see the commanding general.

  John J. Pershing was in his mid-sixties. He didn’t look younger than his years so much as tough and well-preserved for them. His jaw jutted. His gray Kaiser Bill mustache—the style was now falling out of favor with younger men—added to his bulldog appearance. His icy blue eyes seized and held Dowling. “Hello, Colonel. Take a seat. There’s coffee in the pot, if you care for some.”

  “No, thank you, sir. I’m just back from lunch,” Dowling answered.

  General Custer would have been even money or better to make some snide crack about his weight. Pershing simply nodded and got down to business: “I’m worried, Colonel Dowling. This place is like a powder keg, and I’m afraid the fuse is lit.”

  “Really, sir?” Dowling said in surprise. “I know Utah’s been a powder keg for more than forty years, but why do you think it’ll go off now? If the Mormons were going to rise against us, wouldn’t they have tried it when the Canucks did?”

  “Strategically, that makes good sense,” Pershing agreed. “But the trouble that may come here hasn’t got anything to do with what happened up in Canada. You are of course aware how we hold this state?”

  “Yes, sir: by the railroads, and by the fertile belt from Provo up to Ogden,” Dowling answered. “Past that, there’s a lot of land and not a lot of people, so we don’t worry very much.”

  “Exactly.” Pershing nodded. “We just send patrols through the desert now and again to make sure people aren’t plotting too openly.” He sighed. “Out in the desert, maybe a hundred and seventy-five miles south of here, there’s a little no-account village called Teasdale. A troop of cavalry rode through it a couple of weeks ago. The captain in command discovered several families that were pretty obviously polygamous.”

  “Uh-oh,” Dowling said.

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Pershing replied.

  Polygamy had been formally illegal in Utah since the Army occupation during the Second Mexican War. It hadn’t disappeared, though. Dowling wished it had, because, more than anything else, it got people exercised. Fearing he already knew the answer, he asked, “What did the cavalry captain do, sir?”

  “He applied the law,” Pershing said. “He arrested everyone he could catch, and he burned the offending houses to the ground.”

  “And he came out of this place alive? I’m impressed.”

  “Teasdale’s a very small town—smaller still, after he seized the polygamists,” Pershing replied. “And he is an able young man. Or he would be, if he had any sense to go with his tactical expertise. Naturally, even though this happened in the middle of nowhere, news got out right away. And, just as naturally, even a lot of Mormons who aren’t ardent polygamists are up in arms about it.”

  “No
t literally, I hope,” Dowling said.

  “So do I, Colonel. But we must be ready, just in case,” Pershing said. “I’ve asked Philadelphia to send us some barrels to use against them at need. If the War Department decides to do it instead of reprimanding me for asking for something that costs money, I’m going to put you in charge of them. You became something of an expert on barrels, didn’t you, serving under General Custer and with Colonel Morrell during the war?”

  I became an expert on not getting myself court-martialed on account of barrels, is what I became, Dowling thought. Custer wanted to use them against War Department doctrine, and I had to cover for him. Does that make me an expert? Aloud, he answered, “I’ll do whatever I can, sir.”

  “I’m sure of it,” Pershing said. “This may all turn out to be so much moonshine, you understand. The War Department may need a real rising from the Mormons before they send in the weapons that would have overawed them and stopped the rising in its tracks. And the powers that be may not send us anything even in case of rebellion. They’re in a cheese-paring mood back there, sure enough. They’ve stopped spending any money on improving barrels, you know.”

  “Yes, I do know that,” Dowling replied. “I don’t like it.”

  “Who would, with a brain in his head?” Pershing said. “But soldiers don’t make policy. We only carry it out, and get blamed when it goes wrong. I wonder how fast and how well the Confederate States are rearming.”

  “They aren’t supposed to be doing anything of the sort, sir,” Dowling said.

  Pershing tossed his head, like a horse bedeviled by flies. “I know that, Colonel. I wonder anyway.”