American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold Read online

  “That’s better,” the U.S. officer said. “If you think we won’t open fire, you’d goddamn well better think again.”

  “You’ll never get out of this harbor if you do,” somebody called.

  The U.S. lieutenant commander had spunk. He shrugged. “Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. But if you want to start a brand new war against the United States of America, go right ahead. If you start it, we’ll finish it.”

  No one from the United States would have talked like that before the Great War. The Confederate States had been on top of the world then. No more. The Yankees had the whip hand nowadays. And people in Charleston knew it. The crowd in front of the U.S. gunboat dispersed sullenly, but it dispersed. Some of the men who walked away knuckled their eyes to hold back tears. The Confederates were a proud folk, and choking on that pride came hard.

  Potter made his way to the harbormaster’s office. That worthy, a plump man named Ambrose Spawforth, fumed about Yankee arrogance. “Those sons of bitches don’t own the world, no matter what they think,” he said.

  “You know that, and I know that, but do the damnyankees know it?” Potter answered. “I’ll tell you something else I know: the way that bastard in a blue jacket acted, he just handed the Freedom Party a raft of new votes.”

  Spawforth was normally a man with a good deal of common sense. When he said, “Well, good,” a chill ran through Clarence Potter. The harbormaster went on, “Isn’t it about time we start standing up to the USA again?”

  “That depends,” Potter said judiciously. “Standing up to them isn’t such a good idea if they go and knock us down again. Right now, they can do that, you know.”

  “Don’t I just!” Spawforth said. “We’re weaklings now. We need to get strong again. We can do it. We will do it, too.”

  “Not behind Jake Featherston.” Potter spoke with absolute conviction.

  But he didn’t impress Spawforth, no matter how certain he sounded. The fat man said, “He’ll tell the Yankees off. He’ll tell the niggers off. He’ll tell the fools in Richmond off, too. That all needs doing, every bit of it.”

  One of Potter’s eyebrows rose. “Splendid,” he said. “And what happens after he tells the Yankees off?”

  “Huh?” Plainly, that hadn’t occurred to Spawforth.

  “The likeliest thing is, they take some more of our land or they make us start paying them reparations again,” Potter said. “We aren’t strong enough to stop them, you know. Do you want another round of inflation to wipe out the currency?”

  He was—he always had been—a coldly logical man. That made it easy for him to resist, even to laugh at, Jake Featherston’s fervent speechmaking. It also made him have trouble understanding why so many people took Featherston seriously. Ambrose Spawforth was one of those people. “Well, what we need to do is get strong enough so the USA can’t kick us around any more,” he said. “The Freedom Party’s for that, too.”

  “Splendid,” Potter said again, even more sardonically than before. “We tell the United States we aim to kick them in the teeth as soon as we get the chance. I’m sure they’ll just go right ahead and let us.”

  “You’ve got the wrong attitude, you know that?” the harbormaster said. “You don’t understand the way things work.”

  What Potter understood was that you couldn’t have whatever you wanted just because you wanted it. Even if you held your breath till you turned blue, that didn’t mean you were entitled to it. As far as he could see, the Freedom Party hadn’t figured that out and didn’t want to.

  He also understood getting deeper into an argument with Spawforth would do him no good at all. The man didn’t have to hire him to snoop around the harbor. Yes, he’d been in intelligence during the war. But plenty of beady-eyed, needle-nosed men were at liberty in Charleston these days. A lot of them could do his job, and do it about as well as he did.

  And so, however much he wanted to prove to the world at large—and to Ambrose Spawforth in particular—that Spawforth was an ass, an imbecile, an idiot, he restrained himself. Instead of laying into the man, he said only, “Well, I didn’t come here to fight about politics with you, Mr. Spawforth. I came to tell you about the fellows who’re sneaking dirty moving pictures into the CSA and taking tobacco out.”

  “Tobacco? So that’s what they’re getting for that filthy stuff, is it?” Spawforth said, and Potter nodded. The harbormaster looked shrewd. “If it’s tobacco, they’re likely Yankees. I would’ve reckoned ’em some other kind of foreigners—goddamn Germans, maybe—from the girls on the films, but they don’t talk or nothin’, so I couldn’t prove it.”

  “Yes, the films are coming in from the USA. I’m sure of that.” Potter looked at Ambrose Spawforth over the tops of his spectacles. “So you’ve seen some of these moving pictures, have you?”

  The harbormaster turned red. “It was in the line of duty, damn it. Have to know what’s going on, don’t I? I’d look like a right chucklehead if I didn’t know what all was coming through Charleston harbor.”

  He had enough of a point to keep Potter from pressing him. And the veteran, in the course of his own duties, had seen some of the films himself. He didn’t think the girls looked German. They were certainly limber, though. He took some papers from his briefcase. “Here’s my report—and my bill.”

  Jonathan Moss hadn’t taken up the law to help Canadians gain justice from the U.S. occupying authorities. Such thoughts, in fact, had been as distant from his mind as the far side of the moon before the Great War started. He’d spent the whole war as an American pilot in Ontario, beginning in observation aircraft and ending in fighting scouts. He’d come through without a scratch and as an ace. Not many of the men who’d started the war with him were still there at the end. He knew exactly how lucky he was to be here these days, and not to need a cane or a hook or a patch over one eye.

  U.S. forces had planned to take Toronto within a few weeks of the war’s beginning. But the Canadians and the English had had plans of their own. The U.S. Army had taken three years to get there. Almost every inch of ground around Lake Erie from Niagara Falls to Toronto had seen shells land on it. The city itself . . .

  Having spent a lot of time shooting it up from the air, Moss knew what sort of shape Toronto had been in when the fighting finally stopped. It was far from the only Canadian place in such condition, either. Towns came back to life only little by little. Wrecked buildings got demolished, new ones went up to take their places. But the key words were little by little. Canadians, these days, didn’t have much money, and the American government was anything but interested in helping them with their troubles.

  That meant a lot of people doing the wrecking and the rebuilding weren’t Canadians at all, but fast-buck artists up from the States. That was certainly true in Berlin, where Moss had has practice. (The town had briefly been known as Empire during the war, but had reverted to its original name after the Americans finally drove out stubborn Canadian and British defenders.) Americans in conquered Canada often behaved as if the law were for other people, not for them. Sometimes the military government looked the other way or encouraged them to act like that.

  Moss had defended one Canadian’s right to reclaim a building he incontrovertibly owned—that it was the building where he’d had his office made the case especially interesting for him. Not only had he taken the case, he’d won it. That got him more such business. These days, most of his clients were Canucks. Some of his own countrymen accused him of being more Canadian than the Canadians. He took it as praise, though doubting they meant it that way.

  And, when Saturday rolled around and the courts closed till the following Monday, he got into his powerful Bucephalus and roared off to the west. The motorcar did more to prove his family had money than to prove he did. The road to the little town of Arthur proved nobody in the province of Ontario had much money to set things to rights.

  What had been shell holes in ground torn down to the bone were now ponds or simply grassy dimples in fertile
soil. Rain and ice and grass and bushes softened the outlines of the trenches that had furrowed the countryside like scourge marks on a bare back. Even the ugly lumps of concrete that marked machine-gun nests and larger fortifications were beginning to soften with the passage of time, weathering and getting a coating of moss. Though cities were slow in recovering, the farmland in the countryside was back in business. Several trucks hauling broken concrete and rusted barbed wire back toward scrap dealers in Berlin or Toronto passed Moss on the opposite side of the road.

  Here and there, fresh barbed wire stayed up: not in the thickets of the stuff used during the war, but single, sometimes double, strands. Signboards showed a skull and crossbones and a two-word warning in big red letters: DANGER! MINES! How long will those mines stay in the ground? Moss wondered.

  From Berlin over to Arthur was about thirty miles. Even with his powerful automobile, Moss needed almost an hour and a half to get to the little farm outside of Arthur. That wasn’t the Bucephalus’ fault, but the road’s—especially after rains like the ones they’d had a couple of days earlier, it was truly appalling.

  His squadron had been stationed at an aerodrome only a mile or so from this little farm. It had been stationed here for a long time; the front hadn’t moved fast enough to make frequent relocations necessary. And so Jonathan Moss, wandering the countryside in search of whatever—and whomever—he might find, had got to know a woman whose maiden name, she’d bragged, was Laura Secord.

  She was named for a relative who’d made herself famous during the War of 1812, warning that the Americans were coming in much the same way as Paul Revere had warned that the British were coming during the Revolution. If that hadn’t been enough to make her a Canadian patriot, she’d been married to a soldier who was either missing or captured.

  She hadn’t wanted to look at Jonathan. He’d certainly wanted to look at her. She was tall and blond and shapely and pretty—and she was more of a man than most of the men he knew. She could take care of herself. In fact, she insisted on taking care of herself. He’d come back right after the war ended. Her husband hadn’t. She sent him off with a flea in his ear anyhow.

  But, when she was desperate for money to keep from being taxed off the farm, she’d written to him while he was in law school. He’d lent it to her. That had helped ease him into her good graces, though she’d paid back every dime. Helping that fellow over in Berlin regain his building had done far more. Any practical-minded American would say what happened mattered more than how it happened. Now . . .

  Now, when Moss pulled onto the track that led from the road to her farmhouse and barn, he squeezed the bulb on the motorcar’s horn. The raucous noise made a cow look up from the long, green grass it was cropping. The cow didn’t act too startled. It had heard that noise before.

  So had Laura Secord. Moss stopped the automobile just in front of her house. She came toward him, nodding a greeting. She carried a headless chicken, still dripping blood, by the feet. A hatchet was buried in a red-stained stump that did duty for a chopping block.

  “Hello, Yank,” she said, and held up the chicken. “Once I settle her, she’ll make us a fine stew. Her laying’s down, so I don’t care about culling her.”

  “Suits me,” Moss said. “How have you been?”

  “Not bad,” she replied.

  By a year’s custom, they were decorous with each other as long as they stayed outside, which made Moss want to hurry into the farmhouse. But this . . . Moss frowned. She sounded more—or rather, less—than merely decorous. He asked, “Is something wrong?”

  She didn’t answer right away. When she did, all she said was, “We can talk about it a little later, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure. Whatever you want.” Moss didn’t see what else he could say. He wondered if he’d done something to put her nose out of joint. He didn’t think so, but how could a mere male—worse, an American male—know for sure?

  When they went inside, she gutted the chicken and threw the offal out for the farm cats, which were the wildest beasts Moss had ever known. She plucked the carcass with automatic competence, hardly looking at what her hands were doing. Then she got a fire going in the stove, cut up the bird, threw it in a pot with carrots and onions and potatoes and a cabbage, and put it over the fire to cook.

  As soon as she’d got the chicken stew going, he expected her to throw herself into his arms. That was how things had gone since they became lovers. When they got inside the farmhouse, all bets were off. The first time they’d gone to bed together, they hadn’t gone to bed. He’d taken her on the kitchen floor. If she hadn’t got splinters in her behind, it wasn’t because he hadn’t rammed her against the floorboards.

  Today, though, she shook her head when he took a step toward her. “We need to talk,” she said.

  “What about?” Moss asked with a sinking feeling worse than any he’d known while diving to escape an enemy pilot. Whenever a woman said something like that, the first careless joy of two people as a couple was over.

  “Come into the parlor,” Laura Secord told him. That surprised him, too; she hardly ever used the impressive-looking room. He’d walked past it on the way to the stairs that led to her bedroom, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually been inside it. What could he do now, though, but nod and let her lead the way?

  At her gesture, he sat down on the sofa. The upholstery crackled under his weight; the sofa wasn’t used to working. On the table in front of the sofa stood a framed photograph of her late husband in Canadian uniform. Moss had resolutely forgotten his surname; thinking of Laura by her maiden name made it easier for him to forget the dead man altogether. But how could you forget someone whose image stared at you out of eyes that looked hard and dangerous?

  The chair in which Laura Secord sat also made noises that suggested it wasn’t used to having anyone actually sit in it. She looked at Moss, but didn’t say anything. “You were the one who wanted to talk,” he reminded her. “I asked you once, what about?”

  She bit her lip and looked away. Something close to a sob burst from her. She’s going to send me packing, Moss thought with sudden sick certainty. She can’t stand a damn Yank rumpling her drawers any more, no matter how much she likes it. What do I do then? he wondered, panic somewhere not far under the surface of his mind. He’d spent years alternately chasing her and trying—always without much luck—to get her out of his mind. Now that he’d finally got her, finally found out just how much woman she was, losing her was the last thing he wanted. But two had to say yes. One was plenty for no.

  “What is it?” he said again, like a man bracing himself for the dentist’s drill. “After this buildup, don’t you think you’d better tell me?”

  Laura nodded jerkily. But then, instead of talking, she sprang up to light a kerosene lamp. The yellow glow added enough light to the parlor for him to see how pale she was. Another thought intruded on him—she’s going to have a baby. He gave a tiny shrug. We’ll deal with that, dammit. Shakespeare’s first kid came along seven months after he got married. The world won’t end.

  She sat down again, biting her lip. Moss’ nostrils twitched—not at the way she was behaving, but because he’d just got the first whiff of the stew. At last she said, so low he had to lean forward to hear her (which made the couch rustle again), “There’s going to be . . . an uprising. Here. In Canada. Against . . . against the United . . .” She didn’t get States out. Instead, she buried her face in her hands and wept as if her heart were breaking.

  It probably is, Moss realized. “Why are you telling me? I thought you’d be . . .”

  “Cheering them on?” Laura asked. He nodded, though leading them on was more what he’d had in mind. She said, “Because I don’t want you to get hurt. Because I—” She stopped again.

  “Well!” he said, quite taken aback. He didn’t say anything else for close to a minute; what man wouldn’t savor such a compliment? She cares for me, he thought dizzily, and not just for my . . . He shook his head and asked
the other question that needed asking: “How do you know about this?”

  Laura looked at him as if he’d been foolish. And so I have, he decided. She answered as she might have to a child: “I am who I am—I am what I am—after all.”

  “They thought you’d be cheering them on, too,” Moss said. “Cheering them on or helping them, I mean.”

  “Yes.” In the one word, Laura Secord unwittingly spoke volumes on how close they’d come to being right. Then she burst into tears. When Moss tried to comfort her, she pushed him away as fiercely as if he were still the enemy she’d thought him for so long.

  Lucien Galtier took life a day at a time. As far as he could see, that was a good idea for any man, and an especially good idea for a farmer like himself. Sometimes you got sunshine, sometimes rain or snow or just clouds. Sometimes you got peace. Sometimes, he’d seen, you got war.

  Sometimes you got a whole new country. He still had trouble remembering he lived in the Republic of Quebec. The USA had invaded the Canadian province of Quebec and found enough men willing to detach it from its longtime home to make a new nation. Without the United States, my country would not be, Galtier thought.

  That had been a very strange notion, the first time it crossed his mind. By now, though, he’d realized the United States did as they pleased all through North America. When they point at this one and say Come! he cometh, and when they point at that one and say Go! he goeth.

  “That’s from the Bible, isn’t it?” his wife asked when he spoke the thought aloud to her.

  “I think so, Marie,” he answered, scratching his head as he tried to remember where he’d found the language in which he robed his thought. He wasn’t a tall man, or broad through the shoulders; his strength was of the wiry sort that didn’t show. It was also of the wiry sort that endured after a bigger man’s youthful power faded with the passing years. He’d seen his fiftieth birthday. The only real difference between it and his fortieth was that he’d gone gray over the past ten years. He’d had only a few silver strands among the midnight at forty. Now the black hairs were the ones that were few and far between.