Breakthroughs (55 page)

“Can they do that?” Maude asked the ruthlessly pragmatic question. A farm wife who was anything but ruthlessly pragmatic had a long, hard, rocky road ahead of her.

But McGregor, to his own surprise, had an answer ready: “Look at Quebec. The Frenchies there are still mad that we licked them on the Plains of Abraham a hundred and fifty years ago. As soon as the Yankees gave them their chance, they jumped on the idea of this Republic of theirs, and to the devil with whatever went before it. If somebody gives us the chance, we can do the same.”

“Who would give us a chance, with the United States smothering us the way a bad sow smothers her piglets?” Maude said.

“I don’t know,” McGregor admitted. “But the Quebecers didn’t know before the war, either. Sooner or later, something will turn up.”

“My bread!” Julia exclaimed. “I forgot the bread!” She fled back into the kitchen. The oven door clanked open. Julia let out a sigh of relief.

“It smelled fine,” Maude called after her. “I didn’t think you had anything to worry about.”

Mary looked at her mother in astonishment. “Don’t you think turning into a Yankee is something to worry about?”

“Well, yes,” Maude said, “but it isn’t something Julia can fix by taking it out of the oven on time.” Her younger daughter thought that over. At last, reluctantly, Mary nodded.

McGregor said, “Maybe they can make us stand up in front of the Stars and Stripes. Whatever they do, though, they can’t keep us from spitting on it in our hearts, and from staying loyal to the King.”

“God save the King!” Mary said, and McGregor and Maude each put a hand on her shoulder. She caught fire, as she had a way of doing. “We’ll make it our secret,” she breathed. “We’ll all make it our secret. I don’t mean all of us—I mean all of us Canadians. We’ll do what the Yanks tell us, but inside we’ll be laughing and laughing, because we’ll know what we really think.”

Arthur and Maude McGregor looked at each other over their daughter’s head. “Some of us will,” McGregor said. “Some of us will keep the secret. Some of us will want to. Some of us won’t care, though—remember how things were in your school? Some people will believe the Americans’ lies.”

“We’ll make them pay,” Mary said fiercely. Her parents looked at each other again. McGregor didn’t know how much she knew about his bombs. She did know Major Hannebrink kept coming around—and she knew her father hated him. McGregor might have taken her out of school because the teacher mouthed the Yanks’ lies, but Mary knew how to add even so.

“What happens next?” Maude asked.

McGregor blew air out through his lips, making a whuffling noise a horse might have produced. “I don’t know. I don’t know enough to know. If we can stop them
in
Winnipeg and keep them from getting at the new railroads farther north, the fight goes on a while longer.”

He was trying to find the bright side, and that was the most hopeful thing he could say. If the Americans kept driving, if the Canadians and the British were able to stop them no more…in that case, the fight wouldn’t go on a while longer. It would be over in a matter of weeks.

“Whatever happens,
we
have to go on,” he said.

“Whatever happens, we have to pay the Americans back,” Mary said. “We have to pay them back for Alexander.”

“We will,” Maude said. “I don’t know how, but we will.”

“You can count on that, Mary,” McGregor added. His daughter nodded. She had confidence in him even if he had none in himself, even if the war was as good as lost. He looked up at the ceiling. He seemed to look right through the ceiling, to look on the naked face of God. The war might be as good as lost, but all his confidence came flooding back.

As she’d done every day she could since the war began, Nellie Semphroch opened the coffeehouse for business. The morning was fine and bright. Before long, it would get impossibly hot and impossibly muggy, the way it did every summer in Washington. Nellie stood on the sidewalk, enjoying the freshness while it lasted.

She had little else to enjoy. The view was one to inspire horror, not delight, even if a robin did trill from a tree that had been broken only into table legs, not into matchsticks. Most of her own block had come through pretty well, which is to say it hadn’t been smashed flat and then burned. Even so, bullet holes pocked storefronts, shells had bitten chunks out of them, and the only glass in sight was not in the windows but drifted in the street to puncture motorcars’ inner tubes.

Off to the south, on the far side of the Potomac, artillery boomed. It was U.S. artillery, pounding the Confederates still farther south. Confederate forces had retreated out of artillery range of Washington, driven not so much by the U.S. troops who had retaken the capital as by U.S. successes off to the west, which had left the Rebels afraid of being cut off. Not having to worry about shellfire for the first time in weeks felt good, though C.S. bombers did still make nocturnal appearances overhead.

Hal Jacobs threw wide the boarded-up door across the street to show his cobbler’s shop was open, too. He waved and called, “Good morning, Nellie.”

“Good morning, Hal,” Nellie answered. She didn’t like giving Jacobs the encouragement of using his Christian name, but didn’t see she had much choice, either. As she did every morning she saw the shoemaker these days, she said, “Thank you for getting me and Edna out of that military jail.”

Jacobs waved his hands. “I have told you before, do not thank me for this. It was my duty. It was my pleasure. People saw Confederate officers in your coffeehouse—naturally they thought you were collaborating. They didn’t know you were passing what you heard on to me.”

“You could have let me rot,” Nellie said.
I didn’t come across for you, so you didn’t have any reason to come across for me.
That was how things worked in the world from which she’d escaped, and, for the most part, in the more decorous world she’d managed to enter, too. They didn’t seem to work that way for Hal Jacobs, which made Nellie intensely suspicious.

He waved again, this time in rejection of the idea. “You bravely served your country. How could I do such a wicked thing? If Bill Reach turns up again—no, I will say
when
Bill Reach turns up again—I know he would—
will
—feel the same.”

“That’s nice,” Nellie answered. She had to make herself not look in the direction of the wreckage where, she presumed, Bill Reach still lay. Jacobs might talk about his turning up, but she knew he wouldn’t turn up again till the Last Trump blew.

With a final wave, Jacobs went back inside and got to work. Nellie went inside, too. While she was opening up, Edna had come downstairs. Her daughter’s face bore a look of sullen discontent, as it often did lately. “Jesus, this town is dead nowadays,” Edna complained. “We did a hell of a lot better when the Rebs were running things.”

“We wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for the help we got from Mr. Jacobs and the rest of the people who worked for the United States,” Nellie said.

Edna’s discontented look went from sullen to angry. “And you never told me about it, not a word,” she said shrilly. “I even said that crazy Bill Reach was a spy, and you went, ‘Pooh-pooh! The very idea!’ You would have let me marry Nick and then taken my pillow talk straight across the street.”

Since that, while unkind, was not altogether untrue, Nellie did not rise to it. She did say, “You know I never wanted you to marry him at all.”

“But that wasn’t because he was a Reb,” Edna said. “That was just because he was a man. He could have been on the U.S. General Staff, and you would’ve felt the same way.” That also had a good deal of truth in it. Edna went on, “You just don’t want a girl to have any fun, and look at what all you done when you was my age and even younger.”

“That’s wasn’t fun,” Nellie replied. “That was hell, is what that was.” But Edna didn’t believe her. She could see as much in her daughter’s eyes. Edna was convinced she was acting like a dog in the manger. What Edna wanted was to screw herself silly, not having a clue how silly she was already. With a sigh, Nellie said, “Get a pot of coffee going, why don’t you? I could use a cup, and I bet you could, too.”

“Might as well make it for us,” Edna said. “Ain’t nobody else likely to come in and drink it. Most of the folks left here in town don’t have the money, and most of the ones who do still think we was a pack of traitors.”

“I know.” Nellie sighed again, this time over lost business unlikely to return. “Good thing I put aside as much as I did, or we’d be in worse shape than we are.” One more sigh. “Only thing that Rebel scrip we got is good for now is blowing our noses on it, I’m afraid.”

“We haven’t got that much of it, though,” Edna said, lighting the fire in the stove. “The Rebs liked us. Why not? We always had good coffee and good food, so no wonder they liked us and mostly paid us real cash.” As she started measuring grounds for the pot, she gave her mother another sour stare. “Now I know how we got all that good stuff. I never did before, on account of you never told me.”

Before Nellie could answer, a motorcar stopped outside. She was amazed anyone had even tried to negotiate the shell-pocked, glass-strewn roadway. “Got a puncture, I’ll bet,” she said.

A moment later, the door opened. Nellie started to say,
See? Told you so,
but the words clogged in her throat. Into the coffeehouse walked Theodore Roosevelt. He pointed a finger at her. “You are Mrs. Nellie Semphroch,” he said, as if daring her to disagree.

“Y-Yes, sir,” she said, and dropped a curtsy. “And this here is my daughter Edna.” She didn’t know whether she ought to be introducing Edna to the president of the United States. She didn’t know whether she should have admitted her own name, either. If Roosevelt was inclined to believe most of her neighbors and not Hal Jacobs, he was by all accounts capable of ordering her dragged out and shot on the spot.

“Now that our capital is in our own hands once more,” he said, “I decided to come down from Philadelphia and see what was left of this city that was once so wonderful. The Rebs haven’t left us much, have they?”

“No, sir,” Nellie answered. On the stove, the pot began to perk. “Would you care for some coffee, sir?”

“Bully!” Roosevelt said. A couple of hard-faced men in green-gray—bodyguards, by the look of them—came into the coffeehouse after him. “Cups for Roland and Stan, too, if you please. I have something for you here, Mrs. Semphroch, and also for your lovely daughter.”

Edna simpered as she poured the coffee. Nellie wished the cups that had survived the recapture of Washington were all from the same set. She supposed she should have been grateful any cups had survived. One direct hit and they wouldn’t have. One direct hit and she might not have, either.

After taking a sip, Roosevelt set down his cup and reached into his pocket. His hand came out not with a derringer but with a dark blue velvet box, the sort of box in which a ring might have come. He opened the box. Nellie gaped at the big golden Maltese cross on a red, white, and blue ribbon. Roosevelt lifted the medal out of the box. The ribbon was long enough to go around Nellie’s neck.

“The Order of Remembrance, First Class,” Roosevelt boomed. “Highest civilian honor I can give. I argued for a Distinguished Service Cross myself, but the stick-in-the-muds at the War Department started having kittens. This is the best I could do. Congratulations, Mrs. Semphroch: a grateful country thanks you for your brave service.”

He slipped the medal over Nellie’s head. Dazedly, she watched him put a hand in his pocket again and produce another velvet box. When he opened it, the Maltese cross inside was of silver, with inlaid gold stripes. The ribbon attached to it was also of the colors of the national flag, but not quite so wide as the one on Nellie’s medal.

“Order of Remembrance, Second Class,” he said, putting the decoration over Edna’s head. “For you, Miss Semphroch, for helping your mother gather information from the foe and pass it on to the United States.”

Edna gaped. So did Nellie. Maybe Roosevelt didn’t know Edna had been on the point of marrying Confederate Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid—would have married him if the U.S. bombardment hadn’t turned the ceremony into a bloody shambles. Maybe he did know and didn’t care.

No sooner had that thought crossed Nellie’s mind than, as if on cue, a photographer strode into the coffeehouse. President Roosevelt put one arm around Nellie, the other around Edna, and Nellie realized the photographer’s appearance wasn’t
as if
on cue at all. It
was
on cue. The fellow touched off his tray of flash powder.
Foomp!
As a glowing purple smear made hash of Nellie’s eyesight, the shutter clicked.

“Can we do one more?” the photographer asked, beginning to set up again.

“I’m standing here with my arms around two lovely ladies, and you ask me a question like that?” Roosevelt said. “By all means, sir, by all means. Take all day if you need to—but make sure you do the job right.”

Edna laughed at the president’s joke. Had Roosevelt shown any interest in more than her laugh, she probably would have given him that, too. Nellie did not like being touched without having invited it, but she endured it. She’d endured worse in her time, and Roosevelt took no undue liberties.

Of one thing Nellie was very, very sure: he had no more idea than did Hal Jacobs of how Bill Reach had died. Nor did she intend to let either of them ever learn.

Thinking that, she was smiling when the flash powder went
Foomp!
again. So was Theodore Roosevelt. So was Edna. “Great!” the photographer said. “The newspapers’ll eat this one up.”

“Bully!” Roosevelt said again. He let the women go and then turned to them. “Now I must depart, I fear. I have to look over this poor tormented town and try to decide how we can set it to rights once more. But now that I have had a cup of your excellent coffee and given you some small portion of the reward you so richly deserve, I do hope any and all slanders against you on the part of your neighbors shall cease forthwith. A very good day to you both.”

And he was gone, a human hurricane in a black suit and straw boater. His bodyguards followed him out. So did the photographer, who had the grace to tip his hat. Nellie felt as if she’d survived yet another bombardment.