Drive to the East

II

Brigadier General Irving Morrell wished to God he could get out of the hospital. His shattered shoulder was improving, but there was an unfortunate difference between improving and improved. Morrell, a rawboned, weathered man of fifty, had found out all about that when he was wounded in the Great War. An infection after he got shot in the leg had kept him on the shelf for months, and kept the doctors darkly muttering about amputation. In the end, they didn’t have to go in there with a hacksaw, for which he’d never stopped being grateful.

No wound infection this time, or none to speak of. They had drugs now they hadn’t dreamt of a generation earlier. But he still needed to heal, and that took time, however much he wished it didn’t. He could use his right hand again, though he feared the arm would never regain all its strength and dexterity.

“When can I go back to work, Doc?” he asked the Army physician who was tending his wound. He might have been a roofer who’d taken a fall-most wounds in war weren’t that different from industrial accidents. Most-but not his. The sniper who’d wounded him hadn’t been aiming at anybody else. Two more bullets had cracked past him as the gunner on the barrel he commanded hustled him out of harm’s way.

Like any Army doctor, Conrad Rohde held officer’s rank so he could tell enlisted men what to do. He had a major’s gold oak leaves on the green-gray tunic he wore under his white hospital coat. He was big and blond and slow-moving-slow-talking, too. After his usual careful consideration, he answered, “Well, sir, it shouldn’t be too long now.”

“Gee, thanks a lot. Thanks a hell of a lot,” Morrell said. Rohde’d been telling him the same thing for a while now. Before that, he’d said a few weeks… for a few weeks.

“I’m sorry I can’t be more exact.” As usual, the sawbones sounded not the least bit sorry. “You aren’t ready yet, not unless you don’t intend to do anything more strenuous than stay behind the line-far behind the line-and move pins on a map.”

Since Morrell intended no such thing, he swore under his breath. A barrel commander who didn’t lead from the front wasn’t worth much. So he told himself, anyhow. It was true enough. The other half of the truth was that he’d always been a man who liked to mix it up with the enemy.

Rohde knew what that muttering meant. He didn’t even smirk and look superior; he had a deadpan that probably won him money in poker games. He did say, “You see?”

“The arm’s not too bad,” Morrell insisted. “Honest to God, it’s not.”

Dr. Rohde didn’t come right out and tell him he was a liar. He thought for a moment, then said, “You’re in a barrel. It gets hit. It starts to burn. You have to bail out-right now. Can you open a hatch with that arm?”

Morrell thought about it. He raised the injured member. It hurt. That didn’t bother him so much. He’d learned to live with pain. What bothered him was how weak the arm was. Savagely, he said, “I wish I were lefthanded.”

“I can’t do anything about that. You should have talked to God, or to your parents.” Rohde was maddeningly unhelpful. “Since you aren’t lefthanded, do I take it you’ve answered my question?”

“Yes, dammit.” Morrell couldn’t have been more disgusted. He was even willing to make what was, for him, not far from the ultimate sacrifice: “If they need me on light duty behind the lines for a while, I’ll do that. Anything to get out of here.”

Rohde looked at him. “You don’t like it in beautiful, romantic Syracuse?”

“Now that you mention it, no.”

“And if I turn you loose, how do I know you won’t head straight for the front? That’s the reputation you’ve got.”

The reputation was well deserved. Morrell knew as much. He said, “I could sign a pledge, but you probably wouldn’t believe me. Or you could take your chances and let me take mine. I’m a big boy, Doc. I can take my own chances if I think I ought to and if I think the country needs me.”

“Part of my job, General, is to see that you don’t endanger yourself without good reason,” Dr. Rohde replied. “And do you really think you’re as indispensable to the United States as all that?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Morrell said. “Go call Philadelphia and find out what the War Department thinks. They wouldn’t have given me stars if they didn’t think I was good for something. Call them. If they say I can sit on the shelf a while longer, I’ll sit. I’ll even stop bitching about it. But if they say they need me…”

He was rolling the dice. Not everybody in the War Department loved him. He also had a reputation for being right in spite of people. High-ranking officers were supposed to be right. They weren’t supposed to rub their superiors’ noses in it, as Morrell had done. But if even the Confederates thought him worth killing, his own side ought to be able to figure out he was worth a little something. That was how he’d got promoted to general’s rank.

“I’ll take you up on that-sir.” Dr. Rohde lumbered out of the room.

He didn’t say anything to Morrell about the War Department for the next several days. With some men, that would have made Morrell suspect he hadn’t got on the horn to Philadelphia at all. The barrel officer didn’t believe that of Rohde. The doctor struck him as honest, if stuck in a rut. And the War Department never had been, wasn’t, and probably never would be an outfit that could make up its mind in a hurry-which was part of the reason the United States were in the current mess.

I’ll give him a week. Then I’ll ask him, Morrell thought. Nobody could get huffy about his asking after a week. And if Rohde hadn’t made the call or if the War Department was still twiddling its thumbs, well, at least he would know what was what.

Come the day, he got ready to beard Rohde. But the doctor forestalled him. Wearing an uncommonly sour expression, the big blond man said, “Pack your bags-sir. Philadelphia is dying to have you, and I don’t suppose you’ll die if you go there.”

“Thanks, Doc!” Morrell grinned as if he’d just stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum. “Uh-what bags? All I came here with was the uniform I got shot in, and that’s never going to be the same.”

“A point,” Dr. Rohde said. “Nothing to flabble about, though. I’m sure we can fix you up. This sort of thing happens now and again.”

The hospital proved to have a good selection of uniforms for both officers and enlisted men. Some of them bore signs of being repaired; others seemed as fresh as the day they were made. Morrell didn’t care to think about how they’d been obtained, or about what had happened to the men who’d formerly worn them. He chose an officer’s tunic and trousers that fit well enough, and pinned his stars on his shoulder straps and the Purple Heart with oak-leaf cluster above his left breast pocket. He got his own shoes back. The hospital had cleaned off whatever blood he’d got on them, and polished them to a higher gloss than he usually achieved himself.

Getting dressed was tougher and more painful than he’d thought it would be. It left him feeling worn as a kitten, and without the kitten’s sharp claws and teeth. He did his best not to show Dr. Rohde weakness. The doctor didn’t say a word, but Morrell doubted he was fooling him.

A driver took him to the train station in an ordinary auto. He’d wondered if Rohde would stick him in an ambulance and gain a measure of revenge for getting overruled by Philadelphia. Maybe the doctor was too nice a man to do something like that. On the other hand, maybe it just hadn’t occurred to him.

Coming down from upstate New York brought Morrell back to the war a little at a time. It hadn’t touched Syracuse. The farther east and south the train went, the more bomb damage he saw. Before long, the train started sitting on sidings or just on the tracks when it should have been moving. He wondered whether that was bomb damage or sabotage. Whatever it was, it slowed him to a crawl.

A sergeant waited for him on the platform when he finally pulled into Philadelphia in the middle of the night. The man wasn’t standing there in plain sight. He dozed on a bench near the far wall. Morrell shook him awake.

Horror spread over the noncom’s face when he saw a general looming over him. “I’m sorry, sir!” he cried, and sprang to his feet.

“It’s all right. Don’t blow a gasket.” Morrell returned a rather frantic salute. “You weren’t on sentry duty. Nobody’s going to shoot you for sacking out. How late was I, anyway?”

Before answering, the sergeant looked at his watch. “Uh-just over three and a half hours, sir.”

“That’s about what I thought,” Morrell said. “Are things always that bad around here?”

“Well…” The sergeant didn’t want to admit it. “They’re not what you’d call real good.” Whether he wanted to admit it or not, he didn’t seem to have much choice. Reality spoke for itself.

“Take me to the War Department,” Morrell said.

“Yes, sir.” The sergeant did. The short journey was slow and roundabout. Philadelphia had a battered look. Months of bombing hadn’t knocked it out of action, though. Traffic still moved, even if it had to detour around craters in the street. Repairmen swarmed over damaged buildings, even if the next raid might hit them again. Men and women filled the sidewalks and the shops: Philadelphia ran around the clock. They didn’t seem beaten or intimidated, just determined to get on with the job no matter what.

Antiaircraft guns were everywhere, their snouts poking up from vacant lots and street corners and roofs. Searchlight batteries would do what they could to find the guns’ targets. Signs pointed the way to air-raid shelters.

The War Department was one of the buildings under repair. That didn’t surprise Morrell. It was a big target, and the Confederates knew where it was. Even bombing by night, they were bound to score some hits.

“Here we go, sir.” The sergeant jumped out of the auto and held the heavy bronze doors that led inside for Morrell. The barrel officer was gladder of that than he cared to admit. He wasn’t sure he could have opened them with his right hand, though his left would have done the job.

Even in the War Department, brigadier generals were uncommon birds. Morrell got whisked to the offices of the assistant to the chief of the General Staff, a much more senior one-star general named Edward McCleave. “How are you feeling?” McCleave asked.

“Sir, I’ll do,” Morrell answered. “That’s why I wanted to get out of the damn hospital. I wasn’t doing anybody any good there.”

“Except yourself,” McCleave pointed out.

Morrell shrugged. It didn’t hurt-too much. “Sitting on the shelf was worse than getting shot. Can you send me to Virginia, sir? If we’re going to make a real run at Richmond, I want to be part of it.”

“Your attitude does you credit,” the older man said. “Although General MacArthur has forced a crossing of the Rappahannock, he does not anticipate an immediate armored assault on the Confederates. The terrain is not conducive to such movements.”

“You’re telling me he’s stuck,” Morrell said.

“That’s not what I said.” Brigadier General McCleave sounded prim.

“It’s what you meant, though,” Morrell said, and McCleave didn’t deny it. Morrell went on, “Do you want me to take over the barrels down there and see what I can shake loose?”

“MacArthur has not requested your presence,” McCleave said. “If, however, the War Department were to order you to the Virginia front…” He waited. Morrell nodded. The two men exchanged smiles that were downright conspiratorial. And so much for staying behind the lines, Morrell thought.

Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Colleton knew his regiment helped hold an important position. His soldiers defended Confederate positions east of Sandusky, Ohio, on the southern shore of Lake Erie. As long as the Confederate States held a corridor from the Ohio River to the lake, they cut the United States in half. The damnyankees couldn’t ship anything or anybody by rail or road from east to west or west to east within their own territory. They had to take the long way around, through occupied Canada-and Canada didn’t have nearly so many lines or roads as the USA did.

No matter how true that was, though, Tom Colleton wasn’t happy. He didn’t like standing on the defensive. He’d reveled in the push north from the border. That was what war was supposed to be about. He’d fought in Virginia the last time, and hated stalemates with the grim and bitter passion of a man who’d seen too many of them. Barrels meant soldiers didn’t have to huddle in trenches this time around. They didn’t have to, no-but too often they did anyway.

Fortunately, the Yankees were as preoccupied with Virginia these days as the Confederates had been with Ohio and Indiana at the start of the war. Even more fortunately, U.S. forces weren’t doing as well in Virginia as the Confederates had here farther west. In Sandusky, Tom couldn’t help hearing both C.S. and U.S. wireless reports. When both sides told the same story, it was probably true. When they diverged, he had to try to figure out who was lying and who wasn’t.

No matter what his sister had thought about Jake Featherston, Tom had no great love or admiration for him. His mouth tightened. Anne had died in the opening days of the war. If she hadn’t been down in Charleston when that damnyankee carrier raid hit the town… But she had, and nobody could do anything about it now.

His own wife and boys were safe in St. Matthews, not far from Columbia, the capital of South Carolina. The last of the Colletons, he thought. He’d never felt that way while Anne was alive, even though she’d been childless. She’d bossed the family ever since their parents died. Now everything rode on his shoulders.

He laughed as he looked east toward the damnyankees’ lines. The Colletons were a family with a fine future behind them. Before the Great War, Marshlands was one of the leading plantations in South Carolina, with hundreds of colored hands working in the cotton fields. The mansion went up in flames in the Negro uprising in 1915, and not even Anne could make a go of cotton after the war.

Up ahead, the Yankees and some of Tom’s men started banging away at one another. Telling which side was which by ear was easy. The U.S. soldiers used bolt-action Springfields, rifles much like the Tredegars C.S. troops had carried in the last war. In this fight, soldiers in butternut had either automatic rifles or submachine guns. The damnyankees were always going to outnumber them, so each Confederate soldier needed to have more firepower than his U.S. counterpart.

The only trouble was, rifles and submachine guns weren’t the sole weapons involved. U.S. and C.S. machine guns were as near identical as made no difference. So were the two sides’ artillery, barrels, and aircraft. Add all that in and what had been a good-sized edge for the Confederate foot soldier shrank considerably.

Sure as hell, machine guns from both sides joined the conversation within a couple of minutes. Mortar rounds didn’t make much noise leaving their tubes-soldiers on both sides called them stove pipes-but the harsh, flat crump! of the bursting bombs was unmistakable.

Colleton shouted for his wireless man. When the small soldier with the large pack on his back came up, Tom said, “What the hell’s going on there? This was a pretty quiet sector up until a few minutes ago. Get me one of the forward company command posts.”

“Yes, sir.” The wireless man did his job without fuss or feathers. “Here’s Captain Dinwiddie, sir-A Company, First Battalion.”

“Dinwiddie!” Tom called into the mouthpiece. “Who went and pulled on the damnyankees’ tails?”

“Other way round, sir,” the captain answered. “Yankee sniper potted Lieutenant Jenks. He’s not dead, but he’s hurt pretty bad. Some of our boys spotted the muzzle flash up in a tree. They started shooting at him, and some of those green-gray fuckers shot back, and now it’s hell’s half acre up here.”

“You want artillery? You want gas?” Tom asked. He hated gas, as every Great War veteran did, which didn’t mean he wouldn’t use it in a red-hot minute. God only knew the damnyankees weren’t shy about throwing it around.

“Not right now, sir,” Dinwiddie said. “They’re just shooting. There’s no real attack coming in. If we stir ’em up, though, Lord only knows what they might try.”

“All right.” Colleton wasn’t particularly sorry about the response. His job now was to keep the USA out of Sandusky, no matter what. If that meant not stirring up the enemy, he didn’t mind. He didn’t much feel like getting stirred up himself. It was a cold, miserable day, and he would sooner have stayed inside by a nice, hot fire.

The firefight lasted about half an hour. Well before then, Confederate medics with Red Cross armbands and Red Crosses on their helmets went up to the front to bring back the wounded. A couple of medics came back on stretchers themselves. Tom swore, but without particular fury. He’d never yet seen the Yankees make a habit of picking off medics, any more than the Confederates did. But neither machine-gun bursts nor mortar bombs were fussy about whom they maimed.

After the shooting eased, a U.S. captain came across the line under flag of truce. An officer at the front sent him back to Tom. The Yankee gave him a stiff little nod. “I’d like to ask you for a two-hour truce, Lieutenant-Colonel, so the corpsmen on both sides can bring in the dead and wounded.”

“Do you think they’ll need that long?” Tom asked.

“Been a lot of shooting going on up there,” the U.S. captain answered. He had a flat, harsh Midwestern accent, far removed from Colleton’s South Carolina drawl. They spoke the same language-they had no trouble understanding each other-but they plainly weren’t from the same country.

Tom considered, then nodded. “All right, Captain. Two hours, commencing at”-he looked at his watch-“at 0945. That gives you half an hour to get back to your own line and pass the word that we’ve agreed. Suit you all right?”

“Down to the ground. Two hours, starting at 0945. Thank you, Lieutenant-Colonel. You’re a gentleman.” The captain stuck out his hand. Tom hesitated, but shook it. The man was an enemy, but he was playing by the rules-was, in fact, making a point of playing by the rules.

As the U.S. officer left, Tom had his wireless man tell the forward positions that the truce was coming. He sent runners up to the front, too, to make sure no platoon with a busted wireless set failed to get the word. Once the truce started, his men would probably swap cigarettes with the damnyankees for some of the ration cans the U.S. Army issued. Tom didn’t intend to issue an order forbidding it: less than no point in issuing an order bound to be ignored. Like everybody on both sides of the front, he knew the USA made horseshit cigarettes but had rations better than their C.S. counterparts.

It won’t make a dime’s worth of difference who wins the war, he consoled himself. That same sort of illicit trading had gone on in the Great War and in the War of Secession, too. Then it was tobacco for coffee. That wasn’t a problem these days, not with the Caribbean a Confederate lake.

At 0945, the guns on both sides fell silent. The sudden quiet made Tom jumpy. He didn’t feel he could trust it. But the truce held. Confederate medics brought back more bodies and pieces of bodies than wounded men, though they did save a couple of soldiers who might have died if they’d been stuck where they were. Graves Registration-usually called the ghouls-took charge of the remains. Colleton was damned if he knew how they would figure out just whose leg came back in a stretcher, especially since it had no foot attached. That, thank God, wasn’t his worry.

Sure as hell, he saw men in butternut chowing down on corned-beef hash and creamed beef and something tomatoey called goulash, all from cans labeled with the U.S. eagle in front of crossed swords. The only thing he wished was that he had some of those cans for himself.

At 1130, both sides started shouting warnings to their opposite numbers. At 1145, firing picked up again. Neither side shot as ferociously as it had earlier in the morning, though. Tom thought the gunfire was as much an announcement that the truce was over as anything else.

That didn’t turn out to be quite right. At about 1205, the Yankees started shelling his front-not just with the mortars they’d been using before but with real artillery, too. Shouts of, “Gas!” rang out through the chilly air. Dismayed wireless calls came in from the front and from his reserves. The U.S. guns seemed to know just where to hit.

Tom started swearing horribly enough to startle his wireless man, who asked, “What’s the matter, sir?”

“I’ll tell you what’s the matter, goddammit,” Colleton ground out, furious at himself. “I’m an idiot, that’s what. That Yankee son of a bitch who came back here to dicker the truce-to hell with me if the bastard didn’t spy out our dispositions on the way here and back. Nothing in the rules against it, of course, but fuck me if I like getting played for a sucker.”

U.S. forces followed the bombardment with an infantry push, and drove Tom’s regiment from several of the positions it had been holding. He got on the field telephone with division HQ in Sandusky, warning them what had happened and how.

“Sneaky bastards,” was the comment he got from the major to whom he talked. “How much ground have they gained?”

“Looks like about a mile,” Tom said ruefully. He’d be kicking himself for weeks over this one. He hadn’t thought he was a trusting soul, but that Yankee captain had sure made a monkey out of him.

The major back in Sandusky didn’t seem all that upset. “Don’t get your balls in an uproar, Lieutenant-Colonel,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do about it.”

Later that afternoon, eight or ten butternut-painted barrels came rumbling up the road and across the fields to either side of it. Confederate foot soldiers loped along with them. The armored fighting vehicles started shelling the ground the U.S. forces had gained. Just seeing and hearing them was enough to make soldiers who’d been huddling in foxholes ready to get out and fight some more. The Confederates still sometimes called their battle cry the Rebel yell, though they’d been their own country, not rebels at all, for eighty years. The shrill ululation resounded now, way up here in Yankeeland. The surge that had gone west reversed course once more.

But nothing came cheap today. The Yankees had brought a couple of antibarrel cannons to the front. The sound of an armor-piercing round smashing into steel plate reminded Tom of an accident in a smithy. The stricken barrel burst into flames. A couple of men managed to get out. The other three didn’t. The blazing barrel sent up a plume of greasy black smoke. Some of what burned in there had been alive moments before.

Colleton cursed softly. “See if I give those sons of bitches another truce,” he muttered. “Just see if I do, ever.”

Mary Pomeroy always liked driving out from Rosenfeld and visiting the farm where she’d grown up. Her mother was all alone on the Manitoba prairie these days. Maude McGregor still had her health, but she wasn’t getting any younger. Mary felt good checking up on her every so often.

The visits did remind her how much time had passed by. Mary’s mother had had hair as red as her own. No more; it was almost all gray now. As Mary neared thirty-five, the first silver threads were running through her copper, too.

She and her mother sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee and eating sweet rolls her mother had baked. “Oh, Ma,” Mary said, “the smells in here take me back to when I was a little girl. The oilcloth on the table, the coal fire, the kerosene lamps, all the cooking…” She shook her head, lost in a world that would never come back again, a world where her father and older brother were alive, a world where the Yanks hadn’t occupied Canada for a generation.

“It does smell different in your apartment,” her mother agreed. Quickly, she added, “Not bad-not bad at all-but not the same, either.”

“No, not the same,” Mary said. She had a gas stove and electricity; the one didn’t smell like coal, while the other didn’t smell like anything. And what she cooked just wasn’t the same as what her mother made. She couldn’t put her finger on the difference, but she knew it was there.

“How are the Frenchies?” Maude McGregor asked.

“They’re there.” Mary made a sour face. These days, the United States needed all the soldiers they could scrape up to fight the Confederate States. The men now occupying Rosenfeld and a lot of other Canadian towns came from the Republic of Quebec. They wore blue-gray uniforms, not U.S. green-gray. Mary couldn’t stand them. They should have been Canadians, too, but instead they helped the Yanks oppress their countrymen. Most of them-almost all of the young ones who’d grown up in the so-called Republic-spoke nothing but French, and jibber-jabbered in it all the time. As far as she was concerned, that added insult to injury.

“Any trouble with them?” her mother asked.

“No,” Mary said tonelessly. “No trouble at all.”

She wondered where her mother would go with that, but Maude McGregor didn’t go anywhere at all. She only nodded and got the teapot and filled her own cup. She held the pot out to Mary, who nodded. Her mother refilled it. The milk Mary added came from one of the cows in the barn.

“How’s Alec?” her mother asked.

Mary smiled. She didn’t have to consider her answers and watch every word about her son. “He’s fine, Ma. He’s growing like a weed, he raises trouble every chance he gets, and he’s doing good in kindergarten. Of course, he already pretty much knew how to read and write before he started.”

“I should hope so,” her mother said. “You and Julia and Alexander did, too.”

Alec was named for Mary’s dead older brother. Remembering him took the smile off her face. She said, “You know what the bad thing is about school these days?”

“Of course I do,” Maude McGregor said. “The Yanks pound their lies into the heads of children who aren’t old enough to know malarkey when they hear it.”

“That’s it. That’s just it.” Mary didn’t know what to do about it, either. Her mother and father had pulled her out of school when the Americans started throwing propaganda around instead of teaching about what had really happened-that was how Canadians saw it, anyhow. No one had raised a fuss back then, but rules were stricter now. And Mary didn’t want the Yanks paying attention to her for any reason.

Her mother said, “And Mort? How’s the diner doing?”

“Pretty well,” Mary answered. “One of the cooks burned his hand, so he’ll be out a few days. Mort’s filling in behind the stove.”

“Must be strange, having a man who knows how to cook,” her mother remarked.

“It is. It keeps me on my toes all the time,” Mary said. “But it’s all right. I’m glad I found anybody, and Mort and I get along real good.”

She’d had a young man courting her when her father was killed by his own bomb trying to blow up General Custer as he passed through Rosenfeld. Afterwards, the young man dropped her as if she were explosive herself. Nobody looked at her for years after that, not till Mort Pomeroy did. Was it any wonder she’d promptly fallen in love?

Her mother said, “I’m glad you do. It’s nice. Your father and I, we hardly had a harsh word between us.”

“I know, Ma.” Mary also knew why. Her mother noticed everything and said nothing. If she didn’t complain, how could Pa have found fault with her? Mary wasn’t like that. She’d never believed in suffering in silence. If something was wrong, she let the world know about it. She didn’t always restrict herself to words, either, any more than her father had. She asked, “How are things here?”

“Oh, I get along,” Maude McGregor answered. “I’ve been getting along for years and years now. I expect I’m good for a little while longer.”

The farm lacked not only electricity but also running water and indoor plumbing. Mary had never noticed what was missing when she was growing up. She’d taken the pungency of the outhouse as much for granted as the different pungency of the barn. Kerosene lamps had always seemed good enough. So had the pot-bellied coal-burning stove. Now the stinks and the inconveniences, though still familiar, jolted her when she visited. Little by little, she’d got used to an easier life in town.

Even so, she said, “I’m going out to the barn for some chores.”

“Oh, you don’t need to do that,” her mother said quickly.

“It’s all right. I don’t mind.” Mary did intend to gather eggs and feed the animals while she was out there; she wasn’t dressed for mucking out the place. That wasn’t all she would do, though. Her mother knew as much, knew and worried. But, being who and what she was, she couldn’t bring herself to say much.

A motorcar rolled along the dirt track that ran in front of the McGregor farm as Mary went from the farmhouse to the barn. The dirt road didn’t see much traffic these days, though Mary remembered endless columns of soldiers in green-gray marching along it when she was a little girl: U.S. soldiers heading for the front that had stalled between Rosenfeld and Winnipeg. Then the front wasn’t stalled anymore, the Yanks got what they’d always wanted, and hard times descended on Canada. They weren’t gone yet.

The barnyard stink wasn’t as sharp and oppressive as the one from the privy. It made Mary smile instead of wrinkling her nose. Her shoes scrunched on straw as she walked back toward the chickens. She proved to herself that she still knew how to get eggs out of nests without ruffling feathers and without getting pecked. A few hens clucked complaints, but that was all. Smiling a self-satisfied smile, she put the eggs in a basket.

That done, she fed all the livestock. She could still handle a pitchfork, too. She didn’t have much need to do that in the apartment in Rosenfeld. Come to think of it, though, sometimes a pitchfork would come in handy for prodding Alec along in the right direction.

Off in one corner of the front of the barn lay an old wagon wheel. Its iron tire was red with rust. It had been lying there for at least twenty years, probably longer. Anyone who saw it would figure it was just a piece of junk nobody’d bothered getting rid of. Mary had thought the same thing for years.

Now, grunting, she shoved it off to one side and scraped away at the straw and dirt under it. Before long, her fingernails rasped against a board. She got the board free and looked down into the neat, rectangular hole in the ground it and the wagon wheel concealed.

Her father had dug out that hole to hide his bomb-making tools. The U.S. occupiers had long suspected him. They’d searched the farmhouse and the barn again and again. Despite their suspicions, they’d never found a thing. Arthur McGregor had known what he was doing, in explosives as in everything else.

These days, the bomb-making tools belonged to Mary. She hadn’t used them as often as her father had. But she’d bombed the general store in town (owned by a Yank), killed a traitor in Ontario (she thought of it that way, not as blowing up a woman and a little girl), and derailed a train not far from Coulee, the next town west of Rosenfeld. With Ohio lost, the United States depended on rail traffic through Canada. Doing the train had proved easier than she’d expected. She thought she would go in some other direction when she planted her next bomb.

She was so intent on her work, she didn’t hear the running feet till they were just outside the barn. She looked up in horror as half a dozen men in green-gray, some with pistols in their hands, others with rifles, burst in shouting, “Hold it right there! You’re under arrest, in the name of the United States of America!”

It was over. After all these years, it was over. Mary lifted one of the sticks of dynamite that had sat in her lap. “If you want to take the chance of shooting this instead of me-” she began. If the dynamite went up, the Yanks would go up with it-a good enough last exchange, as far as she was concerned.

But one of the riflemen said, “Ma’am, I’ve been on the national rifle team at ranges a lot longer than this-they didn’t know if they’d need a sharpshooter to take you. If I shoot, I won’t miss, and I won’t hit the explosives.”

He sounded coldly confident, confident enough to make Mary believe him. She set down the dynamite and slowly got to her feet. “Raise your hands!” two Americans shouted at the same time. She obeyed. Why not? Nothing mattered anymore. One of the Yanks said, “Out of the barn now. Slow and easy. Don’t do anything cute, or you won’t last long enough to stand trial.”

“Oh, yes. I’m sure you’re worried about that,” Mary said. They didn’t answer her. Why should they? They’d won.

When she got outside, she saw two more Yanks holding her mother back. They’d slapped a gag on her so she couldn’t scream and warn Mary. Two motorcars were parked by the side of the house. She thought one was the auto she’d seen driving along the dirt road. They must have been keeping an eye on her all along, then.

“Leave my mother alone,” she said dully. “She never had anything to do with this. It was all me.”

“We’ll see about that,” one of the Yanks said. But he turned to the men holding Maude McGregor. “Take the gag off her, Jack. She can yell her head off now. It won’t make any difference.”

As soon as Jack removed the gag, Mary’s mother said, “She’s lying to save me. I was the one who set the bombs.”

“That isn’t so!” Mary exclaimed. “How about that one the other side of Coulee, Ma? You don’t even drive.”

“I took the wagon,” her mother said with stubborn, hopeless defiance.

“And that’s how come we caught your daughter in there with dynamite in her lap, right?” said the Yank who seemed to be in charge of things. He waved to his men. “Get her into the auto. We’ll take her up to Winnipeg and tend to business there.”

As the other Americans obeyed, one of them asked, “How about the old broad?” Both Mary and her mother squawked irately. The Yanks ignored them.

“Leave her alone for now,” their boss said. “Looks to me like we’ve got the one we want.” They shoved Mary into a Chevrolet. As it sped off down the dirt road, she knew how right he was.

Chester Martin had known rejoining the U.S. Army would make his wife furious. He hadn’t known how furious. Rita had lost her first husband in the Great War, and seemed sure she would lose her second in this one. When Chester reupped, he’d asked for a month to get his affairs in order before he went in. The Army gave it to him; they weren’t conscripting middle-aged retreads, even if they were glad to have them, and so they’d acted accommodating as all get-out.

Now he wished he hadn’t asked for so long. It was the longest month of his life. “You said they’d shot you last time, and that was plenty for you!” Rita said over and over again. “You lied!” She might have accused him of falling off the wagon-or maybe falling into the arms of an old girlfriend came closer to the mark.

And maybe he was. He had no romantic illusions about war. Nobody who’d been a noncom in the trenches all the way through the Great War could possibly have any illusions about it. But he kept saying, “The country needs me,” and that was no illusion. The United States needed all the help they could get from anywhere.

“Have you looked at yourself in the mirror lately?” Rita would ask. That stung, not least because he had. His hair, once sandy-brown, was graying and thinning at the temples. There were lines on his forehead, and more beside his pointed nose. He had a double chin and something of a belly. He still had muscles, though; nobody could hold a construction job without them.

His son, Carl, who was six, didn’t know whether to be proud of him or worried about him. Carl knew people could get shot. “You won’t let that happen to you, will you, Dad?” he would ask.

“Not me,” Chester would answer gravely. “That kind of stuff always happens to the other guy.” Carl accepted that. Chester knew better, but didn’t want to burden the boy with worries he couldn’t do anything about. Rita knew better, too, and wasted no time pointing out to Chester what a liar he was.

With all that going on, then, he wasn’t altogether unhappy escaping the little rented house in East Los Angeles and heading to the recruiting station a few blocks away when the time finally came. He took the oath there, which officially put him back in uniform. They gave him just enough of a physical to make sure he had a pulse and could see out of both eyes. If he’d flunked the second half, he suspected they would have worked something out.

They gave him a uniform, too. The tunic was too tight and the trousers were baggy; the tailoring hadn’t changed a bit since the Great War. They gave him a first sergeant’s stripes on his left sleeve. He knew what that meant. “You’re going to have me nursemaid some officer who was still spitting up sour milk when the Confederates tossed in the sponge the last time.”

He got exactly no sympathy, which was exactly what he’d expected. The sergeant who’d talked him into rejoining said, “Well, Martin? What about it? Are you going to tell me you’re not qualified for the job? I’ll say bullshit to your face if you’ve got the brass to try it.”

Martin didn’t have that kind of brass. Maybe he could keep a kid from getting some good men killed. He might even save the kid’s neck-and, with luck, his own in the process.

His orders were to report to a replacement depot in Virginia. Accompanying them was a travel voucher for rail transportation from Los Angeles to Milwaukee. He asked the noncom who gave him the voucher, “How the devil do I get from Milwaukee to where I’m supposed to go? Stick out my thumb?”

“Beats me,” that worthy said cheerfully. “For all I know, hitching’s faster than any other way. Once you get to Milwaukee, I promise they’ll tell you what to do next.”

“I hope so.” Martin didn’t trust Army bureaucracy. While the people in Wisconsin were figuring out how to get him past the Confederate corridor that split the USA in two, the people in Virginia were liable to decide he was AWOL if he didn’t show up on time and throw him in the guardhouse when he finally did. He knew that was unreasonable. He also knew the Army had some strange notions about what was reasonable and what wasn’t.

He had a brand-new green-gray duffel bag slung over his shoulder when he went to Remembrance Station, the big new railroad depot in downtown Los Angeles. Rita and Carl came along to say good-bye. If Rita cried, she wasn’t the only wife with a husband in uniform who did. He squeezed her and kissed her one last time, kissed Carl on the forehead, and climbed into a second-class car. Maybe officers got Pullman berths. Sergeants, or at least one sergeant in particular, didn’t.

More than half the men in the car were soldiers, either coming back from leave or reporting to duty for the first time. Chester listened. The chatter sounded much like what he remembered from the last go-round. Nobody seemed to want to talk to him. That didn’t surprise him. He had a lot of stripes on his sleeve, and he was at least twice the age of most of the men in green-gray.

When night came, the train slowed down to a crawl. He hadn’t thought about how the blackout applied to trains. He realized he should have. If locomotives went tearing along at full speed behind the beam of a big, bright light, they shouted, Hey, come shoot me up! at whatever enemy airplanes happened to be in the neighborhood. That made perfect sense-once you worked it out.

Conductors went through the cars making sure blackout curtains were in place on every window. Light leaking out the sides was as bad as any other kind. Chester wondered how likely an attack was. He shrugged. If it could happen at all, you didn’t want to take needless chances.

About half an hour after the blackout curtains came down, Chester went back to the dining car. The featured entree was something called Swiss steak. It struck him as a good reason for emigrating from Switzerland. He looked at the private at the table next to his and said, “I’m not back on duty yet, but now I feel like I’m back in the Army, by God.”

“Yeah.” The kid was pushing the gravy-smeared meat around with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. “This is pretty lousy, isn’t it?” He eyed Martin’s heavily striped sleeve. “Have you, uh, been in the Army all along?”

By the way he said it, he might have meant since the War of Secession, or possibly since the War of the Roses. Chester laughed and shook his head. “Nope. I got out in 1917”-undoubtedly before the private was born-“and went on with my life.”

“Oh.” The youngster digested that, which had to be easier than digesting the Swiss steak. He risked another question: “How come you came back? They conscripted me. I had to go. But you must’ve had it made.”

“Well, not quite,” Martin said. “I was doing all right, but I wasn’t rich or anything. But I didn’t want to see Jake Featherston kicking us in the slats, and so here I am.”

“Uh-huh.” The private seemed surprised anybody who didn’t have to would put on the uniform. Maybe he was what was wrong with the USA, part of the reason the country was having so much trouble with the CSA. On the other hand, maybe he just had a good deal of common sense.

Chester wondered how the Chicago-bound train would go to avoid both the Mormon uprising and the chance of bumping into Confederate raiders. It headed east through Kingman and Flagstaff, New Mexico, and on to Santa Fe, where it turned north for a run through the mountains to Denver. It got hung up there for two days, though, at a little Colorado town called Salida. Somebody said Salida meant exit in Spanish, but there was no exit from the place till damaged track up ahead was repaired. Avalanche? Sabotage? No one seemed to want to say, which left Chester suspecting the worst.

He dug a greatcoat out of his duffel and used it to stay warm. Sleeping in his seat was anything but delightful. Everybody grumbled. Nobody could do anything but grumble. Misery might not have loved company, but had a lot of it.

Once they got going again, they made pretty good time till they came to Chicago. The Confederates had done what they could to bomb the railroad yards. Given the accuracy of night bombing, that meant the whole city had caught hell. But the crawl at which the train proceeded showed the enemy had hurt the tracks and the stations to which they led.

Following signs that said MILITARY PASSENGERS for the transfer to Milwaukee, Chester stood in line for twenty minutes and then presented his voucher to a bored-looking corporal who eyed it and said, “You’re late.”

“My whole goddamn train is late. So sue me,” Chester said. The corporal looked up, wondering who could be so cavalier about this business. Seeing a man with a lot more stripes than he owned instead of a scared young private, he kept his mouth shut. Chester went on, “I knew I was late before I got here. Now I want to know how to get where I’m going.”

“I’ll fix it, Sergeant,” the corporal promised, and he did. If he took it out on some luckless kid later on, Chester didn’t find out about that.

From Chicago to Milwaukee was a short hop, like the one from Toledo to Cleveland. Naturally, whatever eastbound transport they’d planned from Milwaukee was also obsolete. Another noncom did some more fixing. An hour and a half later, Martin found himself taking off in a twenty-two-seat Boeing transport, bound for Buffalo: the first airplane ride of his life.

He didn’t like it. It was bumpy-worse than bumpy, in fact. Several people were airsick, and not all of them got all of it in their sacks. There was a snowstorm over Buffalo. The pilot talked about going on to Syracuse or Rochester. He also talked about how much-or rather, how little-fuel he had. The kid next to Chester worked his rosary beads hard.

They did put down in Buffalo, snowstorm or not. The transport almost skidded off the end of the runway, but it didn’t quite. The rosary beads got another workout during and after that. “Give ’em some for me, too,” Chester said when the airplane finally decided it did intend to stop. The only thing that could have made the landing more fun would have been Hound Dogs shooting up the transport while it came in.

He wondered if the Army would try to fly him down to Virginia. If they did, he might have found out more about Confederate fighters than he ever wanted to know. But he got on another train again instead. And he got delayed again, twice: once from bombed-out rails and once from what they actually admitted was sabotage.

Somebody in the car said, “Christ, I hope we’re doing the same thing to the Confederates.”

“If we weren’t, we would’ve lost the goddamn war by now, I expect,” somebody else replied. Chester suspected that was true. He also suspected the United States were using Negro rebels to do a lot of their dirty work down there. He knew they’d done that in the last war; he’d led a Negro Red through U.S. lines to get whatever he needed in the way of arms and ammunition. Blacks now had even less reason to love the CSA than they’d had then.

“You’re late,” a sergeant growled at him when he finally got where he was going.

“That’s right,” Chester said. “I’m damn lucky I’m here at all.” The other sergeant stared at him. He stared back. He’d had three years of guff the last war. Enough, by God, was enough.

Cincinnatus Driver sat in the Brass Monkey soaking up a bottle of beer. The Brass Monkey wasn’t the best saloon in Covington, Kentucky. It wasn’t even the best saloon in the colored part of Covington. But it was the closest one to the house where he lived with his father and his senile mother. He walked with a cane and had a permanent limp. Close counted.

A couple of old black men sat in a corner playing checkers. They were regulars, and then some. As far as Cincinnatus could tell, they damn near-damn near-lived at the Brass Monkey. They’d nurse a beer all day long as they shoved black and red wooden disks back and forth. Every so often, they would stick their heads up and join in some conversation or other. More often, though, they stayed in their own little world. Maybe they were smart. The one outside looked none too appetizing to any Negro in the Confederate States of America.

Talk in the saloon reflected that. A middle-aged man named Diogenes blew cigarette smoke up at the ceiling, smiled, and said, “Shoulda got outa here when the gettin’ was good. Too damn late now.”

“Do Jesus, yes!” another man said, and knocked back his shot. He set a quarter on the bar for another one. “We is nothin’ but the remnants-the stupid remnants, I should oughta say. Remnants.” He repeated the fancy word with an odd, somber relish.

He wasn’t wrong. After Kentucky voted to return to the CSA in early 1941, a lot of blacks voted with their feet, heading across the Ohio to states that remained in the USA. Cincinnatus had intended to do that with his father and mother. He’d been sure ahead of time how the plebiscite would go. If he hadn’t stepped in front of a car searching for his mother after she wandered off…

Diogenes savagely stubbed out his cigarette. “God damn Al Smith to hell and gone. Reckon he fryin’ down there now, lousy, stinkin’ son of a bitch.”

Several men nodded, Cincinnatus among them. Al Smith hadn’t had to give Jake Featherston that plebiscite. He hadn’t had to, but he’d done it. Cincinnatus wasn’t sorry he was dead, not even a little bit.

The bartender ran a rag over the smooth top of the bar. The rag was none too clean, but neither was the bar. Cincinnatus couldn’t tell what, if anything, went on behind that expressionless face. Nodding while somebody else cursed Al Smith had probably been safe enough. He wouldn’t have cursed Smith himself, not where people he didn’t know could hear. Even if everybody here was black, that was asking for trouble. Anybody-anybody at all-could be an agent or a provocateur.

And sometimes trouble came without asking. The doors to the Brass Monkey flew open. In stormed half a dozen Freedom Party guards, all in what looked like C.S. Army uniforms, but in gray cloth rather than butternut. They all had submachine guns and mean looks on their faces. When the one with a sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve said, “Don’t nobody move!” the saloon suddenly became a still life.

The white men fanned out. They weren’t quite soldiers, but they knew how to take charge of a situation. The three-striper (he wasn’t officially a sergeant; the Freedom Party guards had their own silly-sounding names for ranks) barked, “Let’s see your passbooks, niggers!”

No black in the CSA could go anywhere or do anything without showing the book first. It proved he was who he was and that he had the government’s permission to be where he was and do what he was doing. Cincinnatus dug his out of the back pocket of his dungarees. He handed it to the gray-uniformed white man who held out his hand. The guard checked to make sure his photo matched his face, then checked his name against a list.

“Hey, Clint!” he exclaimed. “Here’s one we’re looking for!”

Clint was the noncom in charge of the squad. He pointed his submachine gun at Cincinnatus, then gestured with the weapon. “Over here, nigger! Move nice and slow and easy, or that spook back of the bar’s gonna have to clean you off the floor.”

Cincinnatus couldn’t move any way but slowly. The noncom was careful not to let him get close enough to lash out with his cane. He hadn’t planned to anyhow. He might knock the gun out of the man’s hand, but then what? He wasn’t likely to shoot all the Freedom Party guards before one of them filled him full of holes. He couldn’t run, either, not with his ruined leg. He was stuck.

They hauled him away in a paddy wagon. He felt some small relief when they took him to a police station, not a Freedom Party meeting hall. The police still stood for law, no matter how twisted. The Party was a law unto itself, and beyond anyone else’s reach.

And a police captain rather than a Freedom Party guard questioned him. “You know a man named Luther Bliss?” the cop demanded.

That told Cincinnatus which way the wind was blowing. “I sure do, an’ I wish to Jesus I didn’t,” he answered.

“Oh, yeah? How come?” The policeman exuded skepticism.

“On account of he lured me down here and threw me in jail back in the Twenties,” Cincinnatus said, which was nothing but the truth. He didn’t like and didn’t trust Luther Bliss. He never had and never would. The U.S. secret policeman and secret agent with the hunting-hound eyes was too singlemindedly devoted to what he did.

His reply seemed to take the policeman by surprise. “How come?” the cop repeated. “He reckon you was a Red nigger?”

“Hell, no.” Cincinnatus sounded as scornful as a black man in a Confederate police station dared. Before his interrogator could get angry, he explained why: “Reds didn’t bother Luther Bliss none back then. They weren’t out to overthrow the USA. Bliss was afraid I was too cozy with Confederate diehards.”

“Nigger, we can look all this shit up. If you’re lyin’, you’re dyin’,” the cop growled.

“Why you reckon I’m telling you this stuff? I want you to look it up,” Cincinnatus said. “Then you see I ain’t done nothin’ to hurt the CSA.” The one didn’t follow from the other, but he hoped with all his heart that the policeman wouldn’t see that.

His attitude did confuse the white man, anyhow. He sounded a little less hostile when he asked, “You seen Bliss since?”

That was a dangerous question, because the answer was yes. Since Luther Bliss was one of the worst enemies the Confederates had in Kentucky, Cincinnatus would be suspected for not reporting that he’d spotted him. Cautiously, he said, “I done heard tell he was in town, but I ain’t set eyes on him. Don’t want to set eyes on him, neither.” The last sentence, at least, was true.

If the Confederates asked the right questions of the right people, they could show the rest was a lie. The cop pointed a warning finger at Cincinnatus. “Don’t you go nowhere. I’m gonna check up on what you just told me. What happens next depends on whether you were tryin’ to blow smoke up my ass. You got me?”

“Oh, yes, suh. I surely do,” Cincinnatus said. “An’ I ain’t goin’ nowhere.” He almost laughed at the policeman. If the fellow thought he could just waltz out of the station, that didn’t say much for how alert the Covington police usually were.

He sat there in the little interrogation room and worried. After a while, he needed to use the toilet-the Jax he’d drunk was taking his revenge. He stuck his head out the door and asked another cop if he could. He was afraid the white man would say no, if only to pile more discomfort and indignity on him. But the cop took him down the hall, let him do his business, and then led him back.

Cincinnatus had almost started to doze when his interrogator came back. “Well, looks like you weren’t lying about your run-in with Bliss,” he said grudgingly. He pointed an accusing finger at Cincinnatus. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been living in Iowa? Why the hell didn’t you get your black ass back there when you had the chance? What have you been doin’ here since you came back?” He seemed sure Cincinnatus’ answer would have to be something incriminating.

“Suh, I been takin’ care o’ my mama, an’ my pa’s been taking care o’ me.” Cincinnatus explained how he’d returned to Kentucky to get his parents out, and what had gone wrong. He finished, “You don’t believe that, go check the hospital.”

“I seen you walk. I know you’re screwed up some kind of way,” the cop said.

“Do Jesus! That is the truth!” Cincinnatus said.

“I know what we ought to do with you,” the policeman told him. “We ought to send you over the damn border. If the Yankees want you, they’re welcome to you. Sounds like all you want to do is get the hell out, and take your ma and pa with you. The longer you stay here, the more likely you are to get in trouble.”

Hope flowered in Cincinnatus. He needed a moment to recognize it; he hadn’t felt it for a long time. He said, “Suh, you do that for me, I get down on my knees to thank you. You want me to kiss your foot to thank you, I do that. I was laid up when I could have taken my folks out of here. By the time I could get around even a little bit, the border with the USA was closed.”

“I’ll see what we can cook up,” the policeman said. “We deal with the damnyankees every now and then under flag of truce. If they want to let you cross the border, we’ll let you go.”

“Suh, when them guards grabbed me, I reckoned I was a dead man,” Cincinnatus said, which was also nothing but the truth. “But you are a Christian gentleman, an’ I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

“Don’t get yourself all hot and bothered yet,” the police captain said. “These things don’t move fast. When we’ve got to talk to the Yankees or they’ve got to talk to us, though, you’re on the list. For now, go on home and stay out of trouble.”

“Yes, suh. God bless you, suh!” Cincinnatus had dished out a lot of insincere flattery to white men in his time. He didn’t know any Negroes in the CSA-or, for that matter, in the USA-who hadn’t. It was part of life for blacks in both countries. Here, though, he meant every word of what he said. This Confederate cop hadn’t had to do anything for him. Cincinnatus had expected the man to do things to him. Maybe the policeman thought he would turn subversive if he stayed in the CSA. (Fortunately, the man didn’t know he’d already turned subversive.) Whatever his reasons, he wanted Cincinnatus out of the CSA and back in the USA. Since Cincinnatus wanted the same thing…

Since he wanted the same thing, he didn’t even complain about the long walk home. It didn’t hurt as much as it might have, either. When he got there, he found his father almost frantic. “What you doin’ here?” Seneca Driver exclaimed, eyes almost bugging out of his head in disbelief. “Some damnfool nigger done tol’ me them Freedom Party goons grab you.”

“They did, Pa,” Cincinnatus answered, and his father’s eyes got bigger yet. He went on, “An’ then they let me go.” He told what had happened at the station.

“You believe this here policeman?” His father didn’t sound as if he did.

But Cincinnatus nodded. “Uh-huh. I believe him, on account of he didn’t have no reason to lie to me. I was there. He had me. He coulda done whatever he pleased. Who’s gonna say boo if a cop roughs up a nigger? Who’s gonna say boo if a cop kills a nigger, even? Nobody, an’ you know it as well as I do.”

The older man thought it over. He screwed up his face in what was almost a parody of cogitation. “He don’t mean nothin’ good by it,” he said at last. He wouldn’t believe a Confederate cop could be decent, and Cincinnatus had a hard time blaming him.

Cincinnatus had a trump card, though. “I’m here,” he said, and his father couldn’t very well quarrel with that.

Congresswoman Flora Blackford clicked on the wireless set in her Philadelphia office. She usually left it off, turning it on at the hour and half hour to get what news she could. She had little-no, she had no-use for the music and advertising drivel that came out of the speaker most of the time.

Some people were saying television-wireless with moving pictures-was the next big thing. The war had put it on hold, and might have derailed it altogether. Flora wasn’t sure she was sorry. The idea of having to watch advertisements as well as listen to them turned her stomach.

She wasn’t listening to news now, though, or not directly. She looked at the clock on the wall. It was a quarter to five. What were they waiting for? The announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, live from New York City and newly escaped from the Confederate States of America, we are proud to present… Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces!”

Out of the wireless poured music the likes of which was almost unknown in the United States. Negroes in the Confederate States had been oppressed for hundreds of years, and had no hope of anything else, anything better. They poured their wish for a different life-and a jaunty defiance of the life they were forced to live-into their music. Those sly rhythms and strange syncopations had no parallel in the USA. Satchmo might almost have been playing his trumpet in Portuguese rather than English.

And yet, a great singer could make an audience feel what he felt even in a foreign language-would opera have been so popular if that weren’t true? Satchmo had the same gift. Nobody in the United States played his kind of music. But joy and despair and anger came through just the same.

When the Rhythm Aces finished their number, the announcer said, “You know folks will hear this program in the CSA as well as the USA. What do you have to say to the people of the country you chose to leave?”

“Ain’t got nothin’ much to say to the white folks there,” Satchmo answered, sounding like a gravelly bullfrog. “White folks down there don’t listen to the niggers anyways. If you is colored an’ you is in the Confederate States, I gots one thing to tell you-git out if you can. You stays dere, you gwine end up dead. I hates to say it, but it’s de Lawd’s truth.”

His English was almost as foreign to Flora’s ear as his music. White Confederates had their own accent, or group of accents; she was used to those. People from the USA, though, seldom got to hear how uneducated Confederate Negroes spoke.

“How did you get out of the CSA?” the announcer asked.

Flora already knew that story; she’d met Satchmo after he and his fellow musicians came to Philadelphia. Knowing what he was going to say helped her follow his account: “We was up in Ohio, playin’ fo’ de sojers dere. We done decided we better run, on account of we never gits no better chance. So we steals a command car-you know, one o’ dem wid a machine gun on it.” His accent got even thicker as excitement filled his voice. “We drives till we comes to de front. It’s de nighttime, so de Confederate pickets, dey reckons we’s ossifers-”

“Till we commences to shootin’ an’ drives on by,” one of the other Rhythm Aces broke in. They all laughed at the memory.

“Good for you. Good for you,” the announcer said. Flora didn’t like his fulsome tones; she thought he was laying it on with a trowel. The idea wasn’t to patronize the Negroes. It was to show the world they were human beings, too, human beings abused by their white Confederate masters. She couldn’t think of a better word than that, even though the Confederates had formally manumitted their slaves in the 1880s. Neither side’s propaganda was subtle these days. The announcer asked, “What will you play for us next?”

As usual, Satchmo spoke for the band: “This here is a song dat show we is glad to be where we’s at.”

They broke into “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was not the National Anthem as Francis Scott Key had written it. It was not the National Anthem as Flora had ever imagined it, either. They did things with and to the rhythm for which she had no names. But what they did worked. It made the staid old tune seem new and fresh to her again. Most of the time, she listened to “The Star-Spangled Banner” with half an ear, if that. She knew it too well to pay much attention to it. Not here, not now. She had to listen closely, because she couldn’t be sure just what was coming next. She didn’t think even the Rhythm Aces knew before the notes flowed from their instruments.

After the last proud wail of Satchmo’s trumpet, even the bland announcer seemed moved when he murmured, “Thank you very much.”

“You is mighty welcome, suh,” Satchmo said. “You is mighty welcome, an’ we is mighty glad to be in ‘de land o’ de free an’ de home o’ de brave.’ If we was still in de CSA, maybe they fixin’ to kill us.”

The announcer still didn’t seem to know what to make of that. Getting people in the USA to believe that whites in the CSA were systematically killing blacks wasn’t easy. Getting people in the USA to care even if they did believe was harder yet. People in this country wanted as little to do with blacks as they could, and wanted as few blacks here as possible.

Flora wondered if Satchmo and his fellow musicians had bumped up against that yet. They weren’t valued for themselves; they were valued because their escape gave the Confederates a black eye.

“What will you do now that you’re in our great country?” the wireless man asked at last.

“Play music.” By the way Satchmo said it, he could conceive of no other life. “Wherever folks wants us to play music, we do dat.”

How many people would want them to play music as alien to the U.S. tradition as that National Anthem had been? Flora couldn’t know. One way or another, Satchmo and his band would find out. They wouldn’t starve; the government wouldn’t let them. And they wouldn’t have to worry about pogroms and worse. People might not like them, but their lives weren’t in danger anymore.

After farewells and commercials, the news did come on. It wasn’t good. The big U.S. push in Virginia remained bogged down. U.S. counterattacks in Ohio hadn’t come to much. The fight to grind down the Mormon uprising remained stalled in Provo. If the United States could have thrown their full might at Utah, the revolt would have been crushed in short order. The Mormons, of course, had the sense not to rebel when the USA could do that. Flora hoped Yossel stayed safe.

Other fronts were sideshows. Confederate-sponsored Indian uprisings in Sequoyah kept the occupied territory in an uproar. That wouldn’t have mattered much if Sequoyah didn’t have more oil than you could shake a stick at. As things were, the United States had trouble using what they could get, and sabotage ensured that they didn’t get much.

Sequoyah was one more piece of trouble left over from the Great War and the harsh peace that followed. If the peace had been milder, maybe someone like Jake Featherston never would have arisen in the Confederate States. The smoldering resentments and hatreds that fueled the Freedom Party’s growth wouldn’t have existed. On the other hand, if the peace had been more draconian-more on the order of what the United States had visited on Canada-any sign of trouble would have been ruthlessly suppressed before it could turn dangerous.

Which would have been better? Flora didn’t know. All she knew for sure, all anyone in the battered USA knew for sure, was that what they’d tried hadn’t worked. That was particularly bitter to her because so much of what they’d tried had been under Socialist administrations, including her own late husband’s.

The Democrats had ruled the USA almost continuously between the disaster of the War of Secession and the bigger disaster of the Great War. Teddy Roosevelt hadn’t seen the Great War as a disaster; he’d seen it as a vindication, a revenge toward which the country had worked for two generations. Maybe he’d even been right. But the voters thought otherwise. They’d elected Socialists ever since, except for one four-year stretch.

And what had that got them? The economic collapse while Hosea Blackford was in the White House, and the rebirth of Confederate military power while Al Smith was. If only he hadn’t agreed to the plebiscites in Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah… But he had, and he’d won reelection on the strength of it, and none of Jake Featherston’s solemn promises turned out to be worth the paper it was written on.

We aren’t immune from mistakes, either, Flora thought, and laughed bitterly. There were times when the Socialists seemed to go out of their way-a long way out of their way-to prove that.

The telephone rang, dropping a bomb on her train of thought. Not sorry to see it go, she picked up the handset and said, “Yes? What is it, Bertha?”

“Mr. Roosevelt is on the line, Congresswoman,” her secretary answered.

“Is he?” Flora could hear the pleasure in her voice. “Put him through, of course.”

“Hello, Flora! How are you today?” the Assistant Secretary of War said. Franklin Roosevelt always sounded jaunty, even though poliomyelitis left him paralyzed from the waist down. He was only a distant cousin to Theodore, and had always been a solid Socialist.

“I’m fine, Franklin. How are you? What can I do for you today?” Flora said.

“I’m about as well as can be expected,” he replied. “I’d be better if the war were better, but I expect that’s true of the whole country. Reason I called is, I wondered whether you’d listened to Satchmo and his pals on the wireless just now.”

“I certainly did,” Flora told him. “I don’t think I ever heard the National Anthem sound like that before.”

Roosevelt had a big, booming laugh, a laugh that invited everyone who heard it to share the joke. “Neither did I, by God!” he said. “But it didn’t sound bad, you know-just different.”

Had he been a Democrat like his late cousin, the two words would have meant the same thing to him. Flora said, “I liked the way he and the Rhythm Aces talked between numbers. They’ll make some people think-here and in the CSA.”

“That’s the idea,” Roosevelt said. “We made sure this broadcast went out over a big web. Featherston’s boys could try till they were blue in the face, but they couldn’t jam all our stations. People on the other side of the border will have got the message.”

“Good. Excellent, in fact,” Flora said. “Featherston says he tells the truth. His people-white and black-need to know better.” She knew white Confederates wouldn’t pay much attention to anything Negroes said. But plenty of blacks in the Confederate States had wireless sets, too.

“They sure do.” Franklin Roosevelt paused. It seemed very casual. Then he went on, “President La Follette wanted me to pass on to you that, as far as he’s concerned, the bargain you had with Al Smith still holds. He’ll meet his end of it. He wants me to check and see that you will, too.”

“If he does, I will.” Flora hoped she hid her bemusement. Two presidents, now, had agreed to speak out against Confederate atrocities on Negroes if she didn’t speak out on a strange budget item she’d found. Stranger still, she didn’t even know what the item was for.