The Center Cannot Hold

XX

At three in the morning on an early December day when the sun wouldn't be up for hours and hours in Berlin, Ontario, Jonathan Moss thought wistfully of California or the Sandwich Islands or Florida or some other place with a halfway civilized climate. It was snowing outside. It had been snowing for a month. It would go on snowing till April, maybe May. He twisted in bed, trying to go back to sleep. Trust me to move out of Chicago for a place with worse weather, he thought. Most of the time, such musings carried wry amusement. Every so often, as tonight, they felt too much like kidding on the square.

"There," Laura said from the other bedroom. "Isn't that better?"

"Mama," Dorothy said. At not quite a year, she could say a couple of dozen words. That made her advanced for her age. She wasn't nearly advanced enough to keep from needing her diaper changed, though.

"Now lie down and go back to sleep," Laura said. The crib creaked as she put the baby back into it.

"Mama!" Dorothy wailed as her mother left her bedroom and came back to the one she shared with Jonathan. That desperate appeal failing, Dorothy started crying and screaming and making as much racket as she could.

All the books said you were supposed to let children cry themselves out when you put them to bed. After a while, they would get used to the idea that they could settle down by themselves. What the books didn't say was how you were supposed to keep from going crazy while the baby had conniptions. Earplugs might have helped, except that Jonathan had never found any good enough to keep out the noise.

His wife lay down beside him. "What are we going to do?" she said.

"How is she going to learn to go to sleep by herself if you go in there and pick her up?" he asked.

"How are we ever going to go to sleep if she screams her head off for the next two hours?" Laura returned.

Jonathan didn't have a good answer for that, because it had happened. It had happened more than once, as a matter of fact. The books said it wasn't supposed to. Dorothy hadn't read the books. She wasn't advanced enough to know how to read, either.

The next-door neighbors pounded on the wall, which meant the baby's racket had woken them up. "That does it," Laura said, and got out of bed. "I don't care what the books say. I don't want the Boardmans hating us. I'm going to rock her."

"All right." Moss didn't want to argue. He wanted to go back to sleep. And he did, as soon as the screaming stopped.

When the alarm went off a few hours later, Moss thought it was Dorothy crying again. "Turn it off, for Christ's sake!" Laura snarled. Muzzily, he did. His wife started snoring again before he left the room. He made his own coffee in the kitchen, and scrambled some eggs to go with it. Then he put on his overcoat and went downstairs to see if the Bucephalus would start.

It did. A new battery helped. As he piloted the auto to the office, he imagined he was piloting one of the fighting scouts he'd flown during the war. Aeroplanes were faster these days. One-deckers were replacing two-deckers-but then, he'd flown a one-decker, a U.S. copy of the German Fokker, through a long stretch of the war. He figured he could do it again if he ever had to.

An old Ford ran a red light and shot across his path. That was moronic any time, and all the more so with snow on the ground, when stopping was as much a matter of luck as anything else. Fortunately for Moss and the other guy, the Bucephalus did stop. Even so, he wished its headlights were twin machine guns. Then he could have given the fool in the Ford just what he deserved.

That was funny, in a way. He chuckled about it till he got to the office. But the world didn't feel so comfortable as it had a couple of years before. The sputtering war with Japan was only one sign of that. With the Action Francaise in the saddle in France, with Charles XI on the throne there and sounding fiercer every day, with the Mosley thugs a noisy minority in the British Parliament, both the German Empire and the United States, he thought, had reason to worry.

And with the Freedom Party set to take over the Confederate States, the USA had another reason to be anxious, one much closer to home. "Idiots," Moss muttered, cautiously applying the brakes at another light. "How could they have voted for that crazy blowhard?"

Actually, he knew how, or thought he did. The Confederates didn't just want to put their own house in order. Like the French, they wanted revenge for what had happened to them during the Great War. Of course, the French had friends. Little by little, Russia was shaking off the trauma of the war and the endless Red uprising afterwards-an uprising that made the Red revolt in the CSA seem a walk in the park by comparison. And England wanted another crack at Kaiser Bill… and, no doubt, at the United States as well.

A patrol of men wearing green-gray and carrying Springfields tramped past Moss' building as he parked the Bucephalus. That reminded him he was in a land-not a country any more-that also despised his nation. His very shingle reminded him of the same thing. JONATHAN MOSS, it said. OCCUPATION LAW.

He got out of the auto. He was laughing again as he went into the office, not that it was any too funny. Not a day went by when his marriage didn't remind him he was in a land that despised his nation.

At least we're occupying a place without all that many people, he thought. The Germans would have needed to put half their men in France to keep an eye on all the frogs who hate them. That was probably why they'd let the Action Francaise get off the ground: till too late, they hadn't seen it as a real threat. And now King Charles is talking about rearming. I'm sure the Kaiser loves that. But would he start another war to stop it? He's an old man now.

President-elect Featherston also made loud noises about rearming. Moss wished he hadn't remembered that, not least since no one in the USA seemed much inclined to stop him.

Moss turned the key in his door, turned on the lamp in his office, and turned the knob on the steam radiator to make the place feel as if it was at least a little south of the Arctic Circle. That done, he plugged in a hot plate and got a pot of coffee perking. It would be black, oily sludge by this afternoon. He knew that. He knew he'd go on drinking it anyway, too.

A letter from a military prosecutor lay on his desk. He'd left it there when he went home the morning before. Major Lopat's secretary had neatly typed, We are not obligated to turn over this evidence to you prior to its production in court. Rules of discovery applicable in civilian cases do not apply here, as you are doubtless perfectly well aware. If I can be of further assistance to you, do not hesitate to call on me. Then Lopat had signed it-in red ink, for good measure.

"Well, screw you, Sam," Moss muttered. What the military prosecutor didn't know was that he already had back-channels photostats of the documents in question. They'd come in the same mail delivery as the snotty letter.

He was gloating about the surprise he had planned for the prosecutor when the telephone rang. He was his own secretary. Picking up the telephone, he said, "Jonathan Moss."

A man's voice on the other end of the line: "You're the Yank barrister, aren't you?"

"That's right," Moss answered. "Who are you? What can I do for you?"

"If I was you, I wouldn't start my motorcar no more," the voice said. A click followed. The line went dead.

Moss looked out the window. There sat the Bucephalus, right where he'd left it. Had someone done something to it there on the street, brazen as could be? Or was somebody just trying to rattle his cage?

That wasn't the biggest question, he realized. The biggest question was, did he feel like finding out the hard way?

He didn't. He called the local garrison and reported what had just happened. The sergeant with whom he spoke knew who he was. The noncom thought the call highly amusing. "You're worth more to the Canucks than a dozen of their own kind," he said. "They ought to give you a medal, not blow you up."

"Funny. Ha, ha," Moss said. "Will you send your bomb squad out to go over my auto?"

"Yes," the sergeant answered. "I'll do that. The squad may take a while to get there, though. Yours is the fifth call we've had this morning."

"A hoaxer, then," Moss said. "He must want to make people run around in circles and waste time."

"We thought so, too," the sergeant told him. "The first two times we sent out the bomb squad, nothing. The third time, there was a bomb. They're still playing with it. If you hear a bang and your windows rattle, you can bet the squad will be late to your place." He laughed again.

Moss remembered such humor from his own days in the Army. It had seemed funny then. It didn't now-not to him, anyhow. The sergeant enjoyed it. "You ought to be trying to find out who your practical joker is," Moss said. "We could have another Arthur McGregor on our hands."

"Don't worry about it, Mr. Moss," the sergeant said. "When we do catch this son of a bitch, whoever he turns out to be, you can get him off the hook. So long. The bomb squad will be along sooner or later." He hung up.

That shows what my own people think of me, Moss thought unhappily. I'm not doing anything against the law-I'm working strictly within it. This is the thanks I get.

He wondered whether the bomb squad would show up at all, or whether he would get to find out if his car was wired by going out to it and turning the key. He heard no sudden and dreadful boom, though he worked with his ears peeled all day. Toward evening, a squad of men whose heavy armor made them look like a cross between modern soldiers and medieval knights showed up and went over his car. After twenty minutes or so, one of them waddled into the building.

By the time he got to Moss' door, he was sweating despite the chilly weather. How much did that protective clothing weigh? If a bomb went off, how much good would it do? Even had Moss intended to ask those questions aloud, he didn't get the chance. The man from the bomb squad asked if he was Jonathan Moss. When he nodded, the fellow said, "No bomb. Just that asshole running us from pillar to post." Without waiting for an answer, he waddled away.

"Thanks," Moss called after him. He raised a gauntleted hand and kept on walking.

Who would want to blow me up, or at least to scare me spitless? Moss wondered. The U.S. sergeant was right. He had done a lot of good for the Canucks. They shouldn't have wanted to hurt him. They should have wanted to coat him in bulletproof glass.

Do they hate me just because I'm a Yank? He shook his head in slow wonder. Who could be that stupid?

M ary Pomeroy. Mary Pomeroy. Mary Pomeroy. No matter how often she wrote her new name, trying to get used to it, she still thought of herself as Mary McGregor. She'd been married only a couple of months. The change in her name sometimes seemed the smallest of the changes that had swept over her. She'd known they would be there when she said yes after Mort got down on one knee in front of her. She'd known they would be there, but she hadn't had any idea how overwhelming they would prove.

How could living in Rosenfeld, for instance, be so very different from living on a farm not that far outside of town? So she'd asked herself before going from the farmhouse where she'd spent her whole life to rooms across the street from the diner where her new husband worked with his father. So she'd asked herself, and she'd found out.

Electricity, for instance. She'd never had it at the farm, so she'd never known what she was missing. Now she felt as if she'd spent her life in the Dark Ages. That was literally true; kerosene lamps didn't come close to matching light bulbs for brilliance or convenience. But there was so much more. A refrigerator beat an icebox all hollow. A vacuum cleaner was ever so much easier to use and more effective than a carpet sweeper. An electric toaster knocked the stuffing out of the wire grid that went over the fire. An electric alarm clock didn't stop running if she forgot to wind it.

An electric phonograph also didn't run down, unlike the windup machine the McGregors had had on the farm. And a wireless set-a wedding present from Mort's father-offered a window on the world Mary had never imagined. Music, dramas, comedies-all in the apartment, all at the twist of a dial? If that wasn't a miracle, what was? She had to keep reminding herself the news that came from the machine on the hour was only what the Yanks wanted her to hear.

The apartment had a telephone, too. That didn't impress Mary so much. None of the few people who might have wanted to call her had telephones of their own, so they couldn't. Whenever it rang, it was for Mort. She suspected that would change as time went by. The Pomeroys were still a very new couple. Bit by bit, they would fit themselves into Rosenfeld's jigsaw puzzle of class and sociability.

That thought had hardly crossed her mind before the other half of the Pomeroys came out of the bedroom pulling his overcoat tight around himself. "I'm off to the diner," he said, and paused to give Mary a kiss.

"Oh, Mort," she said. Her arms tightened around him. The kiss took longer and got hotter than he'd probably expected. He didn't seem disappointed, though, when they finally broke apart.

"I'll see you tonight," he said huskily.

Mary nodded. Some of the other things that went with marriage and a move to town were even more startling, even more exciting, than electricity. Although if it wasn't electricity that set her pulse racing now, what was it? She knew what it was, all right. "Tonight," she said.

Mort looked as if he had to remind himself he was supposed to go out the door, down the stairs, and across the street to the diner. Mary watched him from the window. He hurried across when no motorcars were coming in either direction. Snow flew up from his overshoes as he crossed the street. Rosenfeld would have a white Christmas in a couple of weeks. More snow started falling even as Mary watched.

Mort opened the front door to the diner, ducked inside, and closed it after him. With a regretful sigh, Mary turned away. What shall I do with the rest of my day? she wondered. Oh, she had work to do keeping the place clean and getting supper ready for tonight. But that was work for a few hours, not work that would devour a day. She had no livestock to look after but a cat, and Mouser, like any of his kind, looked after himself perfectly well.

Mary laughed. "I never thought I would miss shoveling manure," she said. It wasn't that she missed it, exactly, but she didn't have certainty in her routine any more.

Once she was done with what she had to do, she could go out and explore Rosenfeld. She'd done that a lot after coming back from her honeymoon at the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. She hadn't wanted to set foot in New York, and Mort hadn't argued with her. She didn't go out into Rosenfeld so often as she had on first coming home. She hadn't needed long to figure out there was only so much to see and do here. Compared to a farm, Rosenfeld was a metropolis. Compared to a real metropolis, Rosenfeld… might as well have been a farm.

When she finished her chores today, she sat down and turned on the wireless. The tubes inside glowed to life. She waited for sound to start coming out of the machine. This is what it's for, she realized. It fills up the spaces when you're not working. She hadn't had to worry about many spaces like that on the farm, for she was almost always working or eating or sleeping. But town life was different.

She could make herself a cup of tea, sit down in a rocking chair and read a book or a magazine, and listen to the wireless, and nobody would call her lazy or worthless. And she wasn't, either; she'd done everything that needed doing except for making supper, and that could-should-wait till the afternoon.

The book she had was called I Sank Roger Kimball. She didn't remember Kimball's death; she'd been a lot younger then, and the Confederate States had seemed farther away than the mountains of the moon. Come to that, they still did. Her honeymoon train ride was the first time she'd ever left Manitoba, and even then she'd gone only one province away.

But Sylvia Enos' travels weren't what leaped out of the sparsely written book at her. The American woman's revenge was. She'd found out what had happened to her husband, and she'd paid back the man who did it. Her government had seemed powerless to do any such thing, but she'd pulled it off. Not only that, she'd got off scot free-and people all across the United States acclaimed her as a heroine.

Part of Mary applauded that. But it infuriated more of her. This Enos woman had struck back for her country, and politicians in the USA praised her to the sky. Mary's own father had struck back at the USA for Canada, and he'd been hounded and hunted and ended up dying fighting the Americans. They'd murdered her brother, Alexander, who'd also been a patriot: murdered him under the disguise of law. Where was the justice in that?

And I haven't done anything-not a single, solitary thing-to pay the Yanks back for what they did to Alexander and to my pa. Shame burned Mary's cheeks. Her father's bomb-making tools remained hidden in the barn back at the farm. How am I supposed to bring them here? One day I'll have the chance, I suppose, but it hasn't happened yet. How old will I have to be before I can do something? To twenty-three, even twenty-five looked far away.

She went through I Sank Roger Kimball at a feverish pace. She did it, she thought again and again. She did it, and she got away with it.

I haven't done anything. When will I do something? Will I ever do anything? She went to the window and looked outside. As if on cue, a green-gray U.S. Army truck rolled slowly up the street. The Americans had been in Rosenfeld for going on twenty years now. The most she'd ever done to them was flatten a Model T's tires with a nail, and she'd been a little girl then.

Most Canadians, these days, found it easier just to… get along with the Yanks. Even people who'd called themselves patriots during and after the war were in bed with the Americans these days, sometimes literally. She despised them even more than she despised the Yanks. Americans were wrong, but at least they served their own country. What could you say about a Canadian who did the bidding of the United States? Mary didn't know any words vile enough for such people.

She'd had thoughts like that before, had them and done nothing about them. But I Sank Roger Kimball fired her all over again. Her father hadn't feared to pay the price. Did she?

She shook her head. It wasn't that. Life had got in the way. She'd never expected to fall in love, to get married, to leave the farm. She didn't see how anyone could do that sort of thing and keep fighting the Americans.

That was all right-as long as she eventually got on with the war. As far as she was concerned, it hadn't ended in 1917. It would never end till the Yanks left Canada and her country got its freedom back.

She salted and peppered a pork roast and put it in the oven with dried apples-the potatoes could wait till later. Buying meat at the butcher's shop instead of doing the slaughtering herself was one more thing she'd had to get used to. It was much more convenient, even if she couldn't always get the cuts exactly the way she wanted them.

Mort came home carrying a copy of the Rosenfeld Register. "Here's something funny from Ontario," he said, pointing to a story on an inside page. "Somebody threatened to bomb an American barrister's auto in Berlin."

"Just threatened?" Mary said. "Shame he didn't do it."

Mort Pomeroy nodded. He didn't love the Yanks, either; Mary couldn't have loved him if he had. But then he said, "He's not an ordinary barrister, though. Have you heard of Jonathan Moss? He defends Canadians in trouble with the occupation government, and he gets a lot of them off."

"No, I hadn't heard of him," Mary said. "Why does he do that, if he's an American? He must have some kind of angle."

"I don't think so," her husband said. "He is married to the woman whose maiden name was Laura Secord, but he was doing the same thing before he married her. And she wouldn't have anything to do with the ordinary run of Yank, would she?"

Mary didn't want to argue with Mort, even about something like this-which proved she was a newlywed, and very much in love. "I wouldn't think so," she said, and then, "Supper should be ready. Let me go make sure."

"Smells good," Mort said, and Mary smiled.

But she wasn't smiling on the inside. She remembered Laura Secord's name from the failed Canadian uprising of the mid-1920s. Wasn't the woman supposed to have warned her American lover about it? And wasn't it likely that that lover was this Moss fellow?

If that was so, the fellow who'd threatened to bomb the motorcar really should have done it, but with Moss' wife in the machine. Mary remembered her scorn-no, her hatred-for collaborating Canadians when the rebellion fizzled. She'd vowed revenge on them then. She'd vowed, and then she'd ignored her vow.

She took the pork roast out of the oven. Savory steam filled the kitchen. Mort exclaimed again. Mary hardly heard him. As she plunged her carving knife deep into the roast, she knew what she had to do.

"And I will," she murmured.

"Will what?" Mort asked.

"Get some butter for the potatoes," Mary answered smoothly. She took the butter out of the refrigerator. She'd bought it. She hadn't had to churn it: one more change from farm to town. But that wasn't what she'd meant. No, that wasn't what she'd meant at all.

W hen the door to your flat opens at three in the morning and you wake up at the noise and you smile and murmur, "Oh, thank God," odds are you are a fisherman's relative. Raising her voice slightly from that relieved murmur, Sylvia Enos called, "Is that you, George?"

"It's me, Ma," he answered, also in a soft voice: Mary Jane lay sleeping in the bedroom she now shared with her mother. "I'm sorry I woke you up."

"Don't worry about it. I'm glad you're here," Sylvia said. Mary Jane muttered, rolled over, and started to snore again. Sylvia went on, "Four days after New Year's and I've got my Christmas present. What time did your boat get in?"

"Last night, about five," George, Jr., said.

"What?" Sylvia couldn't believe her ears. She jumped out of bed and angrily hurried to her son. She wanted to shake him, but he was too big to shake. "And what were you doing between then and now? Drinking away your pay with a pack of worthless sailormen, I'll bet-that or worse." She sniffed, but she didn't smell beer or whiskey on her son's breath. She didn't smell cheap perfume, either, so maybe he hadn't been doing worse.

"Ma, I'm not drunk," George, Jr., said, and Sylvia had to nod, for she could tell that was true. He went on, "I didn't do… anything else, either. Not like that. Not what you meant."

Reluctantly, Sylvia nodded again. She didn't think he would lie to her straight out. "What did you do, then?" she asked. "Why didn't you come home?"

George, Jr., took a deep breath. "Ma, I didn't come home because I paid a call on Constance McGillicuddy and her folks. I asked her to marry me, Ma, and she said yes."

"Oh." The word took all the breath out of Sylvia. She stared up at her tall, broad-shouldered son in the gloom inside the flat. To her, he would always be a little boy. "Oh," Sylvia said again. Yes, she'd had to inhale first. Little boys didn't give her news like that.

"I love Connie, Ma," her son said. "She loves me, too. We'll be happy together. And she's got a waitressing job that looks like it's good and steady. We'll be able to make it, with a little luck."

In times like these, how much luck was out there? Sylvia didn't know. Times were hard when you had to worry about what your wife-to-be could bring in. She did know that. But George, Jr., was sensible enough to make the calculation instead of ignoring it. I did something right, Sylvia told herself.

Aloud, she said, "I haven't even met this girl, or her family. What do they do?"

She could barely make out her son's smile in the darkness. "Her father's a fisherman-what else? He knew Pa a little. I don't think they ever sailed together, though. He was in a destroyer during the war, too. He even got torpedoed, but he made it to a boat and got picked up."

"He didn't get torpedoed after the damn war was over." Sylvia's voice stayed soft, but she could hear the savagery in it. Even after more than sixteen years, what Roger Kimball had done still felt filthy to her. She remembered the weight of the pistol in her hand, remembered the way it had bucked when she pulled the trigger, remembered the deafening report, remembered Kimball falling with a look of absurd surprise on his face and blood spreading over the front of his shirt. If I had it to do over again, would I? she wondered.

She didn't wonder long. Hell, yes! I'd do it in a red-hot minute!

Coming back to here and now took a distinct effort of will. "McGillicuddy," she said. "She'll be Irish, then. Catholic."

"Does it bother you?" her son asked. "It doesn't bother me a bit, honest to God it doesn't." He laughed at his own choice of words.

Sylvia had to think about how much it bothered her. Some, yes, but how much? It wasn't as if she went to church every Sunday herself. She'd known plenty of Catholics who were perfectly nice, perfectly good people. How much did it really matter if her grandchildren grew up as mackerel-snappers? Less than she'd expected it to before she looked things over inside herself. "I guess it's all right," she said, and then nodded, firming up her acquiescence. "Yes, it is all right."

"That's taken care of, then," George, Jr., said. "They don't mind too much that I'm not." That side of the coin hadn't occurred to Sylvia. Her son went on, "It's the United States. Who you are counts for more than who your folks were. President Blackford's wife was Jewish, and nobody made a big fuss about that."

"I suppose," Sylvia said. "I'm still glad he lost. The Socialists just don't know what to do about the Confederate States."

"With this new Freedom Party taking over, who does?" George, Jr., said.

"I know." Sylvia hesitated, then went on, "That Roger Kimball was a grand high panjandrum in the Freedom Party. If he hadn't been, I never would have found out about him. That's the kind of people that party draws, and it's the best reason I can think of to figure they're up to no good."

"We licked the CSA once," her son said. "If we ever have to, we can lick 'em again."

He remembered only the last war. Unlike people born in the nineteenth century, he didn't think of the repeated humiliations the United States had suffered at the hands of the Confederacy, Britain, and France before the Great War. And, though his own father was part of the cost of licking the Confederate States, he didn't think about that, either.

Well, why would he? went through Sylvia's mind. He hardly remembers his father. How do you miss what you didn't even know you had?

She stood on tiptoe to kiss George, Jr., on the cheek. "Go to bed now. It's late. It's so late, it's getting early." He laughed at that, though Sylvia knew perfectly well what she'd meant. She went on, "I'm happy for you."

"Connie's the most wonderful girl in the world." He spoke with absolute conviction.

Did she already let him into her bed, to make him that happy? Sylvia shrugged. It hardly mattered, not if they were getting married soon. The worst that could happen was a baby, and most people looked the other way if a first baby came seven or eight months after the wedding instead of the usual nine. "All right, son. Sleep tight tonight, and we'll talk more in the morning."

In the morning, though, George, Jr., was still asleep when Mary Jane's alarm clock went off. He didn't wake up, either; in fact, his breathing didn't even change. Mary Jane got dressed while Sylvia made coffee for both of them. Her daughter had landed a typist's job. Neither of them knew how long it would last. They both knew she couldn't afford to be late. She'd got the job when the girl who had it before was late three times in two weeks.

Along with the coffee and eggs over hard, Sylvia gave Mary Jane the news. "That's wonderful!" Mary Jane squealed. She hugged Sylvia. "Wonderful!"

"Have you met the girl?" Sylvia asked. "I haven't."

"Once," her daughter answered. "We were at a dance together. We'd come separately, but we were both there at the same time. She's blond-green eyes. Pretty enough, I guess." Mary Jane shrugged, as if to say what men saw in women was largely a closed book to her.

It was to Sylvia, too, but she said, "George certainly seems to think so. Do you care that she's Catholic?"

"Not me," Mary Jane said at once. "As long as she gets along with George, that's what matters."

"That's what I think, too. We're going to have to meet her and her folks, you know. I wonder what they'll be like." Sylvia sighed. "I wonder if they have a telephone. If they do, I could go to a booth and call them up and arrange it. But Lord only knows how many McGillicuddys there are in Boston."

"If they have a telephone, George will know the number." Mary Jane was bound to be right about that. She gulped down the last of the coffee, rose from the table, and put on hat and overcoat against the cold, nasty weather outside. She hurried to the door, then turned back. "I'll see you tonight. Gotta run now, or I'll miss the trolley."

Sylvia had been laid off from a job in a canning plant not long before, just as she had after the Great War ended. She wasn't hurting yet, not with Mary Jane working and with the money she'd made in the 1932 presidential campaign, some of which she still had. Not going out to look for work one morning didn't worry her.

George, Jr., emerged from bed, still yawning, a little before nine. "They want to meet you, too, Ma, and Mary Jane," he said when Sylvia asked him about the McGillicuddys. "They haven't got a telephone, though. I'll set it up when I see Connie."

Sylvia and Mary Jane went to the McGillicuddys' house-it was a house, not a flat-near T Wharf two days later, on Sunday afternoon. Constance's father, Patrick, was a redhead, going gray; her mother, Margaret, had hair whose defiant gold had to come from a dye bottle. George, Jr.'s, intended also had three strapping brothers and a kid sister who couldn't have been much above ten. A big black dog named Nemo barked and wagged his tail and generally considered the house to be his, with the McGillicuddys tolerated guests whose purpose in life was to keep him full of horsemeat.

"You've got a fine boy there," Patrick McGillicuddy said, squeezing Sylvia's hand as she stood in the front hall. "We're glad to have him in the family." He didn't particularly talk like an Irishman. Looking Mary Jane up and down, he went on, "And I think Connor and Larry and Paul will be glad to have his sister in the family." His sons grinned.

"I'm glad to have her in the family, too," said Constance's sister, whose name was Liz.

"Good for you, dear," her father said, "but I don't think you're glad the way your brothers are." The young men's grins grew wider. Liz look confused. Whatever the McGillicuddys were going to tell her about the birds and bees, they didn't seem to have told her yet.

The way Connie looked at George, Jr., and the way she clung to him whenever she got the chance, told Sylvia everything she needed to know on that score. Her eyes met Margaret McGillicuddy's. The two women shared a moment of perfect understanding. Enjoy it while it lasts, their faces both said, because it doesn't usually last long.

"One of these days, I'm going to read your book," Patrick McGillicuddy told Sylvia. She nodded politely; she'd heard that a good many times. He went on, "You made a lot of people proud when you went down to the CSA and did what you did. Could have been me you were paying that sub skipper back for, easy as not."

She could tell he spoke from the heart. "Thank you," she said. "That means a lot to me, especially since George tells me you were in the Navy, too."

"Only luck I'm still here." He suddenly seemed to remember he had a drink in his hand. Raising it, he said, "And we've got luck right here in the room with us. To Connie and George!" He drank. So did Sylvia. So did everyone else.

A nother lonely winter night. Lucien Galtier took some fried chicken off the stove. He would never make a good cook, but he'd got to the point where he didn't mind eating what he made. After he finished supper, he washed dishes and tidied up as meticulously as he could. Marie would have expected it of him, and he didn't want to let her down. It wasn't as good a job as she would have done, but he hoped she would give him credit for making the effort.

After he put the last plate in the drainer-no matter what his wife had done, he couldn't make himself waste time drying dishes-he left the kitchen and went out to the parlor: the living room, people were calling it these days. He turned on the wireless and waited for sound to start coming out of it.

As music began to play, Lucien tapped the cabinet. "This is a marvelous machine," he said, talking to himself as he often did while alone. "It makes me feel I have company, even when I have none."

The music stopped. The people on the wireless began to try to sell him laundry soap. He listened to the pitch with half an ear while he lit a cigarette. Not all the company was welcome. Another little skit proclaimed the virtues of a brand of tobacco different from the one he smoked. He shrugged and took another puff.

More music came out of the speaker-a concertina solo. He grinned. "Welcome to Voyageurs," the announcer said. Lucien settled down to listen. All of Quebec settled down to listen at half past seven on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights. The comedy about fur traders and Indians was the most popular show in the country.

One of the Indians started complaining the voyageur had cheated him. That was a running gag on the show-in fact, the Indian got the better of the voyageur every time. He also spoke French not like an Indian but like a Jewish peddler, which made things funnier and made them funny in a different way.

As usual, everything turned out all right-and turned out absurd-within the appointed half hour. After the show was done, Lucien turned to a station that played music, poured himself some apple brandy, and settled down with a French translation of an American story: a woman who'd gone down into the Confederate States to avenge her husband.

It was a strange kind of French, extraordinarily terse and to the point. He wondered if the English was the same. Then he wondered if he could make enough sense out of written English to find out. He doubted it.

"But I can ask my son-in-law," he said. He had to remind himself Dr. Leonard O'Doull was a born anglophone. Whenever the two of them talked together, they spoke French. O'Doull sounded more like a Quebecois every year, too, losing bit by bit the Parisian accent with which he'd originally learned his second language.

At about a quarter to nine, someone knocked on the door. Wondering who could be mad enough to pay him a call at this hour, Lucien put down the book and went to find out. It wasn't snowing at the moment, but it had been and it would be, and it probably was below zero outside.

When he opened the door, his younger son waited there. "Oh, hello, Georges," Lucien said. "I might have known it would be you. What are you doing here so late?"

"Well, you wouldn't expect me to leave my house before Voyageurs was done, would you?" Georges asked reasonably. He stepped into the farmhouse where he'd been born and grown up. Lucien closed the door behind him to stop letting out precious heat. He went on, "I am not a rich man, to have a wireless set in my automobile. I am lucky to have an automobile."

"I've got the applejack out, to settle me before I go to bed," Lucien said. "Would you like some?"

"Yes, thank you, mon pere. It will warm me up after the chilly drive over, the motorcar also lacking a heater. Ah, merci." Georges accepted the glass and took a cautious sip-with bootleg applejack, you never knew what you were getting till you got it. He nodded. "This is a good batch. Strong enough to feel, but not strong enough to burn off the roof of your mouth."

"Yes, I thought the same," Lucien agreed. "Is that why you came over-to drink my brandy, I mean?"

"As good a reason as any, eh? And better than most, I think." Georges looked around. He lit a cigarette, then sighed and shook his head. "Whenever I come here, I keep expecting chere Maman to come out of the kitchen and say hello."

That made Lucien pour his own glass full again. "Whenever I come in the house, son, I expect the same thing. But what I expect and what I get"-he sighed-"they are not the same."

"Calisse," Georges said-almost more of an invocation of the holiness of the chalice than the usual Quebecois curse. He saw the book Lucien had been reading. "I went through that. A brave woman."

"I remember something about it in the papers when it happened," Lucien said. "Not much, though, and of course there was no wireless then. Strange how we've come to take it for granted in just a few years' time."

"My next-door neighbor visited me last fall," Georges said. "It was a Wednesday night, and he listened to Voyageurs. He had no electricity on his farm till then, did Philippe, though he does well for himself. He never saw the need. A week after that, he went out and got it so he could have a wireless set for himself. A wireless show decided him."

"I believe you," Lucien said. "Is this why you came, then? You wanted to tell me about your neighbor and the wireless and electricity?"

"I came because I wanted to visit my father," Georges replied. "Sour as you are, it could be that you find this hard to believe. If so… well, too bad. My neighbor Philippe cannot visit his father, for he has no father to visit. I am lucky, and I take advantage of my luck." He hefted his glass. "And if I get a knock of applejack in the side, this is not so bad, either."

Lucien looked down into the pale yellow liquid filling his own glass. Slowly, he said, "I am going to tell you something I thought I would never say to you in all my days. You are a scamp, you know, and a rogue, and a fellow who gets away with everything he possibly can and then with one thing more."

"You never thought you would say this to me?" Georges raised an eyebrow and made a comical face. " Mon cher papa, you have been telling me this ever since I could stand up, and probably before that, too."

"Yes, before that, too," the elder Galtier agreed. "But that is not what I intended to say. What I intended to say is, you are a good son, Georges. It pains me to say it, and it must pain you to hear it, but there it is. You are a good son."

Georges didn't say anything for close to a minute. When he did speak, his words were slow and thoughtful: "This means a very great deal to me, mon pere." He paused again, then went on, "What it means is, you are obviously senile, and suffering from softening of the brain. I am sure my esteemed brother-in-law, Dr. O'Doull, would have a fancier name for it, but that is what it is."

"Thank you," Lucien said, and sounded enough as if he meant it to make his younger son give him a puzzled look. He explained: "Thank you for showing me you really are the ungrateful wretch I thought you were, and not the caring fellow I believed I saw before. I don't recognize him, and wouldn't know what to do with him if I saw him again."

"Oh, good." Georges' voice held nothing but relief. "Now we are insulting each other again. I know how to do this. I know why I should, too. We understand each other this way. The other?" He shook his head. "What could we do if we talked to each other like that all the time?"

Lucien thought it over. "Lord knows."

His son got up and poured their glasses full of applejack again. "We can always get drunk. We know how to do that, too. How much work have you got in the morning?"

"The usual." Lucien shrugged. "How much have you got?"

"The usual." Georges shrugged, too. "But I have help, and you don't."

With another shrug, Lucien said, "It's winter. I have to feed the animals and muck out. Past that, things can wait. It's not like plowing or harvest time. If you want to get drunk, we can get drunk. Too bad Charles and Leonard are not here to do it with us."

"Winter does not make the brilliant and talented Dr. O'Doull's work lighter, as it does ours," Georges said. "If anything, it makes his work worse."

"We'll just have to drink by ourselves, then," Lucien said. "What shall we drink to?"

"How about drinking to being a small country where not much happens?" his son suggested. "The way the world seems to be going these days, we may be luckier than we know."

"I confess, I pay less attention to the world now than I did when we were part of Canada," Lucien Galtier said. "In those days, we had to worry about the United States, because the United States used to worry about us. Now the United States don't care much about us one way or the other."

"We don't bother them any more. We can't bother them any more," Georges replied. He paused, sipped, and then asked, "What do you think of Action Francaise?"

"It is good to see France feeling strong again. What ever else we are, we are still French, eh?" Lucien said, and his son nodded. He continued, "But to be strong, France has to get ready for war. I do not think this is good, not since I have seen war with my own eyes."

"Most Frenchmen have also seen war with their own eyes," his son said. "Those who have will not be eager to fight again, even if England goes the same way as France, which seems more likely every day."

"An eighteen-year-old in France will no more remember the Great War than an eighteen-year-old here," Lucien replied. "It is 1934 now. Come this summer, the war will have been over for seventeen years." He sipped at his applejack, wondering how that was possible.

But then Georges said, "Half a lifetime for me-oh, not exactly, but close enough. That truly seems unbelievable, but it is so. All the time of my manhood, I have lived since the war in the Republic of Quebec."

"So you have." Lucien also had trouble believing that, though it too was so. To keep from thinking about the passage of the years, he thought some more about how things were across the ocean. "England," he said musingly. "I don't love England-what Quebecois who grew up in Canada before the turn of the century could? But I don't hate her, either, not quite."

"Why not?" Georges asked. "I know plenty of men your age who do."

"Because I always feel that, bad as she was, she could have been much worse," Lucien replied after some thought. "She could have been like the Belgians in Africa, and made her name a stench among the nations. She didn't, and so I give her… some… credit."

"Ah, but would you rather be on her side or on the side of the United States?" Georges asked slyly.

"I would rather be on the side of Quebec, and of Quebec alone," Lucien said. But his son hadn't give him that choice, and he knew it.

F or some reason Nellie Jacobs couldn't fathom, her coffeehouse was full of men from the Confederate States one chilly February afternoon. Three or four of them had served in Washington during the war. By the cheerful way they reminisced, the CSA might have won the fight instead of losing it.

The fellow who'd led them here was a genial, middle-aged man named Robert E. Kent. He'd not only been in Washington, but insisted he'd been a regular at the coffeehouse. Nellie didn't remember him; she did her best not to remember men. But he remembered her and her doings altogether too well. "What ever happened to that pretty daughter of yours?" he asked. "You know, the one who was going to marry our officer."

"After the war, she married a U.S. veteran," Nellie said coolly. "Their son, Armstrong, will be twelve this year. They've got a little girl, too." Kent was named for a C.S. hero, her own grandson for one from the USA. She used Custer's middle name as a weapon against the genial Confederate.

Another man from south of the border said, "I saw a girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, in here a while ago. Is that your daughter's daughter?"

"No," Nellie said. "Clara's my daughter. I married Hal Jacobs, who ran the cobbler's shop across the street. He died last year." She looked down at the counter as she said that. It still hurt. A young Italian fellow had bought the cobbler's shop. He looked to be running it into the ground. Watching that hurt, too.

"Sorry to hear it, ma'am," Robert E. Kent said politely. "He fixed my boots once or twice. He was right good at it."

He gave Hal the sort of impersonal praise he might have given a whore who'd pleased him. Maybe thinking of that particular comparison was what made Nellie ask, "Do you know what else he was good at?"

"No, ma'am," Kent said. Confederates were polite, sometimes even when Nellie wished they weren't.

She said, "He was good at finding out what you people were up to, that's what. He was a big part of the U.S. spy ring in Washington during the war-and so was I."

That proud announcement spawned a considerable silence from the Confederates. At last, Kent said, "Well, ma'am, you helped your country, same as we helped ours."

He was, to Nellie's way of thinking, too polite by half. She'd hoped to get a bigger rise out of him and his countrymen. What good was gloating if the people you were gloating over refused to acknowledge you were gloating? To cover her feelings, she poured herself a cup of coffee.

One of the other Confederates said, "Ma'am, your country won the last war, no doubt about it. That's one for you, and we can't deny it." His compatriots nodded. He went on, "You've got to remember, though, when Jake Featherston gets to be president of the CSA in a couple of weeks… well, tomorrow belongs to us."

Almost all of the Confederates, Robert E. Kent among them, nodded again. One man looked sour as vinegar. Nellie would have bet he hadn't voted for Featherston. The others, though… The others looked as if they were talking not about ordinary earthly politics, but about the Second Coming. Kent said, "He'll put us back on our feet, by heaven."

"And he'll put the niggers in their place," another man said. "If there's anything worse than an uppity nigger, I don't know what it is."

Still more nods. Nellie had the feeling she ought to listen carefully, then take what she heard across the street to Hal, just as she had during the Great War. But Hal wasn't there, never would be there any more. The Italian fellow who had the place now would think she was crazy if she burst in and started babbling about what the Confederates were saying in her coffeehouse. He might be right, too.

"You Yankees waited a long time before you finally whipped us," Robert E. Kent said. "You needed to build yourselves up, and you went and did it. Now we're the ones who have to do that."

"Why?" Nellie asked, as if she were still a spy trying to ease important information out of people and not simply a proprietor trying to get her customers to hang around and order more coffee and sandwiches. "What difference does it make? If we're going to stay at peace, who cares whether one side's built up and the other one isn't?"

Kent said, "Ma'am, I think there's two different kinds of peace. One's where this fellow's strong and that fellow's weak, and when this fellow says, 'This is how we'll do things,' they do 'em that way, on account of that fellow's got no choice. That there is what we've got nowadays. The other kind is where both fellows are strong, and neither one pushes the other one around because he knows he'll get pushed back. That there is what Jake Featherston is after, and I reckon he can get it."

They all nodded again. Even the one who plainly hated Featherston and the Freedom Party nodded. Nellie wondered what that meant. Probably that he might not have much use for the president-elect of the CSA, but that he despised the United States still more. Nellie had never known any Confederates who had much use for the USA, not even when they came up here to do business.

"Let me have another cup of coffee, ma'am, if you'd be so kind," Robert E. Kent said, "and if you could get me a ham and cheese sandwich to go with it, that'd be good." Three or four of the others ordered more food and drink, too. They had plenty of money-U. S. coins and greenbacks, not the scrip and brown Confederate banknotes they'd used during the war. Nellie was glad to take it from them, and they tipped generously. All in all, it was the best business day she'd had in weeks.

Even so, she wasn't sorry when they finally left. She wanted Confederates to know their country was weaker than the United States. She wanted them afraid of the USA. When she found them cocky instead, she worried. She'd seen the CSA bombard Washington in the Second Mexican War as a child and in the Great War when she was in the prime of life. She didn't want it to happen again when she was an old woman.

Edna came by at closing time, as she often did now that Hal was dead. "How are you, Ma?" she said. "How was your day?"

"Fair. No, better than fair," Nellie answered, and told her about the Confederates.

Her daughter sighed, probably thinking of Confederate Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid and what might have been. Another world, Nellie thought, and laughed a little. If she was going to think of other worlds, why not one where the United States won the War of Secession and there never was any such thing as the Confederate States of America? With Virginia still in the USA, Washington wouldn't have been shelled. It would still be the capital in more than name, too. And who would ever have heard of Jake Featherston? Nobody at all, odds were.

"What are you smiling about?" Edna asked. When Nellie told her, she said, "Wouldn't that be something? You ought to write a book, Ma, like that gal from Boston did-you know, the one who shot the Confederate submersible skipper. You could get rich."

"Maybe I could get rich-if I could write a book. And if pigs could fly, we'd all carry umbrellas," Nellie said.

"You wouldn't have to do it all by your lonesome," Edna said. "That other gal had somebody else, a real writer, do most of the work. You could split the money and still have plenty."

"I haven't got enough ideas for a book," Nellie said firmly. "The only other thing I'm sure of is that we wouldn't have had this stinking collapse if we were one big country, and anybody can see that. It's not worth writing about."

"I suppose." Her daughter didn't want to give up the idea. "I know what you could do, then. Write about your life story. That's exciting enough for anybody, what with the spy stuff during the war and the.. the other stuff back before the turn of the century."

By the other stuff, of course, she meant Nellie's time in the demimonde. "I don't want to write about that!" Nellie exclaimed. "I wish to heaven none of that ever happened. I spent all these years getting to be halfway respectable, and now you want me to write about

… that? Forget it, Edna."

"Too bad," Edna said. "It'd be exciting. People'd pay money to read about it."

"It wasn't exciting. It was just nasty." Nellie couldn't imagine how anybody who'd actually been in the demimonde could think it was exciting. She hadn't come close to warming up to a man more than a couple of times in all the years since she'd left. And how much would people want to read about that?

She expected Edna to go on harping about it. Her daughter refused to believe how foul it had been, how foul it had made Nellie feel after a man put gold on the dresser, got undressed, and then did what he wanted-and had her do what he wanted. But Edna didn't nag, or not exactly. Instead, she said, "You remember that Bill Reach, the fellow who Hal said ran the whole spy show?"

The fellow who made me out to be a whore in front of a coffeehouse full of Confederates, Nellie thought grimly. "I remember him," she said, and not another word.

"I wonder what ever happened to him," Edna said. "If you know that, you could stick it in the book, too."

I know what happened to him. I killed the drunken son of a bitch when he tried to rape me. She almost told that to Edna, just to shut her daughter up. How much could it matter now that Hal, who'd idolized Bill Reach for no good reason Nellie could ever see, was dead? But she swallowed the words. She'd promised herself she would take that secret to her own grave, and she aimed to do it.

"If I had to guess," she said after an all but imperceptible pause, "he got killed when the United States bombarded Washington before they took it back. An awful lot of people did."

"No story in that, though," Edna said.

"I don't care," Nellie said. "That's what I'm telling you. There was no story."

"Ma, you're a stick."

"Well, maybe I am. I don't care. I worked too hard for too long to tell a bunch of fancy lies now that I'm on the edge of turning into an old lady. What would Hal say if I did?"

"Tell the truth, then," Edna said.

"I have been telling the truth," Nellie lied.

Her daughter threw her hands in the air. "What am I supposed to do with you, Ma?" she said, half affectionate, half exasperated.

"You could just leave me alone. That's what you told me and told me, and then I finally went and did it." Nellie came as close as she ever had to admitting she might have meddled too much and too long in Edna's life. "Now maybe I get to tell you the same thing."

"Why do you think I'll listen any better than you ever did?" Edna asked. Nellie had no answer to that, and not having one frightened her. A child outgrew a parent's efforts at care, but a parent wasn't likely to outgrow a child's.

M arch 4, 1934, was a Sunday. Church bells rang in Richmond. Some of them summoned the faithful to worship. Others, later, proclaimed the imminent inauguration of a new president of the Confederate States of America.

At Freedom Party headquarters, Lulu fussed over Jake Featherston, fiddling with his collar as if she were his mother and not his secretary. He put up with it for as long as he could. Then he stepped away and said, "I'm fine. You don't need to fool with it any more."

"I want it to be perfect," Lulu said, for about the fifth time that day.

"Come two o'clock this afternoon, the chief justice of the Supreme Court is going to swear me in," Jake said. "Nothing in the world-in the world, you hear me? — could be more perfect than that." He shook his head. "No, I take it back. Burton Mitchel, that… so-and-so"-he was careful of his language around Lulu-"has to stand there and watch me do it and shake my hand before I do it-and afterwards, too. That's even better than all the rest."

"I mean, I want you to look perfect." His longtime secretary had said that five or six times, too.

"I'm fine," Jake answered. And he was fine, too, as far as he was concerned. No clawhammer coat for him, no white tie and stiff-fronted white shirt, no top hat. The butternut outfit he had on was almost identical to what he'd worn during the three years of the war. He even had three stripes on his sleeve, though these were also of butternut, not artilleryman's red. The War Department had left him a sergeant, had it? Well, all right. Now the whole country had a sergeant heading it up. He wasn't ashamed of that. He was proud of it, by God.

Willy Knight strode into his office. The vice president-elect also wore a quasi-uniform, one a good deal fancier than Featherston's. Some European armies had a grade one step up from general. They usually called it field marshal. Had the CSA used that rank, the men who held it would have worn uniforms a hell of a lot like Knight's.

"Whoa!" Jake shielded his eyes against the glare of gold lace and brass buttons. "You look like the nigger doorman at an expensive hotel, you know that?"

"Go to hell," Knight said, and grinned enormously. He stuck out his hand. Featherston shook it. No furtive trial of strength today. For once, they both had all the strength they needed. "We did it!" Knight's grin got wider. Jake hadn't thought it could. "We really did it!"

"You bet we did," Featherston said, "and this is only the first day. What you got to remember, Willy, is that getting here's just the start. Now we've got to do what we set out to do with the Party-"

"And with the Redemption League," Willy Knight added.

"Yeah-and with the Redemption League," Jake allowed generously. "We're in. We keep going right on forward." That was where he had the edge on Knight and everybody else. He kept thinking about the next step, the step to take after the one he was on now. He looked at his pocket watch. "Where's Ferd?"

"I'm here." Ferdinand Koenig stepped into the office. He wore a plain business suit that seemed all the plainer next to the uniforms.

"Then let's get on with it," Jake said.

They went downstairs. Two identical limousines waited there. Featherston and Koenig got into one, Knight into the other. As they drove the short distance to Capitol Square, they traded places in the motorcade several times. An assassin wouldn't have an easy time figuring out who was who, not in the welter of escorting motorcycle cops and government bodyguards and Freedom Party bodyguards-who regarded one another like two rival packs of mean dogs. That instant rivalry suited Jake fine; the more everybody stayed on his toes, the better.

At his request, the platform where he would take the oath of office had gone up on the south side of the square, near the statue of Albert Sidney Johnston and near Bank Street. Congressmen and Freedom Party bigwigs and other important people packed the platform and nearby wooden bleachers. Party stalwarts in white and butternut and Party guards in not-quite-Confederate uniform kept order in the square. Featherston hadn't requested that. He'd insisted on it.

Among the important people on the platform and in the bleachers were a dozen or so men, most of them elderly, in perfectly genuine Confederate uniforms: the highest-ranking officers from the War Department. Jake chuckled as the limousine stopped near the platform. He pointed to the generals. "I hope those bastards are shaking in their boots."

"If they're not, they're even dumber than you always said they were," Koenig answered.

Jake got out of the motorcar. The stalwarts sprang to attention. The guards presented arms. "Freedom!" they shouted as one. Congressmen who weren't Party members-a minority, now-flinched. They'd never watched Party rallies up close. They'd stayed away on purpose, in fact. They had some lessons to learn, and Featherston looked forward to teaching them.

His boots thumped on the wooden stairs as he ascended to the platform, Knight and Koenig trailing him. Waiting to greet him were President Burton Mitchel and Chief Justice James McReynolds. Mitchel extended his hand. Featherston shook it. They'd had the four months since the election to get to know each other as Mitchel prepared to leave office and Featherston to take over. Getting to know each other hadn't meant getting to like each other; on the contrary.

"May I give you one last bit of advice?" Mitchel asked formally.

With newsreel cameras turning, Jake couldn't say no without looking ungracious. "Go ahead," he answered.

Mitchel looked weary unto death. He'd become president after a Freedom Party man murdered his predecessor. Now he handed his office over to the head of the Freedom Party. And how do you feel about that, Burton old boy? Jake wondered. The outgoing president said, "I believe, Mr. President-elect, that you and your followers will find it has been easier to criticize than it will be to govern."

"Do you?" Jake said. Mitchel nodded stiffly. For the benefit of the cameras, Featherston smiled and clapped him on the back. "Well, Mr. President," he went on quietly, smiling still, "I reckon some folks'll believe anything, won't they?"

He stood well away from the microphones. He didn't think they would pick that up. If by some mischance they did… Well, that bit of film could always end up on the cutting-room floor. Burton Mitchel winced as if bayoneted. Willy Knight laughed.

Chief Justice McReynolds was a handsome man with a long face, a jutting chin, and white hair that had receded just enough to give him a high, high forehead. He had frowned when Jake delivered his cut, but made himself rally. "Are you ready to take the oath, Mr. President-elect?"

Jake looked out over Capitol Square, over the crowd filling it (after the local Mitcheltown had been bulldozed to let a crowd fill it), and the throngs of people on the sidewalks of Bank Street. "Am I ready?" he echoed. "You bet I'm ready."

"Very well, sir. Raise your right hand and repeat after me…"

"I, Jake Featherston… do solemnly swear… that I will faithfully execute… the office of President… of the Confederate States, and will… to the best of my ability… preserve, protect, and defend… the Constitution thereof."

There. It was official. When Featherston lowered his hand, he did so as president of the Confederate States of America. Chief Justice McReynolds shook hands with him. "Congratulations, Mr. President," he said. "I am the first one to have the privilege of addressing you thus."

"You sure are," Jake agreed. He even smiled. But if you think I've forgotten your Supreme Court let this Mitchel bastard run again in 1927, you'd better think again. I haven't forgotten one goddamn thing, not me. And I know how to settle your hash when the time comes. You may not think so, you fancy-pants son of a bitch, but I do.

The time hadn't come yet, though. For now, he had to show everybody what a smooth fellow he was. He shook hands with Burton Mitchel again, then stepped to the microphones. "Friends, I'm Jake Featherston, and I'm still here to tell you the truth."

"Feather ston! Feather ston! Feather ston!" The rhythmic chant from the crowd in Capitol Square and across the street rolled over him. He drank it in. He liked his whiskey as well as the next fellow, but the intoxication of a crowd took him higher and didn't leave him with a headache the next morning.

He held up his hands. Not everybody who was cheering had Party discipline; the noise took longer than it should have to die away. When it did, he went on, "The truth is, we're going to make this country work again, and we're going to make it work better than it ever did before. We're going to dam the big rivers and keep them from flooding the way they did seven years ago. We're going to use the electricity from the dams for people's houses-the houses of honest people, working people, white people-and for factories that will make all the things we need, and make 'em cheap enough so folks can afford 'em."

More applause. Again, it faded more slowly than it might have. Once it did, he continued, "And it's high time we show the USA that the Confederate States are a country that works, too. It's time we stand up straight again and look the United States in the eye and say, 'We've got a few things to talk about.' We haven't been able to do that yet, even though the war's been over for a long time. We haven't been strong enough. We will be, though."

This time, the rapturous shouts from the crowd were the older Party cry: "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" They were deeper and fiercer than those that had gone before, with more men and fewer women joining in. Even the generals in their gleaming uniforms looked intrigued. What's this, boys? You think I'll put my toys in your hands? In the quiet of his own mind, Jake laughed out loud. You're fools, too. You're worse fools than that stinking McReynolds, only you're too dumb to know it.

He kept the inaugural address short and sweet. That was best for the wireless web and for the crowd there in person. After the speech came the parade, for the crowd and for the newsreel cameras. An Army marching band began it. Behind the band strutted a crack regiment in dress uniform.

And behind that one regiment came formation after formation of Freedom Party men from every state in the CSA: stalwarts in white shirts and butternut trousers, smaller units of guards in those almost military uniforms. Some bands of stalwarts simply marched. Some carried truncheons. Like the Army regiment, the Freedom Party guards carried rifles, and they plainly knew what to do with them.

"Look at the generals," Jake whispered to Ferdinand Koenig. "Now they're seeing what we've got, and and they want it for themselves."

Scorn filled Koenig's voice: "Not likely."

"Oh, hell no," Featherston said. "All that there"-he pointed to the parade-"that's ours. We made it, and we'll use it. I know just how, too. By God, you'd better believe I do."