Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“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.”