Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Buildings that still had glass in their windows were the lucky ones. Some people had replaced the glass with sheets of plywood. Others made do with cardboard, which was fine till it got wet. Quite a few hadn’t patched the wounds with anything. Those buildings, even when otherwise undamaged, seemed to look out on the world with dead eyes.

A lot of motorcars were missing glass from their windows, too. Patching them with plywood wasn’t practical. People made do, not that they had much choice.

Bomb damage beyond broken windows was scattered almost at random throughout Richmond. Here a building would have a chunk bitten out of it or a street would be cordoned off with sawhorses to keep automobiles from diving into a hole in the pavement eight feet deep and thirty feet across. Gangs of Negroes directed by whites with submachine guns worked with picks and shovels to clear rubble and repair roads.

Every now and then, most of a city block of buildings was gone, smashed to matchsticks and bricks and rubbish. Men and women sifted through the rubbish, trying to find fragments of the lives they’d just had blown to smithereens. A girl of about six clutched in her arms a rag doll she’d just picked up and did a triumphant, defiant dance. Take that, Potter thought, looking north. The damnyankees might have wrecked her home, but she’d found her best friend again.

Despite the wreckage, morale seemed good. Men and women on the street often greeted Potter with calls of, “Freedom!” He had to return the same answer, too, which made his sense of irony twinge. His rank drew notice. “We’ll get ’em, General,” one man said. “Don’t you worry about it.”

“Yankees can’t lick us,” a woman declared. “We’re tougher’n they are.”

Potter made himself nod and agree whenever someone said something like that. He also thought any one Confederate was likely to be tougher than any one Yankee. Did that mean the USA couldn’t lick the CSA? He wished he thought so. There were a lot more Yankees than Confederates. Jake Featherston had hoped to knock the United States out of the fight in a hurry. It hadn’t quite worked.

Now it was a grapple. The Confederates still had an edge, but it wasn’t so big as Potter would have liked. The United States can lick us, he thought. They’d just better not, is all.

Mary Pomeroy sat in a jail cell in Winnipeg, waiting for the other shoe to drop. That it would, she had no doubt. They’d caught her red-handed this time. And, of course, now that they had caught her red-handed, Wilf Rokeby’s charges looked a lot different. They hadn’t believed the retired postmaster when he said she’d sent a bomb through the mail. They hadn’t-but they sure did now.

A rugged matron in a green-gray blouse and skirt-a woman’s U.S. uniform-led two male guards up the corridor toward her. “Your lawyer is here,” she announced. “You have half an hour to talk with him.”

“Thanks a lot,” Mary said. Sarcasm rolled off the matron like rain off a goose. She opened the door. Mary came out through it; if she hadn’t, the matron would have slammed it shut again. Anything was better than just sitting on the rickety cot in there.

The guards pointed the rifles at Mary as she went up the hall. They looked ready to start shooting at any excuse or none. They no doubt were, too. She almost wished they would. If she went up before a real firing squad, she’d have to try to be as brave as Alexander was. Maybe I’ll see him up in heaven, she thought.

Heavy wire mesh kept her from doing anything but talking with the lawyer. His name was Clarence Smoot; the military judge in charge of her case had appointed him. He was plump and bald and looked prosperous. Maybe that meant he got clients off every once in a while. Mary didn’t expect he’d be able to do much for her. She knew she was guilty, and so did the Yanks.

“Half an hour,” the matron barked again. “From now. Clock’s ticking.”

“Oh, shut up, you miserable dyke,” Clarence Smoot muttered, loud enough for Mary but not for the matron to hear. The lawyer raised his voice then: “Shall we talk about your chances, Mrs. Pomeroy?”

“Have I got any?” Mary asked bleakly.

“Well… you may,” Smoot said, fiddling with the knot on his gaudy necktie. “They can’t prove you blew up Laura Moss and her little girl. They may think so”- and they may be right, too, Mary thought-“but they can’t prove it. All they can prove is that you had explosives when they caught you, and that those explosives were well hidden. You won’t get away with saying you were going to blow up stumps or anything like that.”

“They won’t listen to me no matter what I say.” Mary was more nearly resigned than bitter. “I’m Arthur McGregor’s daughter and I’m Alexander McGregor’s sister. And now they’ve got me.”

“They may not apply the maximum penalty-”

“Shoot me, you mean.”

Clarence Smoot looked pained. “Well, yes.” But you don’t have to come right out and say it, his attitude suggested. “Colonel Colby is a fairly reasonable man, for a military judge.”

“Oh, boy!” Mary put in.

“He is,” Smoot insisted. “Compared to some of the Tartars they’ve got…” His shudder made his jowls wobble. “If you throw yourself on the mercy of the court, I think he’d be glad enough to let you live.”

“In jail for the rest of my life?” Mary said. Reluctantly, Smoot nodded. She shook her head. “No, thanks. I’d sooner they gave me a blindfold and got it over with.”

“Are you sure?” Smoot asked. “Do you want your husband to have to bury you? Do you want your mother and your husband and your sister and your son to have to go to the funeral? If you do, you’ll be able to get what you want. I don’t think there’s any doubt of that.”

Mary winced. He was hitting below the belt. Alec was too little to understand what all this meant. His mother was in a wooden box and they were putting her in the ground forever? That would have to be a bad dream, except it wouldn’t be. It would be real, and when he grew up he would hardly remember her.

But some things were more important. If she’d thought they would let her out one day before too long, she might have weakened. With nothing but endless years in a cell as an alternative, though… “My brother didn’t beg. My father didn’t beg. I’ll be damned if I’m going to.”

Clarence Smoot exhaled heavily and lit a cigarette. “You don’t give me much to work with, Mrs. Pomeroy.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Then she shook her head again. “I’m sorry they caught me. That’s the only thing I’m sorry for. They’ve got no business being here. You’ve got no business being here. You’re a Yank, eh? You talk like one.”

“I’m from Wisconsin. Up till now, I didn’t know that made me a bad person.” Smoot’s voice was dry. He eyed her. “Would you rather have a Canadian lawyer bumping up against an American military judge? I don’t think that would do you an awful lot of good, but you can probably find one.”

“What I want…” Mary took a deep breath. “What I want is for all you Yanks to get out of Canada and leave us alone to mind our own business. That’s what I’ve wanted since 1914.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Pomeroy, but that’s not going to happen. It’s way too late to even worry about it,” Clarence Smoot said. “We’re not going to go away. And the reason we won’t is that you wouldn’t mind your own business if we did. You’d start playing footsie with the Confederates or England or Japan, and you’d make all kinds of trouble for us. We don’t aim to let that happen.”