Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

“Can you blame us?” Mary exclaimed. “After everything the United States have done to my country, can you blame us?”

Smoot spread his pudgy hands. He wore a wedding ring; Mary hoped he wasn’t married to a Canadian woman. “Whether I can blame you doesn’t matter,” he said. “Whether the United States are going to take that kind of chance… well, they won’t, so there’s no point even thinking about it.”

That was how a Yank would think. Before Mary could tell him so, the matron stuck her formidable face into the room and said, “Time’s up.”

Mary’s time nearly was up. She felt it very strongly. Smoot said, “We’ll do the best we can at your hearing. The less you say, the better your chances. I can see that plain as day.”

In tramped the guards. They didn’t point their rifles at Mary this time, but they looked as if they were just about to. “When I say that’s it, that’s it,” the matron barked, her voice almost as deep as Smoot’s.

“Take it easy, Ilse,” the lawyer said soothingly. But the matron wasn’t inclined to take it easy. She jerked a muscular thumb toward the door. Mary got up and went. If she hadn’t, the matron would have made her pay for it-oh, not right there where Smoot could see, but later on. The food would be worse, or Mary wouldn’t get to bathe, or maybe the matron would just come in and thump her. She didn’t know what would happen, only that it wouldn’t be good.

They took her to the hearing in an armored personnel carrier, a snorting monster of a vehicle only one step this side of a barrel. If they had to use it here, they weren’t using it against their foreign enemies. That consoled her a little-as much as anything could.

Colonel Colby was a Yank in a uniform. That was all that registered on her at first. Another, younger, Yank, a captain named Fitzwilliams, prosecuted her. He laid out what her family connections were. Clarence Smoot objected. “Irrelevant and immaterial,” he said.

“Overruled,” the military judge said. “This establishes motive.” The worst of it was, Mary knew he wasn’t wrong. She hated the Yanks for what they’d done to her country and what they’d done to her family.

Captain Fitzwilliams set out the case linking her to the bombing at Karamanlides’ general store (she thought they’d forgotten all about that one) and to the one that killed Laura and Dorothy Moss. Smoot objected to that, too. “The only kind of evidence you’ve got is the testimony of a man who is obviously biased,” he insisted.

“Why obviously?” Fitzwilliams asked. “Because he doesn’t agree with you? It doesn’t matter much anyhow. She was caught with explosives in the barn on the farm where her mother lived. Bomb-making is-and should be-a capital crime all by itself. The other charges are icing on the cake.” By the pained way Smoot grunted, he knew that only too well.

“Does the defendant have anything to say in mitigation or extenuation?” the judge asked. He sounded as if he hoped she did. That surprised her. As Clarence Smoot had said, he wasn’t a monster, only a man doing his job.

Smoot nudged Mary. “This is your chance,” he whispered. “Think of your little boy.”

She hated him then, for trying to deflect her from what she intended to do. She had to steel herself to tell the judge, “No. I did what I did, and you’ll do what you do. If you think I love my country any less than you love yours, you’re wrong.”

Colonel Colby looked at her. “A plea for mercy might affect the verdict this court hands down.” It wasn’t that he wanted her to beg. He wanted her to live.

“You can give me the same mercy you showed Alexander,” she said.

The military judge sighed. “Why do you want to martyr yourself? It won’t change anything one way or the other.”

“You have no right to be here. You have no right to try me,” Mary said.

“We have the best right of all: we won,” Colby said. “If your side had, would you have been gentle to the United States? I doubt it.” Mary hadn’t even thought about that. It didn’t worry her, either. Colby let out a long, sad sigh. “I have no choice but to pronounce you guilty, Mrs. Pomeroy. The punishment for the infraction is death by firing squad.”

“We will appeal, your Honor,” Smoot said quickly.

“No.” Mary overruled him, or tried to.

“An appeal in a capital case is automatic,” Colby told her. “Part of me hopes I will be overruled. I must say, though, I don’t expect to be.”

They took Mary back to her cell. They allowed her no visitors. That was more a relief than a torment. She didn’t want to see Mort, and she especially didn’t want to see Alec. He might have made her weaken. She didn’t think she could stand that, not when she’d come so far.

Colonel Colby knew what he was talking about. The appeal was denied. The panel that heard it ordered the sentence carried out, and so it was, on a sunny day with spring in the air. Mary knew she should have been afraid when they tied her to the pole, but she wasn’t.

They offered her a blindfold. She shook her head, saying, “This is for Canada. I’ll take it with my eyes open.”

A minister prayed. She wondered why the Yanks had him here when they were doing something so ungodly. An officer commanded the men in the squad: “Ready!.. Aim!.. Fire!” The noise was shattering. So was the impact. And then it was over.

Guards at the Andersonville prison camp often let U.S. POWs see Confederate papers. Sometimes they would offer their own editorial comments, too. They jeered whenever the CSA did something good. If the USA scored a success, it never showed up in the news in the Confederate States.

The guards also jeered at what they called U.S. atrocities. “Look at this here,” one of them said, waving a newspaper at Major Jonathan Moss. “Now you people are shooting women up in Canada.”

Moss glared at him. “Are you going to let me see it, or are you just going to flap it in my face?” The guard blinked, then handed him the paper, which came from Atlanta. Where Confederate newspapers came from hardly mattered. They all had the same stories in them: whatever the Freedom Party wanted the Confederate people to hear.

Moss read the story. The way the reporter told it, Mary Pomeroy was a martyr whose like the world hadn’t seen since St. Sebastian. That the damnyankees alleged she’d blown up a woman and a little girl in Berlin, Ontario, only proved what a pack of liars and murderers came out of the United States.

So the reporter said, anyhow. It proved something different to Jonathan Moss. He thrust the paper under his arm without a word. “Well?” the Confederate asked him. “What have you got to say about that there?”

“She had it coming.” Moss’ voice was hard and flat.

The guard gaped at him. “How can even a damnyankee say such a heartless thing as that?”

“Because she murdered my wife and my daughter, you cracker son of a bitch.” Moss braced himself. If the guard wanted to mop the floor with him, he could. The fellow was bigger than he was and only half his age-and carried a submachine gun besides.

But the guard’s gape only got wider. “She killed- your kinfolk?” He sounded as if he couldn’t believe his ears.

“That’s what I told you,” Moss answered. “It’s the God’s truth, too. If she hadn’t done that, I’d probably still be up in Canada. I’d be a damn sight happier than I am now, too. I wish I’d been up there even now. I’d have stood in that firing squad. I’d have pulled that trigger. You bet your life I would have.”

He wondered if the guard would call him heartless again. The man didn’t. He just went off shaking his head. That’ll teach you to wave a newspaper in somebody’s face, you know-nothing bastard, Moss thought savagely.