McGregor sighed. 'How do I feel about that? Like the mother bird after the cuckoo laid the egg in her nest, son. But what am I supposed to do, I ask you that? What the Americans don't take, we'll eat ourselves.'
His son kicked at the dirt. When you were young, you were sure every thing had answers either black or white. Alexander was getting his nose rubbed in the reality of gray, and didn't much care for it. Trying to avoid it, he said, 'Why not just plant enough for us, and leave the rest of the fields'- he waved at the broad, flat acreage-'to lie fallow for the year?'
'I could do that, I suppose, if I didn't need to make some cash to buy the things we can't raise on the farm,' Arthur McGregor said. He eyed his son with genuine respect; the boy-no, the young man-could have come up with many worse notions. But- 'If I try that, too, the other thing likely to happen to me is farming at the point of an American bayonet.'
'If every farmer in Manitoba did the same thing, they couldn't put bayonets to all of our backs.' Alexander's face flamed with excitement. In the course of a couple of sentences, he'd given himself a bold and patriotic movement to join. 'A farmers' strike, that's what it would be!'
The only drawback to the movement was that it didn't exist. Arthur McGregor shook his head: no, it had more. 'For one thing, son, with all the Yanks in Manitoba these days, they likely do have enough men to put a bayonet at every farm. And for another, the way they shoot hostages, they wouldn't wait more than a minute or two before they started shooting farmers. And once they shot a few, the rest would-'
'Rise up and throw the Yanks off our soil!' Alexander broke in.
'Not that easy,' McGregor said with a sigh. 'I wish it was, but it's not. They shoot a few, most of the rest will do just what they say and nothing else but. Other thing is, there's too many Americans up here for us to throw 'em out even if we did rise up. Oh, we could make nuisances of ourselves, that I don't deny, but no more. The Yanks are bastards, sure enough, but we've seen too much to have the notion that they are cowards and they are fools. They'd beat us down, and we'd spend our blood for nothing.'
Alexander still looked mutinous. It was in the nature of youths his age to look mutinous: that is, to have their looks accurately reflect their thoughts. To quell the mutiny, McGregor didn't shout or bluster. Instead, he pointed to the roadway. Small in the distance but growing steadily larger as they approached, here came a battalion of U.S. soldiers marching north toward the front. In column of fours, they made a green-gray snake slithering across the land. The snake was having heavy going, the road still being muddy from melted winter snows.
After the troops came supply wagons topped with white canvas, lineal descendants of the Conestogas in which so many Americans-and not a few Canadians, too-had gone west to settle. Hooves and wagon wheels had even more trouble advancing through mud than did marching boots.
About half a mile behind that battalion came another, barely visible in the distance as yet but all too soon to approach in turn. 'Do you see, son?' McGregor asked, his voice halfway between gentle and rough. 'There are just too many of them, and us spread too thin on the ground to be much use fighting 'em. Either we find some other way to drive 'em mad, or we do as much of what they tell us as we have to and trust to God it'll all come out right in the end.'
'That's a bitter pill, Father,' Alexander said.
'I never told you it wasn't,' McGregor agreed. 'And trusting in God is hard, because He does what He wants, not what we want. I don't know what else to say, though. We get along, and we wait, and we see what happens.'
He couldn't have given his son much harder advice, and he knew it. The advice was hard for him, too. He wanted nothing so much as to strike back at the Americans. Before the war began, he'd been starting to think about buying a gasoline-powered tractor. Now he counted himself lucky to have a team of horses. He flicked the reins; he'd been standing idle long enough. The horses snorted and strode forward.
As the sun sank toward the flat horizon that evening, he and the team headed back toward the farmhouse and the barn. He'd curry the animals and get them fed and watered, and then go in to see what Maude had done up for supper.
The horses stopped, snorting, their ears twitching. McGregor stopped, too. For a moment, he failed to sense anything out of the ordinary. Then he too caught the low rumble out of the north. Far-off thunder, he would have thought the year before. He knew better now, an education he would willingly have done without. That was artillery. He hadn't heard it for a while. The front was a long way off these days. A bombardment had to be big to be noticed across so many miles.
'And whose guns are they?' he wondered out loud. Spring was here, summer coming: fighting weather. He had the feeling he'd be hearing guns a lot in days to come. He hoped they'd get louder, not softer: that would mean the front was drawing closer, his countrymen and whatever soldiers the mother country could spare pushing back the invaders.
He and his family spoke of little else over supper: rabbit stew. All they could do, though, was guess and hope. The artillery barrage went on through the night; it was still roaring away when McGregor visited the outhouse in the wee small hours.
And it was still roaring away when he took the horses out to the fields at sunrise. A train no doubt full of troops roared up the track toward the front; the road was full of marching men. By afternoon, ambulances and trains showing the Red Cross rolled south. Were their wounded the residue of advance or retreat? The hell of it was, Arthur McGregor had no way of knowing.
For Remembrance Day, Flora Hamburger and the other Socialists, not only from the Tenth Ward and the rest of the Lower East Side but from all over New York, came to Broadway to watch the parade. Coming as it did just nine days before May Day, their own great holiday, it was a rival focus for the energy and allegiance of the American working class.
As always, the parade route was packed to commemorate the day of mourning. Flags fluttered from poles on top of every building, every one of them flown upside down, symbolizing the distress of the United States when they had had to yield to the forces of the Confederacy, England, and France, and to recognize the Confederate States' acquisition of Chihuahua and Sonora.
Burly policemen cordoned the Socialist Party delegation away from the rest of the crowd. Brawls broke out every year after the Remembrance Day parade. Now, with the war on, who could say what might happen?
Flora peered across Broadway, to the three-story brick building that housed Slosson's Cafe and Billiards. Men looked out through the plate-glass window of the pool hall, and men and women both watched from the cloth- awninged windows of the upper floors. She wondered what sort of bosses squeezed profit from their labor.
Beside her, Herman Bruck said, 'Far more of the people are with us than the minions of the ruling class'-he pointed to the policemen-'would ever admit. They'll let the veterans' groups, with their fat bellies and their minds full of blood and iron, they'll let them know what they think.' He looked like a boss himself, in his broadcloth suit and stovepipe hat: a younger son, maybe, or one just taking over the business. But, whether Flora cared for him or not, she had to admit he was Socialist to the core.
'So many have lost husbands and brothers and sons,' she said, nodding, 'and for what? How are we better? What have we gained? How many more young men will have to die on the altar of capitalism and nationalism before the war ends?'
'All that is true,' Maria Tresca put in, 'but some will say, 'We have come this far, so how can we stop halfway?' This is the biggest stumbling block we have to overcoming the support of the masses for the war.' Her sister Angelina nodded.
'It is a problem,' Flora admitted. 'I have run into it many times myself.'
'It should not be a problem.' Bruck sounded angry. 'We should be able to show clearly why this war is immoral, unnatural, and serves only the interests of the ruling class.'
A few feet away, a policeman with a red Irish face heard that. He turned to Bruck and, smiling nastily, made motions as if of counting money. Then, with theatrical scorn, he turned his broad, blue-clad back.
'Do you see?' Flora said triumphantly. 'We voted to finance the war along with everyone else, and now no one lets us forget it. I said at the time that was a mistake.'
'So you did,' Herman Bruck muttered. He was in a poor position to do anything but mutter, as he had supported paying for the war. He still did, sometimes, but not when policemen mocked him for it. And so it was with some relief that he pointed down Broadway and said, 'Here comes the parade.'
Leading it, as had hardened into ritual over the past generation, came an enormous soldier carrying the Stars
