as he would a lot of others, but he'd learned better than to get too excited about such things.
When he got up to his apartment, he slit the envelope open. It held just what he'd expected: a postal money order and a note. The money order was for $ 12.50. The note read, Dear Mr. Moss, With this latest payment I now owe you $41.50.1 hope to get it all to you by the end of the year. The crops look pretty good, so I should have the money. God bless you again for helping me. Laura Secord.
She'd been sending him such money orders, now for this amount, now for that, since the middle of winter. He'd written her that it wasn't necessary. She'd ignored him. The only thing he'd managed to do-and it hadn't been easy-was persuade her she didn't owe him any interest.
'Lord, what a stiff-necked woman,' he muttered. He'd realized that when he was up in Canada during the war. She hadn't bent an inch in her animosity toward the Americans.
He'd made her bend to the extent of being polite to him. He hadn't made her bend to the extent of wanting to stay obligated to him one instant longer than she had to. As soon as she'd paid off the last of what she owed, she could go back to pretending he didn't exist.
He couldn't even refuse to redeem the money orders. Oh, he could have, but it wouldn't have made things any easier for Laura Secord. She'd already laid out the cash to buy the orders. Not redeeming them would have been cutting off his nose to spite his face.
'Haven't you done enough of that already?' he asked himself. Since he had no good answer, he didn't try to give himself one.
He cooked a little beefsteak on the stove, then put some lard in with the drippings and fried a couple of potatoes to go with it. That didn't make a fancy supper, but it got rid of the empty feeling in his belly. He washed the plate and silverware and scrubbed the frying pan with steel wool. His housekeeping was on the same order as his cooking: functional, efficient, uninspired.
Once he'd taken care of it, he hit the books. Bar examinations would be coming up in the summer. Much as he'd enjoyed most of his time at the Northwestern law school, he didn't care to wait around another semester to retake the exams after failing.
A tome he studied with particular diligence was titled. Occupation Law: Administration and Judicial Proceedings in the New American Colonial Empire. The field, naturally, had swollen in importance since the end of the Great War. Before the war, it had hardly been part of U.S. jurisprudence at all, as the United States, unlike England, France, and Japan, had owned no colonial empire. How things had changed in the few years since! Occupation law was said to form a large part of the examination nowadays.
Moss told himself that was the only reason he worked so hard with the text. Still, if he decided to hang out his shingle somewhere up in Canada, it behooved him to know what he was doing, didn't it? He didn't think about hanging out his shingle anywhere near Arthur, Ontario… not more than a couple of times, anyway.
He realized he couldn't study all the time, not if he wanted to stay within gibbering distance of sane. The next morning, he met his friend Fred Sandburg at the coffeehouse where they'd whiled away-wasted, if one felt uncharitable about it-so much time since coming to law school.
'You've got that look in your eye again,' Sandburg said. Moss knew he was a better legal scholar than his friend, but he wouldn't have wanted to go up against Fred in a courtroom: Sandburg was ever so much better at reading people than he was at reading books. He went on, 'How much did she send you this time?'
'Twelve-fifty,' Moss answered. He paused to order coffee, then asked, 'How the devil do you do that?'
'All in the wrist, Johnny my boy; all in the wrist.' Sandburg cocked his, as if about to loose one of those newfangled forward passes on the gridiron. Moss snorted. His friend said, 'No, seriously-I don't think it's something you can explain. Sort of like card sense, if you know what I mean.'
'Only by hearing people talk about it,' Jonathan Moss confessed sheepishly. 'When I played cards during the war, I lost all the damn time. Finally, I quit playing. That's about as close to card sense as I ever got.'
'Closer than a lot of people come, believe me,' Fred Sandburg said. 'Some of the guys I played with in the trenches, it'd take inflation like the damn Rebs are having to get them out of the holes they dug for themselves.'
Up came the waitress. She set coffee in front of Moss and Sandburg. Sandburg patted her on the hip-not quite on the backside, but close-as she turned away. She kept walking, but smiled at him over her shoulder. Moss was gloomily certain that, had he tried the same thing, he'd have ended up with hot coffee in his lap and a slap planted on his kisser. But Fred had people sense, no two ways about it.
Moss decided to put his pal's people sense to some use and to change the subject, both at the same time: 'You think Teddy Roosevelt can win a third term?'
'He's sure running for one, isn't he?' Sandburg said. 'I think he may very well, especially if the Socialists throw Debs into the ring again. You'd figure they'd have better sense, but you never can tell, can you? As a matter of fact, I hope Teddy loses. Winning would set a bad precedent.'
'Why?' Moss asked. 'Don't you think he's done enough to deserve to get elected again? If anybody ever did, he's the one.'
'I won't argue with you there,' Sandburg said. 'What bothers me is that, if he wins a third term, somewhere down the line somebody who doesn't deserve it will run, and he'll win, too.'
'All right. I see what you're saying,' Moss told him, nodding. 'How many other people will worry about that, though?'
'I don't know,' Sandburg admitted. 'I don't see how anybody could know. But I'll bet the answer is, more than you'd think. If it weren't, we'd have elected someone to a third term long before this.'
'I suppose so.' Moss sipped his coffee. He watched people stroll past the coffeehouse. When a man with only one leg stumped by on a pair of crutches, he sighed and said, 'I wonder how the fellows who didn't come through the war would vote now if they had a chance.'
'Probably not a whole lot different than the way our generation will end up voting,' Sandburg said. Moss nodded; that was likely to be true. His friend continued, 'But we're in the Half Generation, Johnny my boy. Every vote we cast will count double, because so many of us haven't even got graves to call our own.'
'The Half Generation,' Moss repeated slowly. 'That's not a bad name for it.' He waved for the waitress and ordered a shot of brandy to go with the coffee. Only after he'd knocked back the shot did he ask the question that had come into his mind: 'Did you ever feel like you didn't deserve to come back in one piece? Like fellows who were better than you died, but you just kept going?'
'Better fighters? I don't know about that,' Fred Sandburg said. 'Harder to tell on the ground than it was in the air, I expect. But I figured out a long time ago that it's just fool luck I'm still breathing and the fellow next to me caught a bullet in the neck. I don't guess that's too far from what you're saying.'
'It's not,' Moss said. For that matter, Sandburg had caught two bullets and was still breathing. No doubt luck had a great deal to do with that. Moss wished there were something more to it. 'I feel I ought to be living my own life better than I am, to make up for all the lives that got cut short. Does that make any sense to you?'
'Some, yeah.' Sandburg cocked an eyebrow. 'That's why you're still mooning over this Canuck gal who sends you rolls of pennies every couple of weeks, is it? Makes sense to me.'
'God damn you.' But Moss couldn't even work up the energy to sound properly indignant. His buddy had got him fair and square. He defended himself as best he could: 'You don't really have much say about who you fall in love with.'
'Maybe not,' Sandburg said. 'But you're not quite ready to be a plaster saint yet, either, and don't forget it.'
'I don't want to be a plaster saint,' Moss said. 'All I want is to be a better person than I am.' This time, he caught the gleam in Fred's eye. 'You tell me that wouldn't be hard and I'll give you a kick in the teeth.'
'I wasn't going to say anything of the sort,' Sandburg answered primly. 'And I'll be damned if you can prove anything different.'
'You're not in court now, Counselor,' Moss said, and they both laughed. 'But what the devil are we going to do-the Half Generation, I mean, not you and me-for the rest of our lives? We'll always be looking over our shoulders, waiting for the other half to come up and give us a hand. And they won't. They can't. They're dead.'
'And you were the one who just got through saying Teddy Roosevelt deserved a third term,' Sandburg pointed out. 'And I was the one who said I couldn't argue with you. God help us both.'
'God help us both,' Jonathan Moss agreed. 'God help the world, because there's hardly a country in it that doesn't have a Half Generation. With the Canucks, it's more like a Quarter Generation.'
