he'd have been ready for a second round as soon as the first was over. Now… Now he'd wait for tomorrow, or maybe the day after. Laura gave him another shove, and twisted under him, too. 'Let me up. Let me set myself to rights.'
'Oh, I suppose so,' he said. But he couldn't keep wonder from his voice as he went on, 'A baby. How about that?'
'Yes. How about that?' His wife's voice softened, too. 'It isn't what I expected, but I'm glad it's happened.'
'So am I.' He wondered if he meant it. He decided he did. 'About time we put down some roots here.'
' I've already got roots here,' Laura said pointedly. She nodded, too, though. 'It's about time we were a family.'
'A baby,' Moss said again. 'I wonder what he'll see by the time he grows up.' The baby would be his age in the early 1970s. What would the world be like then?
A creek ran through the farm on which Mary McGregor and her mother lived. Scrubby oaks and willows grew alongside it. They got some firewood there, which was all to the good. Ducks sometimes nested along it, too, which gave Mary practice with a shotgun and gave her mother and her a tasty dinner every so often. And she would pull trout out of it once in a while, though she seldom had the time to sit and fish.
The creek and the trees by it also came in handy in other ways. Mary lit a fuse and ducked down behind an oak to wait for the explosion. It came just when she thought it would-a harsh, flat crack! Mallards leaped into the air with a thunder of wings. A couple of crows in a willow flapped away, cawing in alarm. Moments later, quiet returned.
Mary stepped out from behind the tree trunk to see what the dynamite had done. She nodded to herself. The stump she'd blown up had landed in the creek, just as she'd thought it would. The hole in the ground it left was about the size she'd expected, too.
She hadn't done anything particularly useful-a stump here wasn't the nuisance it would have been out in the middle of a field. But she'd learned a little more about explosives and fuses, which was knowledge that wouldn't go to waste, either on the farm or…
Or anywhere else, she thought. She was, after all, Arthur McGregor's daughter. She wondered what had gone through her father's mind while he waged his long one-man war against the Americans who occupied Canada. He'd never talked about it much-but then, he'd never been one to talk about anything much. What had he thought? Her guess was that he'd tried not to think about it except while he was actually busy at it. That would have made it harder for him to give himself away when the Yanks came snooping around, which they had again and again.
Not thinking about it would also have made it easier for him to go on thinking of them as the enemy, as abstractions, not as human beings. Killing the enemy was what you did when you went to war. Blowing up men- people-who were just like you, who fell in love and drank beer and got sore backs and dug splinters out of their hands and played checkers… That was a different business. It had to be a different business. Mary couldn't see how anybody would want, or would even be able, to do that.
Had Major Hannebrink, the American officer who'd ordered her brother Alexander shot during the war, ever imagined him as a human being? Or had Alexander simply been the enemy to him? For a moment, Mary came close to understanding how the American could have done what he did, came close to understanding without hating.
For a moment, and for a moment only. She shoved that understanding away with all the force of the hate she'd nursed ever since the USA invaded her country in 1914. She saw Americans as the enemy, not as human beings at all. She saw them so, and intended to go right on seeing them so.
When she got back to the farmhouse, her mother sat at the kitchen table drinking a cup of tea. 'I heard the boom,' Maude McGregor said.
Mary nodded. 'I took out a stump,' she said. 'I'm getting the hang of it, I think.'
'Are you?' Her mother's voice held no expression what ever. 'And what will you do with it once you've got it?'
'It'll come in handy around the farm, Ma,' Mary answered. 'You know it will.'
'Yes-as long as you only use it around the farm,' her mother said. 'That's what worries me. I know you too well.'
I don't know what you're talking about would have been a lie, an obvious lie. 'I don't intend to use it anywhere else,' Mary said. That was a lie, too, but maybe not so obvious. Maybe.
Maude McGregor looked at her for a long time. 'I hope not,' she said at last, and then, 'Would you like a cup of tea?'
'Yes, please,' Mary said. Her mother fixed her one. She added milk and sugar herself, and sat down to drink it across the table from her mother. Neither of them said another word till the tea was done-or, for that matter, for several hours afterwards. When they did start speaking to each other again, it was quietly, cautiously, as if they'd had a knockdown, drag-out fight that might pick up again if they weren't careful.
That's silly, Mary thought. We didn't. Not even close. All we did was talk about that stump. To her mother, that stump seemed plenty. And Mary herself wasn't inclined to change her mind. Maybe that was what worried her mother.
They were still wary around each other a few days later, when they had to go into Rosenfeld to shop. Mary remembered checkpoints outside of town, where the Americans would carefully examine wagons and goods for explosives before letting them go on. Not now. The Yanks seemed to think her countrymen weren't dangerous any more. One day, she hoped to show them they were wrong. That too, though, would have to wait for another day.
Many more motorcars were on the road now than had been there when Mary first started going into Rosenfeld. They whizzed past the wagon, one after another. Some of the drivers, angry because they had to slow down to keep from hitting it, honked as they went by.
'I wish I were a man,' Mary said. 'I'd tell them what I think of them.'
Her mother nodded. 'Yes, I'm sure you would,' she said. It did not sound like praise. Mary muttered to herself, but didn't rise to it.
When they got into Rosenfeld, her mother tied the horse to a lamppost. 'Hardly any hitching rails left,' Mary said.
'I know.' Maude McGregor nodded again. 'Automobiles don't need them. You go to the post office and get some stamps. I'll be in Henry Gibbon's store.'
'All right.' Mary hesitated, then plunged: 'Do you want to go to the cinema afterwards? We haven't been in an awfully long time.'
'Maybe,' her mother answered. 'We'll see how much I have to spend at the general store, that's all.'
Mary wished she could argue more, but knew she couldn't, not when the argument involved money. Even the half a dollar two tickets would cost was a lot, considering how little the farm brought in.
Wilfred Rokeby stood behind the counter at the post office, as he had for as long as Mary could remember. She noticed with surprise that he'd gone gray. When had that happened? It must have sneaked up when she wasn't looking. He still parted his hair in the middle and slicked it down with some old-fashioned, sweet-smelling oil whose spicy odor she indelibly associated with the post office.
Only one other customer was ahead of her: a young man close to her own age, who had a huge swarm of parcels. The postmaster had to weigh each one individually and calculate the proper postage for it, then stick on stamps and write down the sum so he could get a grand total when he finally finished.
Seeing Mary, the young man waved her forward. 'If you want to take care of what you need, go ahead,' he told her. 'I'll be here for a while any which way.'
She shook her head. 'It's all right. You were here first. I can wait.'
'Are you sure?' he asked.
'Positive,' she said. 'Where are you sending all those boxes, anyway?'
'Winnipeg. My brother just moved up there, and he figured out this was the cheapest way to get his stuff up there with him. Of course, that means I have to stand here and go through this, but why should Bob care?' He grinned.
To her surprise, Mary found herself grinning, too. 'Brothers and sisters are like that,' she said, speaking from experience. 'You might as well be a pack mule, as far as they're concerned.'
'That's right. That's just right.' Bob's brother-Mary still had no better name for him-nodded enthusiastically.
