lucky to have an automobile.'
'I've got the applejack out, to settle me before I go to bed,' Lucien said. 'Would you like some?'
'Yes, thank you, mon pere. It will warm me up after the chilly drive over, the motorcar also lacking a heater. Ah, merci.' Georges accepted the glass and took a cautious sip-with bootleg applejack, you never knew what you were getting till you got it. He nodded. 'This is a good batch. Strong enough to feel, but not strong enough to burn off the roof of your mouth.'
'Yes, I thought the same,' Lucien agreed. 'Is that why you came over-to drink my brandy, I mean?'
'As good a reason as any, eh? And better than most, I think.' Georges looked around. He lit a cigarette, then sighed and shook his head. 'Whenever I come here, I keep expecting chere Maman to come out of the kitchen and say hello.'
That made Lucien pour his own glass full again. 'Whenever I come in the house, son, I expect the same thing. But what I expect and what I get'-he sighed-'they are not the same.'
'Calisse,' Georges said-almost more of an invocation of the holiness of the chalice than the usual Quebecois curse. He saw the book Lucien had been reading. 'I went through that. A brave woman.'
'I remember something about it in the papers when it happened,' Lucien said. 'Not much, though, and of course there was no wireless then. Strange how we've come to take it for granted in just a few years' time.'
'My next-door neighbor visited me last fall,' Georges said. 'It was a Wednesday night, and he listened to Voyageurs. He had no electricity on his farm till then, did Philippe, though he does well for himself. He never saw the need. A week after that, he went out and got it so he could have a wireless set for himself. A wireless show decided him.'
'I believe you,' Lucien said. 'Is this why you came, then? You wanted to tell me about your neighbor and the wireless and electricity?'
'I came because I wanted to visit my father,' Georges replied. 'Sour as you are, it could be that you find this hard to believe. If so… well, too bad. My neighbor Philippe cannot visit his father, for he has no father to visit. I am lucky, and I take advantage of my luck.' He hefted his glass. 'And if I get a knock of applejack in the side, this is not so bad, either.'
Lucien looked down into the pale yellow liquid filling his own glass. Slowly, he said, 'I am going to tell you something I thought I would never say to you in all my days. You are a scamp, you know, and a rogue, and a fellow who gets away with everything he possibly can and then with one thing more.'
'You never thought you would say this to me?' Georges raised an eyebrow and made a comical face. ' Mon cher papa, you have been telling me this ever since I could stand up, and probably before that, too.'
'Yes, before that, too,' the elder Galtier agreed. 'But that is not what I intended to say. What I intended to say is, you are a good son, Georges. It pains me to say it, and it must pain you to hear it, but there it is. You are a good son.'
Georges didn't say anything for close to a minute. When he did speak, his words were slow and thoughtful: 'This means a very great deal to me, mon pere.' He paused again, then went on, 'What it means is, you are obviously senile, and suffering from softening of the brain. I am sure my esteemed brother-in-law, Dr. O'Doull, would have a fancier name for it, but that is what it is.'
'Thank you,' Lucien said, and sounded enough as if he meant it to make his younger son give him a puzzled look. He explained: 'Thank you for showing me you really are the ungrateful wretch I thought you were, and not the caring fellow I believed I saw before. I don't recognize him, and wouldn't know what to do with him if I saw him again.'
'Oh, good.' Georges' voice held nothing but relief. 'Now we are insulting each other again. I know how to do this. I know why I should, too. We understand each other this way. The other?' He shook his head. 'What could we do if we talked to each other like that all the time?'
Lucien thought it over. 'Lord knows.'
His son got up and poured their glasses full of applejack again. 'We can always get drunk. We know how to do that, too. How much work have you got in the morning?'
'The usual.' Lucien shrugged. 'How much have you got?'
'The usual.' Georges shrugged, too. 'But I have help, and you don't.'
With another shrug, Lucien said, 'It's winter. I have to feed the animals and muck out. Past that, things can wait. It's not like plowing or harvest time. If you want to get drunk, we can get drunk. Too bad Charles and Leonard are not here to do it with us.'
'Winter does not make the brilliant and talented Dr. O'Doull's work lighter, as it does ours,' Georges said. 'If anything, it makes his work worse.'
'We'll just have to drink by ourselves, then,' Lucien said. 'What shall we drink to?'
'How about drinking to being a small country where not much happens?' his son suggested. 'The way the world seems to be going these days, we may be luckier than we know.'
'I confess, I pay less attention to the world now than I did when we were part of Canada,' Lucien Galtier said. 'In those days, we had to worry about the United States, because the United States used to worry about us. Now the United States don't care much about us one way or the other.'
'We don't bother them any more. We can't bother them any more,' Georges replied. He paused, sipped, and then asked, 'What do you think of Action Francaise?'
'It is good to see France feeling strong again. What ever else we are, we are still French, eh?' Lucien said, and his son nodded. He continued, 'But to be strong, France has to get ready for war. I do not think this is good, not since I have seen war with my own eyes.'
'Most Frenchmen have also seen war with their own eyes,' his son said. 'Those who have will not be eager to fight again, even if England goes the same way as France, which seems more likely every day.'
'An eighteen-year-old in France will no more remember the Great War than an eighteen-year-old here,' Lucien replied. 'It is 1934 now. Come this summer, the war will have been over for seventeen years.' He sipped at his applejack, wondering how that was possible.
But then Georges said, 'Half a lifetime for me-oh, not exactly, but close enough. That truly seems unbelievable, but it is so. All the time of my manhood, I have lived since the war in the Republic of Quebec.'
'So you have.' Lucien also had trouble believing that, though it too was so. To keep from thinking about the passage of the years, he thought some more about how things were across the ocean. 'England,' he said musingly. 'I don't love England-what Quebecois who grew up in Canada before the turn of the century could? But I don't hate her, either, not quite.'
'Why not?' Georges asked. 'I know plenty of men your age who do.'
'Because I always feel that, bad as she was, she could have been much worse,' Lucien replied after some thought. 'She could have been like the Belgians in Africa, and made her name a stench among the nations. She didn't, and so I give her… some… credit.'
'Ah, but would you rather be on her side or on the side of the United States?' Georges asked slyly.
'I would rather be on the side of Quebec, and of Quebec alone,' Lucien said. But his son hadn't give him that choice, and he knew it.
F or some reason Nellie Jacobs couldn't fathom, her coffeehouse was full of men from the Confederate States one chilly February afternoon. Three or four of them had served in Washington during the war. By the cheerful way they reminisced, the CSA might have won the fight instead of losing it.
The fellow who'd led them here was a genial, middle-aged man named Robert E. Kent. He'd not only been in Washington, but insisted he'd been a regular at the coffeehouse. Nellie didn't remember him; she did her best not to remember men. But he remembered her and her doings altogether too well. 'What ever happened to that pretty daughter of yours?' he asked. 'You know, the one who was going to marry our officer.'
'After the war, she married a U.S. veteran,' Nellie said coolly. 'Their son, Armstrong, will be twelve this year. They've got a little girl, too.' Kent was named for a C.S. hero, her own grandson for one from the USA. She used Custer's middle name as a weapon against the genial Confederate.
Another man from south of the border said, 'I saw a girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, in here a while ago. Is that your daughter's daughter?'
'No,' Nellie said. 'Clara's my daughter. I married Hal Jacobs, who ran the cobbler's shop across the street. He died last year.' She looked down at the counter as she said that. It still hurt. A young Italian fellow had bought the cobbler's shop. He looked to be running it into the ground. Watching that hurt, too.
