hard, especially in out-of-the-way places like this. She led the immense horse into the barn. When she came out, she asked, 'And how do you have in mind celebrating, eh, Yank?'
'I expect we'll think of something,' he answered.
'What I'm thinking of first is a bath,' she said.
Moss nodded. 'Sure, sweetheart. I'll scrub your back, if you want me to.'
'I'm sure you will,' she told him. And, as a matter of fact, he did. One thing pleasantly led to another. After a while, they lay naked, side by side, on her bed. Lazy and sated, Moss lit a cigarette. He offered her the pack. She shook her head. That made other things jiggle, too. He watched with interested admiration. Though he didn't care to remember it, he was a little closer to forty than thirty these days; a second round wasn't so automatic as it had been a few years before. He thought he could rise to the occasion today, though. Laura Secord watched him watching her. 'Did you enjoy your celebration?' she asked.
Had she smiled, that would have been different. As things were, her voice had an edge to it. 'What's the matter, darling?' he asked, and reached out to toy with her left nipple.
She twisted away. 'Why should anything be the matter?' she asked. 'You come up here when it suits you, you… celebrate, and then you drive back down to Empire.' She stubbornly kept using the name the Canadians had tried to hang on Berlin during the war, before the USA took it.
Although Jonathan Moss didn't have experience with a great many women, he knew trouble when he heard it. 'Dammit, Laura, you'd better know by now that I don't come up here just to have a good time,' he said.
'I know you didn't used to,' she answered. 'But things have been going on for a while now, and I do start to wonder. Can you blame me? Will you still drive up here every couple of weeks in 1935, or will you have found someone younger and prettier and closer to Empire by then?'
'I'm not looking for anybody else,' Moss said. 'I love you, in case you hadn't noticed.'
'Do you?' Laura Secord asked.
'Of course I do!' he said. She looked at him. She didn't say what she was obviously thinking: in that case, what are you going to do about it? The question was, if anything, more effective left hanging in the air. Jonathan Moss took a deep breath. His response looked pretty obvious, too. 'Will you marry me?' he asked. 'Will you sell this farm and come over to Berlin-you can even call it Empire if you want-and live with me for the rest of our lives?'
Her nod said that that was the right question, sure enough. But it wasn't a nod of acceptance. She asked a question of her own: 'Why didn't you ask me that a long time ago, Jonathan?'
'Why? Because I know I'm nothing but a lousy American, and I figured you'd tell me no for sure. I'd sooner have gone on the way things were than have that happen. Hearing no to a question like that hurts worse than anything else I can think of.'
'What if I said yes?' she asked quietly.
'I'd throw you into my motorcar, and we'd get back to Berlin in time to find a justice of the peace. If you think I'd let you have the chance to change your mind, you're nuts.'
Laura Secord gave him the ghost of a smile. 'It couldn't be quite that fast, I'm afraid. I'd have to make arrangements to sell the livestock or to have it taken care of before I leave the farm.'
' Are you telling me yes?' Moss demanded. She nodded again. This time, she meant it the way he'd hoped she would. He let out a whoop that probably scared some of her feral farm cats out of a year's growth. Moss didn't care. And he did rise again, and they found the best way to inaugurate their engagement.
Afterwards, she said, 'I was afraid you didn't want to buy a cow as long as milk was cheap.'
'Moo, me?' he answered, and startled her again, this time into laughter. If that wasn't a good omen, he didn't know what would be.
G eorge Enos, Jr., set cash on the kitchen table-more of it than Sylvia Enos had expected. 'Here you go, Ma,' her son said, his voice breaking with excitement. 'We had us a he… heck of a run. Cod like you couldn't believe.' He looked down at his hands, which had acquired the beginnings of the scabs and scars that always marked fishermen's fingers and palms. 'I did more gutting than anybody could think of. And with the offal over the side, the birds that came, and the sharks-I never imagined anything like it.'
'Your father used to talk the same way,' Sylvia answered. She remembered him sitting up over a mug of coffee in the days when they were first married, telling her about what he'd done and what he'd seen and what it had felt like.
But this wasn't quite the same, after all. George Enos had done enough fishing by the time he married her that it had become routine, and wearying routine at that. George, Jr., didn't seem tired at all. Maybe that was because everything still seemed bright and new to him. Or maybe it was just because, at seventeen, he never got tired at all. His father certainly had, though, and he'd been only a few years older.
'How much is it, Ma?' Mary Jane asked, looking up from the onions she was chopping. She paused to rub her streaming eyes, then let out a yelp-she must have had onion juice on her fingers, and made things worse instead of better.
'Quite a bit,' answered Sylvia, who'd been trained from childhood not to talk about money in any detail. 'It will help a lot.'
'That's good,' Mary Jane said. 'I'm going to look for a shopgirl job again tomorrow. I bet I find something, too. That one I had last summer was swell, but then you went and made me go back to school.' She sent Sylvia as severe a look as a fifteen-year-old girl could give her mother.
Sylvia had no trouble withstanding it; she'd known far worse. 'Summer work is one thing,' she said. 'School is something else. You need your schooling.'
George, Jr., glanced at his sister. They both almost-but not quite; no, not quite-invisibly shook their heads. These days, they were old enough to team up on Sylvia, instead of fighting each other as they'd done for so long. Sylvia knew why George, Jr., sneered at school. He was making good money without it.
And Sylvia had a pretty good idea why Mary Jane didn't want to keep going. She was bound to be thinking something like, Who cares whether I can divide fractions and diagram sentences? What difference will it make? I'm going to get married and have babies, and my husband will make money for me.
'You never can tell,' Sylvia said, half to herself, half to her daughter. 'I thought George, Jr.'s, father was going to take care of things forever. But then the war came, and the Confederates captured him, and after that he joined the Navy, and he… he didn't come home. And I've had to run like crazy ever since, just trying to make ends meet. If I knew more about spelling and typing and arithmetic, I'd've had better jobs and made more money, and we'd've done better for ourselves. And if you think things like that can't happen to you and the people you love, Mary Jane, you're wrong. I wish you weren't, but you are. Because you never can tell.'
By something surely not far from a miracle, she got through to her daughter. Instead of giving her a snippy answer, Mary Jane nodded and said, 'I wish I could've known Pa better.'
George, Jr., got up and set a hand on his younger sister's shoulder. 'I wish I could have, too.' His voice roughened. 'But at least Ma paid back the stinking son of a bitch'-had he been out on the trawler instead of in his kitchen, he undoubtedly would have said something much hotter than that-'who sank the Ericsson. Everybody I sail with knows Ma's a hero.'
Sylvia brushed that aside. 'It won't get me any supper,' she said, and stood up herself so she could start cooking. She hadn't felt heroic when she'd pumped a revolverful of bullets into Roger Kimball. She had trouble remembering now exactly how she had felt. Frightened and resigned was about as close as she could come to it. She hadn't thought she would ever see her children or Boston again.
But here she was, with all the same problems, all the same worries, she'd had before getting on the train for Charleston. Being a hero, she'd rapidly discovered, paid few bills. When she'd come home, she had got back the job she'd left so she could go to the Confederate States. She'd made a few speeches that brought in a little money. By now, though, she was old news. Even in this presidential election year, no one asked her to come out. Joe Kennedy, for instance, had used her and forgotten about her. Every once in a while, she wondered how many women he'd really, rather than metaphorically, seduced and abandoned. More than a few, or she missed her guess.
While washing dishes later that evening, Mary Jane asked, 'Who are you going to vote for come November, Ma?'
Women's suffrage had finally come to Massachusetts-and to the rest of the holdout states in the USA-with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. These days, all the men who'd opposed it were busy explaining how they'd never really done any such thing, how they'd always looked out for the country's best interests, and as many other lies as they could find.
