long, wearing day out in the fields. 'You'll meet somebody, get married yourself, and move away. I'll probably have to sell this place and move in with you or Julia.'
'I wouldn't do that!' Mary exclaimed.
Her mother smiled. 'Of course you would. You should. That's the way the world works. Young folks do what they need to do, and older ones ride along with it as best they can. I don't see how we'd go on if things worked any different.'
'It doesn't seem right. It isn't right,' Mary said-she'd had that passionate certainty for as long as she'd been alive. After a moment, she went on, 'If I ever marry anybody'-and the thought had crossed her mind more and more often since she'd passed her twentieth birthday-'he ought to come and live here and help us work this place. Then our children could go right on working it, years and years from now.'
'The trouble with that, you know, is that Julia and Kenneth, and their children when they have them, have an interest in this land, too,' her mother said.
'Julia doesn't seem very interested,' Mary said. 'She went off without so much as a backwards glance.'
'Julia doesn't seem very interested now,' her mother replied. 'How she'll feel about things ten or twenty years from now-or how her husband and her children will feel-well, how can anybody know for sure?'
Thinking about what things might be like ten or twenty years from now still didn't seem natural to Mary. She tried to imagine herself at forty, but no picture formed in her mind. That lay too far in the future to mean anything to her now. She wondered if Julia still felt the same way. Maybe not-with a husband at hand, she had to be looking forward to having children.
How children were begotten was no mystery to Mary, as it could be no mystery to anyone who'd grown up on a farm. Why anyone would want to have anything to do with the process was a different question. To let a man do that with her, to her… She shook her head. The mere idea was repulsive. But people did it. That was what being married was about. She knew that, too. If people didn't do it, after a while there wouldn't be any more people.
Sometimes that didn't seem such a bad idea.
Her mother went on, 'A couple of knotholes have popped out of the wood in the barn. I want you to nail wood over them when you get the chance, so the inside will stay warmer in winter. The sooner you do it, the sooner we don't have to worry about it any more.'
'I'll take care of it,' Mary promised. 'I've noticed 'em, too, especially the one that came out right behind that old wagon wheel.'
'Yes, that's the biggest one,' Maude McGregor agreed. 'A good patch there will keep a lot of warm air from leaking out when the weather turns cold again-and it will.'
'I know,' Mary said. No one who'd lived in Manitoba any time from September to April could help knowing.
When she went out to the barn the next morning, she took care of the livestock first. That had to be done, and done every day. As soon as she'd finished, she went over to her father's work bench. She cut a square off a flat board, then grabbed the wood, a hammer, and some nails and went to get at the knot that had turned into a knothole.
It was right behind that wagon wheel. She had to put down the tools and the patch to wrestle the wheel out of the way. 'Miserable thing,' she muttered, or perhaps something a little stronger than that. Why the devil hadn't her father got rid of it? Come to that, why hadn't she or her mother in the years since her father died? She had no good answer except that there had always been more important things to do.
Once she'd shifted the wheel, she picked up the square of wood and the hammer and nails and advanced on the knothole. As she took the next to last step, she frowned. It didn't sound right-she'd never known that reverberation anywhere else in the barn. It didn't feel quite right underfoot, either. Ground had no business giving slightly, as it did here. It almost felt as if…
Mary bent down to look more closely at where she'd been standing. It just looked like dirt, with straw scattered over it. But when she scraped at it with her hand, she didn't have to dig far at all before her fingers found a board-undoubtedly, the board she'd trodden on after moving the broken wagon wheel.
What's that doing there? she wondered. Almost of their own accord, her fingers kept searching till they found the edge of the board. She pulled up. Dirt slid from the board as she raised it.
Under it was a sharp-edged hollow dug into the soil. And in that hollow… Mary's eyes got big and round. In that hollow rested sticks of dynamite and blasting caps and lengths of fuse and some highly specialized tools. 'At last,' she whispered. She'd finally found her father's bomb-making gear.
The first thing she imagined was going into Rosenfeld, as Arthur McGregor had done at the end of the Great War, and blowing as many Americans as she could sky-high. She didn't worry about getting caught. If it meant more revenge on the USA, she would gladly pay the price. The real problem was, she didn't know enough about explosives to make a bomb that had any real chance of doing what she wanted it to do.
I can learn, she thought. It can't be too hard. I just have to be careful. I'm sure I can figure it out without killing myself while I'm doing it.
'Thank you, Pa,' Mary said. 'I'm sorry you had to stop. I'm even sorrier you didn't get General Custer. But the fight's not done. The fight won't be done till Canada's free again.'
She looked toward that old, broken wagon wheel. Suddenly, a wide smile flashed across her face. Now she understood why her father had never repaired it or got rid of it. It perfectly concealed his tools and explosives. Not one of the Yankee soldiers who'd searched this barn-and there had been a lot of them, for they'd suspected much more than they could ever prove-had thought to move it and see what lay underneath. She wouldn't have thought of it, either, if she hadn't had to shift the wheel for an altogether different reason.
She wondered if she could find anyone in the sputtering Canadian resistance movement who could teach her about making bombs. Then, almost as soon as the thought occurred to her, she shook her head. Her father had gone his own way in fighting the Americans, which meant no one had betrayed him. No one could betray him if no one knew what he was doing.
People told a bitter joke: when three people sit down to conspire, one is a fool and the other two American spies. That would have been funnier had it not held so painfully much truth. More than once, the Rosenfeld Register had exulted about plots that failed because one member or another gave them away to the Yankees.
Mary McGregor nodded to herself. Whatever I do, I'll do it alone. That's how Pa did it. He'd still be blowing them up if he hadn't had bad luck. It's my turn now. I'll be as careful as he was, or even more so. Nobody will give me away, and I won't give myself away, either.
Some people said even the big Canadian uprising of a few years before had been betrayed to the Americans before it broke out, that they'd been on the alert because of that. Mary had even heard some people with reputations as patriots had turned traitor because they'd fallen in love with invaders from the south.
She didn't want to believe that. She had trouble imagining any proper Canadian falling in love with a Yankee. The Americans had ravished the country. Wouldn't they be ravishing anyone in it who had anything to do with them? That was how it seemed to Mary. As far as she was concerned, nobody who'd betrayed the uprising deserved to live.
'Yes, that's what I'll do,' she said, as if someone had suggested it to her. Getting rid of traitors was the best way she could think of to remind the whole country that going along with the occupation had a price.
She wanted to go out and start planting bombs that very morning. She knew some names. She was sure she could learn others without much trouble. But she checked herself. You were going to be careful, remember? After nodding, she patched the knothole that had led to her discovery. Then she carefully concealed the hole in the ground once more, replacing the board, covering it with dirt and straw, and putting the old wagon wheel back where it belonged. When she was done, she looked hard at the ground and did a little more smoothing. Satisfied at last, she nodded and went on to cover up the other knots that had come out of the planking.
'Took you long enough,' her mother said when Mary came into the farmhouse. 'I didn't think it was that hard a job.'
'Sorry, Ma.' Mary had known from the minute she lifted the edge of the board and saw what lay beneath it that she couldn't tell her mother about it. What would Maude McGregor do? Pitch a fit and tell her to leave the stuff alone. She was as sure of that as she was of her own name. She was also sure she wouldn't leave the stuff alone, no matter what her mother told her to do.
'Sorry?' Her mother shook her head. 'Don't you think you have enough other things to take care of? What were you doing, playing with the chicks? You haven't done that since you were a little girl.'
