Walk in Hell

Flora studied him. He was bright. He was earnest. He would campaign hard. If he was elected, he would serve well enough. He was also bloody dull. If Governor MacFarlane named someone with spirit, the Socialists were liable to lose this district. That would be…humiliating was the word that came to Flora’s mind.

I’d make a better candidate than Herman Bruck, she thought. At first, that was nothing but scorn. But the words seemed to echo in her mind. She looked at Bruck. She looked down at her own hands. Women could vote and hold office in New York State. She was over twenty-five. She could run for Congress-if the Socialists would nominate her.

She looked at Herman Bruck again. No one had shouted his name to the rafters, but there he stood, confident as if he were already the candidate. Of one thing she was certain: anyone so confident with so little reason could be overhauled. She didn’t know how it would happen, or even if she would be the one to do it, but it could be done. She was sure of that.

Arthur McGregor rode the farm wagon toward Rosenfeld, Manitoba. Days were almost as long as nights now, but snow still lingered. They could have more snow for another month, maybe six weeks-and for six weeks after the thaw finally began, the road to Rosenfeld would be hub-deep in mud.

Most years, McGregor cursed the spring thaw, which not only cut him off from the world but also made working the fields impossible or the next thing to it. Now he turned to Maude, who sat on the seat beside him, and said, “The road’ll make it hard for the Yanks to move.”

“That it will,” she agreed. “Weather’s never been easy here for anyone. I expect they’ve found that out for themselves by now.”

Alexander McGregor sat up in the back of the wagon. “You know what they say about our seasons, Pa,” he said, grinning. “We’ve only got two of ’em-August and winter.”

“When I first came to this part of the country, the way I heard it was July and winter,” McGregor said. “But it’s not far wrong, however you say it. And when the weather’s bad, they have the devil of a time getting from one place to another.”

“Except for the trains,” Alexander said, making no effort to conceal his anger at the railroads. “If it’s not a really dreadful blizzard, the trains get through.”

“I can’t say you’re wrong, son, because you’re right,” McGregor answered. The way he thought about trains was another measure of how the past year and a half had turned the world on its ear. Up till the day the war started, he’d blessed the railroads. They brought supplies into Rosenfeld in all but the worst of weather, as Alexander had said. They also carried his grain off to the east. Without them, he would have had no market for most of what he raised. Without them, the Canadian prairie could not have been settled, nor defended against the United States if somehow it was.

But now the USA held the tracks leading up toward Winnipeg, and used them to ship hordes of men and enormous amounts of materiel to the fighting front. In peace, he’d blessed the railroad and cursed the mud. In war, he did the exact opposite. He nodded to himself. Things were on their ear, all right.

Mary stuck her head up and looked around. With her eyes sparkling and her round cheeks all red with cold, she looked like a plump little chipmunk. “We ought to do something about the railroads,” she said in a voice that did not sound at all childlike. What she sounded like was a hard-headed saboteur thinking out loud about ways and means.

“You hush, Mary,” her mother said. “You’re not a soldier.”

“I wish I was,” Mary said fiercely.

“Hush is right,” Arthur McGregor said. He looked back over his shoulder at Alexander. So far as he knew, his son was keeping the promise he’d made and not trying to act the part of a franc-tireur. So far as he knew. Till the war, he hadn’t savored the full import of that phrase, either. It was what he didn’t know that worried him.

Half a mile outside of Rosenfeld, a squad of U.S. soldiers inspected the wagon. McGregor hated to admit it, but they did a good, professional job, one of them even getting down on his back on the dirt road to examine the axles and the underside of the frame. They were businesslike with him, reasonably polite to Maude, and smiled at his daughters, who were too young to be leered at. If they gave Alexander a sour look or two, those weren’t a patch on the glares he sent them. After a couple of minutes, they nodded and waved the wagon forward. Fortunately, Alexander didn’t curse them till it had gone far enough so they couldn’t hear him.

Julia gasped. Mary giggled. Arthur McGregor said, “Don’t use that sort of talk where your mother and sisters can hear you.” He glanced over to Maude. She was keeping her face stiff-so stiff, he suspected a smile under there.

Rosenfeld, as it had since it was occupied, seemed a town of American soldiers, with the Canadians to whom it rightfully belonged thrown in as an afterthought. Soldiers crowded round the cobbler’s shop, the tailor’s, the little cafe that had been struggling before the war started (what ruined most folks made a few rich), and the saloon that had never struggled a bit. There were three or four rooms up above the saloon that must have had U.S. soldiers going in and out of them every ten or fifteen minutes. McGregor had never walked up to one of those rooms-he was happy with the lady he’d married-but he knew about them. He glanced over to Maude again. She probably knew about those rooms, too. Husband and wife had never mentioned them to each other. He didn’t expect they ever would.

Henry Gibbon’s general store was full of U.S. soldiers, too, buying everything from five-for-a-penny jawbreakers to housewives with which to repair tattered uniforms in the field to a horn with a big red rubber squeeze-bulb. “You don’t mind my askin’,” Henry Gibbon said to the sergeant in green-gray who laid down a quarter for that item, “what the devil you going to do with that?”

“Next fellow in my squad I catch dozing when he ain’t supposed to,” the sergeant answered with an evil grin, “his hair’s gonna stand on end for the next three days.” A couple of privates who might have been in his squad sidled away from him.

A tiny smile made the corners of McGregor’s mouth quirk upward. Back in his Army days, he’d had a sergeant much like that. When they were just being themselves, the Yanks were ordinary people. When they were being occupiers, though…The smile disappeared. If they had their way, they’d do whatever they could to turn all the Canadians in the land they’d occupied into Americans. That was why Julia and Mary didn’t go to the school they’d reopened.

McGregor held onto Mary’s hand; Maude had charge of Julia. They picked their way toward the counter. Some of the U.S. soldiers politely stepped aside. Others pretended they weren’t there. That rude arrogance angered McGregor, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He held his face still. So did Maude. Their children weren’t so good at concealing what they felt. Once he had to give Mary’s hand a warning squeeze to get rid of the ferocious grimace she gave an American who’d walked through the space where she had been standing as if she didn’t exist.

“Good day to you, Arthur,” Henry Gibbon said. Had a moving picture wanted to cast somebody as a storekeeper, he would have been the man, if only his apron had been cleaner: he was tubby and bald, with a gray soup-strainer of a mustache that whuffed out when he talked. “Brought the whole kit and kaboodle with you, I see. Well, what can I do for you this mornin’?”

“Need a couple of hacksaw blades, and a sack of beans if you’ve got some. We’ll get our kerosene ration, too, I expect, and the missus is going to make a run at your yard goods. And tobacco-”

“Ain’t got any.” Gibbon moved his hand just enough to suggest that the Yanks had bought him out. McGregor looked glum. So did Alexander. Life was hard. Life without a pipe was harder.

“And we’ll see what kind of candy you’ve got here, too,” McGregor said. His eye went to the Minnesota and Dakota papers piled on the counter. He reached out and shoved one of them at the storekeeper, too. It would be full of Yankee lies, but new lies might be interesting.

He went over and stood by the pickle barrel, waiting while Maude told Gibbon what she needed and he compared that to what he happened to have, which was a good deal less. He wasn’t quite emptied out, though, as McGregor had feared he would be. That was something, anyhow.

When McGregor took a look at the hacksaw blades while walking back to the wagon, he understood why. “These were made in the United States,” he exclaimed, and then, a few steps later, “No wonder Henry’s still got stuff on his shelves.”

“Traitor,” Alexander said, low enough so that none of the U.S. soldiers passing by could hear him.

But, after a moment, McGregor shook his head. “Everybody’s got to eat,” he said. “Storekeeper can’t live