'If you can't find that certificate, I'm making bricks without straw,' Moss warned. 'You'd do better trying to settle-if they will.'
'But I've lived a quiet, peaceable life since 1917. No one can say otherwise,' Toby Godfrey protested. 'That must count for something!'
'A little,' Moss said again, even more glumly than before.
Godfrey seemed not to hear that glumness-seemed to refuse to hear it, in fact. Clients were often like that: full of their own hopes and fears, they became deaf and blind to anything that ran against whatever they already had in their minds. The Canadian said, 'I'm sure you'll do your very best, Mr. Moss.'
Moss nodded. 'I will. But I tell you frankly, I've taken a lot of cases where I liked the odds better. If you can arrange a compromise with the occupying authorities…'
Godfrey wouldn't hear of it. He must have thought it was a way of asking for more money, for he set ten crisp, new ten-dollar bills on the desk. 'Your very, very best, Mr. Moss.' He didn't even wait for a reply. He got up and stuck out his hand. Moss took it. His client left the office.
Moss scooped up the money. I'll have to mail him a receipt, he thought, sighing. He would do his best. If you were fighting a foe too much bigger and stronger than you were, sometimes your best wasn't good enough. The Canadians had found out all about that during the Great War, and Jonathan Moss had been one of the men who taught them the lesson.
He turned the swivel chair back to the typewriter stand and started banging away again. He'd just got up a good head of steam when somebody knocked on the door. 'Come in,' he called. Who the devil? went though his mind. Clients didn't usually knock, and he had no one scheduled till the afternoon. The mailman didn't knock, either. Besides, the mail wouldn't get here for at least another hour. Just in case, Moss' hand found the pistol he'd taken to keeping in a desk drawer.
In walked Major Rex Finley. Moss pulled his hand out of the drawer. 'Hello, Major,' he said. 'This is a surprise. What brings you here?'
'A government-issue Chevy, and I hope it'll bring me back to London, too,' answered the officer who commanded the airdrome there.
Laughing, Jonathan pointed to the chair across from his desk and said, 'Well, sit down and tell me what I can do for you.'
'I've come to say good-bye,' Finley said. 'I've been transferred to Wright Field, outside of Dayton, Ohio. Captain Trotter will be in charge of things here from now on. You'll be able to keep flying. Don't worry about that. Before too long, we may want every trained man we can find.' His voice had an edge to it.
'Dayton,' Moss said musingly. 'That's down toward the border, isn't it?'
Major Finley nodded. 'It sure is, and it'll be even closer if there's a plebiscite in Kentucky and we lose.' Neither of them said anything after that for a little while. If there was a plebiscite, the USA would lose. Everything Moss knew about Kentucky told him as much. By Finley's expression, he had the same opinion.
At last, Moss asked, 'Do you really think it will come to… that?'
'I don't know,' Finley replied. 'I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised.'
'Well, well.' Moss whistled tunelessly. 'Do you want to go out and get drunk?'
'Too early in the day for me,' Finley said with genuine regret. 'And, like I said, I have to be able to drive back to London. But don't let me stop you.'
'I've got work to do myself.' Jonathan looked for a silver lining: 'Maybe we're wrong. Here's hoping we're wrong.'
Major Finley nodded. 'Yes. Here's hoping.' But he didn't sound as if he believed it.
Mary Pomeroy cut up pieces of fried pork chop and put them on Alec's plate along with some string beans. Her son ate string beans only under protest. He would eat them, though, and only rarely required threats of imminent bodily harm. Not even threats of imminent bodily harm would make him eat spinach. Bodily harm itself wouldn't; Mary and Mort had both made the experiment, which had left everyone in the family unhappy.
Mort dug in. 'That's good,' he said.
'Thanks,' Mary answered. 'What's the news at the diner?'
'Not a whole lot,' her husband said. 'Two different tables of Yank soldiers talking about whether there'll be a whatchamacallit down south.'
'A plebiscite?' Mary asked.
Mort nodded. 'That's it. I hear it a dozen times a day, and I never remember it.'
'If there is one, the people down there will vote to leave the United States. They'll vote to be Confederates again,' Mary said.
'I suppose so.' Mort lit a cigarette. He didn't care one way or the other.
That he didn't care disappointed Mary. She did her best not to let it infuriate her. 'What do you suppose would happen if we had one of those plebiscites here in Canada?' she asked.
Mort didn't answer right away. He was blowing smoke rings for Alec. He was good at it; he could send them out one after another. His son watched in goggle-eyed fascination. Only when Mort ran out of smoke did he shrug and say, 'I don't know.'
'Don't you think we'd vote to be Canadians again, to be free again?' Mary blazed. 'Don't you think we'd vote to send the Yanks packing?'
'I suppose so.' But Mort still didn't sound very excited. 'But we're not going to get to vote, you know.'
'Why not?' Mary said. 'If the people in those states ever get to, we should, too. I don't want to be a Yank any more than somebody in Houston does.'
After another virtuoso set of smoke rings, Mort said, 'I'll tell you why not. Because those other places have the Confederate States shouting for 'em all the time. Who's going to shout for us? We can't even shout for ourselves.'
Canadians didn't shout, or not very much. One surefire way to tell Yanks in Canada was by how much noise they made. Mary didn't just want to shout. She wanted to scream. 'We ought to be shouting for ourselves. We're just as much a country as the United States are.'
'I suppose we could be, if-' Mort began.
Alec interrupted: 'More smoke rings, Daddy!'
But Mort stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray. 'Next time I light up, sport,' he told the little boy, and turned back to Mary. 'I suppose we could be, if they let us,' he said, picking up where he'd left off. 'But they aren't going to let us, and there's nobody who can make them let us. We're stuck. We might as well get used to it. If we do, maybe they'll ease up on us a little more.'
Mary had never imagined hating her husband. She came unpleasantly close to it now. Mort wasn't a collaborator. Mary never would have had anything to do with him if he were, no matter how he stirred her. But he was- what would you call somebody like him? — an accommodator, that was it. He knew he was a Canadian. He even liked being a Canadian, and was proud of it. He didn't think staying a Canadian was worth a big fight, though. All he wanted to do was get along from one day to the next.
More and more Canadians seemed to be accommodators these days. That made Mary want to scream, too. Accommodate enough, accommodate long enough, and you weren't a Canadian any more, were you? Not as far as she could see. Didn't you turn into a pale imitation of a Yank instead?
'You want to go to the cinema Saturday night?' Mort asked. 'The new film about Roosevelt's Unauthorized Regiment is supposed to be good. And they say Marion Morrison makes a first-rate TR.'
'I don't think so,' Mary said tightly, fighting hard against despair. Mort already sounded like a pale imitation of a Yank. He would have denied it if she'd called him on it. She didn't. She didn't want a fight. Life was too short, wasn't it?
If you don't fight, aren't you giving up, too? she asked herself. She supposed that was partly true, but only partly. She still cared about the wrongs the Americans had committed in occupying her country. She didn't, she wouldn't, forget.
'Oh,' Mort said. 'Almost slipped my mind.'
'What?' Mary asked.
'You know Freddy Halliday?' Mort said. That was a silly question; Rosenfeld wasn't such a big town that everybody didn't know everybody else. Mary nodded impatiently. Her husband went on, 'He says the public library
