Anthony was five; her daughter Priscilla, three. Mary picked each of them up in turn, which made them squeal. Picking up Anth-that was what they called him, for no reason Mary could make out-made her grunt. He was a big boy, and gave the promise of growing into a big man.
Julia was taller than Mary, and Ken Marble was a good-sized man, though stocky and thick through the chest rather than tall. 'Glad to see you,' he said gravely. Both he and Julia were quiet people, though their children made up for it. He might have been talking about the weather when he went on, 'We've got number three on the way. First part of next year, looks like.'
'That's wonderful!' Mary hurried to her sister and squeezed her. Julia looked even more weary than their mother. As a farm wife with two small children, she had every right to look that way. 'How do you feel?' Mary asked her.
She shrugged. 'Like I'm going to have a baby. I'm sleepy all the time. One day, food will stay down. The next, it won't. When are you going to have a baby, Mary?'
People had started asking her that after she'd been married for about two weeks. 'I don't know exactly,' she answered in a low voice, 'but I don't think it'll take real long.'
Julia's mother-in-law, Beth Marble, said, 'What's the news from in town, kids?' She was a pleasant woman with shoulder-length brown hair going gray, rather flat features, and a wide, friendly smile.
'Tell you what I heard late last night at the diner,' Mort said. 'There's talk Henry Gibbon's going to sell the general store.'
'You didn't even tell me that when you came home!' Mary said indignantly.
Her husband looked shamefaced. 'It must've slipped my mind.'
Mary wondered if he'd saved the news so it would make a bigger splash at the gather. He liked being the center of attention. It was big-no doubt about that. She said, 'Gibbon's general store's been in Rosenfeld for as long as I can remember.'
'For as long as I can remember, too, pretty much,' her mother said.
'That's likely why he's selling-if he is selling, and it's not just talk,' Mort said. 'He's not a young man any more.'
When Mary thought of the storekeeper, she thought of his bald head, and of the white apron he always wore over his chest and the formidable expanse of his belly. But sure enough, the little fringe of hair he had was white these days. 'Won't seem the same without him,' she said, and everybody nodded. She added, 'I hope to heaven a Yank doesn't buy him out. That'd be awful.'
More nods. Julia hated the Americans as much as Mary did, though she wasn't so open about it. The Marbles had no reason to love them, either, even if they hadn't suffered so much at U.S. hands. The only Canadians Mary could think of who did love Americans were collaborators, of whom there were altogether too many.
'Let's go take the baskets out to the field and have our picnic,' Maude McGregor said, which was not only a good idea but changed the subject.
Sprawled on a blanket under the warm summer sun and gnawing on a fried drumstick, Mary found it easy enough not to think about the Americans. She listened to gossip from town and from the surrounding farms. The Americans did come into that, but only briefly: a farmer's daughter was going to marry a U.S. soldier. It wasn't the first such marriage around Rosenfeld, and probably wouldn't be the last. Mary did her best to pretend it wasn't happening.
Far easier, far more pleasant, to talk about other things. She said, 'These deviled eggs you made sure are good, Ma.'
Her husband nodded. 'Can I get the recipe from you, Mother McGregor? They beat the ones we fix in the diner all hollow.'
'I don't know about that,' Maude McGregor said. 'If other people use it, it won't be mine any more.'
'Of course it will,' Mort said. 'It'll just let other people enjoy what you were smart enough to figure out.'
'He's a smooth talker, isn't he?' Julia murmured. Mary smiled and nodded.
In a low, confidential voice, Mort went on, 'I'm not just talking to hear myself talk, Mother McGregor. That recipe's worth money to my father and me. If we were buying it from someone else in the business, we'd probably pay'-he screwed up his face as he figured it out-'oh, fifty dollars, easy.'
The farm barely made ends meet for Mary's mother. Mary doubted the Pomeroys would pay anywhere near that much for a recipe-they'd be more likely to swap one of their own-but the diner was doing well, and Mort had a generous heart. After blinking once or twice to make sure he was serious, Maude McGregor said, 'When we get back to the house, I'll write it down.' Everyone beamed.
When they got back to the house, Mary said, 'I'm going out to the barn, Mort, and get us some fresh eggs. I wonder if I remember how to get a hen off the nest.'
'You don't need to take the big picnic basket with you, just for some eggs,' Mort said.
'It's all right. I've got a smaller one inside,' Mary said. That display of feminine logic flummoxed her husband. He shrugged and watched her go, then turned back to her mother, who was putting the deviled-egg recipe on paper.
In the barn, Mary quickly gathered a dozen eggs. She put them, as she'd said she would, in the smaller basket inside the big one, cushioning them with straw. She didn't go back to the house right after that. Instead, she walked over to an old iron-tired wagon wheel that had been lying there since the Great War, maybe even since before it started. The iron, by now, was red and rough with rust. It rasped against her palms-which were softer than they had been-as she shoved the wheel aside.
Mary scraped aside the dirt under it, and lifted a board under the dirt. The board concealed a hole in the ground her father had dug. In it lay his bomb-making tools, the tools the Yanks had never found. She scooped up sticks of dynamite, blasting caps, fuses, crimpers, needle-nosed pliers, and other bits of specialized ironmongery, and put them in the basket.
She was just replacing the wheel over the now-empty hole when her nephew Anthony charged into the barn. 'What you doing, Aunt Mary?' he asked.
'I was squashing a spider that had a web under there,' she lied smoothly. Anth made a horrible face. She made as if to clop him with the picnic basket. He fled, giggling. She went out to the car and put the basket in the trunk.
II
Saul Goldman was a fussy little fellow, but good at what he did. 'Everything's ready now, Mr. President,' he said. 'Newsreel photographers, newspaper photographers, and the wireless web connection. By this time tomorrow, everyone in the Confederate States will know you've signed this bill.'
'Thanks, Saul,' Jake Featherston said with a warm smile, and the little Jew blossomed under the praise. Jake knew Goldman was exaggerating. But he wasn't exaggerating by much. The people who needed to know he was signing the bill would hear about it, and that was what mattered.
At a gesture from the communications chief, klieg lights came on in the main office of the Gray House. Featherston smiled at the camera. 'Hello, friends,' he said into the microphone in front of him. 'I'm Jake Featherston. Just like always, I'm here to tell you the truth. And the truth is, this bill I'm signing today is one of the most important laws we've ever made in the Confederate States of America.'
He inked a pen and signed on the waiting line. Flashbulbs popped as the photographers did their job. Jake looked up at the newsreel camera again. 'We've had too many floods on our big rivers,' he said. 'The one in 1927 came close to drowning the middle of the country. Enough is enough, I say. We're going to build dams and levees and make sure it doesn't happen again. We'll use the electricity from the dams, too, for factories and for people. We've needed a law like this for years, and now, thanks to the Freedom Party, we've got it.'
'Mr. President?' A carefully prompted reporter from a Party paper stuck his hand in the air. 'Ask you a question, Mr. President?'
'Go right ahead, Delmer.' Featherston was calm, casual, at his ease.
'Thank you, sir,' Delmer said. 'What about Article One, Section Eight, Part Three of the Constitution, sir? You know, the part that says you can't make internal improvements on rivers unless you aid navigation? Dams don't do
