The Victorious opposition

"Damned if I know about that last one," Forrest said. "Now we've got those niggers robbing houses in town instead." Featherston waited. The general nodded. "All right, sir. I get your point. But you'd better be able to take my twenty dollars. That's all I've got to say."

"Look here, General-I hope there won't be a war, too," Featherston said. "But one way or the other, the Confederate States are going to get what we want. We deserve it, it's our right to have it, and we're going to get it. Is that plain enough for you? Thanks to the Whigs, we've been waiting for almost twenty-five years. That's too damn long. We can't wait forever."

"Yes, sir. Whatever you decide needs doing, we'll try our best to give it to you," Forrest said. "Doing that is our job. Figuring out what we need-that's yours." He got to his feet, saluted, and left.

Jake looked after him. As the door closed, he said, "I know what needs doing," though Nathan Bedford Forrest III could not hear him. "And by God, I aim to do it."

Mary Pomeroy paused with a forkful of scrambled eggs halfway to her mouth. "It's not fair!" she said. "The Yanks let Kentucky and Houston vote on where they wanted to go, and now they're back in the CSA. It they let us vote, the Americans would be gone from here so fast, it would make your head swim."

Mort Pomeroy chewed up a mouthful of bacon-Canadian bacon, not the ski

Red curls flew as Mary tossed her head. "At least it had a choice. The Yanks don't give us any."

"I can't do anything about that." Mort ate another chunk of bacon. He might have been chewing on his words, too. After swallowing the bacon, he spat out the words: "And neither can you."

She bridled. The Yanks had shot her brother for trying to do something about the occupation. Her father had fought a one-man war against the USA till his own bomb blew him up instead of General Custer, for whom it was intended. Mort braced himself, regretting what he'd said and getting ready for an argument. Before she could answer him, Alec spoke from his high chair: "More bacon?" He was wild for bacon and ham and sausage-anything salty, in fact.

"Sure, sweetheart," Mary told him, and gave him some. While she cut it up for him, she wondered what to say to her husband. In the end, all that came out was, "Maybe you're right. Maybe I can't."

Mort blinked, plainly thinking he'd got off easy. He waited for her to come out with something else. When she didn't, he decided to count his blessings. He finished his bacon and eggs, his toast and jam, and his tea. Then he got into his overcoat, hat, and earmuffs for the trip across the street to the diner. It was warmer today than it had been lately; the high might get up into double digits. On the other hand, it might not, too.

Mary also finished her breakfast. Then she let Alec chase little pieces of bacon around his plate with his fork as long as he ate one every so often. When it stopped being breakfast and turned into playtime, she extracted him from the high chair and carried him over to the sink so she could wash his greasy face. He liked that no better than he ever did, and he was getting big enough to put up a pretty good fight. But she was still bigger, and so, whether he liked it or not, the grease came off.

She read to him for a while. He liked Queen Zixi of Ix, even if a Yank had written it. She didn't suppose L. Frank Baum had particularly disliked Canada. The book gave no sign that he'd ever heard of it-or of the United States, either. Hard to go wrong with a world so thoroughly imaginary.

When Alec started to fidget in her lap, she let him down to play. She didn't have to watch him quite every second these days; he was old enough not to stick everything into his mouth the instant he saw it. That let Mary go into the kitchen and play with something of her own.

Alec wandered in to watch. "Whatcha doing?" he asked.

"Fixing something," Mary answered.

"Is it busted?" he asked. "It don't look busted."

"Doesn't," Mary said. "It doesn't look busted."

"If it doesn't look busted, how come you're fixing it?"

Conversations with children could be surreal. By now, Mary had got used to that, or as used to the unpredictable as you could get. She said, "I'm not fixing it like that. I'm fixing it up."

"Are you making it fancy-like?"

She shook her head. "No, I'm just taking care of what needs taking care of." That didn't mean much to Alec. It didn't mean much to her, either. She didn't care. It kept him from asking too many more questions, which was what she'd had in mind. She worked on it for a while, then put it away. Before too long, it would be done.

"Can we go out and play?" Alec asked.

"No. It's too cold."

"Can we throw snowballs? I'll bop you in the nose with one."

"No. It's even too cold to throw snowballs."

"How can it be too cold to throw snowballs?" Alec was disbelieving. "It's not too cold to snow."

"It's too cold for people to go out there unless they have to."

"Daddy went out there."

"He just went across the street to the diner. And he didn't stop to throw snowballs at anybody." Mary still wondered how Mort had come to be daddy to Alec. Her own father had always been pa to her. She hadn't looked for anything like that to change. But change it had.

"Sometimes Daddy throws snowballs," Alec said.

Mary couldn't very well deny that. They'd had a memorable snowball fight only a few weeks before. But she said, "He doesn't do it on days like this. On days like this, he stays inside where it's warm as much as he can."

Alec went to a window and looked out. "There's people out there."

"I know there are people out there. Sometimes you have to go to the general store or to the dentist. Sometimes you have to deliver letters and things, the way the postman does." The Yanks called him the mailman. Mary refused to. She'd been calling him the postman since she learned to talk, and she wasn't about to change now. She still called the last letter of the alphabet zed, too. She wondered if Alec would after he started going to school. Yanks said zee, which struck her as insufferably… American.

"Do you have to go to the general store, Mommy?" Alec asked hopefully.

"No. I've got everything I need right here," Mary answered. She wasn't ma, either. She wondered why not. How had the language changed while she wasn't looking? She couldn't have said, but it had.

Cleaning and dusting here took only a fraction of the time they would have back on the farm. She didn't have any livestock to worry about, either. How many times had she gone out to the barn no matter what the weather was like, to feed the animals and collect eggs and muck out? She didn't have a number, but she knew it would have been a large one. Animals needed tending, rain or shine or blizzard. Back on the farm, if she had a moment to relax, it probably meant she'd forgotten something that needed doing. Here, she could sit down and smoke a cigarette and read a book or listen to the wireless without feeling guilty about leaving work undone.

Except for electric lights, the wireless was the best thing about electricity she'd found. And there were replacements of sorts for electric lights: gas lamps, or even the kerosene lanterns her mother still used out on the farm. What could replace the wireless, for immediacy or for entertainment? Nothing she could imagine.

No sooner had that thought crossed her mind, though, than she remembered a story the Rosenfeld Register had run not so long before. People were starting to figure out how to send moving pictures the same way they sent wireless signals. Apparently they'd broadcast pictures of a football game in New York City. But the sets cost more than a thousand dollars. Mary didn't suppose they'd ever come down to where an ordinary person could afford them.