The Victorious opposition

"In another bombing case," the broadcaster went on, "investigators continue to probe the ruins of a Berlin, Ontario, apartment building, seeking clues to the perpetrator of the atrocity. A mother and child, Laura and Dorothy Moss, are confirmed dead. Several other persons were injured in the blast, and three remain missing…"

A mother and a child. That wasn't how Mary had thought of them. A traitor and her half-American brat was more what she had in mind. That way, she didn't have to remind herself that the woman who'd been born Laura Secord-born with the name of a great Canadian patriot-had been a person as well as a political symbol. She didn't want to think of the late Laura Moss as a person. If she did, she had to think about what she'd done.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd physically hurt anyone, aside from spanking Alec when he needed it. Maybe when she was little, in a fight with her older sister. But Julia had several years on her, so she might not have managed it even then.

Well, she'd managed it now. She'd blown a woman and her little girl to kingdom come, and she'd hurt some other people with them. Not bad for a package she'd mailed from Wilf Rokeby's post office. Not bad? Or not good?

This is war, she told herself. Look what the Americans did to my family. Why should I care what happens to them, or to the people who collaborate with them?

Had the Americans blown up women and children? Mary nodded defiantly. Of course they had, with their bombs and their artillery. She didn't feel guilty. She paused, too honest to go on with that. The trouble was, she did feel guilty. Unlike the Yanks-or so she insisted to herself-she had a working conscience. At the moment, it was working overtime.

"No one has claimed to be responsible for the murderous attack in Berlin," the newsman continued. "Attention is, however, focusing on several known subversive groups. When the truth is known, severe punishment will be meted out."

Mary laughed at that. The Yanks were liable to grab somebody, say he was guilty, and shoot him just to make themselves look good. She remained certain that was what they'd done with her brother, Alexander, Alec's namesake. Her conscience twinged again. Did she want them to punish someone else, someone who hadn't done anything, for what she'd done?

She wanted them to get out of Canada. Past that, she didn't-or tried not to-care.

"Ironically, the victims' husband and father, barrister Jonathan Moss, though a U.S. aviation ace during the Great War, was well known in Ontario for his work on behalf of Canadians involved in disputes with the occupying authorities," the man on the wireless said. "Only desperate madmen who hate Americans simply because they are Americans would have-"

Click! "Why'd you turn it off, Mommy?" Alec asked.

"Because he was spouting a lot of drivel," Mary answered.

Alec laughed. "That's a fu

"Nonsense. Hooey. Rubbish."

"Drivel!" Alec yelled, alarming Mouser. "Hooey!" He liked that one, too. The cat didn't, at least not yelled in its ears. It fled. Alec ran after it, screeching, "Drivel! Hooey! Hooey! Drivel!"

"Enough," Mary said. He didn't listen to her. "Enough!" she said again. Still no luck. "Enough!" Now she was yelling, too. Short of clouting Alec with a rock, yelling at him was the only way to get his attention.

She didn't usually turn off the wireless in the middle of the news. She found she missed it, and turned it back on, hoping it would be done talking about what had happened in Berlin. It was. The newscaster said, "King Charles XI of France has declared that the German Empire is using Kaiser Wilhelm's illness as an excuse for delay on consideration of returning Alsace-Lorraine to France. 'If strong measures prove necessary, we are not afraid to take them,' he added. Prime Minister Churchill of Great Britain voiced his support for the French. In a speech before Parliament, he said, 'High time the Germans go.' "

Music blared from the speaker. A chorus of women with squeaky voices praised laundry soap to the skies. When Mary first listened to the wireless, she wanted to go out and buy everything she heard advertised on it. She was vaccinated against that nonsense these days. She did sometimes wonder why a singer with a voice good enough to make money would choose to sing about laundry soap. Because she couldn't make money with her voice any other way? Sometimes that didn't seem reason enough.

I killed two people, one of them a little girl who never did anybody any harm. The thought didn't want to go away; even if she hadn't watched them die, they were as dead as if she'd taken them to a chopping block and whacked off their heads with a hatchet, the way she had with so many chickens on her mother's farm. Laura Secord betrayed her country. Mary had no doubt of that. But who appointed you her executioner? she asked herself.

Her back stiffened. She was damned if she'd let herself feel guilty for long. Who appointed me her executioner? The Yanks did. If they hadn't shot Alexander, her father never would have felt the need to go on the war path against them. She was entitled to revenge for that. She was entitled to it, and she'd taken it.

She nodded to herself. Nothing was going to make her feel sorry about ridding the world of Laura Secord. Every so often, though, she couldn't help feeling bad about Dorothy Moss. She wished she'd blown up the girl's father instead. Yes, the newsman went on and on about how he struggled for Canadians' rights, but that overlooked several little details. First and foremost, no Yank should have had any business saying what rights a Canadian had or didn't have. And Jonathan Moss had been one of the Yanks who'd beaten Canada down during the Great War. And he was still a combat flier; she remembered the newspaper stories about him. Yes, better the bomb should have got him.

She was cutting up a chicken for stew in the kitchen when two trucks pulled to a stop in front of the diner. They looked like the sort of trucks in which U.S. Army soldiers rode, but they were painted a bluish gray, not the green-gray she'd known and loathed since she was a little girl. The men who piled out of the back of the trucks were in uniforms cut about the same as those U.S. soldiers wore-but, again, of bluish gray and not the familiar color. Mary wondered if the Yanks had decided to change their uniforms after keeping them pretty much the same for so long. Why would they do that?

The soldiers all tramped into the diner. That will make Mort happy, Mary thought. Soldiers ate like starving wolves. These days, they also paid their bills. The occupation was more orderly than it had been during the war and just afterwards. That made it very little better, not as far as Mary was concerned.

Forty-five minutes later, the soldiers came out and climbed into the trucks again. The engines started up with twin roars. Away the trucks went, beyond what Mary could see from the window. She reminded herself to ask Mort about the men when he came back to the flat, and hoped she wouldn't forget.

As things turned out, she needn't have worried about that. When her husband got home, he was angrier than she'd ever seen him. "What's the matter?" she asked; he hardly ever lost his temper.

"What's the matter?" he repeated. "Did you see those trucks a couple of hours ago? The trucks, and the soldiers in them?"

Mary nodded. "I wanted to ask you-"

He talked right through her: "Do you know who those soldiers were? Do you? No, of course you don't." He wasn't going to let her get a word in edgewise. "I'll tell you who they were, by God. They were a pack of Frenchies, that's who."

"Frenchies? From Quebec?" The news made Mary no happier than it had Mort. She was damned if she would call their home the Republic of Quebec, though, even if it had been torn away from Canada for twenty-five years now.