They found sailors closer to the damage who were already doing what they could to stem the tide of water pouring into the Remembrance : stuffing mattresses and whatever else they could find into sprung seams between doors and hatchways and such. Carsten took charge of them, too. He kicked aside a floating severed hand that still trailed blood.
Before long, he was sure the hit the aeroplane carrier had taken wouldn't sink her. Most of her compartments were holding against the flood. Both his sense of balance and a level he had with him insisted that her list had stabilized. Her pumps never faltered. Most important of all, the second torpedo, the one he'd dreaded so much, never came.
In spare moments, when he wasn't too busy sloshing through seawater eventually up past his waist, he wondered why the Japanese submersible hadn't put another fish, or two or three more, into the Remembrance. Word eventually trickled down from above. "Sir, we sank the fucker," a messenger said. "She launched two at us. One missed. The other one nailed us. We had some aeroplanes with bombs underneath 'em in the air by then, to help sink the Jap freighter and the speedboat. One of 'em spotted the submersible as she launched, and he put a bomb right on the bastard's conning tower. That sub sank, and it ain't coming up again."
"Bully!" Every once in a while, especially when he didn't think, Sam still used the slang he'd grown up with. The messenger was a fresh-faced kid who'd surely been pissing in his diapers when the Great War started, and looked at him as if at the Pyramids of Egypt or any other antiquity. He didn't care. If the kid wanted to say swell, that was fine. Most of the time, Sam said swell himself. But bully, even if it did smack of the days before the war, said what he wanted to say, too. The United States had found themselves a new fight. They'd need the Remembrance. And Sam, old-fashioned or not, was glad not to be among its first casualties.
H eadlines in the Rosenfeld Register shrieked of war: VICIOUS JAP ATTACK ON USS REMEMBRANCE! A subhead said, Ship badly damaged but stays afloat! Another headline warned, BEWARE THE YELLOW PERIL!
Mary McGregor had never seen a Japanese in her life. Except for pictures in books, she'd never seen a Negro, either. She imagined Japanese almost as yellow as sunflowers, with slit eyes set in their faces at a forty-five-degree angle. It wasn't a pretty picture. She didn't care. The Japs were fighting the United States. As far as she was concerned, nothing else mattered. If they were fighting the USA, she was all for them.
The Yellow Peril story in the Register warned anyone who spotted a Jap to report him at once to U.S. occupation authorities. She pointed that out to her mother. "Pretty funny, isn't it?" she said. "Can't you just see a Jap walking down the main street in Rosenfeld and stopping in at Gibbon's general store to buy a pickle and some thumbtacks?"
"That story must be going out all over Canada," her mother said. "Maybe there are places where you really might run into Japanese people-Vancouver, somewhere like that. I know they've got Chinamen in Vancouver. Why not Japs, too?"
"Maybe," Mary said. "That would make some sense-as much sense as the Yanks ever make, anyway. But why put that kind of notice in the Register? It's just stupid here, really, really stupid." She held up a hand before her mother could answer. "I know why. Some Yank in a swivel chair probably said, 'Stick this order in every paper in Canada, from British Columbia to Nova Scotia. And stick it in every paper in Newfoundland, too, while you're about it.' Who cares whether it makes sense if you're sitting in a swivel chair?"
Maude McGregor smiled. "You're probably right. The Americans do things like that. They like giving big orders, if you know what I mean. It's part of what makes them the kind of people they are."
Had Mary been a man among men and not a young woman talking with her mother, she would have expressed her detailed opinion about what sort of people Americans were. Her eyes must have sparked in a way that got her opinion across without words, for her mother's smile got wider. Then Maude McGregor said, "Next time you go to the cinema with Mort Pomeroy, make sure there aren't any Japs under the front seat in his motorcar."
"I'll do that," Mary said, laughing.
Her mother's smile changed. She said, "Your face just lit up. You think he's special, don't you?"
"Yes." Mary nodded without hesitation. "I've never felt like this about a boy before." She hadn't had much chance to feel anything special about boys up till now. Most of them stayed away from the McGregor house as if she had a dangerous disease. And, in occupied Canada, what disease could be more dangerous than not only descending from someone who'd fought the Yanks to his last breath but also being proud of it?
"I'm glad he makes you happy," her mother said. "I hope he keeps making you happy for years and years, if that's what you both end up wanting."
"I think maybe it is," Mary said slowly, a certain wonder in her voice. "He hasn't asked me or anything, but I think I'll say yes if he does. The only thing I don't know about yet is how he feels about the
USA."
"Would you let that stand between the two of you if you really love each other?" her mother asked.
"I don't think I could really love anybody who sucks up to the Americans," Mary answered. "I just couldn't stand it. So I'll have to find out about that. Then I'll make up my mind."
Maude McGregor sighed. "All right, dear. I'm not going to try to tell you any different. You're old enough to know your own mind. But I am going to tell you this: I'm afraid you won't have too many chances, so you'd be smart to think twice before you waste any of them."
"I never expected to have any," Mary said. "We'll see what happens, that's all. I'm going out to the barn now. I want to give the cow a bottle of that drench we got from the vet."
"I don't know how much good it will do," her mother said.
"Neither do I." Mary shrugged. "But it won't do any good if the cow doesn't drink it, so I'd better try."
The trick in getting medicine into a cow, she knew, was making sure she thrust the bottle almost down its throat. Otherwise, the drench would slop out the other side of the beast's mouth. It probably tasted nasty-it stank of ammonia, and she wouldn't have wanted to drink it herself. She poured it down the cow, though, and had the satisfaction of pulling the empty bottle from the beast's mouth and seeing only a few drops on the dirt and straw in the stall.
However satisfied Mary was, the cow was anything but. It drank from the trough, no doubt to get rid of the taste of the drench. Mary left the stall. She paused and sat down by the old wagon wheel. She hadn't given up. She didn't intend to give up. She still burned to pay back the Yanks-and the Canadians who collaborated with them.
"I'll take care of it, Father," she whispered. "Don't you worry about a thing. I'll take care of it."
And what would Mort Pomeroy think of that? He hadn't run away from her when he found out she was Arthur McGregor's daughter. That surely meant he had some interest in her-and that he liked the Yanks none too well. What else could it possibly mean?
Cold as Manitoba winter, she answered her silent rhetorical question. It could mean he's head over heels for you and doesn't care about politics one way or the other-or, if he does care, he'll forget about that for the time being because he's head over heels for you.
Or -colder yet- it could mean he's really a collaborator himself, but he's pretending not to be so he can trap you. Mary shook her head. It wasn't so much that she believed Mort incapable of such an outrage, though she did. It was much more that she didn't think the Yanks could be interested in her. Her father, after all, was almost nine years dead. She'd been a girl when he blew himself up. Since then, she hadn't done anything overt against the Americans. Oh, they were bound to know she didn't love them. But if they got rid of every Canadian who didn't love them, this would be a wide and ever so empty land.