Kidde drove the point home: “I guess you were still a short-pants kid when the Confederates talked about digging a canal through Nicaragua or one of those damn places. President Mahan said the USA would go to war the minute the first steam shovel took a bite, and they backed down. Reckon he’s the best president we had before TR.”
Commander Grady peered into the sponson again. One of his eyebrows rose quizzically. “Not that much fun in here, boys,” he remarked.
He might have broken a spell. The gun crew filed out. Hot and stuffy as the sponson was, Sam wouldn’t have minded staying there a while longer. Now he’d have to go out in the sun again. Out of the entire crew of the Dakota, he might have been the only man looking forward to the Straits of Magellan.
Arthur McGregor hitched his horse to the rail not far from the post office. His boots squelched in mud till he got up to the wooden sidewalk. He scraped them as clean as he could before he went inside.
Wilfred Rokeby looked up from a dime novel. “Good day to you, Arthur,” the postmaster said. “How are you?” He spoke cautiously. Everyone in Rosenfeld, like everyone in the surrounding countryside, knew of Alexander McGregor’s execution. Arthur McGregor had been into town once since then, but he hadn’t stopped at the post office.
“How am I, Wilf?” he said, and paused to think about it. That was probably a mistake, for it required him to come out with an honest answer in place of a polite one: “I’m right poorly, is how I am. How would you be, in my shoes?”
“The same, I expect.” Rokeby licked his thin, pale lips. Lamplight glistened from the metal frames of the half-glasses he was wearing, and from the lenses that magnified his eyes without making them seem warm. “What can I do for you today, eh?”
“Want to buy some postage stamps,” McGregor answered. “When I need beans, I’ll go to Henry Gibbon.” In a different tone of voice, it would have been a joke. As he said it, it was only a statement of fact. He’d seldom joked before Alexander was shot. He never joked now.
“Sure enough.” Rokeby bent his head down and looked over the tops of those glasses as he opened a drawer. McGregor studied the part that ran down the middle of his crown, dividing the brown hair on one side from that on the other as if Moses had had a bit of a miracle left over after parting the Red Sea. To make sure none of his hairs got Egyptian tendencies, Rokeby slicked them all down with an oil reeking of spices. The odor was part of coming to the post office for McGregor, as it was for everyone in and around Rosenfeld. After taking out a sheet of stamps, Rokeby looked up at the farmer. “How many you need?”
“Let me have fifteen,” McGregor answered. “That’ll keep me for a while.”
“Should, anyway,” the postmaster agreed. “Sixty cents’ll do it.”
McGregor stared at him, then at the stamps. They were some shade of red or other, though only a stamp collector could have told at a glance exactly which. Every country in the world used some sort of red for its letter-rate stamps. And the letter rate in occupied Manitoba, as it had been before the war, as it was in the USA and CSA, was two cents.
“Don’t you mean half that?” he asked Wilfred Rokeby. “Look, Wilf, I can see for myself they’re two-cent stamps.” They were, as far as he was concerned, ugly two-cent stamps. They showed a U.S. aeroplane shooting down one either British or Canadian-the picture was too small for him to be sure which.
“Two cents still is the letter rate, sure enough,” Rokeby said. “But you got to pay four cents each to get ’em, all the same. These here are what they call semipostal stamps: only kind we’re gonna be able to sell hereabouts from now on. See? Look.” He pointed to the lower left-hand corner of the stamp. Sure enough, it didn’t just say 2. It said 2 + 2, as if it were part of a beginning arithmetic lesson.
“Semi-what?” McGregor said. “What the devil is that supposed to mean? And if two cents is the letter rate but I’ve got to pay twice that much to get one of these things, where do the other two cents go?”
“Into the Yankees’ pockets-where else?” the postmaster said. “Into a fund that pays ’em to send actors and dancing girls and I don’t know what all out toward the front to keep their soldiers happy.”
“We get to pay so they can do that?” McGregor demanded. Wilfred Rokeby nodded. McGregor took a deep breath. “That’s-thievery, is what it is,” he said slowly, suppressing the scream.
“You know it, and I know it, and I expect the Yankees know it, too,” Rokeby said. “Next question is, do they care? You can figure that one out for your own self. If we’re paying for their damn vaudeville shows, they can spend more of their money on guns.”
In its way, the casual exploitation of occupied Canada appalled McGregor almost as much as the casual execution of his son. It showed how the invaders had the conquest planned out to the last little detail. “What happens if we don’t pay the extra two cents?” he asked, already sure of the answer.
“The surcharge, you mean?” Rokeby’s fussiness extended to using precisely the right word whenever he could (come to that, McGregor didn’t remember ever hearing damn from him before). “If you don’t pay the surcharge, Arthur, I can’t sell you the stamps, and you can’t mail your letters.”
“You don’t happen to have any of the old ones left?” McGregor asked.
“Not a one,” Rokeby said. “Sold out of ’em right quick, I did, when these here first came out last month. I’d have expected you to notice the new stamps on your mail by now.”
“Who pays attention to stamps?” McGregor said, which drew a hurt look from the postmaster. The farmer took another deep breath and dug in his pocket. “All right, sell ’em to me. I hope the dancing girls give the Yankee soldiers the clap.”
Rokeby giggled, a high, shrill, startling sound. He gave McGregor fifteen cents’ change from the quarter and half-dollar the farmer laid on the counter. McGregor took the change and the stamps and left the post office shaking his head.
Henry Gibbon’s general store was only a few doors down. The storekeeper nodded when McGregor came inside. “Mornin’, Arthur,” he said.
“Good morning.” McGregor’s eyes needed a little while to adjust to the lantern-lit gloom inside the general store. Boards covered what had been the big window fronting on the street before a bomb blew it out. That was a year ago now. “When are you going to get yourself a new pane of glass?”
“Whenever the Yanks say I can have one,” Gibbon answered; no U.S. soldiers were in the store to overhear his bitterness. “I ain’t holding my breath, I’ll tell you that. How’s your family, Arthur?”
“What I have left of it, you mean?” McGregor said. Bitterness…how could you replace a broken son? But the storekeeper had meant the question kindly. “They’re healthy, Henry. We’re all down at the mouth, but they’re healthy-and thank God for that. We’ll get by.” He stood a little straighter, as if Gibbon had denied it.
“That’s good,” Gibbon said. “I’m glad to hear it. Like I told you last time you were in, I-” He broke off abruptly, for two men in green-gray walked in off the sidewalk and bought a few cents’ worth of candy. When they had left, the storekeeper shook his head. “You see how it is.”
What McGregor saw was Henry Gibbon making money. He didn’t say anything. What could he say? “You still have any of those beans, Henry? I want to buy a couple of sacks if you do.” No postage stamps here, he thought, and almost smiled.
“The kidney beans, you mean? Sure enough do.” Grunting, Gibbon put two sacks of them on the counter. “What else you need?”
“Sewing-machine needles and a quart of vinegar for Maude, and some nails for me,” McGregor answered. “Ten-pennies, the big ones. Got some wood rot in the barn, and I’m going to have to do a deal of patching before the weather gets worse. Don’t want the stock to freeze.” He gave the storekeeper a quart bottle.