American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold Read Free Page B

Muncies, Bertha’s parents, were grocers, and their daughter no fit match for a planter’s son. These days . . . Well, grocers never starved. And Bertha Talmadge, though a widow whose husband, like so many others, had died in the trenches, was reasonably young, reasonably pretty, reasonably bright.
      Anne nodded approval. “Have a nice time. You should find yourself a wife, settle down, have yourself some children.”
      He didn’t get angry at her, as he would have before the war. In fact, he nodded again himself. “You’re right. I should. And, as a matter of fact, so should you.”
      “That’s different,” Anne said quickly.
      “How?”
      Because he was her brother, she told him: “Because my husband would want to try to run everything, because that’s what men do. And odds are he wouldn’t be as good at it as I am. That’s why.”
      “And even if he was, you wouldn’t admit it,” Tom said.
      That was also true. Anne Colleton, however, had not the slightest intention of admitting it. Giving her brother her most enigmatic smile, she went back to the Wall Street Journal .
     
      M ary McGregor was only thirteen years old, but her course in life was already set. So she told herself, anyhow, and also told her mother and her older sister as they sat down to supper on their farm outside Rosenfeld, Manitoba: “The Yankees killed my brother. They killed my father, too. But I’m going to get even—you see if I don’t.”
      Fright showed on her mother’s careworn face. Maude McGregor touched the sleeve of her woolen blouse to show Mary she still wore mourning black. “You be careful,” she said. “If anything happened to you after Alexander and Arthur, I don’t think I could bear it.” She didn’t tell Mary not to pursue vengeance against the Americans occupying Canada. Plainly, she knew better. That would have been telling the sun not to rise, the snow not to fall. Ever since the Americans arrested her older brother during the war on a charge of sabotage, lined him up against a wall, and shot him, she’d hated them with an altogether unchildlike ferocity.
      “Of course I’ll be careful,” she said now, as if she were the adult and her mother the worried, fussy child. “Pa was careful. He just . . . wasn’t lucky at the end. He should have got that . . . blamed General Custer.” However much she hated Americans, she wasn’t allowed to curse at the supper table.
      Her older sister nodded. “Who would have thought Custer would be waiting for Father to throw that bomb and ready to throw it back?” Julia said. “That was bad luck, nothing else but.” She sighed. She hadn’t only lost her father. Arthur McGregor’s failure had also cost her an engagement; the Culligans had decided it just wasn’t safe to join their son, Ted, to a bomber’s family.
      “Part of it was,” their mother said. “Mary, would you please pass the butter?” Mayhem and manners lived together under the McGregors’ roof.
      “Here you are, Ma,” Mary said, and her mother buttered her mashed potatoes. Mary went on, “What do you mean, part of it was bad luck? It all was!” Her mother shook her head. “No, only part. The Americans suspected your father. They came sniffing around here all the time, remember. If they hadn’t suspected, Custer wouldn’t have been ready to . . . to do what he did.”
      What he’d done by throwing the bomb back had blown Arthur McGregor to red rags; the family could have buried him in a jam tin. No one still alive wanted to think about that. “I’ll be careful,” Mary said again. She brushed a wisp of auburn hair back from her face in a gesture her mother might have made.
      Maude McGregor had reddish hair, too. Julia was darker, as her father had been.
      Maude McGregor said, “I just thank God you’re only thirteen, and not likely to get into too much mischief for a while. You know the Yankees will keep an eye on us forever, on account of what the