American Empire: Blood and Iron - By Harry Turtledove Page 0,14

If they came here, I’d…I don’t know what I’d do, but it’d be pretty bad.”

“We won’t have to worry about that till next spring at the earliest,” McGregor said. “Won’t be any Yanks settling down to farm in the middle of winter, not here in Manitoba there won’t.” His chuckle was grim. “And the ones who come in the spring, if any do, they’re liable to turn up their toes when they find out what winters are like. We’ve seen that the Americans don’t fancy our weather.”

“Too bad for them,” Julia said.

After the children had gone to sleep, McGregor lay awake beside his wife in the bed the two of them shared. “What am I going to do, Maude?” he whispered, his voice barely audible through the whistling wind. “By myself, I can hurt the Americans, but that’s all I can do. They won’t leave on account of me.”

“You’ve made them pay,” Maude said. He’d never admitted making bombs, not in so many words. She’d never asked, not in so many words. She knew. He knew she knew. But they formally kept the secret, even from each other.

“Not enough,” he said now. “Nothing could ever be enough except driving them out of Canada. But no one man can do that.”

“No one man can,” Maude said in a musing tone of voice.

He understood where she was going, and shook his head. “One man can keep a secret. Maybe two can. And maybe three can, but only if two of them are dead.” That came from the pen of Benjamin Franklin, an American, but McGregor had forgotten where he’d first run across it.

“I suppose you’re right,” Maude said. “It seems a pity, though.”

“If Alexander hadn’t hung around with a pack of damnfool kids who didn’t have anything better to do than run their mouths and make foolish plots, he’d still be alive today,” McGregor said harshly.

Maude caught her breath. “I see what you’re saying,” she answered after a long pause.

“And the strange thing is, if he was still alive, we wouldn’t hate the Yanks the way we do,” McGregor said. “They caused themselves more harm shooting him than he ever would have given them if they’d let him go.”

“They’re fools,” Maude said. That McGregor agreed with wholeheartedly. But the American fools ruled Canada today. God must have loved them, for He’d made so very many.

The notion of God loving Americans was so unlikely, McGregor snorted and fell asleep bemused by it. When he woke up, it was still dark; December nights fifty miles south of Winnipeg were long. He groped for a match, scraped it alight, and lit the kerosene lamp on the nightstand.

He didn’t want to get out from under the thick wool blankets: he could see his own breath inside the bedroom. He threw a shirt and overalls over his long johns and was still shivering. Maude got out of bed, too. She carried the lamp downstairs as soon as she was dressed. He followed her.

She built up the fire in the stove and started a pot of coffee. It wasn’t good coffee; if the Americans had any good coffee, they kept it for themselves. But it was hot. He stood by the stove, too, soaking in the warmth radiating from the black iron. Maude melted butter in a frying pan and put in three eggs. McGregor ate them along with bread and butter. Then he shrugged on a long, heavy coat and donned mittens. Reluctantly, he opened the door and went outside.

It had been cold in the bedroom. As he slogged his way to the barn, he wondered if he would turn into an icicle before he got there. A wry chuckle made a fogbank swirl around his face for a moment, till the fierce wind blew it away. People said there wasn’t so much work on a farm in winter. In a way, they were right, for he didn’t have to go out to the fields.

In spring and summer, though, he didn’t have to work in weather like this. The body heat of the livestock kept the barn warmer than the weather outside, but warmer wasn’t warm. He fed the horse and cow and pigs and chickens and cleaned up their filth. By the time he was done with that, he was warmer, too.

His eye fell on an old wagon wheel, the sort of junk any barn accumulated. Under it, hidden in a hole beneath a board beneath dirt, lay dynamite and fuses and blasting caps and crimpers