Breakthroughs Read Online Free Page B

muttered under her breath.
                      
    Winter nights up in southern Manitoba were long. Arthur McGregor wished they were longer still. If he lay in bed asleep, he would not have to think of his son Alexander, executed by the U.S. occupiers for sabotage—sabotage he had not committed, sabotage McGregor was convinced he had not even planned.
    He stirred in bed, wishing he could sleep: a big, strong, hard-faced Scots farmer in his early forties, his dark hair grayer than it had been before the war started, grayer than it would have been had the Yankees stayed on their own side of the border.
Damn them.
His mouth silently shaped the words.
    Maude stirred beside him. “You can’t bring him back, Arthur,” she murmured, as if he’d shouted instead of soundlessly whispering. “All you can do is make yourself feel worse. Rest if you can.”
    “I want to,” he answered. “The harder I chase after sleep, though, the faster it runs away. It didn’t used to be like this.”
    Maude lay quiet.
It’s because I’m right,
McGregor thought. Before the Americans came, he’d fallen asleep every night as if he were a blown-out lantern. Farm work did that to a man. It did that to a woman, too; Maude hadn’t lain awake beside him. Now worry and anguish fought their exhaustion to a standstill.
    “We have to go on,” Maude said. “We have to go on for the sake of the girls.”
    “Julia’s turning into a woman,” he said in dull wonder. “Thirteen. God, where does the time go? And Mary…” He didn’t go on. What he’d started to say was,
Mary would kill every American in Manitoba if she could.
That wasn’t the sort of thing you should say about an eight-year-old girl, even if it was true—maybe especially if it was true.
    “Arthur—” Maude began. She fell silent again, and then spoke once more: “Whatever you do, Arthur, be careful.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answered stolidly. “Been a goodish while since I let the horse kick me.”
    “That’s not what I meant.” Maude rolled over, turning her back on him. She was angry. She would have been angrier if she hadn’t had to tell him that, though. He was sure of it.
    Eventually, he slept. When he went downstairs the next morning, Julia had oatmeal ready and fried a couple of eggs while he ate it. The oatmeal and the eggs came straight from what the farm produced. The coffee Julia poured, however, he’d bought in Rosenfeld, the nearest town. He made a face when he drank it. “I’m sorry, Father. Didn’t I make it right?” Julia asked anxiously.
    “It’s as good as it can be,” he answered. “It’s about one part coffee to ten parts burnt roots and grain, is all. I expect the Americans think they’re good-hearted for letting us have any of the real bean at all.”
    “Are you sure it’s all right?” Julia said. McGregor was a serious man in a practical way, as farmers have to be. Julia was serious, too, but more thoughtfully so; she’d been outraged at the lies the Yankees were having the schools teach, and even more outraged because some of her classmates accepted those lies for truth. Now she seemed to wonder if her father was trying to deceive her about the coffee.
    “I’m sure,” he told her. “Your mother couldn’t have made it any better.” That did reassure her. McGregor went on, “And no matter what else, it’s hot. The Yanks can’t take that from us—unless they rob us of fuel, too, that is.”
    “I wouldn’t put it past them,” Julia said darkly.
    McGregor wouldn’t have put it past them, either. As far as he was concerned, the Americans were nothing but locusts eating their way through everything he and the rest of the Canadians whose land they occupied had spent years—sometimes generations—building up. Whatever fragments they happened to leave behind, the Canadians could keep. His mouth twisted in what was not a smile. He hoped such generosity wouldn’t bankrupt