Blood and Iron

by Harry Turtledove

  He’d pleased her, though; he saw it in her eyes. “You should have got married a long time ago,” she told him.

  He shrugged. “My mother says the same thing. She wants grandchildren. I never met a girl I felt like marrying.” He shook his head. “No. That’s not so. Before the war, I was sweet on a girl. But she wasn’t sweet on me. She wasn’t sweet on anybody, not back then she wasn’t. I heard she finally married some Navy man after the war. Now, what was his name? I heard it. It’s going to bother me if I can’t remember.” He paused, thinking hard. “Brantley? Buckley? No, but something like that…Brearley! That’s what it was, Brearley. I knew I’d come up with it.”

  “Now, if you could just come up with a girl,” Sally said.

  “If I wanted to listen to my mother, I’d have gone to visit my mother,” Reggie said. Everybody laughed. He held out his glass to Bill Foster. “You want to get me another drink? I know good and well my mother wouldn’t.” Everyone laughed again.

  Sylvia Enos smoked in short, savage puffs. “That man!” she said.

  Neither Sarah Wyckoff nor May Cavendish needed to ask about whom she was talking. “What did Frank do now?” Sarah asked.

  “Felt me up,” Sylvia snarled. “He hadn’t bothered me for weeks, but this morning, all of a sudden, he grew more arms than an octopus. He came back to where I was working and he felt me up like I was a squash he was buying off a pushcart. I almost hauled off and belted him.”

  “You should have,” Sarah said. “I would. I’d have knocked him into the middle of next week, too.” With her formidable build, she could have done it.

  May said, “He’s been sniffing around Lillian for a while. He’s probably been doing more than sniffing, too; she’s a little chippy if I ever saw one.” She sniffed herself, then went on, “But I haven’t seen Lillian for the past couple days, and—”

  “She quit,” Sylvia said. “I heard one of the bookkeepers talking about it. She’s moving out to California. It’s good for your lungs out there.”

  “Well, if she quit, then Frank is going to be on the prowl for somebody new,” May said. “We’ve watched it happen often enough now.”

  “Often enough to be good and sick of it,” Sylvia said. “And I wish to heaven he wouldn’t come sniffing around me. If he doesn’t know by now that I don’t feel like playing games, he’s an even bigger fool than I think he is.”

  “He couldn’t be a bigger fool than I think he is,” Sarah Wyckoff said.

  Sylvia took a big bite of her egg-salad sandwich. She wished she were a gigantic carnival geek, biting the head off of Frank Best instead of a chicken. Then she shook her head in bemusement. He really had to be on her nerves, or she would never have come up with such a bizarre mental image.

  She said, “I wish I could find another job. But how am I even supposed to look for one when I’m here five and a half days a week? And jobs aren’t easy to come by, not like they were during the war.”

  “It’s a nasty bind to be in, dearie,” May said. “I hope it turns out all right for you.”

  “The worst he can do is fire me,” Sylvia said. “Then I will have time to look for a new job. When he gets to be like this, I almost wish he would fire me. You girls are dears, but I wouldn’t mind getting out of this place.”

  “What makes you think it would be different anywhere else?” May asked. “You’d still have a man for a boss, and you know what men are like.”

  “Careful,” Sarah said in a low voice. Frank Best strolled past and waved to the women at their dinner break. He doubtless thought his smile was charming. As far as Sylvia was concerned, it was so greasy, it might have been carved from a block of lard.

  She lit a new cigarette. The foreman favored her with another oleaginous smile when he returned from wherever he’d gone. “Almost time to get back to the line,” he said.

  “Yes, Mr. Best.” Sylvia looked forward to returning to work about as much as she looked forward to going to the doctor to have a carbuncle lanced. Sometimes, though, she had to go to the doctor. And, when the whistle blew, she had to go back and paint red rings on galoshes.

  Frank Best left her alone for twenty minutes after that, which was about fifteen minutes longer than she’d expected. Then he came back toward her with a pair of rubber overshoes in his hand. The rings on them were perfect. Sylvia had made a point of painting perfect rings since he’d started bothering her again, to give him as little excuse as she could.

  But, being the foreman, he didn’t necessarily need an excuse. Sylvia dipped her brush in the can of red paint by the line and painted two more perfect rings on the galoshes in front of her.

  “Tried to slip these by on me, did you, Sylvia?” Best asked. He thrust the overshoes in his hand at her.

  “I don’t see anything wrong with them,” Sylvia said.

  That turned out to be a mistake—not that she had any right course. “Here. Take a closer look,” Best said, and stepped up right alongside her. He brushed her breast with his arm as he brought the galoshes up and held them under her nose. That might have been an accident—had he not been bothering her all morning.

  She took half a step back—and knocked over the can of red paint so that most of it spilled on his shoes. That might have been an accident—had he not been bothering her all morning.

  “Oh, Mr. Best!” she exclaimed. “I’m so very sorry!” I’m so very sorry I didn’t think of that a long time ago.

  He jumped and hopped and used language no gentleman would have employed in the presence of a lady. He’d already proved he was no gentleman by treating Sylvia as if she were no lady. “You’d better watch yourself!” he said when something vaguely resembling coherence returned to his speech. “You’d better clean this mess up, and you’d better make sure nothing like it ever happens again, or you’ll be out on the sidewalk so fast, it’ll make your head spin.”

  “Yes, Mr. Best. I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Best,” Sylvia said. The foreman stomped off, leaving a trail of red footprints.

  Sylvia soaked up as much of the red paint in rags as she could. She got some on her hands, but none on her dress or shirtwaist—she was careful about them, where she hadn’t cared at all about Best’s shoes. She opened another can of paint and went right on giving galoshes red rings, too. If she hadn’t done that, Best would have got another reason to come back and have a word with her.

  As things worked out, he didn’t speak to her for the rest of the day. That suited her fine. Women from all along the production line found excuses to come by and say hello, though. Under their breath, they found considerably more than hello to say, too. She got more congratulations than she’d had on any one day since Mary Jane was born. If any of the women had a good word to say about Frank Best, nobody said it where she could hear.

  Sarah Wyckoff said, “That was even better than knocking his teeth down his throat, on account of it made him look like the fool he is.”

  May Cavendish added, “Now all the girls will be bringing paint to work, Sylvia, and it’s your fault, nobody else’s.”

  “Good,” Sylvia said. May giggled.

  When the closing whistle blew, Sylvia left the galoshes factory with a spring in her step that hadn’t been there at quitting time for quite a while. She got her children off the school playground, and was far from the only mother doing so. The school didn’t take care of children in the classrooms after teaching was done for the day, as it had during the war. But it did let kids play in the yard till their parents could pick them up. That was something, if not much.

  “I’m frozen, Ma,” George, Jr., said.

  “Me, too,” Mary Jane added. Half the time, she agreed with whatever her big brother said. The other half, she disagreed—violently. Sylvia never knew in advance which tack she would take.

  “We’ll be home soon,” Sylvia said. “We’ve got the steam radiator, and I’ll be cooking on the stove, too, so things will be nice and toasty. The more time you spend complaining here, the longer it’ll be before you’re b
ack.”

  For a wonder, the kids got the message. In fact, they ran to the trolley stop ahead of her. She might have had a spring in her step, but they were children. They didn’t need to spill paint on anybody to feel energetic.

  After they all got back to the apartment, Sylvia boiled a lot of cabbage and potatoes and a little corned beef for supper. The vegetables were cheap; the corned beef wasn’t. The children loved potatoes and ate cabbage only under protest. Sylvia had been the same way when she was small.

  As long as she was boiling water for supper, she also heated some for the bathroom down at the end of the hall. The children were old enough now that she couldn’t bathe them together any more. That meant going down the hall first with Mary Jane, then with George, Jr., and last by herself. By the time she got to use the tub, she could hardly tell any hot water had ever gone into it.

  That meant she bathed as fast as she could. Then she got out, threw on a robe, wrapped her wet hair in a towel, and hurried back to her flat. It was just as well that she did; she found the children doing their best to kill each other. Size favored George, Jr., ferocity and long fingernails Mary Jane.

  “Can’t I leave the two of you alone for five minutes?” Sylvia demanded, despite the answer obviously being no. She did her best to get to the bottom of what had started the brawl. The children told diametrically opposite stories. She might have known they would. She had known they would. This time, she couldn’t sort out who was lying, or whether they both thought they were telling the truth. With fine impartiality, she whacked both their bottoms.

  “I hate you!” Mary Jane screamed. “I hate you even worse than I hate him.” She pointed to George, Jr.

  Ignoring his sister, he told Sylvia, “I’m never going to speak to you again as long as I live.” He’d made that threat before, and once made good on it for a solid half hour: long enough to unnerve her.

  She went into the bedroom and looked at her alarm clock. “It’s after eight,” she said. “You both need to get ready for bed.” That produced more impassioned protests from the children; George, Jr., abandoned silence so he could squawk his head off. It did him no good. In fifteen minutes, he and Mary Jane were both in bed, and asleep very shortly after that.

  Sylvia sat down on the couch with a weary sigh. She would have to go to bed pretty soon herself. When she got up, all she had to look forward to was another day at the galoshes factory. Life was supposed to be better than that, wasn’t it?

  Life would have been better—she was sure of it—had George lived. Then he would have been going out to sea, true, and complaining about the drudgery when he was back on land. But, no matter how hard the work was, he’d liked it. Sylvia wouldn’t have liked making galoshes even had Frank Best not bothered her whenever he wasn’t bothering someone else. It was only a job, something she did to keep food on the table. She wished she could quit.

  She sighed again. She was trapped. The only difference between her and a mouse in a trap was that her back wasn’t broken…yet.

  “If I had that limey submersible skipper here,” she said, “I’d shoot him right between the eyes. What the hell was he doing in that part of the Atlantic?” She didn’t own a pistol; George hadn’t kept one in the flat. She would gladly have learned to shoot one, though, if she could have avenged herself on that Englishman. She shook her head. For all she knew, the King of England had pinned a medal on him. If there was any justice in the world, she had a devil of a time seeing where.

  A nasty wind blew snow into Lucien Galtier’s face. He pulled down his hat and yanked up the collar of his coat as he made his slow way from the farmhouse to the barn. His way had to be slow; because of the snow, he could hardly tell where the barn lay. But his feet knew.

  He accepted Quebec winter with the resignation of a man who had never known and scarcely imagined anything different. Moving to a warmer climate had never crossed his mind. Quebec boasted no warmer climates. Besides, moving would have taken him off the land his family had farmed since the seventeenth century. He was less likely to leave his patrimony than he was to leave his wife, and never once in all the years since the priest joined them together had he had any thought of leaving Marie.

  When he got to the barn, he let out a sigh of relief. The horse snorted, hearing him come in. It was not a snort of friendly greeting, in spite of all the hours of conversation that had passed between the two of them as they traveled the roads around the farm. No, the only thing that snort meant was, Where’s my breakfast, and what kept you so long?

  “Compose yourself in patience, greedy beast,” Galtier said. The horse snorted again. It was not about to compose itself in patience, or any other way. It wanted hay and it wanted oats and it wanted them right this second.

  He fed all the livestock and cleaned up the muck. By the time he was done with that, the muscles in the small of his back were complaining. Why didn’t you send out Georges or Charles? was what they were complaining. He did do that a lot of the time, but they were busy elsewhere this morning.

  “And,” he said, speaking to his muscles as if they were the horse, and therefore incapable of talking back, “I am not in my dotage. If I cannot do this work, what good am I?” But it was not that he couldn’t do the work. It was that doing the work exacted its price these days, and the price went up with the years.

  He went back out into the cold, back to the farmhouse. Once he got close to it, he whistled in surprise. Dr. Leonard O’Doull’s Ford was parked by the house. Even though his son-in-law worked at the hospital on Galtier land, he didn’t come to visit all that often. Lucien picked up his pace, to see why O’Doull had come today.

  “Bonjour, mon beau-père,” O’Doull said, rising to shake his hand. Marie had already given the young doctor a cup of coffee and a sweet roll.

  “Bonjour,” Lucien said. “My daughter and my grandson, I trust they are well?”

  “Yes,” O’Doull said, and Marie nodded: she must have asked the same question. The American went on, “I have come, as I was beginning to tell your wife before you got here, to ask a favor of you.”

  “Vraiment?” Lucien said in some surprise. O’Doull was an independent fellow, and the favors he asked few and far between. Galtier waved his arms. “Well, if you came here to do that, you’d better get on with it, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, certainly.” But O’Doull hesitated again before finally continuing, “My mother and father have decided they would like to come up to Quebec to see their first grandson. You know our house, and know that it is not of the largest. Is it—would it be—possible that you might put them up here for a few days’ visit? If it cannot be done, you must know I will understand, but it would be good if it could.”

  Before answering, Galtier glanced toward Marie. The farmhouse was her province. He knew there would be disruption, but she was the one to gauge how much. Only after she gave him a tiny nod did he answer in effusive tones: “But of course! They would be most welcome. When would they be traveling up to see you?”

  “In a couple of weeks, if that’s all right,” O’Doull answered. “They’re so looking forward to meeting Nicole and seeing little Lucien and to meeting all of you, for your doings have filled the pages of our letters.”

  “I hope we are not so bad as you will have made us out to be,” Galtier said.

  While Leonard O’Doull was still figuring out how to take that, Marie asked, “Is it that your mother and father speak French?”

  “My father does, some,” O’Doull replied. “He is a doctor himself, and studied French in college. My mother has been trying to learn since I decided to live here, but I do not know how much she has picked up.”

  “We will get along,” Galtier said in his rusty English. Then he had to translate for his wife. Marie nodded, though she had almost no English of her own.

  “I thank you very much,” O’Doull said with a nod of his own that was almost a bow. “I will wire them and tell them it is arranged. Truly, they do want to meet you. I will also, natura
lly, let you know when I hear just when they will arrive in Rivière-du-Loup.” With one more nod, he went back to his motorcar and then back to the hospital.

  After the door closed behind him, Lucien and Marie looked at each other. They both raised eyebrows and then both started to laugh. Galtier said, “Well, this will be something out of the ordinary, at the very least.”

  “Out of the ordinary, yes,” Marie agreed. “And the work we will have to do to be ready in time will be out of the ordinary, too.” She drew herself up straight with pride. “But we will do it. We will not shame ourselves before Leonard’s rich American parents.”

  Doctors weren’t necessarily rich, but Lucien didn’t bother contradicting his wife. Contradicting Marie rarely did any good. Besides, she was in essence right. Galtier too wanted to put on the best show he could for his son-in-law’s parents.

  Over the next couple of weeks, a tornado might have passed through the house. Doing spring cleaning and the laundry that went with spring cleaning while snow lay on the ground wasn’t easy, but Marie and her daughters managed, with help from Lucien and the two boys whenever they could be roped into it. Denise, who’d had the room she’d once shared with Nicole to herself since her sister’s wedding, was bundled off to sleep with Susanne and Jeanne to give the guests a room of their own.

  “Why have we no electricity?” Marie moaned. “Why have we no piped water?”

  “Why does not matter for these things,” Galtier said with a shrug. “We do not have them, and we cannot have them before the O’Doulls arrive. Save your worries for things we can help.”

  “They will think we are backwards,” Marie said.

  “They will think we live on a farm.” Galtier looked around. “As best I can see, they will be right.” She wrinkled her nose at him. Shrugging again, he added, “I have heard from our son-in-law that it is the same on farms in the United States as it is here.”