“You take care of yourself, Joe,” Specs Peterson told his friend. “Don’t let the bugs bite you back at the hospital.” Everyone laughed at that. The bugs bit harder in the trenches than anyplace else. Peterson went on, “I’ll see if I can’t shoot the damn Reb who got you there.” For that moment, he looked and sounded altogether serious. Birds who wore glasses were supposed to be peaceable types. Somehow Specs hadn’t got the word.
Paul Andersen let out a long sigh. He sat down on the firing step, took off his iron helmet, and ran a dirty hand through his dirty-yellow hair. “Another one of the old boys down,” he remarked.
Chester Martin sat down beside him and began to roll a cigarette. “Yeah,” he said. “Time this war’s finally done, ain’t gonna be a lot of people left who went in at the start.”
“Don’t I wish you were wrong.” Andersen touched the two stripes on his sleeve, then the three on Martin’s. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to say anything. They’d both been promoted because men senior to them had gone down. One of these days, you had to figure they would go down, too, and fresh-faced kids would inherit their jobs.
Martin lighted the cigarette and sucked in smoke. It rasped his lungs raw. Maybe that was because the U.S. tobacco wasn’t so good as the stuff from the CSA that you could get only from Rebel corpses nowadays. Or maybe the chlorine still mixed with the air had something to do with it. Martin didn’t know. He didn’t care, either. The cigarette eased his nerves.
Back of the line, U.S. artillery opened up on the Confederate forward positions. “Go ahead,” Martin exclaimed with the bitterness any veteran comes to feel about the shortcomings of his own side. “Hit the sons of bitches now. That’s bully, that’s what that is. Doesn’t do us a damn bit of good. Why didn’t you shell them when they were coming up over the top at us?”
Andersen also got out makings for a cigarette. “Damn right,” he said while rolling it. “’Course, that would have done us some good, so we can’t have it, now can we?” He leaned forward to get a light from Martin’s smoke.
“They were probably getting shelled, too,” Martin allowed, trying to be fair.
Paul Andersen wasted no time on such useless efforts. “Poor babies,” he said. “Yeah, they get shelled every once in a while. So what? You bring those bastards up to the front line and they’d turn up their toes double quick. Tell me I’m lying-I dare you.”
“Can’t do it,” Martin said. Infantrymen took as an article of faith the notion that nobody else in the Army had a nastier job than theirs. It was, as far as Martin was concerned, a faith justified by works. He laughed. “At least the artillery fights. You ever seen a dead cavalryman?”
“Not likely,” Andersen exclaimed. “Hey, they’re all sitting back there, living soft and sharpening up their sabers for the breakthrough.”
“The breakthrough we’re going to give them,” Martin said. He and his friend laughed. That they would see a breakthrough in their lifetimes struck both of them as unlikely. That the cavalry would be able to exploit it if it ever came was even more absurd. Meditatively, Martin observed, “A horse makes a hell of a target for a machine gun, you know that?”
“It’s a fact, sure enough,” Andersen said. They both smoked on till their cigarette butts were too tiny to hold. Then they tossed them into the mud at the bottom of the trench.
Rain began pattering down a few minutes later. “Always comes right after a bombardment,” Martin said. That wasn’t strictly true, but shelling and rain did seem to go together. At first, he welcomed the rain, which washed the last remnants of poison gas from the air. But it did not let up. It kept raining and raining and raining, till the trenches went from mud to muck.
Martin ordered men to start laying down boards, so they could keep moving up and down the trench in spite of the rain. That would work-for a while. Eventually, if the rain kept up, the muck would start swallowing the boards. Martin had seen that the winter before. He’d never expected to spend two winters in the trenches. But then, when the war started, he hadn’t figured on spending one winter in the trenches.
“Only goes to show,” he muttered, and began to fix himself another cigarette. He hadn’t known how to keep one going in miserable weather till the war started. He did now. The sort of talent I could live without, he thought as he struck a match and lighted the cigarette, shielding it from the wet with his cupped hands as he did so. He sucked in more smoke. As long as he had the talent, he saw no reason not to use it.
“Come on,” Sylvia Enos said to George, Jr., and Mary Jane. “We’re going to be late to the Coal Board if you two don’t stop fooling around.”
Her son was five, her daughter two. They didn’t understand why being late for a Coal Board appointment-as with any government appointment in the USA-was a catastrophe, but they did understand that it was a catastrophe. They also understood Sylvia would warm their backsides hotter than any coal fire if they made her late. She’d made that very plain.
Taking one of them in each hand, she started to head away from Brigid Coneval’s flat, which lay down the hall with the one she and her children had shared with George, Sr., till the Navy sent him off to the Mississippi.
George, Jr., said, “Why can’t we stay with Mrs. Coneval? We like staying with Mrs. Coneval.” Mary Jane nodded emphatically. She couldn’t have said anything so complex, but she agreed with it.
“You can’t stay with Mrs. Coneval because she has an appointment with the Coal Board this afternoon, too,” Sylvia answered. Had George meant, We like staying with her better than staying with you? Sylvia tried not to think about that. She worked all day five days a week and a half-day Saturday like everyone else. That meant her children spent more time awake with Brigid Coneval, who hadn’t taken a factory job when her husband was conscripted but made ends meet by caring for the children of women who had, than with their own mother. No wonder they thought the world of her these days.
“Don’t wanna go Coal Board,” Mary Jane said.
Sylvia Enos sighed. She didn’t want to go to the Coal Board, either. “We have to,” she said, and let it go at that. The Coal Board, the Meat Board (not that she couldn’t evade that one, with her connections to the fishing boats that came into T Wharf), the Flour Board…all the bureaucracies that kept life in the United States efficient and organized-if you listened to the people who ran them. If you listened to anyone else, you got another story, but no one in power seemed interested in that tale.
Mary Jane stuck out her plump lower lip, which had a smear of jam beneath it. “No,” she said. Being two, she used the word in every possible intonation, with every possible variation on volume.
“Do you want to go to the Coal Board, or would you rather have a spanking?” Sylvia asked. As she’d known it would, that got Mary Jane’s attention. Her daughter held still long enough so she could button the girl’s coat all the way up to the neck. It was early December, still fall by the calendar, but it felt like winter outside, and a hard winter at that.
George, Jr., had buttoned his own buttons. He was proud of everything he could do on his own, in which he took after his father. He had, unfortunately, buttoned the buttons wrong. Sylvia fixed them quickly, and with as little fuss as she could, nodded to Mrs. Coneval, and took the children downstairs and down to the corner where the trolley stopped.
Had she imagined it, or did Brigid Coneval seem to be looking forward to a trip to the Coal Board offices? Putting up with a dozen or more little ones from before sunup to after sundown had to wear at her nerves; George, Jr., and Mary Jane were often plenty to make Sylvia wish she’d never met her husband, and they were her own flesh and blood. If you didn’t sneak into the whiskey bottle while caring for your neighbors’ brats, you were a woman of stern stuff.
Out on the street, newsboys wearing caps and wool mufflers against the chill hawked copies of the Boston Globe and other local papers. They were shouting about battles in west Texas and Sequoyah, and up in Manitoba, too. Sylvia thought about spending a
couple of cents to get one, but decided not to. The black-bordered casualty lists that ran on every front page would only make her sad. So long as the newsboys weren’t yelling about gunboat disasters on the Mississippi River, she knew everything about the war that mattered to her.
She clambered onto the trolley and put a nickel in the fare box. The driver cast a dubious eye at George, Jr. “He’s only five,” Sylvia said. The driver shrugged and waved her on. She was having to say that more and more. Next year, she’d have to pay her son’s fare, too. When every five cents counted, that hurt.
“Coal Board!” the trolley man shouted, pulling up to the stop half a block away from the frowning gray-brown sandstone building. As if by magic, his car nearly emptied itself. It filled again a moment later, when people who had already arranged for their coming month’s ration climbed aboard to go home.
“It didn’t used to be this way,” an old man complained to his wife as Sylvia shepherded the children past them. “Back before the Second Mexican War, we-”
Distance and the crowd kept Sylvia from hearing the rest of that. It mattered little. She knew how the old man would have gone on. Her own mother had always said the same sort of thing. Back in the 1870s, the USA hadn’t been full of Boards watching every piece of everybody’s life and making sure all the pieces fit together in a way that worked best for the government. Back then, the CSA, England, and France had humiliated the United States only once, in the War of Secession, and people figured it was a fluke. After the second time, though, it seemed pretty obvious that the only way to fight back was to organize to the hilt. Thus conscription, thus the Boards, thus endless lines and endless forms…
Coal Board forms were stacked in neat piles, a whole array of them, on a long table just inside the entrance. Sylvia started to reach for the one that said, ENTIRE FAMILY DWELLING IN SAME LIVING QUARTERS. She jerked her hand away. That hadn’t been the right form for some months now. Instead, she grabbed the one reading, FAMILY MEMBER ON MILITARY SERVICE.
She sat down on one of the hard, uncomfortable chairs in the vast office. After fishing a cloth doll out of her handbag for Mary Jane and a couple of wooden soldiers painted green-gray for George, Jr., she guddled around in there till she found a pen and a bottle of ink. Normally, she would have contented herself with a pencil, if anything, but since the start of the war all the Boards had grown insistent on ink.
The form was long enough to have been folded over on itself four different times. As she did each month, she filled out the intimate details of her family’s life: ages, address, square footage, location of absent member(s), and on and on and on. She wished the bureaucrats could remember from one month to the next what she’d put down the month before. That didn’t seem to be in the cards, although, if you invented a palace for yourself so you could get a bigger coal ration, they generally did find out about that, whereupon you wished you hadn’t.
“Come on,” she said to the children. They got into the line appropriate to the form. It was, naturally, the longest line in the entire office: conscription had made sure of that. Up at the distant front, a clerk standing behind a tall marble counter like that of a bank examined each form in turn. When satisfied, he plied a rubber stamp with might and main: thock! thock! thock!
“Wonder what’s keeping him out of the Army,” the middle-aged woman in front of Sylvia muttered under her breath.
“When they start conscripting clerks, you’ll know the war is as good as lost,” Sylvia said with great conviction. The woman in front of her nodded, the ragged silk flowers on her battered old picture hat waving up and down.
The line inched forward. Sylvia supposed she should have been grateful the Coal Board offices stayed open all day Saturday. Without that, she would have had to leave work at the fish-canning plant in the middle of some weekday, which would not have made her bosses happy about her. Of course, she would have been far from the only one with such a need, so what could they have done? Without coal, how were you supposed to cook and to heat your house or flat?
When she was three people away from pushing her form over the high counter to the clerk behind it, paying her money, and collecting the ration tickets she’d need for the month ahead, the woman whose turn it was got into a disagreement with the clerk. “That’s not right!” she shouted in an Italian accent. “You think you can cheat me on account of I don’t know much English? I tell you this-” Whatever this was, it was in Italian, and Italian so electrifying that a couple of women who not only heard but also understood it crossed themselves.
It rolled off the clerk like seawater down an oilcloth. “I’m sorry, Mrs., uh, Vegetti, but I have applied the policy pertaining to unrelated boarders correctly, as warranted by the facts stated on your form there,” he said.
“Lousy thief! Stinking liar!” The rest was more Italian, even more incandescent than what had gone before. People from all over the Coal Board offices were staring at anyone bold enough to vent her feelings in that way before the representative of such a powerful organ of government.
The clerk listened to the stream of abuse for perhaps a minute. So, wide-eyed, did George, Jr. “What’s she saying, Mama?” he asked. “She sure sounds mad, whatever it is.”
“I don’t understand the words myself,” Sylvia answered, relieved at being able to tell the literal truth.
Clang! Clang! The clerk had heard enough. When he rang the bell, a couple of policemen came up to the irate Italian woman. One of them put a hand on her shoulder. Wham! She hauled off and hit him with her handbag. The two cops grabbed her and hustled her out of the office. She screeched every inch of the way. “Shut up, you noisy hag!” one of the policemen shouted at her. “No coal for you this month!”
A sigh ran through the big room. The woman in front of Sylvia said, “It would almost be worth it to have the chance to tell the no-good rubber stampers what you really think of them.”
“Almost,” Sylvia agreed wistfully. But that was the operative word. The Italian woman was going to lose a month’s fuel for the sake of a few minutes’ pleasure. Like a foolish woman who fell into immorality, she wasn’t thinking far enough ahead.
Sylvia smiled. There were temptations, and then there were temptations….
At last, she reached the head of the line. The clerk took her form, studied it with methodical care, and spoke in a rapid drone: “Do you swear that the information contained herein is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, knowing false statements are liable to the penalty for perjury?”
“I do,” Sylvia said, just as she had when the preacher asked her if she took George as her lawful wedded husband.
Thock! Thock! Thock! The rubber stamp did its work, a consummation less enjoyable than the one that had followed the earlier I do. But then George had heated her only through the wedding night. The Coal Board clerk would let her keep herself and her children warm all month long.
She passed money over the counter, receiving in return a strip of ration tickets, each good for twenty pounds of coal. The clerk said, “Be ready for a ration decrease or a price increase, or maybe both, next month.”
Nodding, she took George, Jr., and Mary Jane by the hand and headed out of the office. Be ready, the clerk had said. He made it sound easy. But where was the extra money supposed to come from? What was she supposed to do if they didn’t-couldn’t-give her enough coal for both cooking and heating?
The clerk didn’t care. It wasn’t his problem. “Come on,” she told her children. Like all the others the war caused, the problem was hers. One way or another, she would have to deal with it.
Outside the farmhouse, the wind howled like a wild thing. Here on the Manitoban prairie, it had a long running start. Arthur McGregor was glad he wouldn’t have to go out in it any time soon. He had plenty of food; the locusts in green-gray hadn’t been so thorough in their plundering as they had the winter before.
He even had plenty of kerosene for his lamps. Henry Gibbon, the storekeeper over in Rosenfeld, had discove
red a surefire way to cheat the Yankees’ rationing system. McGregor didn’t know what it was, but he was willing to take advantage of it. Cheating the Americans was almost like soldiers making a successful raid on their lines, up farther north.
As if picking that thought right out of his head, his son Alexander said, “The Yanks still don’t have Winnipeg, Pa.” At fifteen, Alexander looked old enough to be conscripted. He was leaner than his father, and fairer, too, with brown hair that partly recalled his mother Maude’s auburn curls. Arthur McGregor might have been taken for a black Irishman had his craggy features not been so emphatically Scots.
“Not after a year and a half of trying,” he agreed now. “The troops from the mother country helped us hold ’em back. And as long as we have Winnipeg-”
“We have Canada,” Alexander finished for him. Arthur McGregor’s big head went up and down. His son was right. As long as grain could go east and manufactured goods west, the dominion was still a working concern. The USA had almost cut the prairie off from the more heavily settled eastern provinces, but hadn’t quite managed it.
“The real question is,” Arthur rumbled, “can we go through another year like this one and the last half of the one before?”
“Of course we can!” Alexander sounded indignant that his father should presume to doubt Canada could hold on.
Arthur McGregor studied his son with a mixture of fondness and exasperation. The lad was at an age where he was inclined to believe things would turn out as he wanted for no better reason than that he wanted them to turn out so. “The United States are a big country,” he said, that being another oblique way to say he wasn’t so optimistic as he had been.
“We’re a big country, too-bigger than the USA,” Alexander said, “and the Confederacy is on our side, and England, and France, and Russia, and Japan. We’ll lick the Yanks yet, you wait and see.”
“We’re a big country without enough people in it, and our friends are a long way away,” McGregor answered. Always dark and cold, December was a good time of year in which to be gloomy. “If the Yankees had chosen to stand on the defensive against the CSA and throw everything they had at us, they would have smashed us in a hurry and then gone on to other things.”
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