Walk in Hell (12 page)

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 discovered 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.”

“Nahh!” Alexander rejected the idea out of hand.

But Arthur McGregor nodded. “They would have, son. They could have. They’re just too big for us. But one thing about Americans is, they always think they can do more than they really can. They tried to smash us and the Confederates and England on the high seas, all at the same time. And I don’t care how big they are, I don’t care how much they love the Kaiser and the Huns, no country on the face of the earth is big enough and strong enough to do all that at once.”