by Amy Stewart
That didn’t get the sympathetic laugh Beulah had been trying for.
“I hope those rags are the regulation shade of khaki, because we start tomorrow morning with a uniform inspection,” said the sour-faced sister, Norma. She had the unflattering habit of tucking her chin down when she spoke, turning what was already a thick neck into a double or even triple roll of fat. She was one of those women who would have a trough of flesh around her neck when she was older.
“Tomorrow? Oh . . . well, I’m sure I can put something together.” Still Beulah didn’t open any of her bags. She hadn’t considered the fact that she’d have to unpack in front of all her tent-mates, who apparently had nothing better to do than to sit on their cots and watch her.
The eldest of the three sisters, Constance, was also the most fearsome of the trio. She was as tall as any man Beulah had ever met, and every bit as stout. She wore her hair up, in a style favored among women of Beulah’s grandmother’s generation: a flat bun, set just high enough on her head to fit under a hat, with the locks in front pinned loosely so they wouldn’t fall out of place. She spoke in a manner both forthright and commanding, her voice deep enough to convey some authority. She reminded Beulah of the ladies who used to patrol Monroe Square downtown, looking for wayward girls in need of correction.
But she showed surprising tenderness when she spoke to Beulah. “We couldn’t talk Fleurette out of bringing her sewing machine, and now I see why. I’m sure the two of you can put something together in the way of a uniform before morning.”
Tears came suddenly to Beulah’s eyes. At first, she couldn’t understand why. But as she submitted to Fleurette’s care, and allowed herself to be stripped down to her bloomers and turned this way and that, and to have her bags rummaged through and fabric draped over her, and pins put around her collar and a measuring tape run up her spine, Beulah felt unexpectedly welcomed, and cared for.
She was pulled suddenly back to the first time she’d ever turned up, unannounced, with all her possessions in a bag dragging the ground, hoping to be let in. Hoping to be welcomed.
It was only a dim memory, one she hadn’t allowed herself to revisit in years.
SHE COULDN’T HAVE been older than six. Claudia was ten: they’d only just celebrated her birthday a few days earlier. That was when they knew their mother was gone for good. If she had any intention of coming home, wouldn’t she have been there for Claudia’s birthday?
On the day that realization came to them, Claudia led her through Richmond’s muddy streets, past a fruit market and a butcher, past the horse stalls where the older boys played cards in the afternoon, up one unfamiliar, tree-lined lane and down another, until they came at last to their grandmother’s house.
It occurred to Beulah, as she thought back on it, that Claudia must’ve had no idea how to get there. She had simply marched them up and down every street, in an ever-expanding radius from the flat their mother rented, until at last they came to the front porch she recognized: the one with the dark red railings along the stairs, and the black iron boot scraper with the cutout of a racehorse above it.
There was a bell next to the front door, but Claudia had never rung it. Their mother always used to walk right in, calling out, “It’s your baby!” as the screen door rattled behind her. But that didn’t seem, to Claudia, like the right thing to do in this instance, so she stood uncomfortably on the front porch until Beulah grew impatient and rang the bell.
“Meemaw!” little Beulah called through the screen door. It was summer and the flies were fierce. Her grandmother was right to keep the screen door closed. They’d be all over her pies and her honey cakes, treats Beulah had come to expect and was eager to get her hands on.
Their grandmother was slow to come to the door. She was old, even for a grandmother, and whatever spirit she had in her had been broken in the last few years, when two of her older sons died, one right after the other. One of them was a stone cutter and he had an accident at work that Beulah wasn’t allowed to know about. The other died of coughing up blood. He was a grown man, older than Beulah’s mother, almost old enough to be a grandfather himself.
Meemaw took to her bed more often after she buried those sons. They were her fifth and sixth children to go into the grave, out of nine that had been born to her. She had also lost a husband, way back when she was young, and before she married Beulah’s grandfather. As hard as she tried to breathe life into the world, death kept beating it back.
She found the afternoons unbearable and preferred to sleep through them, except when Beulah and Claudia were expected. On those days the baking kept her busy for hours. Meemaw used to chide them over how quickly the honey cakes would be gone, how she spent all morning baking them and then they were devoured within minutes. But every time they came to visit, she made more, so she mustn’t have minded too much.
On that day, however, she hadn’t been baking. Beulah knew it because she couldn’t smell the burnt sugar through the screen door. Meemaw wasn’t dressed for company, either: she had her hair up in a pink kerchief of the kind that women of her generation wore to bed.
Beulah rushed to open the door and to bury her face into her grandmother’s apron, but Claudia held her back, having some idea that a negotiation should take place first.
“Mama went off on Tuesday,” Claudia said, believing it best to present the facts plainly and to let her grandmother make up her own mind about them.
Meemaw opened the screen door, the better to see them, but still neither of them crossed the threshold to the other. “Do you mean to say you’ve been without your mama for three days and three nights?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Claudia said.
Meemaw looked out over the tops of their heads at the neighbor lady across the street, who was pretending to fuss with her crape myrtles but was in fact watching them surreptitiously.
In a quieter voice meant only for them, she said, “And what about that daddy of yours?”
Claudia only shrugged. Beulah, watching her sister, shrugged as well. They’d hardly ever seen the man answering to that name. Beulah wouldn’t recognize him walking down the street.
Her grandmother pushed the screen door open a little wider and stepped aside. “You can come in, but you live here now. You understand? If your mama comes back, you won’t go with her. You’ll stay here with me and Poppa.”
Claudia looked down at Beulah, who was small for her age, and put a hand on top of her head the way their mother did sometimes.
“Yes, ma’am,” Claudia said, and that was all. Their grandmother swept them inside and pressed both of them up against her pillowy chest.
“You’re mine,” she whispered into their hair. “You’re my little girls.”
And they were. Their mother didn’t even come looking for them until eight or nine days had passed, and when she did come inside and saw the girls at their grandmother’s kitchen table, wearing new dresses that had been sewn just for them, in the same style that Meemaw had been making for little girls since the first one was born way back in 1851, she knew that her daughters wouldn’t be going back to live with her anymore. She didn’t even remark upon it, except to ask if they had all of their things, to which their grandmother replied that nothing the girls might’ve left back in that cheap old rented room was worth keeping anyhow.
She said the word rented as if it meant something worse, which it did.
FLEURETTE TUGGED TIGHT at the fabric around Beulah’s waist. Beulah hadn’t felt a seamstress’s strong, light fingers on her since those early days back in Richmond, when her grandmother made every stitch of clothing she wore.
“Did I stick you?” Fleurette asked when Beulah gasped.
“Not at all,” Beulah said, her eyes flying open. The lamp-lit interior of the tent swam back into view. “Just tickled, that’s all. Go ahead.”
5
“WELL, WE WON’T starve,” Constance said as she mopped up the last of the pork sausage and Spanish rice that comprised their first supper of
military-style rations. Constance liked food generally and rarely complained about it. Norma declared the stuffed tomatoes superfluous (“No one will have the time to stuff a tomato at the front,” she grumbled), and Fleurette found the mashed potatoes wanting, due to a scarcity of butter. Still, every plate was emptied, thanks in part to a rumor making its way around the mess hall that an hour of drilling and setting-up exercises could be expected before breakfast in the morning.
It was nearly nine o’clock by the time the tables were cleared. Constance stood up, stretched, and said, “I’ll sleep like a stone tonight, even on that little cot.”
“Sit down,” Norma said. “They haven’t even begun orientation. We’re running at least an hour behind.”
So ordered, Constance sat. Her time was not her own, she realized, and wouldn’t be, for the next six weeks. She had to admit that she’d grown soft over the past few months, while she did little more than sulk over the sudden and humiliating loss of her position as deputy sheriff. She slept late, retired early to bed, read novels on the divan in the afternoon, and rarely managed more than a walk around their property. To have to follow a military-style schedule, after such a lazy winter at home, would come as something of a shock to the system.
Norma, of course, was eager to see a regimen imposed upon her sisters. Fleurette would complain about it ceaselessly. Constance would tolerate it if she possibly could. But what of their tent-mates?
Sarah seemed to have something of Norma’s veneration of the military about her, and looked forward to the rigors of camp life. Over supper she and Norma had conferred on the practicality of deploying a cavalry overseas, and Sarah found herself quite at ease discussing methods of signaling during night operations. She’d obviously read her share of Army manuals—more, perhaps, than Norma had, which gave Constance some small satisfaction. To see Norma outmatched, for once, might turn out to be the great reward this camp had to offer.
And what about Roxie? This was not the first time Constance had seen a young woman veer so wildly from light-hearted gaiety to nervous tics and small flights of panic. She reminded Constance of the girls who used to pass through her jail on charges of waywardness and incorrigibility. They never knew, at first, whether they could trust Constance, and as a result would fly from a pretense at nonchalance to an absolute terror of having their wrongdoings uncovered, exposed in the papers, and used against them in court. Roxie seemed, at first glance, just like one of her jailhouse girls.
Then again, she claimed to come from a family of some wealth and substance. It wasn’t unusual for girls of her background to be high-strung. Perhaps Roxie had never been on her own before.
But what of her failure to bring a uniform along? Most of the girls were, to Constance’s eye, almost too well-equipped, with plain but perfectly made uniforms, boots so new that there was still a shine on the toes, and cunning little canteen kits slung over their shoulders. To have shown up with nothing at all in the way of a uniform seemed awfully careless for a girl who didn’t want for anything.
At least she was friendly to Fleurette. The two of them sat together companionably, their heads bent over a little song-book Fleurette carried in her pocket. With two hundred campers assembled under the mess tent, all of them chatting at once, Constance couldn’t hear the two of them, but she could only assume that Fleurette was teaching Roxie a song.
At last Mrs. Nash took the podium and rang a bell to call them to order. “You have an early morning tomorrow, so we must start at once,” she said, in the kind of broad and bosomy voice that came from years of addressing crowds at clubs and churches. She picked up a card and read from it. “‘The National Service School is the first modern attempt to mobilize women for wartime service, organized with the aim of training women for the duties which fall naturally to them in these times, including nursing the sick, feeding the hungry, sewing bandages and other surgical supplies, as well as comforting the sorrows and relieving the necessities of the families of our men serving bravely at the front.’”
She put down the card and added, “And I remind you that it is war that lies ahead, and that even in victory we pay a terrible price. Just like the men who train for battle, every one of you has a part to play. There is no such thing as an inconsequential job or a meaningless task. Every soldier learns that, and you will, too.”
This burst of speech was followed by vigorous staccato applause, whistles, and cheers from the more enthusiastic among them. They were a funny-looking group that evening, as many had not yet put on their khaki camp uniforms and all were still wearing their civilian hats, which is to say that there was quite a lot of ribbon and plumage bobbing around.
“Our school is organized according to military principles, with military drilling and discipline a part of everyday life,” she continued. “We take this approach to obtain immediate response, prompt obedience, to have a sure way of gaining time in going from place to place, and to give an understanding of how superfluous are many of the things we have for a long time considered the ordinary necessities of life.”
The applause began more hesitantly and died out distractedly as the audience was called upon to wonder what, exactly, might be the ordinary necessities of life that would become superfluous over the next six weeks.
“However, there is no intention of producing a modern Amazonian corps. Yes, you will rise at dawn to reveille and begin your day with the same setting-up exercises performed by the men at Plattsburg. You’ll do the same drills and marches, and eat the same meals in mess halls that your brothers and husbands wrote home about. But then you’ll spend your days learning the skills most suited for women who wish to be intelligently useful in times of national stress.”
At the mention of an Amazonian corps, Fleurette nudged Constance and smiled. Constance answered with a look of despair. She didn’t know what, exactly, Mrs. Nash believed to be the skills most suited for women, but she would never forgive Norma if she’d brought them all the way to Maryland to learn to cook and sew.
“Before we issue your field campaign hats and send you back to your tents for the night, I am pleased to introduce your instructors, who will come to the front and take their sashes,” Mrs. Nash said.
Norma was poised at the very edge of her chair with her hands on her knees. It looked like a posture that she might’ve seen in a book. Constance had never seen her stand before a crowd before and wondered how she’d handle it. The instructors rose, one by one, from around the room to join Mrs. Nash on the platform.
“Mrs. Hastings, knitting, plain sewing, and bandages.”
Fleurette took particular interest in Mrs. Hastings, who had yet to meet her star pupil.
“Nurse Cartwright, elementary hygiene, home care of the sick, and scientific bed-making. She will also run our infirmary.”
Nurse Cartwright had trouble working the sash around her Red Cross badges but managed after a brief struggle. She was red-faced in the manner of all older women who tended to overheat easily, but there was something jolly about her, too: a glimmer of mischief in her eyes, perhaps. In Constance’s experience, nurses were champion rule-breakers if it meant getting their patients what they needed.
“Mrs. Billings, home dietetics and cooking for the convalescent.”
Norma whispered that Mrs. Billings was far too slender to be any kind of cook. Constance wearily anticipated the afternoons she’d be forced to spend learning Mrs. Billings’s recipes for celery soup and soda cracker gruel.
“Mr. Turner, map-drawing and wireless.”
That was better, thought Constance. She could learn how to draw a map or run a radio, and Mr. Turner seemed like exactly the sort of angular, bespectacled man who could teach it to her.
“Miss Kopp, raising and dressing pigeons and small game.”
Norma was halfway out of her chair before she understood what had happened. “Dressing?” Fleurette whispered. “We’re not going to eat them, are we?”
Norma didn’t dare to look at them, but Constance could see
from the wobble in her chin that she couldn’t decide what to do. A rumble went around the room as heads turned in search of her.
“Miss Kopp?” called Geneva Nash, turning their surname into one long musical note.
“Don’t keep her waiting,” Constance whispered. “You’re making it worse.”
Norma was rendered temporarily speechless over the idea of roasting her birds and feeding them to soldiers. The sight of her sister in such agitation lifted Constance’s spirits considerably. She was secretly delighted over the misunderstanding and resolved to befriend anyone who spoke of serving Norma’s pigeons for dinner.
“Go on,” Constance whispered, and nudged her shoulder.
Without a glance backwards, Norma marched stoically to the front, where she took her sash and stood alongside the others. She kept her shoulders back and stared across the room, just over the top of everyone’s heads.
There stands my sister, Constance thought, in what should have been her moment of triumph. Constance had been nothing but dismissive toward Norma’s ideas about a military pigeon messaging service. She’d watched Norma write one letter after another to any Army or Navy commander whose name she spotted in the newspaper. Norma even typed a letter to President Wilson himself. There came no response but one: this invitation to teach a class at Camp Chevy Chase, where she could only hope that her contraption would be spotted by a military man and passed up the ranks. It was such a foolish idea, but what would Norma do without it? Even a staid and unimaginative woman like her sister needed a bit of hope to cling to.
Maude Miner stepped up on the platform next, along with a man wearing a uniform made bright with medals and bars.
“I met most of you earlier today,” Miss Miner said. “You won’t see me around the camp, because I’m assigned to Washington now, to work with the War Department on furthering the cause of a role for women in the fight which has become almost inevitable. I want you all to know that this camp did not come about by accident. It was not handed to us by the gentlemen in Washington. No one woke up one morning and decided that women should train just as men do—well, no one of the male persuasion woke up and thought that.”