by Amy Stewart
Just as she rounded the edge of the camp nearest the barn and started to come up the other side, she heard a noise in the woods. There was a little footpath leading into the sparse trees right there, and a break in the fence that she hadn’t noticed before. Constance stood still and listened for just a minute more. There were footsteps, certainly, and the sound of some object being shifted from hand to hand. She saw no light, but thought she might’ve caught a glimmer of metal between the trees: a button, perhaps, or a belt buckle.
For the longest time there were no voices, just the shuffling of feet. They didn’t seem to be leaving or drawing near. Were they merely walking back and forth?
Then, at last, she heard a whisper, and another.
“Port, arms,” the voice said. “Order, arms.”
It was a woman’s voice. Someone was conducting rifle drills in the woods.
Constance looked around and realized that the barn blocked the view from camp. No one could see her duck into the forest. She hopped over the fence and walked as quietly as she could down the path. After only a few minutes she came to a little clearing, and there saw Sarah, Margaret Day, and three other women in a circle, their wooden rifles hoisted at attention.
“Are you planning an invasion?” Constance called. Her voice was unnaturally loud in the woods and the women jumped.
“I didn’t mean to scare you.” Constance stepped away from the trees and lifted her lantern to give them a look at her.
“Oh, I’m glad it’s you,” Sarah said, one hand still over her heart from fright. “We were just out here . . . ah . . . taking a little extra practice.”
“At this hour of the night?” Constance couldn’t help but feel somewhat betrayed: why hadn’t Sarah simply told her what she intended to do?
There was some mumbling and shuffling of feet. They were obviously reluctant to confess. At last Margaret stepped forward.
“Before she was injured, Mrs. Nash told me that there was to be no real firearms training at the camp. She seemed to think we could get by on one day of drilling with wooden rifles, to give us an idea of what the men got up to in training. But some of us do intend to go to France. We ought to be able to look after ourselves.”
Constance looked around at them, each one in a perfectly turned-out uniform, standing, as it were, at attention. They seemed entirely prepared to go into battle.
“Are every one of you bound for France?” she asked.
Margaret eyed Constance evenly. She was the eldest woman in the group and, in Constance’s opinion, the one least willing to bend to camp rules. “Well, you know that Sarah intends to join her brother in the ambulance corps. My husband’s a pilot. He’s gone over to help the British, and I intend to follow him. I’ve nothing and no one to keep me at home. Now, these girls—well, Bernice and Hilda come from military families. Fern just feels called to serve. They’ll need more than a turn around a field with a wooden rifle.”
Fern looked a little hesitant. She fidgeted with a button on her collar. Bernice and Hilda stood rigidly upright, with their hands at their sides, like the daughters of soldiers might do. Sarah stood apart, watching the scene with a little half-smile, which told Constance that she’d been the ringleader. These were her troops.
“But wooden rifles are all you have,” Constance said. “Why be so secretive about it?”
“We’ll train with these for now.” Sarah held up a pocket-sized book. “We’re just following the manual. But I have an idea of how we might get hold of a few real rifles.”
Constance’s heart leapt at the idea, but then she steadied herself. “Under no circumstances are you to fire off a rifle in these dark woods. Do you all understand that? Anyone could be out here.”
Margaret turned and nodded over her shoulder. “There’s a larger clearing just over the next hill. It’s a bit of a march to get there, but we can set up a target on a clear night and hold a practice without disturbing anyone.”
She meant that they could hold a practice without being found out. Constance looked around at them, five women eager for adventure. “Have any of you ever fired a gun before?”
Margaret shook her head. “My grand-daddy lived on a ranch,” she said, “but he only ever took the boys out shooting.”
“My brother likes to hunt,” Sarah said. “I have some idea . . .”
“You don’t have any idea,” Constance said. “I want you to promise me that you won’t bring a gun into these woods. There’s plenty to learn at camp. First aid, wireless, codes, and map-making—it’ll all serve you, if you go overseas. It wouldn’t hurt to study your French, and even learn a few words of German so that you can speak the language of the enemy. You don’t need to gather in the woods at night to study a phrase-book. You ought to know how to drive an automobile, too, if you don’t already. And you might practice some holds, and some combat moves, in case you find yourself overpowered. What does that Army book have to say about fighting hand-to-hand?”
All five women were staring at her. It was not lost on Constance that she’d just rattled off the broad outlines of a real military training program for women.
Sarah cocked her head, crossed her arms over her chest, and said, “You seem to know an awful lot about it. Why don’t you show us?”
14
BEULAH AND FLEURETTE hadn’t, of course, stayed inside while Constance made her rounds. They were both a little restless and struck out for the edge of the campground. Back in New York, Beulah could stroll the city’s wide and crowded avenues when her room felt too cramped. But here, there was nothing to do but to circumnavigate their miniature city of tents. On all sides they were hemmed in: by the fence, the gate, the woods beyond. Outdoor living, in an open field beneath an expansive sky, should’ve felt spacious, but to Beulah, a bustling city was far less cramped. She could disappear in a city.
It occurred to her that wartime duty in France might mean living in the countryside, in such makeshift conditions as they now endured. She’d entertained vague thoughts of an assignment in Paris, perhaps in a little office, but it was far more likely that she’d be in a tent, with girls like these—if any of them went at all.
“Did you know, before you arrived,” Beulah asked, “that you wouldn’t necessarily be sent to France at the end of the course?”
“Necessarily? I wouldn’t have left the house if I thought they were sending me to France. You do know they’re at war over there, don’t you?” Fleurette took Beulah’s cigarette and touched it to her lips: it was all she dared to do. It was obvious that she didn’t know how to smoke but didn’t want to let on.
“Well, I intend to go.” Beulah took the cigarette back and gave it a good hard draw. She loved the dry bitter hit of smoke in the back of her throat: it was an old friend, a steady companion that had seen her through some terrible times. “That’s the reason I’m here. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
It had taken her all day to work up to this question, although she asked it casually. All her hopes had been pinned on France: she imagined herself on board that ship, she pictured a bustling port and someone—a French version of Constance, perhaps—awaiting her disembarkation with a bundle of papers that contained her orders, and after that . . . well, she wasn’t sure what might happen after that. She was quite certain about getting away. She was absolutely in love with the idea of disappearing into a country where nobody had ever heard the name Beulah Binford. But how she might serve, where she might work, how she would even put a roof over her head—she hadn’t considered any of that. She’d assumed the camp organizers would take care of practical matters.
“I haven’t met anyone who actually intends to go,” said Fleurette, “except Sarah, and I suppose Margaret. Norma would go if they’d let her.”
“I don’t know how they’d stop Norma,” Beulah said. Should she ingratiate herself to Norma, in the hopes that they might travel as a pair, and make their way through France together? She couldn’t imagine how anyone fell into Norma’s good graces—it appeared th
at one had to be born there, and even then, there were no assurances.
They were perched along the fence, just up a slight hill, so that they could look down on the tents and the lanterns flickering in and out of view.
“There goes your sister,” Beulah said, pointing at the unmistakable figure of Constance marching toward Tizzy Spotwood’s tent. “Do you suppose they’re about to lose their Victrola?”
“And their tins of crackers, and the chocolates,” Fleurette said. “If she takes their kimonos, I’m sneaking one into my trunk.”
“I don’t suppose you got away with much, if you had those two watching over you. Or did they spoil you?”
Fleurette made another attempt with the cigarette. She managed to take in a little smoke and hide the cough demurely behind the back of her hand. “I do as I please.”
From the other side of camp, the figures of Hack and Clarence approached. They always took their first patrol together, right after curfew. Every night they made the same clockwise loop. It was not a coincidence that Beulah and Fleurette were perched at that particular spot. The soldiers had no choice but to pass them on their route.
“What do you make of these two?” Beulah asked.
Fleurette shrugged. “They’re nice boys. It’s a shame to send them off to war.”
“They’ll come back heroes,” Beulah said. “They’ll be men.”
“Won’t they be men if they stay here?”
One of them was whistling as he approached: it was a marching tune, one Beulah couldn’t name. They all sounded alike: the same bouncy beat, the endless repetition of the chorus. It served to keep men moving, she supposed. The two of them stepped in perfect time as they drew near.
“You girls are out after curfew,” Hack called when they were still a good thirty or forty paces away.
“My sister’s the new matron,” Fleurette said. “She knows where we are.”
“I’ll bet you a dollar she doesn’t.” Clarence grinned at them in the dark. He didn’t look like he had any intention of telling Constance about them. Clarence was one of those round-faced boys who hadn’t quite grown into manhood. His eyes were quick to betray uncertainty or confusion, but he would learn to mask that if he went to France. Hack already had: he was taller and leaner, the type who won at any sort of sport and had a wall of trophies at home to prove it. He would be good at soldiering because he’d always been good at things.
“How’d you get stuck out here in Chevy Chase?” Beulah asked. “Where’s the rest of your unit—not out guarding another camp for girls, are they?”
“You saw General Murray at orientation,” Hack said. “He’s in Washington right now, and we’re assigned to him. After this little tour of duty, we’ll be back at Fort Monmouth.”
“In New Jersey?” Fleurette asked. “Don’t tell me you’re with the Signal Corps.”
“How do you know about it?” Clarence said.
Fleurette put a hand over her forehead as if she could hardly bear to think about it. “My sister can’t stop talking about the Signal Corps. She wants the Army to take up pigeons.”
“I heard about that,” Clarence said. “We went around and looked at her cart. Who built that for her?”
“Nobody does a thing for Norma. She built it herself.”
He whistled. “That’s a fine piece of work. But we can’t take birds into battle. They’ll drop dead of fright if they hear the artillery. You wouldn’t believe the noise those French 75s can make.”
“Oh, but she’s already fired a rifle at hers and they did just fine. She’s tried every test imaginable. You can’t rattle those birds any more than you can rattle Norma.”
It was touching, Beulah thought, the way Fleurette defended her sister, even though they bickered ceaselessly with one another. She and Claudia were like that once.
Hack and Clarence had already lost interest in the pigeons. They leaned against the fence, watching from a distance as Constance made her rounds and the camp settled down for the night.
“What do you girls get up to when you’re not learning how to march in a straight line?” Hack asked.
“I’m on the stage,” Fleurette said—a little too eagerly, in Beulah’s opinion.
“Oh yeah? Clarence here plays the piano. You two should work up a duet.”
“I would, if we had a piano,” Fleurette said. “I’ve written off to my old vaudeville troupe and invited them to put on a show for us.”
“It’s not an Army camp without a show,” Clarence said. “Why don’t you sing a little something? I’ll hum along.”
Fleurette would have, but just then Beulah saw Constance making her way up the hill to the barn. They’d be spotted in a few minutes.
“We’d best get on back,” Beulah said. She hopped off the fence and offered her hand to Fleurette, who was shorter and had a harder time managing the rails.
“All right, girlie,” Hack said. “Mind your curfew.”
Girlie. Beulah froze, then spun around on one heel and peered at him through the dark.
“Girlie?”
“Pardon me,” he said. “Miss—”
“Collins,” she said. “Roxanna Collins. You may call me Miss Collins.” Only one man ever called her girlie.
“Yes, ma’am. Good night, Miss Collins. Good night, Miss Kopp.”
15
DURING ALL THOSE years in New York, Beulah had managed to keep the past at bay. She learned how to squeeze her eyes shut at night and replace one memory with another, one face with another, one voice with another.
She visited a spiritualist once who told her that she could make a ghost from her past vanish if she only summoned a convincing replacement every time he showed up. She tried it, and it worked, mostly: she simply buried her memories of Richmond, and planted New York memories on top of them.
But now, even the most careless remark sent her hurtling back to those days. Was it because she’d returned to the South? She was not far from Richmond, just across the Potomac, really, breathing in the sweet southern air she’d been raised on, with the same rich black soil under her feet. Many of the girls at camp came from Virginia, and talked like she used to. Their voices took her right back to her days in Richmond.
And then Hack had to call her girlie. Henry Clay was the only one who ever called her that.
Who came first, Henry Clay or Claudia’s baby? It was all mixed up in her head, the events of that year. She had to count backwards to figure their ages. Claudia had been seventeen, a fine age for a mother. Beulah was only thirteen—no age at all for meeting a man like Henry Clay, but who was going to tell her to stay away from him? All eyes were on Claudia that year. Nobody paid a minute of attention to Beulah.
Claudia hid her pregnancy well. You could do that, in those days, with the dresses they wore. To any stranger passing on the street, it looked like Claudia was dressing more modestly, or like she’d finally sat down to a decent meal for the first time in her life. And some girls just carried that way, where nothing showed for seven months. Claudia was like that.
But Meemaw knew. Meemaw could smell it. She leaned over and put her nose right into Claudia’s neck and came away convinced.
“You’re going to have a little bastard baby right here in this house,” Meemaw pronounced, right in front of Beulah, who hadn’t understood about Claudia’s condition until that moment, even though she’d noticed the way the bed sagged on her sister’s side.
“I don’t have to have it in this house,” Claudia said.
“Oh, but you will, and then we’ll take it right over and give it to the Catholic home,” Meemaw said.
“But we’re not Catholic,” Claudia argued.
“It don’t matter. They do the best by their babies.”
“What if I want it for myself?” Claudia said.
“Then you have to marry the boy that done it to you.”
Claudia looked down at her ever-expanding belly. “I don’t want him to see me like this.”
“Not now. You wait u
ntil you have that baby, and you go show it to him. Show it to his mama, too. She won’t turn a grandbaby away if it’s put into her arms.”
“I don’t know his mama. They live out in the country.”
“Then you’d better hope it’s a boy, because a farming family needs boys.”
It went just like Meemaw said. One night in August, Beulah awoke and the bed was wet and Claudia was moaning. Meemaw was already up, building a fire in the stove. It was hotter than Hades in that kitchen, but Meemaw told Beulah to stay there and to keep boiling rags until Meemaw said to stop.
Upstairs was nothing but Claudia yelling and Meemaw yelling right back at her. Beulah had no way of knowing if a baby’s birth was always so raucous, but this one was. The rags coming out of the boiling water were so hot that Beulah lifted them out with the fire poker and carried them upstairs in one of Meemaw’s iron skillets. She carried a bucket of water up, too, when Meemaw asked for it.
Claudia wouldn’t look at Beulah and shouted at her to stay out of the room. Sometimes when Beulah stood in the doorway, Claudia was on her back, red-faced and crying, but mostly she was down on all fours like an animal, and Meemaw was down there with her, rubbing her back and putting her gnarled old hands against Claudia’s purple-veined belly as if it might burst if she didn’t hold it together. When the baby came, Beulah was just outside, in the dark hallway with her eyes closed tight as she heard it gushing out from between Claudia’s legs in a river of blood. Never in her life had Beulah seen so much blood as she did when Meemaw called her in to help clean up.
“It looks bad, but it ain’t” was all Meemaw said. She was too busy with the baby, a puckered, oily thing that screamed just like Claudia did when she birthed it. Beulah took away the sheets, and all the rags, and even the braided rug that Meemaw had pulled out from under the bed to push under Claudia’s bottom before the baby came. Beulah carried it all out back to be burned in the yard when it dried, according to her grandmother’s instructions.