“Near as I can see, you’re a lobster in the pot, and the water’s starting to boil, too,” Crosetti answered. “If we go up into Brazilian waters, buddy, that might as well be Pearl Harbor.” He pantomimed putting on a bib. “Waiter! Some drawn butter, and make it snappy.”
“You go to hell,” Carsten said, but he was laughing, too.
“Maybe I will,” the swarthy Italian sailor answered, “but if we head to Brazil, you’ll burn ahead of me, and that’s a promise.”
He was right. Sam knew only too well how right he was. All at once, the big, fair sailor dug into the unappetizing dinner before him. “I better eat quick,” he said with his mouth full, “so I can get to the pharmacist’s mate before I have to go back on duty.”
“First sensible thing I’ve heard you say in a long time,” Crosetti told him. With Commander Grady still there celebrating along with the sailors, Sam couldn’t even think about punching his bunkmate in the nose…very much.
The pharmacist’s mate behind the dispensary window was a wizened, cadaverous-looking fellow named Morton P. Lewis. On a day like today, even his face wore as much of a smile as it had room for. “Ah, Carsten,” he said, nodding rather stiffly at Sam. “Haven’t seen you for a while, but I can’t say I’m surprised to see you now.” His Vermont accent swallowed the r in Sam’s last name and turned can’t into something that might have come from an Englishman’s mouth.
“Heading up toward sunny weather,” Carsten said resignedly. “You want to give me a couple of gallons of that zinc-oxide goop?”
“It’s dispensed in two-ounce tubes, as you know perfectly well.” Lewis’ voice was prim, proper, precise.
“Oh, don’t I just,” Sam said. “Don’t I just.” He sighed. “Damned if I know why I bother with the stuff. I burn almost as bad with it as without it.”
“Your answer, I would say, boils down to the word almost,” the pharmacist’s mate replied.
“Yeah.” Carsten sighed again. “Well, let me have a tube now, would you? Sooner I start using it—” He broke off and stared at Morton P. Lewis. “Boils down to is right. You do that on purpose, Mort?”
“Do what?” said Lewis, a man whose sense of humor, if he’d ever had one, must have been amputated at an early age. His blank look convinced Carsten he hadn’t done it on purpose. But, even if humorless, the pharmacist’s mate wasn’t stupid. “Oh. I see what you’re asking about. Heh, heh.”
“Listen, can I have the stuff, for God’s sake?” Sam asked.
“You don’t require a doctor’s prescription for zinc-oxide ointment,” Lewis said, which Carsten already knew from years at sea. “You don’t require authorization from a superior officer, either.” Carsten knew that, too. The pharmacist’s mate finally came to the point: “You do require the completion of the required paperwork.” He didn’t notice he’d used the same word twice in one sentence, and Sam didn’t point it out to him.
He did say, “Mort, if we get men wounded during an action, I hope you don’t make them fill out all their forms before you give ’em what they need.”
“Oh, no,” Lewis said seriously. “Unnecessary delay in emergency situations is forbidden by regulation.” He went back in among his medicaments before Carsten could find an answer for that.
When he returned, he was carrying a tinfoil tube and a sheaf of papers. In ordinary situations, delay seemed to be encouraged, not forbidden. Sam checked boxes and signed on lines. What it all boiled down to was that he wouldn’t use the zinc oxide for anything illegal or immoral. Since the stuff was too thick and resistant to be any fun if he wanted to jack off with it, he couldn’t imagine anything illegal or immoral he could use it for.
Wading through the paperwork meant he had to hustle to make it up on deck without getting chewed out. That was the way life in the Navy worked: you hurried so you could take it easy a few minutes later. It had never made a whole lot of sense to him, but nobody’d asked his opinion. He wasn’t holding his breath waiting for anyone to ask, either.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Hiram Kidde came by, puffing on a fat cigar. He asked Sam’s opinion: “How about Dom Pedro, eh?” But he didn’t wait for an answer, giving his own instead: “Took the wall-eyed little son of a bitch long enough.”
“Yeah,” Carsten said; he agreed with that opinion. “But he’s gone and done it. He sees the writing on the wall.”
“He’d better,” the chief gunner’s mate said. “Train was almost out of the station before he decided to jump on board.” He sneered, an expression that could turn a junior lieutenant’s bones to water. “Doesn’t cost him anything, either—just his name on four pieces of paper. Not like Brazil’s gonna do any fighting.”
“Maybe a little against Argentina,” Sam said. “But yeah, not much. Jesus, though, closing that coast to England and opening it up to us…doesn’t cost Dom Pedro much, like you say, but it does us a hell of a lot of good.”
“Uh-huh.” Kidde gave him almost the same leer Vic Crosetti had. “Does us a hell of a lot of good, but you’re going to be fried crisp when we head up that way.”
Wearily, Sam reached into his pocket and displayed the tube of zinc-oxide ointment. Hiram Kidde laughed so hard, he had to take the cigar out of his mouth. When he started to flick the long, gray ash onto the deck, Carsten said, “Whoever swabs that up ought to swab your shoes, too.”
Kidde looked down at his feet. He could have seen himself in the perfectly polished oxfords. Three steps put him by the rail. The ash went into the Atlantic. “There. You happy now?” he asked.
“Sure,” Sam answered. “Why not? Way I see things, world’s looking pretty decent these days. Yeah, I’m going to burn for a while, but the Dakota’s home port is San Francisco. War ever ends, I figure we’ll go back there for a spell.”
“You burn in Frisco, too,” Kidde pointed out, “and that ain’t easy.”
“I know, but I don’t burn so bad there,” Sam said. “I’ll tell you one more thing, too: Brazil jumping into the war may make me burn, but it makes the limeys sweat. You come right down to it, that’s a pretty fair bargain.”
“Well, mon vieux, how is it with you?” Lucien Galtier asked his horse as they made their way up toward Rivière-du-Loup. A U.S. Ford didn’t bother to honk for them to pull over, but zoomed around the wagon and shot up toward town at what had to be close to thirty miles an hour. “I wonder why he is in such a hurry,” Galtier mused. “I wonder why anyone would be in such a hurry.”
The horse did not answer, save for a slight snort that was likelier to be a response to the stink of the motorcar’s exhaust than to Galtier’s words. But the Ford kicked up hardly any dust from the fine paved road. The Americans had extended it for their own purposes, not for his, but he was taking advantage of it. Jedediah Quigley had told him he would. Jedediah Quigley had told him quite a few things. A good many more than he’d expected had turned out to be true.
His mind couldn’t help doing a little of the arithmetic the good sisters had drilled into him with a ruler coming across his knuckles. If he had a motorcar capable of thirty miles an hour—oh, not today, not tomorrow, but maybe one of these days—he could get to town in…could it possibly be so few minutes?
“My old,” he said to the horse, “I begin to see how it is that the Americans have put so many of your relations out to pasture. I mean no offense, of course.”
A flick of the ears meant the horse had heard him. It dropped some horse balls on the fine paved road. Maybe that was its opinion of going out to pasture. Maybe that was just its opinion of the road. Behind him, some chickens made comments of their own. He never paid attention to what the chickens had to say. Their first journey into town was also their last. They did not have the chance to learn from experience.
Outside Rivière-du-Loup, the snouts of antiaircraft guns poked into the sky. The soldiers who manned them wore uniforms of American cut, but of blue-gray cloth rather than green-gray. Galtier cocked his head to one side to listen to them tal
king back and forth. Sure enough, they spoke French of the same sort as his own. Soldiers of the Republic of Quebec, he thought. Dr. O’Doull had said there were such men. Now he saw them in the flesh. They were indeed a marvel.
“What do you think?” he asked the horse. Whatever the horse thought, it revealed nothing. Unlike the chickens, the horse was no fool. It had come into town any number of times. It knew how much trouble you could find by letting someone know what was in your mind.
Lucien drove the wagon into the market square. Newsboys hawked papers whose headlines still trumpeted Brazil’s entry into the war, though Galtier had heard about it several days before from Nicole, who had heard it from the Americans at the hospital. The newspapers also trumpeted Brazil’s recognition of the Republic of Quebec. That was actually news.
He tried to outshout the newsboys and all the other farmers who’d come into the market square to sell goods from their farms. His chickens had a solid reputation. They went quickly. He made good money. Soon he was down to one last ignorant fowl. He waited for a housewife to carry it off by the feet.
But the chicken was not to go to a housewife and her tinker or clerk or carpenter of a husband and their horde of hungry children. Here came Bishop Pascal, plump enough to look as if he could eat up the whole bird at one sitting. Galtier hid a smile. The bishop was being a good republican—ostentatiously being a good republican—and shopping for himself again, instead of letting his housekeeper do the job. How she would scold if she found out how much a rude farmer had overcharged him! Lucien had no compunctions whatever. Bishop Pascal could afford it, and then some.
“Good day, good day, good day,” he said now with a broad smile. “How does it go with you, my friend?”
“Not bad,” Lucien said. “And yourself?”
“Everything is well. I give thanks to you for asking, and to le bon Dieu for making it so.” Bishop Pascal crossed himself, then held his right forefinger in the air. “No. Not quite everything is perfectly well.” He pointed that finger at Lucien Galtier as if it were a loaded gun. “And it is your fault.” As best he could with his round smiling face, he glowered. He sounded very severe.
“My fault?” Lucien’s voice was a startled squeak, like Georges’ when his son was caught in a piece of tomfoolery. “What have I done?” What had he done to offend Bishop Pascal? Offending the bishop could be dangerous.
“What have you done? You do not even know?” Bishop Pascal sounded more severe yet. He wagged that forefinger in Lucien’s face. “Do I understand correctly that I am not to officiate at the wedding of your lovely Nicole to Dr. O’Doull?”
“I am desolated, your Reverence, but it is so,” Galtier replied, doing his best to imply that he was desolated almost to the point of hurling himself into the St. Lawrence. That was not so; he felt nothing but relief. “You must comprehend, this is not my fault, and it is not meant as an insult to you. Dr. O’Doull is the closest of friends with Father Fitzpatrick, the American chaplain at the hospital, and will hear of no one else’s performing the ceremony.”
Only the truth there. That it delighted Galtier had nothing to do with the price of chickens. He wanted as little to do with Bishop Pascal as he could; the man had got too cozy with the Americans too fast to suit a lot of people, even those who, like Lucien, had ended up getting closer to the Americans themselves than they’d ever expected.
“One can hardly go against the express wishes of the bridegroom, true. Still—” Bishop Pascal always looked for an angle, as his quick collaboration proved. “I must confess, I do not know Father Fitzpatrick as well as I should. I am certain his Latin must be impeccable, but has he also French?”
“Oh, yes.” Galtier most carefully did not smile at the disappointment in the bishop’s eyes. “I have spoken with him several times. He is not so fluent as Major Quigley or Dr. O’Doull, but he makes himself understood without trouble. He also understands when we speak to him. I have seen many an English-speaker who can talk but not understand. I have some of the same trouble myself, in fact, when I try to use English.”
“Ah, well.” Bishop Pascal sighed. “I see there is nothing more to be said in that matter, and I see also, to my great joy, that this choice has not come about because I am diminished in your eyes.” Galtier shook his head, denying the possibility with all the more vigor because it was true. Bishop Pascal turned his forefinger and his attention in another direction. “Since this is so, perhaps you will do me the honor of selling me that lovely fowl.”
Lucien not only did Bishop Pascal the honor, he did him out of about forty cents for which the bishop, being a man of the cloth, had no urgent need. If Bishop Pascal proved unwise enough to mention to his housekeeper the price he’d paid to Galtier, he would indeed hear about it. He’d hear about it till he was sick of it. Odds were, he’d heard enough of similar follies often enough to try to keep quiet about this one.
“I thank you very much, your Reverence,” said Galtier, who could think of several useful purposes to which he might put forty cents or so. He waved at the empty cages behind him. “And now, since that was the last of the birds I brought to town today, I think I shall—”
He did not get the chance to tell Bishop Pascal what he would do. Three newsboys ran into the market square, each from a different direction. They all carried papers with enormous headlines, a different edition from the ones Galtier had glanced at coming into Rivière-du-Loup. They were all shouting the same thing: “France asks for armistice! France asks Germany for armistice!” Over and over, the words echoed through the square.
“Calisse. Oh, maudit calisse,” Lucien Galtier said softly. He needed time to remember that the Germans who were the enemies of France were allied to the United States, the supporters of the Republic of Quebec and, much more to the point, the homeland of his soon to be son-in-law. He wished he had not cursed such news where Bishop Pascal could hear him.
The bishop waved to the newsboys, who raced to get to him. He bought a paper from the one who ran fastest. He blessed them all: some consolation, but probably not much. As they went off, one happy, two disappointed, he turned to Galtier. “I understand how you feel, my friend,” he said, “and I, I feel this pain as well. It is the country from which our forefathers came, after all, and we remain proud to be French, as well we should. Is it not so?”
“Yes. It is so,” Galtier said. To hear that his homeland had gone down to defeat at the hands of the Boches was very hard, even when the Boches were friendly to the United States.
But Bishop Pascal said, “The France that is beaten today is not the France that sent our ancestors to this land. The France that was beaten today is a France that has turned its back on the holy mother Catholic Church, a France that embraced the godless Revolution. This is a France of absinthe-drinkers and artists who paint filthy pictures no sensible man can understand or would want to understand, a France of women who care nothing for their reputations, only that they should have reputations. It is not ours. If it is beaten, God has meant for it to be beaten, that it may return to the right and proper path.”
“It could be that you are right.” Lucien spread his hands. “I am but an ignorant man, and easily confused. Right now I feel torn in two.”
“You are a good man—that is what you are. Here, let us see what has happened.” Bishop Pascal read rapidly through the newspaper, passing sentences to Galtier as he did so: “The Republic of France, unable any longer to withstand the weight of arms of the Empire of Germany, requests a cease-fire…. All English troops to leave France within seven days, or face combat from French forces…. The German High Seas Fleet and the U.S. Navy to have fueling and supply privileges at French ports, the Royal Navy to be denied them…. The new border between France and Germany to be fixed by treaty once the war ends everywhere. Thus the atheists and their mistresses are humbled and brought low.”
No doubt there were some in France who met Bishop Pascal’s description. But, since France was a nation of men and women like any other, Luci
en was sure it also held a great many more folk who did not. And they too were humbled and brought low. A meticulous man, Galtier had trouble seeing the justice in that.
Had Germany been conquered instead of conquering, what would have happened to the ordinary Germans? Much the same, he suspected. Did that make it right? Was he God, to know the answers to such questions?
Bishop Pascal said, “How much longer can the war on this side of the Atlantic go on now? How much longer before all of Quebec joins our Republic of Quebec? I assure you, this cannot now long be delayed.”
“I think you are likely to be right.” Lucien recalled the men in blue-gray uniforms at the antiaircraft guns outside of town.
“The killing shall cease,” Bishop Pascal said. “Peace shall be restored, and, God willing, we shall never fight such a great and mad war again.”
“I hope we do not,” Galtier said. “I shall pray that you are right.” But he spent a lot of time talking to his horse on the way home from Rivière-du-Loup. When he got there, he still felt torn in two.
Colonel Irving Morrell stood up in the cupola of his barrel as it pounded through the rough and hilly country just north of Nolensville, Tennessee. He did that more and more often these days, and more and more of the commanders in the Barrel Brigade were imitating him. Some of them had stopped bullets. The rest were doing a better job of fighting their machines.
He grinned. He had a toy the other fellows didn’t, or most of them didn’t, anyhow. When First Army infantry got light machine guns to give them extra firepower as they advanced, he’d commandeered one and had a welder mount the tripod in front of the hatch through which he emerged. When the Rebels shot at him now, he shot back.
They were shooting. They’d been shooting, hard, ever since the drive on Murfreesboro opened two days before. But First Army had already come better than ten miles, and the advance wasn’t slowing down. If anything, the barrels were doing better today than they had the day before.
The Great War: Breakthroughs Page 53