The Major's Daughter

by J. P. Francis

  “Some of our countrymen have worked their way north to Canada. At least that’s the word leaking around camp. The Canadian government is more forgiving than the Americans’. We are not far from the border,” Gerhard said, raising the stick and pointing to the northwest. “It’s not a mere dream. It’s tangible.”

  “A couple days’ walk,” August added.

  “There’s talk they will send us to England when we leave here. For more labor,” Gerhard said bitterly. “More forced labor. In Canada you can ask for political asylum and it will be granted.”

  “Do you know that for a fact?” Patrick asked.

  “No,” August said, “and that is part of the problem. We can’t know for certain. Too many questions will raise too many suspicions. Much of what we are telling you is rumor. It may all be a story we use to give ourselves hope. Some men have been shot on the way.”

  “I’d go with you,” Patrick said. “Anything is better than staying in prison.”

  “Canada could be a prison, too,” August said. “We can’t know.”

  August heard the guards and the other men returning from lunch. He lay back on a comparatively dry spot of soil and watched the sun move through the treetops. As always, he thought of Collie. He had kissed her twice in the last week, both times briefly and with great nervousness that they might be discovered, but he could call the moments to mind with infinite detail. Once, it had been outside the kitchen in the early evening when everyone else had gone off to wash before dinner; another time it had been close to the river in the morning’s first hour. The risk was all hers. She would be vilified if their meetings came to light; her father would feel betrayed.

  Gradually sleep overcame him. The sun felt wonderful on his skin. He caught the scent of horses now and then, and underneath it the unmistakable breath of mud and water mixed. Spring, he thought. Then he felt himself slowly spinning down, his body letting go, and he jerked twice as his muscles relaxed. Canada, he thought with his last bit of consciousness. That was the solution. Two days of hard hiking. Maybe three. They could keep to the back roads, keep to the woodland game paths they knew from their work on the cutting teams. It was a dream, but it had begun to pull at him. As he fell asleep, he felt himself circling down, falling, and it was always toward Canada and the image of Collie waiting for him there, her hair lifted in the wind, the sound of war washed away and left behind forever.

  • • •

  Collie knelt for a moment and placed a fan of irises on Marie’s grave. The grass over the grave had grown in and joined with the surrounding plots so that, except for the newer headstone, one would not have known how recently Marie had joined them. Still, it was a pretty place; wildflowers, small bluebonnets, had already speckled the ground. A section of the cemetery held the brown headstones of the town settlers. Down a slope, overlooking the mountains, a newer section had been carved free of the pressing woodlands. Marie had been buried in the third row, her dates deeply chiseled into the gray granite. Here she had lived, and here she had died, Collie realized. What a vigorous, beautiful life Marie had led. Collie smiled and felt a mist of tears cover her eyes for a moment. The sweet, sweet girl. How she missed her.

  She stood for a moment and didn’t do much of anything. It was a fine day. She glanced at the other gravestones, most of them familiar at least by name. She took deep, even breaths and let her eyes roam up the mountainsides. Marie could rest here, she thought. If one had to die, one had to leave life, then this was as good a place as any to rejoin the soil. Small consolation, she reflected, but true nonetheless.

  She took a seat on the stone bench located inside a scatter of Patch family gravestones. The Patches, she knew, were a prominent family in the area, and they multiplied and spread their interests everywhere, and it did not surprise her to discover the bench positioned among them. She sat and drew out the letter she had collected from the secret hiding place near the twitch horses’ pole barn. It served as the drop box for August; once each day she swung by on the pretense of seeing the horses and made a quick exchange: her letters for his. He had never disappointed her.

  She smiled when she opened his letter and saw his declaration of love. Marie, she thought, would have adored the secrecy of the situation. For Collie, however, each exchange of letters made her revisit her guilt over betraying her father. It was impossible to stay away from the letters, naturally, but she wished fervently that they could communicate open and honestly. She would have given anything to stand before the community as two lives joined, but that was out of the question.

  His letter touched on the usual themes: food, the work, the scent of pine in the morning, something amusing someone said. His English had improved as had her German, and sometimes he gave her small assignments to translate, usually a phrase that contained a delightful surprise for her. His last paragraph he spent in telling her why he loved her. She read the sentences slowly, one at a time, letting each one ring like a finely cast bell before its tone faded away. When she finished she held the letter against her chest and wondered how she had not known love could feel this way. With all the heated talk, the songs, the movies, the sentimental poetry she had consumed, she had not realized love could be the common back-and-forth between a man and woman, “every day’s most quiet need, by sun and candlelight,” as Elizabeth Barrett Browning had promised. That was what she felt. His love and attention did not surprise her so much as give structure to her day, to her thought, to her hope.

  She stayed a while longer, then made the mile walk back to the boardinghouse. She found a good twig to serve as a walking stick and carried it at her side, slapping at bushes and branches that sometimes intruded on the path. Her father waited on the porch. He smoked a cigarette and had a newspaper open on his lap. It was against the rules to drink in the boardinghouse, but Collie smelled whiskey laced in with her father’s coffee. She imagined Mrs. Hammond turned a blind eye on the minor transgression.

  “There you are,” her father said. “I wondered where you got to.”

  “I went to the cemetery.”

  “Well, good,” he said, and patted the chair beside him. “Have a seat.”

  “Some coffee you have there,” she whispered.

  “Don’t spoil it. Mrs. Hammond and I have come to a truce. I drink only out here on the porch. That way she can preserve the dignity of her establishment and claim with honesty that there is no drinking inside the boardinghouse. See? The root of all diplomacy is equal parts hypocrisy and deliberate ignorance.”

  “Well, I intend to hold it over your head if I ever need to get on Mrs. Hammond’s good side.”

  “Oh, she likes the evilness of it. It gives her something to fret about. Listen, dinner should be ready shortly. Henry Heights stopped by a few minutes ago. I invited him to join us, but he said he couldn’t spare the time. He’s on his way up north to get his brother.”

  She nodded. She watched her father take a sip of his coffee. He held the liquid in his mouth for a moment before swallowing it.

  “What do you think of him anyway?” he asked, trying his best to be casual about it.

  She looked at him carefully.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious. Just a father’s curiosity, that’s all. He’s always been very . . . very polite in our dealings. He does seem set on you, Collie. You know that, don’t you?”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “You know very well it’s not. What don’t you like about him? I’ve tried to put my finger on it, but I haven’t been able to do it.”

  “I don’t dislike him,” she said, feeling uncomfortable, profoundly so, with the letter from August fresh in her mind. “He’s a perfectly nice young man.”

  “Oh, I guess it’s none of my business.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  He looked at her, appeared worried for a moment, then laughed.

  “Okay, okay, okay,�
� he said. “Enough of that. I know when to retreat.”

  “I’m going to run in and wash before dinner.”

  “Yes, and I’ll finish my coffee. Beautiful evening.”

  “How about you, Papa? When are you going to find a woman to your liking?”

  “Oh, please. I deserved that, but let’s agree to a truce.”

  “You seem to need to strike truces with the women in your life.”

  “Surrender is more like it.”

  “I was being charitable,” she said, and rose to go inside.

  Mrs. Hammond met her at the door.

  “Dinner in five minutes,” Mrs. Hammond said.

  “Dinner in five minutes,” Collie repeated for the benefit of her father. “Hope that coffee left you with an appetite.”

  Collie smiled at Mrs. Hammond, then hurried up the stairs. She had ascended half the staircase before she remembered she still had the walking stick in her hand.

  • • •

  Estelle felt she had come to rely on cocktails. It amused her to discover her taste for booze. Of course, she mused as she set out the bar things for the evening get-together, she would never call it booze, or hooch, or any of the words George liked to hide like small explosives inside his genial conversation. He had changed that much, at least; gone were the British phrases he had employed to distraction in the beginning of their courtship, replaced, she noted, by a sort of film noir talk. He spoke from the side of his mouth now, aping actors in those dark, venetian-blind dramas popular among a certain segment of the population, though he just as often spilled out into general American boosterism. He was Babbitt, really, the character made famous by the Sinclair Lewis novel of the same name, a backslapping, joke-telling, inveterate joiner. A Lion, an Elk, an Odd Fellow, a Mason, a Knight Templar, for all she knew . . . she could not keep track of his associations. She did not ask what that made her, naturally, and so she had come to rely on cocktails, an evening medicine that made the days tolerable.

  It was nearly five thirty. Cocktails to six fifteen, then the short drive to the Duck Pond, then more drinks, dinner at seven or seven thirty, a dance or two—or a lap around the track, as George would likely call it—and then back home. It was much the same every Friday night. She looked at the bar things one more time, checked the ice in the bucket, then went and lighted a fire in the brick hearth. The logs were laid and the flames came right up. The fire was supplemented by construction pine, bits of two-by-fours and trim that George cut up on Saturdays. Everything to a purpose, he liked to say, and perhaps he was right about that.

  Car doors sounded in the driveway, almost, she thought, as if conjured by the flames of the fire. She went to the window and peeked out. Two couples, three vehicles. She recognized the first couple: Polly and Missy Kent. They were two old shoes, but the second couple, bright and blond and obviously looking around at George’s domain—customers, Estelle knew—stood on Persimmon Drive and ran their eyes over the various houses that had been built and inhabited in the last few months. Prospects, George would say. Everyone, he liked to claim, sold something. Everyone was buying or selling, sometimes both, and this latest couple, unannounced before arriving, surely came to look.

  She heard George’s voice, doubtless singing the praises of the most recent improvements. Streetlights turned on, sewer in place, speed limits set, local school with a promise to put a new wing on the east side of the building . . . she could do the spiel as well as he could. He had sold five houses; five waited. He was now putting in feelers over at an industrial park he and an investment group had turned up, a potential golf course he was calling Shady Ridge. Houses sitting on adjoining golf courses, he prophesized, would end up being the coming thing.

  Polly came in before the others.

  “There’s my girl!” he said, opening his hands along the lines of his pants like a singer finishing a ballad. “I told them you would have a witches’ brew waiting. . . . How are you, darling?”

  He came and kissed her cheek. She handed him a Scotch glass.

  “Do the honors, would you, Polly? I need to check on the baby. Who are the new candidates?”

  “The Blonds? That’s what George calls them behind their backs. Mr. and Mrs. Blond. He’s just been transferred in . . . from California, sat out the war with a herniated disk or broken hip or something. She’s a Miss something or other. A beauty queen.”

  “Are they interested?”

  Polly began shuffling glasses and nodded.

  “George thinks tonight will put them over. He’s counting on you.”

  “Of course he is.”

  “Sell the woman and the man will follow. Isn’t that the motto?”

  “Fix the drinks, Polly, and let me run upstairs.”

  Louisa, a heavy black woman with one eye pushed down so that it was nearly closed, met her on the upstairs landing. She carried a dirty diaper in a gray pail. She walked softly and put one of her fingers to her lips to signal shhhhh. Hazel, baby Hazel, was asleep.

  “She went down?” Estelle asked, hiding her irritation at the baby going so early to sleep. Sleep made the sitting job easy for Louisa and the following morning difficult for Estelle.

  “Just like a little lamb,” Louisa said. “Hardly stayed awake while I changed her britches.”

  “That’s precious.”

  “She’s a good baby, ma’am,” Louisa said, emphasizing the good in a way, Estelle reflected, no mother could resist.

  “I’m glad you think so, Louisa.”

  “No thinking about it. She just is, that’s all. Sleep like that, that means she was born with a clear conscience.”

  “Really?” Estelle asked, intrigued with this little sample of folk wisdom despite the sound of the guests coming in downstairs.

  “Oh, yes, that means she is not guilty over Cain’s original sin. Not at all.”

  “Wasn’t it Adam and Eve’s disobedience that was the original sin?”

  “Oh, I always believed that they didn’t like it in that nasty old garden. Going around with hardly a stitch of clothes . . . why, you tell me if you would like that! No woman would. One way or the other, your little Hazel is as empty as a cup when it comes to guilt, I’m saying. She be a good sleeper all her life.”

  “That’s a blessing.”

  “Sure it is. Now let me take care of this here, and I’ll come back in and sit with her.”

  Estelle nodded. She tiptoed in and hovered over Hazel’s crib for a moment. She really was a darling child, with red highlights in her downy hair and blue eyes that contained half of the world’s wisdom at least. Wise eyes, everyone said, and it was true. Hazel lay on her belly, her tiny fists curled in fierce blocks at her side. Estelle bent down and kissed her. A baby, she thought. A tiny infant lives in my house and belongs to me and I am responsible for her welfare. It was absolutely extraordinary to consider. She touched Hazel’s fingers and counted them. The baby’s breath came out in little pants, like a small creature, a puppy, perhaps, and Estelle leaned farther into the crib to feel the child’s breath against her cheek. How strange life could be. She did not much care one way or the other about George—oh, she did, she did, she reminded herself, except he felt like a family servant, a clever gardener who came in at times to check the plants and then disappeared—but she was mad about her child. It terrified her to think how much she loved Hazel. Her teeth sometimes gritted when she held her, so passionate was her feeling for the lovely little infant. She kissed the crown of Hazel’s head and backed slowly out of the room. She wondered, as she went, if all mothers felt such love for their children.

  Then she hurried down to join the guests.

  “Here she is!” Missy Kent said as Estelle came down the stairs. “The Queen of Persimmon Drive!”

  “Hardly a queen!” George said, his hand on a brown drink and his color high. “More like the Empress of Japan. Someone imperi
al and faultless . . . this is my better half, as you probably surmised. In all her glory.”

  He said this to the Blonds. Estelle was forced to introduce herself, an event that happened sometimes when George was selling hard and forgot names.

  “I’m Estelle . . . and you’re?”

  “The Emersons. Pat and Patty,” the male Blond said.

  “Not really?” Estelle asked, genuinely incredulous. “You’re having me on.”

  “We confess,” the woman said. Patty, Estelle reminded herself. “It’s really quite ludicrous. We’re aware of it, but those are our names.”

  “How cute!” Estelle said, accepting a drink from Polly. It was Scotch over rocks, and she swirled it for a moment to bleed the ice. “Well, here’s how, Pat and Patty. Welcome aboard.”

  “They were looking for property,” George said, “and Kiley French put them in touch with me. How about that? They may be settlers out here with us on the great frontier.”

  “Everyone’s moving into George’s orbit,” Missy Kent said, drinking something faintly orange. “We might as well turn in all our house keys and surrender.”

  “It seems like a lovely location,” Patty said.

  “Not yet it isn’t,” George piped up. “It’s a promise of what it will be. That’s how I like to phrase it. But you give it five years and the house prices will double. The war’s ending and people are going to be spilling out of the cities, you mark my word. Now, you may be transferred away in a year or two, but this house . . . I’m telling you, buying on this end, buying cheap and selling dear, that’s the way the two-step goes.”

  Estelle took another drink. She admitted a dread fascination in watching George rope in customers. The Emersons, for instance, looked like perfectly nice people. They smiled and took a second round from Polly, and she imagined they had a solid life together. They reminded her of draft horses, or a matched pair of andirons, anything put together side by side to manage a job. George was right about their blondness; it was a disarming glimmer, a shiny gleam as if they had come out of the packing material much more recently than anyone else she had met. As she studied them, she guessed they were not sure what to make of George. He enthused an infectious combination of bonhomie and shark salesman, and one had to smile as he chewed on one’s leg.