by John Dalmas
He enjoyed it, as a game and a challenge. It was easier than learning Yuultal had been. In fact, German grammar had parallels in Yuultal, and he discovered that quite a few German words were recognizably similar to English words meaning more or less the same thing.
Then Mary began working with him on verbs, while Fritzi taught him everyday phrases and simple sentences. Curtis began stopping at Sweiger's almost daily, for coffee and to exercise his expanding German on someone outside his own household. They teased him a bit about his baltisches Deutsch pronunciations, sometimes amusing word choices, and often clumsy grammar, but enjoyed and respected his interest and progress.
They never mentioned how Hansi was doing, or even if they heard from him, and diplomatically, Macurdy never asked.
By summer he understood quite a bit that was said at the supper table. Of course, the others spoke more slowly and carefully than they might have, but it seemed to him that before too long he'd be modestly competent with the language.
* * *
One of the first things Fritzi had done, when Macurdy came on the job, was introduce him to the .38 police special—show him how to use and care for it. And talk with him about when, and more importantly when not to use it.
Although Macurdy had never before held a side arm, he proved a natural marksman. On occasion, off-duty deputies would get together on the department's makeshift firing range in what had been the Nehtaka Livery Stable, and before long he was firing the best scores in the department.
* * *
One day the following spring, Fritzi sent him with his undersheriff, Earl Tyler, to take a prisoner to Portland. After they dropped the man off, Curtis bought a large picture postcard showing Mount Hood, then wrote on it:
* * *
Dear Mom and Dad,
I am traveling and today have stopped in Portland. I can see this mountain from the city. It is even more beautiful to the naked eye than in the picture.
I am feeling fine and doing well. I hope you are the same. Give my regards to Frank and Toodie, to Julie and Max, and to Ferris and Bob and Hattie. Also remember me to Trapjaw and Blaze.
I intend to get home someday for a visit, but it will likely be awhile. It is hard to get away from work long enough, and while I travel on the job, I never travel very far east.
Your loving son,
Curtis
* * *
He gave them no address. Actually he seldom thought about his parents, or Indiana or Yuulith, or even Varia. Though occasionally he dreamed of her, the dreams invariably including sex.
Mary never asked if he dreamed of his earlier wives. If she ever should, he told himself, he could truthfully say he dreamt more often of Vulkan than of Varia—of a half-ton great boar more often than of his beautiful first wife. He'd never told Mary about Vulkan; that would be a little much even for her, it seemed to him—a sorcerer in the body of a giant wild hog! He could never remember much about his dreams of Vulkan, but somehow they seemed meaningful.
His dreams of Varia, on the other hand, he remembered clearly. They were always in the same place, a kind of gazebo on a seashore. They'd talk—about what always escaped him within moments of wakening—and then they'd make love, and when they did, he loved her as much as when they'd married. Maybe more, because now he wasn't spooked by her powers.
He couldn't honestly say which of his three wives he'd loved most. When he'd been with Varia, he'd been a different person, ignorant and naive, while his marriage with Melody had been passionate, occasionally even tempestuous on her part. But his new marriage was the happiest, beyond any doubt.
No doubt Varia could say the same thing of hers. Cyncaidh was as good a man, or as good an ylf, as anyone. Along with being wealthy and powerful, he was honest and thoughtful, and had integrity.
He wondered if Varia ever dreamed of him—if perhaps they dreamed of each other at the same time. He rather thought they did.
* * *
The next March, Mary came up pregnant, but soon afterward miscarried. They were both disappointed, but not deeply so. There'd be other pregnancies; they made love often enough.
* * *
Macurdy had been reading auras for several years—since he'd learned to see them. With Arbel's help, he'd learned to read emotions, character, to a degree even intention from them. Now, for the first time, he made a study of them, and his readings became more refined and precise, enabling him to avoid or deal with trouble as a law officer.
* * *
Fritzi was careful not to favor his son-in-law unfairly on the job, but with a year under his belt, Curtis was easily the best of his deputies, except perhaps for the undersheriff. So he promoted him to corporal.
The duties weren't often dangerous, or even particularly onerous. With the repeal of prohibition, several bars had opened in Nehtaka, and drunkenness became more common, or at least more open. The Moose Hall quickly got a liquor license, followed promptly by the Swedish Club, the Sons of Norway, and the Finnish Brotherhood.
Public drunkenness, fighting, and traffic violations made up most of the work load, and the brawlers in particular could be hard to handle. So in 1935, Fritzi sent Macurdy to Seattle for three weeks of intensive jujitsu training under a Japanese who advertised in law enforcement journals. Macurdy came back with a certificate of completion, another as "best student," and an excellent basic grasp of principles as well as very useful techniques. Fritzi then had him train the other deputies, and afterward, Macurdy claimed that teaching had been almost as helpful as taking the course in the first place.
More important, he had a definite talent for cajoling drunks and others out of violence, and when cajolery wasn't adequate, onlookers were invariably impressed with his new physical skills, which augmented his previous reputation nicely, and helped make cajolery effective.
* * *
At the jujitsu classes, Curtis Macurdy met a Jack McCurdy, a deputy sheriff from Lewis County, Washington. Jack McCurdy's uncle kept saddle horses on his place near Morton, Washington, and on three different summers, Curtis and Mary went with Jack and his wife on horseback trips into the wild high country of the Cascade Mountains. They'd pack in to a lake and make camp. It was the women who fished, while the men explored the craggy higher country on horseback and afoot. Jack asked Curtis where he'd learned to ride so skillfully. Curtis didn't tell him it had been in a world called Yuulith. He thought it best not to.
He never imagined the experience gained in those Cascade outings would prove valuable, a few years later.
* * *
Traffic accidents increased with the constant increase in cars and speeds, and Macurdy had occasions to use his shamanic skills to save a life.
In addition he'd received valuable first-aid training as a deputy, but more interesting was the help he got from Doc Wesley. Fritzi had bragged to the doctor about his son-in-law's work on his arm and Klara's leg and hip. The doctor loaned Macurdy basic texts on anatomy and physiology, with the comment: "If you're going to mess around with healing, you'd better know something about bodies."
Much of the physiological material was over Macurdy's head. His only actual instruction in science had been in the eighth grade, in the one-room Maple Crossing School, which was innocent of a laboratory. But he found the anatomy text, and the more general physiological discussions both understandable and interesting. Particularly since on several evenings, Doc Wesley took the time to answer and even discuss his questions.
* * *
In 1937, Mary got pregnant again, and again miscarried. Macurdy wondered if perhaps he was snake-bit on the subject of fatherhood. Or if the ylvin strain in his ancestry might have something to do with his family tendency not to beget many children, at least with regular humans.
By that time he was reading a German language weekly paper, the California Demokrat from San Francisco. Reading it aloud, because Klara could no longer see well enough to read newspaper print. He'd read all of it that interested her, with only occasional corrections of pronunciatio
n. Fritzi told him he had a talent for German, that if he ever went to Germany, he'd get along just fine.
* * *
In the fall of 1937 they got a new young preacher at Holy Redeemer, Pastor Jacob Huseby. Pastor Huseby's wife, Margaret, was said to have an eye for men. It was even rumored that in Huseby's last church, she'd seduced a teenaged parishioner, who'd become so guilt-stricken, he'd run away. Macurdy was skeptical; wishful thinking, he told himself. Margaret Huseby was well-built and sexy, and he'd heard men say they wished she'd seduce them.
In the summer of '38 she swam too far out in the river, and went under before she could make it back to shore. Her husband swam out to rescue her, while someone drove to a phone and called an ambulance. Macurdy, hearing the siren, sped after it in his patrol car.
When he arrived, the trauma of Melody's drowning kicked in, and he brushed aside the ambulance driver, who was about to begin artificial respiration. After Curtis's futile efforts to revive Melody, not so many years before, he'd talked with Arbel about how to revive drowning victims. He'd never before had an opportunity to test Arbel's advice, but he soon had Margaret Huseby conscious, and she was taken to the hospital for observation.
And that, Macurdy thought, was the end of that, because he seldom went to church. But seeing him in his '35 Chevy one day, getting gas at the Sinclair station, she asked him for a lift home—she'd just left her car for a major tuneup—and he said sure. Before he got her home, she was groping him. She wanted to repay him for saving her life, she told him, and her husband was out of town.
What really shook him was how tempted he'd been. He told himself he wouldn't go to church again till after Pastor Huseby was transferred to another parish. Something else would happen first, however, that made his resolution irrelevant.
10
War!
Macurdy awoke one Friday—September 1, 1939—to a kid shouting in the street: "Extra! Extra Paper!" The only time he could recall the Oregonian distributing an extra edition in Nehtaka was when Bruno Richard Hauptman was executed for the Lindbergh kidnaping. Pulling on his pants, he hurried outside, called to the boy, and bought a paper.
The Germans had bombed Warsaw and invaded Poland. There was war in Europe! Not civil war in Spain, or Italians fighting somewhere in Africa, but an invasion of one European country by another, with France and England almost sure to get involved. It was the war people had feared might happen and spread, maybe even to involve the United States.
That noon he read it to Klara, translating into German. Her thin old lips were a grim slit. Like Hansi Sweiger's dad, she'd disapproved early and emphatically of Hitler and his policies. Two of her four brothers had been killed fighting for Germany in World War One. A quarter of the village's men of military age had died, and others had been maimed. All because of war, she said, war and crazy rulers!
* * *
At first the war in Europe didn't greatly affect life in Nehtaka. The depression had already eased a lot; local men had left to work on dam construction in Washington state and Montana, and projects of other sorts. Now shipbuilding boomed all along the coast, and logging increased. Jobs were easy to find. People listened more to the news on radio, read the papers with greater interest, and talked about the war. In the logging country there was particular interest in the Nazi invasion of Norway and the Soviet invasion of Finland.
But the changes were neither deep nor difficult, let alone painful. America was at peace.
The war became more troubling when the Nazi Wehrmacht ground its way through the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Balkan peninsula. The British army, badly mauled in the defense of northern France, was driven from the continent at Dunkirk, leaving behind its armor and heavy weapons. Afterward came night after night of German bombing attacks on English cities. And Britain, an island nation dependent on shipping for many of its needs, had more than three million tons of merchant vessels sunk by German submarines in 1940 alone.
But though some people believed that America would be in the war before it was over, so far it was foreign, and not fully real.
In September 1940 that reality level jumped. With passage of the Selective Service Act—America's first ever peacetime conscription law—millions of American men registered for potential military service. Curtis wrote to Indiana and got a birth certificate. His birth year was given as 1904, which startled Fritzi but not Mary. Curtis had written 1914 on the employment form, by accident, he said. He still looked 25, give or take a couple.
Now great military training camps had to be built, and the demand for lumber really boomed. Within weeks, the first drafts of young men were loaded onto trains and hauled away. But at age 36, and as Nehtaka County's undersheriff (Earl had left to be police chief in Manders, California), Macurdy was marginal as far as the draft was concerned.
Meanwhile times got better as the defense industries grew. In Nehtaka, the Saari Brothers greatly expanded their machine shop, retooling it to build bomber parts for the Army Air Corps. There were so many jobs, they had to hire women!
And in the summer of 1941, Mary, now 25 years old, was visited again by morning sickness.
By then the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union, and advanced so rapidly, it seemed they'd defeat the Russians before winter. Meanwhile there were major diplomatic differences with the Japanese, but most Americans paid much less attention to those. Asia was farther off than Europe, geographically and culturally, and anyway, diplomatic problems seemed a long way from warfare.
Of more immediate importance was the basketball game between Nehtaka and Saint Helens high schools, on Friday evening, December 5. Nehtaka won in overtime, 36 to 34.
Two days later, at about 10:30 am, Curtis was in the kitchen drinking coffee, reading the funnies, and listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on the radio. The music was interrupted by an announcement: Japanese bombers had just attacked Pearl Harbor.
The war was no longer someone else's.
* * *
A lot of Nehtaka County's young men enlisted. The Severtson Brothers lost quite a few of their loggers, and advertised for men. On the Monday after New Year's Day, 1942, two of Fritzi's deputies enlisted, one in the Marines, one in the Maritime Service. That evening after supper, Fritzi commented (in German, of course) that he was glad Curtis was 37 years old. "Otherwise the draft would be after you for sure."
Curtis looked thoughtfully at him. "I've been talking with Mary about whether I should enlist."
Fritzi, alarmed, looked at Mary. "What did you tell him?"
She met her father's gaze. "That it's up to him."
"What about the little one?"
"It will be all right. And so will Curtis."
Her father grunted. "Bullets and shells do not select their victims. If someone is in their way, the person is dead." He turned to Klara. "Talk sense to them, Mama!"
The old woman's jaw clenched. She too met her son's gaze. "If Curtis wants to go, he should. If Hitler and those Japaner win the war, we will learn how bad things can be, even here."
Snorting, Fritzi put down his knife and fork. "They can never win. We are too much for them here."
Klara sat taller, straighter, more stern. "They will win if we do not do what we can. And if Mary wants to go to work at Saari's, making—whatever it is they make there, I can cook. I can even keep house; a little dust never hurt anything."
Curtis grinned in spite of himself. For years Klara had made war on dust, even when she had to wage it by proxy. So much for the unchangeable.
Fritzi subsided. It hadn't occurred to him that his mother would side against him. Now it seemed to him that if Curtis hadn't already made up his mind, Klara's declaration might well make the difference.
* * *
That night Curtis and Mary lay in bed listening to a cold winter rain beat on the porch roof beneath their window. They'd just agreed—Curtis would go. Not in the Maritime Service or Navy—he'd said that in battle he'd feel trapped on a ship at sea—but in the Army. Now she reached, too
k his hand in hers.
"But you'ld wait till the baby's born? It will only be a couple of months."
He raised himself on an elbow and kissed her. "Of course I will. Unless the draft takes me."
"And long enough afterward that you can make love to me again. I know it's selfish of me, but I'm going to miss you terribly, especially lying here alone when you're far away."
He kissed her again, then they both lay staring at the ceiling, each with their own thoughts. The last time he'd seen Axel Severtson, the logger had reminisced on their first meeting, then added, "You know, you ain't changed any at all. Vhen you first come here, you looked like a big kid, a big strong kid vhat had got his nose broke somevhere, and vhen I stop to really look, you look yust as young now." He'd laughed. "Maybe you been drinking from that fountain of youth. Vhat vill you charge to get me a bottle?"
And at work, Lute Halvoy had commented, "Macurdy, you better start showing your age, or people will think you're a draft dodger."
How long, he wondered, did they have, he and Mary, before they had to go somewhere else? Before people really began to wonder? Mary understood, of course. Sometimes when she looked thoughtfully and a bit wistfully at him, it seemed to him she was thinking about a future when she was old and he was "still young." Eight years ago it hadn't seemed fully real. Now it had begun to.