Army, somewhere out in the South west. 'Have you heard from him lately?'
'I got a letter yesterday, thank God,' Elena said. 'They are moving farther into Texas, to a town called — ' She frowned. 'Lummox? Is that right?'
' Lubbock, I think.' Sylvia remembered seeing the name in the newspaper. 'I'm glad he's all right.'
'Oh, so am I,' the other woman replied. 'He says they are thinking of making him a corporal. He talks it down: he says it is only because — again, thank God-he has stayed alive. But I can tell he is proud of it. Still, it is noth ing like what your George has done. To be one of the crew that sank a submarine-' Her eyes glowed.
What George had had to say about that was that the Spray had gone to sea with a big sink me! sign painted on the cabin, and that the Confederate submarine had thought it was part of the free-lunch spread at a saloon. He didn't think being a decoy was worth getting as excited over as the papers had gone and done.
Before Sylvia found a way to put any of that into words, the conveyor belt gave a couple of jerks. She knew what that meant — it would start up in earnest in a minute or two. Elena Gomes understood that, too. 'I am going to go home and try to get some sleep,' she said with a wan smile, 'so I can come back tonight and do the same thing all over again. Such is life.' She hurried away.
Such is life, Sylvia thought: drudgery, exhaustion, never enough money, never the time to lift up your head and look around. Wasn't it last week she'd had George, Jr., the day before yesterday she'd given birth to Mary Jane? If it wasn't, where had the time gone? How had it slipped past her? She hadn't even been working then-if, that is, you didn't call raising children work. People who didn't have to do it didn't think it was, which, as far as she was concerned, only showed how little they knew. Or maybe they thought it wasn't work because women didn't get paid for it. That was nothing but more foolishness.
With a clatter, the conveyor belt got rolling in earnest. Sylvia thought, The trouble with this job is that I don't get paid… enough. If she'd been a man, she would have made more money. Then again, if she'd been a man, she probably would have been in the armed forces by now. Soldiers and sailors didn't get paid much, either, and the things they did…
She remembered George talking about the torpedo that had slammed into the Confederate submersible. 'It was there,' he'd said, 'and then it was in two pieces, sinking. Nobody had a chance to get out.' He'd known some pride in being part of the ambush that sank it, but also a sailor's horror of watching any vessel go to the bottom.
She pulled the levers on her machine. As Elena had said, it was behaving pretty well. When the paste reservoir ran low, she poured more into it from a big bucket that sat by her feet. She had to keep an eye on the labels, too, to make sure the machine didn't run out of them. She'd let the feeder go empty once, and had the foreman screaming at her because unlabeled cans were go ing down the line. She never wanted that to happen again.
She ate dinner with Isabella Antonelli, whose husband had been a fisherman and these days was fighting somewhere up in Quebec. 'He say they going to do something big,' she told Sylvia. 'What it is, I don' know. The — how you say? — the censor, he scratch out so much, I cannot tell what his big thing is gonna be.'
'I hope he'll be all right,' Sylvia answered, not knowing what else to say. Isabella nodded and then started complaining about her machine, which fas tened strips of tinned steel into cylinders that would be soldered to make the bodies of cans. If half of what she said was true, it made the labeling machine a delight by comparison. But she liked to complain, so who could guess whether half was true?
When she finally slowed down about the machine, she said, 'Your hus band, he's a hero. You don't get no extra money for that, so you no have-a to work here?'
'I wish I did,' Sylvia said. 'But what I really wish is that we weren't at war at all, so he could just catch fish and make a living and we wouldn't have to worry about anything else. I wish we never had the war.'
'So do I,' Isabella Antonelli said. 'But we have it. What can you do?'
'Nothing,' Sylvia answered bleakly. 'Nothing at all.' She gulped her cold coffee and went back to work.
Behind Lucien Galtier, a motorized rumble and rattle and racket grew rapidly. He paid it no mind, clucking to his horse and saying, 'In a little while, we shall be at Riviere-du-Loup. No point in hurrying on such a fine day — I am certain you agree.' If the horse disagreed, it didn't tell him so.
Brakes squealed. Lucien did not look back over his shoulder. Then he heard the raucous squawk of a horn's rubber bulb as it was vigorously squeezed again and again. Through those squawks, an American bellowed at him: 'Get out of the road, you goddamn stinking Canuck, or we'll run you down!'
Now Galtier did look back. Sure enough, he was holding up a convoy of big, snorting White trucks, all of them painted the green-gray of the U.S. uniform. 'I am desolate,' he said, dropping the reins so he could spread his hands in apology. 'I did not know you were there.'
The driver of the lead truck shook a fist at him through the dust-streaked windscreen. 'Get the hell out of the road,' he shouted again, 'or we won't know you're there.'
Lucien fumbled as he picked up the reins, which made the driver start squeezing that rubber bulb again. Lucien tipped his hat to show he did at last hear, then guided the wagon onto the verge to let the truck convoy pass. Delay ing things any longer, he calculated, would be more dangerous than enjoyable.
Truck after truck roared past, gears clashing as drivers upshifted for better speed. The noise of the growling engines was appalling. So was the dust the trucks kicked up from the road. The horse snorted indignantly and twitched its ears, as if blaming Lucien for the gray, choking cloud that enveloped them. 'I am sorry,' Lucien told the animal. 'We would have had the same trouble had we pulled off right away.' The horse looked unconvinced. So did the chickens in the slotted crates in the back of the wagon; they squawked almost as loud as the truck horn and flapped their wings in a vain effort to escape. Galtier wasted little sympathy on them, not when they were bound for the stew pot or the roasting pan.
He counted the trucks that passed him, noting how many carried men and how many supplies. Having done that, he laughed at himself. The army stint he'd put in had trained him well: when in contact with the enemy, gather intel ligence. The only problem with that was, he had nowhere to convey the intelligence he'd gathered. And even if he had known to whom to convey it, how much good would that have done him? Anyone on this side of the St. Lawrence would have needed a wireless set to pass the information on to where it might do some good. He knew no one with such exotic equipment.
Dust from the trucks hung in the air when he got back onto the road and headed up toward Riviere-du-Loup once more. Before he got to town, he had to pull off again to let another convoy pass him. As he had with the first one, he waited to the last possible moment and then a couple of moments more, forcing the whole convoy to slow down to a horse's walking speed before fi nally noticing the trucks were there and getting out of their way.
'How much good does this do, do you think?' he asked the horse when they started traveling again, after the curses of the U.S. drivers finished wash ing over him. 'This getting them angry and giving them a couple of minutes' delay, is it worthwhile?'
Again, the horse did not answer. He got the distinct impression the horse did not care, although the animal had no great use for trucks whether delayed or rolling past. Foolish beast, he thought.
As he drew near Riviere-du-Loup, the wagon rolled through an enormous U.S. encampment: more tents than he had ever imagined, and he was familiar with tents. Soldiers bustled about, doing soldierly things. But for the color of their uniforms and the fact that their brand of soldiers' slang had no French in it, they might have been the sons of the men with whom he had served a gen eration before.
Up near the river, artillery pieces squatted like long-necked, dangerous beasts. Some of them were big, six- or eight-inchers, not just the three-inch popguns that had been here the year before. The Americans could answer warships in kind now. He still remembered the weight of metal the cruiser had been able to hurl at those popguns; thinking about it brought a smile to his lips.
Out in the river, guns boomed. For a moment, he hoped naval vessels were shelling the camp: it would be a target of the sort about which gunners dreamed. But then he realized it was the battery the Americans had placed on the Isle aux Lievres, the Isle of Hares, out in the St. Lawrence. He wondered if the guns were shooting at ships on the river or at the Canadian and British po sitions on the north bank. Either way, they would miss if God was kind.
Those guns out on the Isle aux Lievres had shelled the south bank once, after a couple of companies of picked men rowed over from St.-Simeon or somewhere nearby under cover of darkness and wiped out the American garri son. The locals had laughed about that for weeks, even though the soldiers of the British Empire hadn't been
