been since before the war, maybe better than it had ever been. Being able to get her hands on all the coffee she needed didn't hurt there. A lot of places in Washington had gone belly-up, just as she had been at the point of doing not so long before.
She'd wondered if anyone would ask how she managed to keep getting coffee beans in the middle of a tightly rationed town. But that hadn't happened. Even Edna hadn't been unduly curious. She probably thinks I'm sleeping with someone, Nellie thought sadly. It was, she feared, what her daughter would have done in her place. Or maybe Edna only noticed the beans were there and truly did think no more about it.
The next morning, Nellie and Edna were sweeping up the floor by the light of a couple of kerosene lamps- neither gas nor electricity had yet come back to this part of Washington. Outside, black night brightened toward dawn; a coffeehouse's customers started showing up early. As Nellie emptied the dustpan into a wastebasket, a light went on across the street.
A small pot of coffee was already on the coal stove, to give her and Edna an eye-opener before customers started coming in. Nellie poured a cup from the pot and set it in a saucer. 'I see Mr. Jacobs is up and about, too,' she said. 'I'll take this over to him. It will be better than anything he's likely to make for himself.'
'All right, Ma.' Edna's laugh was not altogether kindly. 'Beyond me what you see in a little wrinkled old shoemaker, though.'
'Mr. Jacobs is a very nice man,' Nellie said primly. Her daughter laughed again. Nellie took a haughty tone: 'Your mind may be in the gutter, but that doesn't mean mine is.'
'Now tell me another one, Ma,' Edna said; her mind was in the gutter, sure enough. To keep from heating up one of their all too frequent fights, Nellie let the door she closed behind her serve in place of an angry response.
No sooner had she crossed the street than a long line of trucks rolled past, their acetylene lamps turning morning twilight to noon. She looked back at the growling monsters. Almost all of the drivers were Negroes. She had to tap twice to get Mr. Jacobs to hear her.
He peered through his magnifying glasses. His wizened face wrinkled in a new way when he smiled. 'Widow Semphroch! Come in,' he said. 'And you have brought me coffee, too. Oh, this is wonderful. I was afraid you would be a Confederate soldier with boots that had to be repaired at once because he was going back to the front. I am glad to be wrong.' He stood aside and bowed like an Old World gentleman as he welcomed her.
She set the coffee on his work counter, by the last. Closing the door after her, he came over, picked up the cup, and sipped. At his appreciative hum, Nellie said, 'Thank you so much for helping to arrange to get the beans delivered to my shop in the first place.'
'It is my pleasure,' he said, and then, sipping again, 'It is my pleasure. And it is so very kind of you to bring a cup to me every morning.' He cocked his head to one side. 'You hear all sorts of interesting news in a coffeehouse. What have you heard lately?'
Nellie told him what she'd heard lately, chief among the stories being the one about the Negroes who had served as artillerymen after the men for whom they laboured went down, wounded or killed. She recounted the tale in as much detail as she could. 'The commander of the battery was a captain named Jeb, though I don't know his last name,' she finished.
'I do not know this, either, but I think I may have friends who will.' Mr. Jacobs nodded thoughtfully. 'Yes, thank you for bringing this to my notice, Widow Semphroch. I think my friends may be most interested to hear it. I am very glad we were able to help you in your difficulty.' He finished the coffee and set cup back in saucer. 'Here you are. Your business grows busy before mine, and I would not keep you from it.'
'Edna will take care of things till I get back,' Nellie said. But she picked up the cup and saucer and hurried back to the coffeehouse even so. Leaving Edna alone in there with all those lecherous Confederates was asking for trouble.
And sure enough, when she walked inside, there sat the handsome artillery captain from the night before, with Edna pouring him a cup of coffee and looking, to Nellie's jaundiced eye, as if she was about to plop herself down in his lap. But the scene was outwardly decorous, so Nellie, in spite of what she was thinking, kept her mouth shut.
Edna didn't. Subscribing to the notion that the best defense was a good offence, she said, 'Hello, Ma. Took you long enough to get back from the shoemaker's shop. What were you doing over there, anyhow?' Her tone was light; Jeb the Confederate gunner would have noticed nothing amiss. But Nellie knew she meant something like, You went over there and tore one off with Mr. Jacobs, didn't you? And since you did, what are you doing meddling in my life?
But Nellie had gone across the street for patriotic reasons, not vile ones. She said, 'We were just talking-he's a good friend. Why don't you go back and scrub out the sinks?' Why don't you wash out your mouth with soap while you're doing it, too?
Edna went, with a walk that, Nellie thought, would have got her arrested for soliciting had she done it on the street-and had the Confederates bothered arresting streetwalkers. They mostly didn't; their basic attitude seemed to be that all U.S. women were whores, so what point to worrying about a few in particular?
Jeb followed Edna with his eyes till she disappeared. Then he seemed to remember the coffee growing cold in front of him. He gulped it down, set a coin on the table, and rose, setting his red-corded artilleryman's hat on his head. Touching the brim, he nodded to Nellie and said, 'Obliged, ma'am.'
Nellie nodded back. Why not? she thought. She was obliged to him, too, for running off at the mouth so freely the night before. And he hadn't got his hands on Edna: the moonstruck way he looked at her proved that. She knew all about the ways men looked at women. If he'd had her, his stare would have been more possessive, more knowing. He was still wondering what she was like, and all the more twitchingly lustful for that.
Keep right on wondering, you stinking Reb, Nellie thought.
Plowing the land had an ancient, timeless rhythm to it. Walking behind horses, guiding the plow, watching the rich, dark earth of Manitoba furrow up on either side of the blade made Arthur McGregor think of his grandfather, who had done the same thing back in Ontario; of his several-times-greatgrandfather, who had done his best to scratch a living from the stony soil of Scotland; and, sometimes, of an ancestor far more distant than that, an ancestor who didn't speak English or Scots Gaelic, either, an ancestor who wore barely tanned skins and walked behind an ox scratching a furrow in the ground with a stick sharpened in the fire.
Like his ancestors, going back to that ancient, half-imaginary one, McGregor eyed the sky, worrying about the weather. If he hadn't, his son would have taken care of that for him. Here came Alexander, with a pitcher of cold water from the well. 'Think it's safe, getting the seed in the ground so soon, Pa?' Alexander asked, as he already had more than once. 'A late frost and we're in a lot of trouble.'
Alexander was a good boy, Arthur McGregor thought, but he was getting to the age where he thought everything his father did was wrong, for no better reason than that it was the old man doing it. 'This year, son, we're in a lot of trouble no matter what we do, I think,' McGregor answered. 'But I want to plow and plant as early as I can, before the Americans find a reason to come round and tell me I can't.'
'They can't do that!' Alexander exclaimed. 'We'd starve.'
'And if the lot of us did, do you think they'd shed a single tear?' Arthur McGregor shook his head. 'Not likely.'
There, for once, his son had a hard time disagreeing with him. But Alexander found a different question to ask: 'Even if we do get our crop in, will they let us keep enough of it to live on?'
His father sighed. 'I don't know. But if we have no crop, I'm certain sure we'll not be able to live on that.'
Arthur McGregor looked north. Like all his ancestors save a couple of lucky ones, he worried about war hardly less than weather. The front lay a good way off now-but who could guess where it would be when harvest time rolled around? Would the Yanks have overrun Winnipeg by then? Or would the Canadians and British have rallied and pushed the thieves in green-gray back south over the border where they belonged? If you read the newspapers, you figured Canada was in a state of collapse. But if you believed all the lies the Americans made the papers tell, Winnipeg had already fallen twice, Montreal three times, and Toronto once-maybe for luck.
Alexander persisted: 'How do you feel about raising a crop when the Americans will end up eating most of it while they're fighting Canada?'
