went on, 'But if he says, 'Be nice to me or go look for another job,' some of the girls are going to be nice to him. Times are hard. Believe me, I know.'
'We all know, sweetheart,' Sarah said. 'If he said anything like that to me, though, I'd break him in half.' She was built like a longshoreman; Sylvia didn't think she meant it any way but literally.
'There ought to be a law,' Sylvia said. She'd had that thought before, when she lost her job at the canning plant because she'd had to stay home and tend to her children after they came down with the chicken pox.
'There ought to be a lot of things that there ain't,' Sarah Wyckoff said with authority. 'If I was Teddy Roosevelt-'
'You'd look silly with a mustache, Sarah, and you haven't got enough teeth to be TR,' May Cavendish said. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her handbag, scraped a match on the sole of her shoe, got the cigarette lighted, and blew out a creditable smoke ring. Then she coughed. 'Sorry. I'm still getting the hang of this.'
'Doesn't it make people think you're fast?' Sylvia asked.
May shook her head. 'Not the way it would have before the war,' she said, and drew on the cigarette again. The coal glowed red. She let the smoke go without showing off this time. 'It's not like it's a big, smelly cigar or anything. It's not like it was hooch, either. You don't get drunk or anything-you feel better about things for a little while, that's all.' She extended the pack toward Sylvia. 'Want to try one?'
'Sure. Why not?' Sylvia said. 'It's not like they can hurt you or anything.' She took a cigarette. May Cavendish struck another match. Sylvia didn't drag deeply on the cigarette, the way May had done. She drew in a cautious mouthful of smoke-or so she thought. When she tried to suck it down into her lungs, she hacked and wheezed and started to choke.
'Very same thing happened to me the first time I tried,' May assured her. 'It gets easier, believe me it does. You get used to it.'
Sylvia's mouth tasted as if someone had just doused a camp-fire in there. She stared at the cigarette in dismay. 'Why would you want to get used to it?' she asked, and coughed again. But she felt tingly all the way out to her fingers and toes, tingly and light-headed in a strange and pleasant sort of way. Ever so cautiously, she took another puff.
It still tasted bad. It made her chest burn. But the tingles and that good feeling in the middle of her brain got stronger.
'Don't do too much the first time,' May Cavendish advised her. 'You can get sick if you do. Think about whether you like it or not. It's not like cigarettes are expensive, or anything like that.'
'That's true,' Sylvia said. 'They've come down since the war ended, too. I've noticed that, even if I don't usually buy them.'
May nodded. 'And the tobacco's better now. It's the one good thing you can say about the Rebs-they grow better tobacco than we do. Some of the stuff they were selling while the war was still on… Honey, I swear to Jesus they were sweeping the horseballs off the street and wrapping paper around 'em.'
'People kept smoking, though,' Sarah Wyckoff said.
'Why not?' Sylvia said. 'It's not a bad thing, and May's right-it does make you feel nice for a little bit.' Despite saying that, she had no great urge to smoke the rest of the cigarette May Cavendish had given her. She let it fall to the ground and crushed it with her foot. Maybe she'd acquire the habit and maybe she wouldn't. If she did, she'd do it slowly. If she tried to do it in a hurry, she had the feeling she would get sick instead.
'Time to get back to work,' Sarah said, 'or Frank'll start sweet-talking us again.' She rolled her eyes to show how much she looked forward to that.
When Sylvia went back into the plant, it didn't stink so badly of rubber, or so it seemed. After a while, she realized the cigarette had numbed her sense of smell. That seemed a good reason to start smoking all by itself.
The line began to move. Sylvia painted red rings on a pair of galoshes. The machinery sent them down the line to the next worker, who would trim off extra rubber. Sylvia dipped her brush in the paint can and painted more rings.
Lucien Galtier was the sort to enjoy summer while it lasted. Up here, close to the St. Lawrence, a few miles outside the town of Riviere-du-Loup, it did not last long. The farmer did not hold that against summer. It was what it was. He accepted along with enjoying.
He accepted weeds, too, but he did not enjoy them. At the moment, he was hoeing the potato patch. When he saw a bit of green of the wrong shade and in the wrong place, the hoe lashed out without his conscious direction. The decapitated weed toppled.
'Strike them all dead, cherpapa,' Lucien's son, Georges, said from a couple of rows over, seeing the hoe come down. At eighteen, Georges overtopped his father by several inches, and was wider through the shoulders, too- Lucien's strength was of the wiry, enduring sort. Georges' humor was also wider than his father's; he enjoyed playing the buffoon, while Lucien met the world with irony.
'Strike them all dead, eh?' Lucien said as he got rid of another weed. 'One fine day, my son, you will make your country a fine general.'
'If the Republic of Quebec needs me as a general, it will be in a great deal of trouble,' Georges said with conviction. He looked down at the ground. 'Come on, you weeds-get out of the potato trenches and charge the machine guns! Die, and save me the trouble of grubbing you out.' Beaming at Lucien, he went on, 'Perhaps you have reason. I can talk like a general, n 'est-cepas?'
His father snorted. 'As always, you are a nonpareil.' He bent his back to the weeding, not wanting Georges to see any surprise on his face. He'd forgotten, as he sometimes could in the daily routine of farm life, that this was, and had been for the past year and more, the Republic of Quebec, dancing attendance on the United States, and not the province of Quebec, a French-speaking appendage to the British Empire.
He laughed-at himself, as he often did. He'd forgotten the American-fostered Republic of Queb ec, and that with an American son-in-law. There was absentmindedness worthy of a professor or a priest.
When he straightened again, he glanced over in the direction of the hospital the Americans had built on his land to care for their wounded from the fighting north of the St. Lawrence. The hospital remained, but no longer flew the Stars and Stripes. Instead, the Republic's flag (which had also been the provincial flag) floated above it: a field of blue quartered by a white cross, and in each quadrant a white fleur-de-lys. These days, the hospital drew its patients from the people of Quebec.
As the sun went down, he and Georges shouldered their hoes like rifles and trudged back toward the farmhouse. A Ford was parked by the house: not one in a coat of green-gray U.S. official paint, nor the Republic's equivalent blue-gray, but somber civilian black. Georges grinned when he saw it. 'Ah, good,' he said. 'My sister is here for me to harass.'
'Yes, and her husband is here to give you what you deserve for harassing her, too,' Lucien replied, to which his son responded with a magnificent Gallic shrug.
Charles, Georges' older brother, came out of the barn just as Lucien and Georges headed toward it to hang the hoes on the rack Lucien's grandfather had built long years before. Charles looked like Lucien, but was more sobersided-he had to take after his mother there.
Marie greeted her husband and sons on the front porch, as much to make sure they wiped their feet as for any other reason. She was a small, dark, sensible woman, ideally suited to be a farm wife. Her younger daughters, Susanne, Denise, and Jeanne, who ranged in age from sixteen down to eleven, also came out. Susanne sixteen! Galtier shook his head. She had been a child when the war started. Seeing her ripening figure forcibly reminded him she was a child no longer.
Lucien waded through his younger daughters to give Nicole a hug. She looked very much the way Marie had as a young wife. She also looked happy, which made her father happy in turn. When she turned Lucien loose, he shook his son-in-law's hand. 'And how does it march with you, the distinguished Dr. O'Doull?' he asked.
Dr. Leonard O'Doull looked back over his shoulder, as if to see whether Galtier were speaking to someone behind him. With a chuckle, he answered, 'It marches well enough with me, mon beau-pere. And with you?'
'Oh, with me?' Galtier said lightly as he got out a jug of the applejack one of his neighbors-most unofficially- cooked up. 'It is good of you to ask. It is good of you to deign to visit my home here, instead of returning to the palace in which you dwell in Riviere-du-Loup.'
'Father!' Nicole said indignantly.
'Be calm, my sweet,' Leonard O'Doull said, laughter in his green eyes. 'He was trying to make you squeak,
