and he did it.' He'd spoken French-Parisian French-before he came up to Quebec. He still spoke Parisian French, but now with a heavy Quebecois overlay. In another few years, he would probably sound like someone who'd grown up here.
Nicole sniffed. 'I expected such behavior from my brother, not from my own dear papa.' She laid the treacle on with a trowel. Her eyes glowed.
'Why?' Georges asked innocently. 'What did you expect Charles to do?' That set Nicole to spluttering, Charles to glaring, and the young ladies of the family to chaffing both their brothers impartially.
In the midst of that racket, Lucien spoke more seriously to Dr. O'Doull: 'It is always good to see you.' He handed his son-in-law a glass of the apple brandy. 'To your health.'
'And to yours,' O'Doull said. They drank. Galtier gasped a little as the applejack clawed its way down to his belly: this was a rougher batch than most his neighbor made. If it fazed Leonard O'Doull, he didn't let on. Irishmen were supposed to have well-tempered gullets, and he lived up to that. After another sip, he went on, 'Nicole and I finished our work at about the same time, and we thought we would pay you a visit.'
'You should have such thoughts more often,' Galtier said, but then qualified that by adding, 'Are you certain it has been good for Nicole to continue to work instead of keeping house full time?'
'She has become a good nurse,' O'Doull answered, 'and the hospital would be the poorer if it lost her. And she desires to work, and I, believe me, I am perfectly happy with the way she keeps house '
'So long as a man is happy, everything will march well,' Lu-cien said gravely, and his son-in-law nodded. The farmer raised an eyebrow. 'Is it for this reason-to boast of your happiness- that you do us the honor of this visit?'
'By no means.' O'Doull could match Georges absurdity for absurdity and Lucien dry for dry. 'It is because a little bird whispered in my ear that Nicole's mother was fixing a great stew of lapins auxpruneaux.'
'Ah, is that the reason?' Lucien slowly nodded. 'Very well. Very well indeed, in fact. The rabbits think I set the cabbages there for them to enjoy. I, on the other hand, think God put the rabbits there for me to enjoy. After you taste of the stew'- whose hot, meaty odor filled the farmhouse-'you will decide.'
'Any rabbit who presumes to taste of your cabbages surely deserves to end up auxpruneaux' his son-in-law agreed with a face so perfectly straight that Galtier, well pleased, elbowed him in the ribs as if he were a son of his own flesh and poured him another glass of the homemade Calvados.
The meal was a great success. Afterwards, Nicole helped her mother and sisters with the dishes-with so many hands, the work could not help being light. O'Doull handed fragrant Ha-banas to Lucien and his sons and lit one for himself. Galtier savored the aroma before drawing the first sweet smoke from his own panatela. He whistled. 'Tabernac,' he said reverently.
'By the tobacco they grow there, Habana must be very close to Paradise.'
'Closest part of the Confederate States, anyhow, not that that's saying much,' Dr. O'Doull replied.
Charles said nothing, which was not surprising. Georges said nothing, which was an astonishment. Both young men puffed happy clouds. So did Lucien. He could not recall the last time he'd been more content, at least outside the marriage bed.
And then another astonishment took place: Nicole came out of the kitchen, followed by Marie and Susanne and Denise and Jeanne. Galtier did not find that an astonishment of the pleasant sort; custom was that the women let their menfolk linger over liquor and tobacco. He reckoned that a good custom, one in no need of breaking. 'What's this?' he asked. 'A parade?'
'No, cher papa, only something I have to tell you- something I have to tell everyone,' Nicole said. 'Everyone except Leonard, that is, for he knows.' Even by the ruddy light of kerosene lamps, Lucien could see her blush. He knew then what was coming, knew it before she spoke: 'Cherpapa, cher maman, you will be grandparents next year.'
'A grandfather?' Lucien exclaimed. Even knowing what was coming, he found himself surprised. But I am too young to be a grandfather! he wanted to cry. Foolishness, of course: if he had a married daughter, he was not too young to be a grandfather. Still, he felt as if he were.
He looked down at his hands, gnarled and scarred and cal-lused by years of farm work, tanned by the sun when there was sun, roughened by the wind and the snow. They were not the hands of a man too young to be a grandfather.
From them, he looked to Marie. She, without any possible doubt, was too young to be a grandmother. But her beaming face said she didn't think so. It also said she looked forward to the role.
'What of me?' Georges said with fine mock anger. 'I will be an uncle next year, but do you say one word about that? No! You leave it to me to figure out for myself. Is that fair? Is that just?'
Nicole said, 'What you will be next year is what you are this year and what you have always been: a nuisance.'
'Thank you.' Georges nodded, as at a great compliment.
'We'll be aunts,' Susanne and Denise and Jeanne chorused. Jeanne, who was the youngest of them, added, 'I can't wait!'
'You'll have to,' Nicole said. 'I am not ready to have the baby just yet.'
Lucien got up from his chair and embraced his daughter. 'Congratulations,' he said. 'May all be well. May all be well with you always.' He let her go and shook his son-in-law's hand. 'Who would have thought I would have a grandchild named O'Doull?'
The young doctor's eyes twinkled. 'See what you get for letting your daughter go to work in the American hospital?'
'At the time,' Galtier said gravely, 'I did not think that a good idea. Perhaps I was right' Leonard O'Doull just grinned at him. He had to wait for Nicole to let out an irate squawk before he could go on, 'Perhaps, too, I was wrong. But only perhaps, mind you.' Someone-he did not see who-had filled his glass with applejack again. If it was full, it needed emptying. Before the war, he'd never imagined a half-American grandchild. Now, though, he discovered he liked the idea.
Jonathan Moss sat in a coffeehouse not far outside the Northwestern University campus. A breeze from Lake Michigan ruffled his light brown hair. An internal breeze ruffled his thoughts.
'What's the matter, Johnny my boy?' asked his companion at the table, a curly-haired fellow named Fred Sandburg. 'You look like you've got bullets whizzing past your head again.'
Sandburg had served on the Roanoke front in Virginia, helping to take the riverside town of Big Lick and the nearby iron mines away from the Confederate States. That had been some of the worst fighting of the whole war. He knew all about bullets flying past his head. He had a Purple Heart with an oak-leaf cluster to show how much he knew.
He knew more about it than did Jonathan Moss, and Moss would have been the first to admit as much. He'd been a flier up in Ontario through the fighting, and never had been shot. When the war was new, he'd thought of himself as a cavalier, meeting other cavaliers in single combat. Three years of flying had convinced him he was as much a gear in a killing machine as an infantryman in the mud. Only the pay and the view and the hours were better.
Moss sipped at his coffee. Conversation buzzed in the background. It was the sort of coffeehouse where vast issues were hashed out and settled every day: the nature of the universe, the effect of the war on the history of the world, whether the waitress would go home with the college kid who'd propositioned her. Vast issues whirled through Moss' head, too.
'I'm trying to sort out whether I really give a damn about studying the law,' he said.
'Ah,' said Sandburg, who was also in law school. 'You finished your first year before the war started, same as I did, right?'
'You know I did,' Moss answered. 'Then, it seemed important. Now… I have a tough time caring now. I guess the war made me look at the scale of things differently, if you know what I mean. I mean, in the big picture, what difference does it make whether or not I hang out my shingle and start drafting wills for wheat traders with more money than sense?'
'Maybe it doesn't make any difference in the big picture,' his friend said. 'It sure as hell does make a difference in the way your life goes. Don't you care about that? Me, I want to be in a spot where nobody can make me pick up a Springfield for the rest of my days.'
'Something to that, no doubt about it,' Moss admitted. He finished his coffee and waved to the waitress for
