son, go work for a newspaper.'
'All right,' Chester said.
His father looked at him in some surprise, evidently not having expected such an easy victory. The older male Martin arose with a grunt from the chair in which he'd been ensconced since suppertime. He went into the kitchen and came out with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses.
'Well, I like that,' Sue said with annoyance only partly affected. 'Are you going to leave Mother and me thirsty?'
'I only have two hands.' Her father set the whiskey and the glasses on the side table by his chair, then held up the members in question. 'Count 'em-two.' He returned to the kitchen and brought out two more tumblers.
Chester wondered if his father had intended to include Sue and his mother in the drinking. If he hadn't, nobody could prove it now. Whiskey gurgled into four glasses. Chester raised his. 'To 1920!' he said.
'To 1920!' his sister and his parents echoed. They all drank. Chester sighed as the whiskey ran down his throat. It wasn't the smoothest he'd ever drunk, but it wasn't bad, either. Some of the rotgut he'd had in back of the lines-and, every once in a while, in a canteen or jug smuggled up to the forward trenches-had been like drinking liquid barbed wire.
His father stood to propose a toast. 'To the 1920s-may they be a better ten years than the ten we've just gone through.' Everyone drank to that, too. Stephen Douglas Martin said, 'Now we ought to all pitch our glasses into the fireplace. Only trouble with that is, you go through a lot of glasses.'
Sue looked at the clock on the mantel over the fireplace. 'Three hours till midnight, less a couple of minutes. Will starting a new calendar really make a difference? It'd be nice to think it would.'
'We always hope it will,' her mother said wistfully. She sighed. 'And we usually end up looking back and saying, 'Well, that's another year down.''
'This wasn't too bad a year,' Chester said. 'I've had work through most of it, anyway, and that's more than I can say for the rest of the time since I got out of the Army.'
He left it at that. Had he said more, he and his father would have got to arguing politics. He was convinced the factory owners had settled with the steelworkers because of the 1918 election returns. Whatever else you might say about them, big capitalists weren't stupid. When handwriting went up on the wall, they could read it. If they didn't come to terms with the people who worked for them, Congress would start passing laws they didn't fancy.
His mother sat down at the tired old upright piano and began to play. Her choice of tunes made him smile. After a little while, he said, 'I'm not in the Army any more. You don't have to give me one Sousa march after another.' He stomped up and down the room as if on parade.
'I like playing them, Chester,' Louisa Martin said. 'They make me want to go marching-except I can't, not while I'm playing.' She swung into a spirited if not technically perfect rendition of 'Remembrance and Defiance.'
'She'll do as she pleases, son,' Stephen Douglas Martin said. 'If you haven't learned that about her by now, how long is it going to take you?'
'If she's playing them for herself, that's fine,' Chester said. 'If she's doing them for me, though, she's wasting her time. I never was so glad as the last time I took that uniform off.'
'You went through a lot,' Sue said. 'I remember the hard time you gave that military policeman in the park when you were home on convalescent leave. It was like you'd seen a lot of things he never had, so you didn't think he had any business bothering you.'
'That's just what I was thinking, Sis,' he answered. 'He behaved like he thought God had sent him down in a puff of smoke. The people who really went through the mill don't act that way.'
'I've seen that with the younger fellows I work with,' his father said. 'One of 'em won the Medal of Honor, but you'd never hear it from him.'
'That's the way it ought to be,' Martin said. 'We didn't go out there to blow our own horns or to have a good time-not that there were any good times to have in the trenches. We went out there to win the war, and we did that.' He tossed down the rest of his whiskey. 'And you know what? I wonder if what we bought is worth what we paid for it.'
'We licked the Rebs,' his father said. 'Along with Kaiser Bill, we licked everybody. We've paid people back for everything they ever did to us.'
'That's so,' Chester said, 'but there are-what? a million? something like that-say a million men who won't ever see it. And Lord only knows how many there are on crutches and in wheelchairs and wearing a hook instead of a hand.' He touched his own left arm. 'I'm one of the lucky ones. All I got was a Purple Heart and some leave time-a hometowner, we called a wound like that. But it was just luck. It wasn't anything else. A few inches to one side and I wouldn't be here now. I wouldn't be anyplace. I was a good soldier, but that's not why I came out in one piece. Nothing but luck.'
The Sousa march Louisa Martin was playing came to a ragged halt. 'You've upset your mother,' Stephen Douglas Martin said, and then, to his wife, 'It's all right, dear. He is here. He's fine. If he weren't here and fine, he wouldn't be spouting such nonsense, would he?'
'No,' Chester's mother said in a small voice. 'But I don't like to think about… about things that might have been.'
Chester poured his glass full of whiskey again. He didn't like to think about things that might have been, either. Most of them were worse than the way things had really turned out. Some of them still made him wake up sweating in the night, even though the war had been over for two and a half years. He drank. If he got numb, he wouldn't have to think about them.
His mother got herself another drink, too. He raised an eyebrow at that; she didn't usually take a second glass. Maybe she had things she didn't want to think about, too. Maybe he'd given her some of those things. All at once, he felt ashamed.
'I'm sorry,' he mumbled.
His father got up and clapped him on the shoulder. 'You'll make a man yet,' he said. 'I think that's the first time I ever heard you say you were sorry and sound like you meant it. Kids say it, too, but they don't say it the same way. 'I'm sorry.' ' Stephen Douglas Martin did a good imitation of a nine-year-old apologizing lest something worse happen to him.
Sue said, 'Here's hoping we don't need to say we're sorry at all-well, not much-next year.'
'I'll drink to that,' Chester said, and he did.
Every time he looked at the clock on the mantel, it got a bit later. He found that pretty funny, which was a sign he'd taken a little too much whiskey on board. He'd have a headache in the morning. He was glad he wouldn't have to go in to the steel mill. That would have made his head want to fall off.
A few minutes before midnight, firecrackers started going off. They alarmed Chester; they made him think of gunfire. They alarmed all the dogs in the neighborhood, too. Along with bangs and pops, Toledo ushered in 1920 with a chorus of canine howls and frantic barks and yips.
'Happy New Year!' Chester said when both hands on the clock stood straight up. 'Happy New Year!' He wondered if it would be. Then he wondered something else, something perhaps not altogether unrelated: who would be running for president?
Arthur McGregor stood in front of the stove in the kitchen, soaking in warmth as a flower soaked in sunlight. He had no idea why he thought of flowers: they weren't likely to appear in a Manitoba January. He turned so he'd cook on all sides.
Maude said, 'When you came inside, you had frost on your eyebrows.'
'I believe it,' he answered. 'If I wore a mustache, I'd have icicles hanging down from it, too. It's that kind of day. But if I don't get out there and take care of the stock, who's going to do it, eh?'
His wife's mouth tightened. Alexander should have been there to help. But Alexander was gone, except in the picture on the wall. McGregor moved away from the stove for a moment to go over and slip an arm around Maude. Her mouth fell open in surprise. Neither of them was greatly given to open displays of affection.
'I'm not doing as much as I should,' he said discontentedly.
'You hush,' Maude told him. 'You've done plenty. You don't need to worry about not doing more. If you want it to be enough, it can be enough.'
'But I don't,' he said. 'I have to do this, don't you see? I have to-and I can't.' Of themselves, his hands folded
