Walk in Hell

only one with such a need, so what could they have done? Without coal, how were you supposed to cook and to heat your house or flat?

When she was three people away from pushing her form over the high counter to the clerk behind it, paying her money, and collecting the ration tickets she’d need for the month ahead, the woman whose turn it was got into a disagreement with the clerk. “That’s not right!” she shouted in an Italian accent. “You think you can cheat me on account of I don’t know much English? I tell you this-” Whatever this was, it was in Italian, and Italian so electrifying that a couple of women who not only heard but also understood it crossed themselves.

It rolled off the clerk like seawater down an oilcloth. “I’m sorry, Mrs., uh, Vegetti, but I have applied the policy pertaining to unrelated boarders correctly, as warranted by the facts stated on your form there,” he said.

“Lousy thief! Stinking liar!” The rest was more Italian, even more incandescent than what had gone before. People from all over the Coal Board offices were staring at anyone bold enough to vent her feelings in that way before the representative of such a powerful organ of government.

The clerk listened to the stream of abuse for perhaps a minute. So, wide-eyed, did George, Jr. “What’s she saying, Mama?” he asked. “She sure sounds mad, whatever it is.”

“I don’t understand the words myself,” Sylvia answered, relieved at being able to tell the literal truth.

Clang! Clang! The clerk had heard enough. When he rang the bell, a couple of policemen came up to the irate Italian woman. One of them put a hand on her shoulder. Wham! She hauled off and hit him with her handbag. The two cops grabbed her and hustled her out of the office. She screeched every inch of the way. “Shut up, you noisy hag!” one of the policemen shouted at her. “No coal for you this month!”

A sigh ran through the big room. The woman in front of Sylvia said, “It would almost be worth it to have the chance to tell the no-good rubber stampers what you really think of them.”

“Almost,” Sylvia agreed wistfully. But that was the operative word. The Italian woman was going to lose a month’s fuel for the sake of a few minutes’ pleasure. Like a foolish woman who fell into immorality, she wasn’t thinking far enough ahead.

Sylvia smiled. There were temptations, and then there were temptations….

At last, she reached the head of the line. The clerk took her form, studied it with methodical care, and spoke in a rapid drone: “Do you swear that the information contained herein is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, knowing false statements are liable to the penalty for perjury?”

“I do,” Sylvia said, just as she had when the preacher asked her if she took George as her lawful wedded husband.

Thock! Thock! Thock! The rubber stamp did its work, a consummation less enjoyable than the one that had followed the earlier I do. But then George had heated her only through the wedding night. The Coal Board clerk would let her keep herself and her children warm all month long.

She passed money over the counter, receiving in return a strip of ration tickets, each good for twenty pounds of coal. The clerk said, “Be ready for a ration decrease or a price increase, or maybe both, next month.”

Nodding, she took George, Jr., and Mary Jane by the hand and headed out of the office. Be ready, the clerk had said. He made it sound easy. But where was the extra money supposed to come from? What was she supposed to do if they didn’t-couldn’t-give her enough coal for both cooking and heating?

The clerk didn’t care. It wasn’t his problem. “Come on,” she told her children. Like all the others the war caused, the problem was hers. One way or another, she would have to deal with it.

Outside the farmhouse, the wind howled like a wild thing. Here on the Manitoban prairie, it had a long running start. Arthur McGregor was glad he wouldn’t have to go out in it any time soon. He had plenty of food; the locusts in green-gray hadn’t been so thorough in their plundering as they had the winter before.

He even had plenty of kerosene for his lamps. Henry Gibbon, the storekeeper over in Rosenfeld, had discovered a surefire way to cheat the Yankees’ rationing system. McGregor didn’t know what it was, but he was willing to take advantage of it. Cheating the Americans was almost like soldiers making a successful raid on their lines, up farther north.

As if picking that thought right out of his head, his son Alexander said, “The Yanks still don’t have Winnipeg, Pa.” At fifteen, Alexander looked old enough to be conscripted. He was leaner than his father, and fairer, too, with brown hair that partly recalled his mother Maude’s auburn curls. Arthur McGregor might have been taken for a black Irishman had his craggy features not been so emphatically Scots.

“Not after a year and a half of trying,” he agreed now. “The troops from the mother country helped us hold ’em back. And as long as we have Winnipeg-”

“We have Canada,” Alexander finished for him. Arthur McGregor’s big head went up and down. His son was right. As long as grain could go east and manufactured goods west, the dominion was still a working concern. The USA had almost cut the prairie off from the more heavily settled eastern provinces, but hadn’t quite managed it.

“The real question is,” Arthur rumbled, “can we go through another year like this one and the last half of the one before?”

“Of course we can!” Alexander sounded indignant that his father should presume to doubt Canada could hold on.

Arthur McGregor studied his son with a mixture of fondness and exasperation. The lad was at an age where he was inclined to believe things would turn out as he wanted for no better reason than that he wanted them to turn out so. “The United States are a big country,” he said, that being another oblique way to say he wasn’t so optimistic as he had been.

“We’re a big country, too-bigger than the USA,” Alexander said, “and the Confederacy is on our side, and England, and France, and Russia, and Japan. We’ll lick the Yanks yet, you wait and see.”

“We’re a big country without enough people in it, and our friends are a long way away,” McGregor answered. Always dark and cold, December was a good time of year in which to be gloomy. “If the Yankees had chosen to stand on the defensive against the CSA and throw everything they had at us, they would have smashed us in a hurry and then gone on to other things.”

“Nahh!” Alexander rejected the idea out of hand.

But Arthur McGregor nodded. “They would have, son. They could have. They’re just too big for us. But one thing about Americans is, they always think they can do more than they really can. They tried to smash us and the Confederates and England on the high seas, all at the same time. And I don’t care how big they are, I don’t care how much they love the Kaiser and the Huns, no country on the face of the earth is big enough and strong enough to do all that at once.”

At last, he’d succeeded in troubling his son. “Do you think they’re going to win the war, Pa?”

McGregor had lain awake at night from that very fear. “I hope not,” he said at last. “It’s just that there are so blasted many of them.”

That put a sour twist on Alexander’s mouth; it was inarguably true. In Arthur McGregor’s mind’s eye, he saw endless columns of men in green-gray tramping north, endless queues of snarling canvas-topped trucks painted the same shade, endless teams of horses hauling wagons and artillery pieces, endless trains also bringing men and supplies up toward the front. True, there were also endless ambulances and trains marked with the Red Cross, taking wounded Yankees away for treatment, and, no doubt, endless corpses at the front. But somehow the U.S. military machine kept grinding on despite the wastage.

Alexander said, “What can we do?”

“Hope,” McGregor answered. “Pray, though God will do as He likes, not as we like.” He was as stern a Presbyterian as he looked. “Cooperate with the Americans as little as we can-though if they hadn’t bought our grain, however little they paid for it, I can’t imagine what we’d do for money.”

He scowled. A farm didn’t need much in the way of cash, especially when a war knocked deeds and land taxes all topsy-turvy. You could live off your crops and your livestock and you might even make your own cloth from wool and from flax if you’d planted any, but you couldn’t make your own coal or your own kerosene or your own glass or books or…a lot of things that made life come close to being worth living.