by, the place was for the moment empty.
Nellie took advantage of that for a trip to the bathroom. When she came out, Edna was setting a cup of coffee in front of Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid. The big lieutenant nodded to Nellie. “Morning, ma’am,” he said, polite as usual.
“Good morning,” she answered coolly. She wished he wouldn’t come around here. He wanted to do more than leer at Edna; he’d made that plain. And she, young and foolish as she was, wanted to let him. Nellie shook her head. That wouldn’t happen, not if she had anything to do with it.
Suddenly, she stiffened. She hadn’t heard the doorbell ring. She should have heard it; the bathroom door was thin. She usually heard customers come in when she was in there. If she hadn’t…if she hadn’t, Edna had been upstairs before, and probably Kincaid had, too. Did Edna look smug?
She did. Without a doubt, she did. She looked like a cat that had fallen into a pitcher of cream. And Lieutenant Kincaid…As always, his eyes followed Edna. Still, that gaze was different now. He didn’t look as if he wondered and dreamt of what she was like under her clothes. He looked as if he knew.
Nellie’s hands balled into fists. Edna saw that, and laughed silently. Nellie wanted to throw a cup at her daughter. But what could she do? She couldn’t prove a thing. Edna had made sure of that. All in a rush, for the first time in her life, Nellie felt old.
Arthur McGregor came in from the fields. The sun was at last dipping toward the northwestern horizon. He’d been up since it rose, or a little before. Manitoba summer days were long. He thanked God for that. Otherwise, he wouldn’t even have come close to doing all the things he had to do if he wanted to bring in a crop. He couldn’t do them all, not now. With the long days, he could come close.
As he walked in, Julia came out of the barn. “I’ve taken care of the livestock, Pa,” she said. She was thirteen now, shooting up fast as a weed, tall as her mother or maybe even taller. He shook his head in bemusement. She wasn’t a little girl any more. Where had the time gone?
“That’s good,” he told her. “That’s very good. One more thing I don’t have to worry about, and I’ve got plenty.”
“I know,” she answered seriously-she’d always been serious, no matter how little. McGregor sometimes thought she’d used up all the seriousness in the family, so that her sister Mary ended up with none. Julia went on, “I know I can’t do as much as Alexander could, but I’m doing all I can.”
“I know you are,” her father told her. The whole family was doing all it could. In spite of themselves, his wide shoulders slumped. When the damned Americans had arrested Alexander, he’d known at once how big a hole it would leave in the family. What he’d realized only gradually was how big a hole not having his son left in the daily routine of the farm.
He made himself straighten. You did what you had to do, or as much of it as you could possibly do. His nostrils twitched. “Whatever Ma’s cooking in there, it sure smells good.”
“Chicken stew,” Julia said.
McGregor’s eyes went to the chopping block between the barn and the house. The stains on it were fresh, and the hatchet stood at an angle different from the way it had this morning. He smiled and nodded at his older daughter. “Good,” he said. “Sticks to the ribs.”
The inside of the farmhouse, as always, was spotless, immaculate. McGregor wondered how Maude managed to keep it that way. She’d taken on extra work, too, with Alexander gone. The weeding in the potato patch, for instance, was in her hands, because no one else had time for it.
And here came Mary, a rag in her hand, a look of fierce concentration on her face, the tip of her tongue peeking out of the corner of her mouth. Whenever she saw dust on anything, she pounced on it like a kitten pouncing on a cricket-and looked to be enjoying herself like a kitten, too.
“Pa!” she said indignantly. “You didn’t wipe your feet very well.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. Maude would have given him a hard time about that, too. He went back out and did it better. Seeing that he’d satisfied Mary-who would have let him know if he hadn’t-he walked past her into the kitchen.
His wife looked up from the stew she was stirring. “You look worn to a nub,” she said, worry in her voice.
“So do you,” Arthur McGregor answered. They smiled at each other, wanly. He poured water from a pitcher over his hands and splashed some onto his face. Maude handed him a towel with which to dry himself. That was all the washing he did. Finding time for a bath even once a week wasn’t easy.
“Supper soon,” Maude said.
“Good.” Walking in from the wheatfields, McGregor had thought he was too tired to be hungry. The first whiff of stew convinced him otherwise. He was ravenous as a wolf, and his stomach, empty since dinner long, long before, was growling like one, too.
He sat down in a chair in the front room to wait, and pulled out a copy of
Over the stew, Maude said, “Biddy Knight came by in the buggy this afternoon, while you were out working.”
“Did she?” McGregor said. “I hope there weren’t any Americans on the road to see her.” Not least because he’d known Biddy’s son, Alexander was in the Rosenfeld gaol now. But Biddy had a harder burden than that to bear: her boy was dead, executed by Yankee bullets. “What did she want?”
“Social call,” his wife answered lightly-too lightly. “Her husband would take it kindly if you dropped in on him one of these days.”
“Don’t know that I want to.” McGregor, as usual, was blunt. “If the Americans know we visit those people, it won’t do Alexander any good.” Maude nodded. Julia looked angry-she’d been angry at the Americans since the day they invaded. For once, something got past Mary, who was playing with the wishbone.
But McGregor hadn’t been so blunt as he might have been. He feared Jimmy Knight’s father was cooking up some kind of scheme to hurt the Americans, and wanted him to be a part of it. He didn’t aim to join any plots. However much he despised the United States and everything they stood for, U.S. soldiers could kill his son any time they chose. That was a powerful argument in favor of prudence.
When Maude said, “Maybe you’re right,” he just nodded. Whenever his wife and he saw things the same way, they weren’t likely to be on the wrong track.
While the womenfolk washed dishes, he indulged himself in the luxury of a pipe. It wasn’t much of a luxury, not with the vile U.S. tobacco Henry Gibbon had to stock these days, but it was better than nothing. McGregor sighed for lost Virginia and North Carolina leaf as he paged through
The kitchen went dark. Kerosene was in short supply these days, too; no lamp ever burned in an unoccupied room. “Let’s go outside, then upstairs to bed,” Maude said. Mary’s yawn was big as the world.
McGregor was the last to use the outhouse. By the time he got back in, his younger daughter was already snoring. “Saxons,” he muttered as he pulled off his boots. “Saxons in a country the Normans stole from them.”
“What are you talking about?” his wife said. But she was puzzled for only a moment. “Oh. That’s right. You’ve been reading
He nodded and undid his overalls. They were old, and hardly blue at all any more; the fabric, softened by many washings, conformed perfectly to the shape of his body. “Living in a land that had been theirs, and then somebody took it away. How did they stand it? How could they?”
Maude sighed. “You’re going to break your heart, Arthur, if you dwell on things you can’t do anything about. Getting Alexander home, we can do something about that. Maybe we can. I pray to God every night we can. But getting Canada back, that’s too big for the likes of us.”
“It shouldn’t be,” he declared. But half of that-more than half-was Sir Walter Scott speaking through him, and he was wise enough to understand as much.
If he hadn’t been, Maude would have nailed it down tight: “If you don’t think so, why didn’t you want to go see poor Jimmy Knight’s father? Sounds like he’s going to try to do something-”
“Stupid,” he finished for her. She nodded; he hadn’t meant it for a joke, and she hadn’t taken it for one. She
