When he got to the farm, he drove the emphatically unwinged wagon into the barn. He unharnessed the horse, brushed it down, and fed it before going into the farmhouse. He did not begrudge the delay; it gave him the chance to think of more uncharitable things to say about Father Pascal’s elevation.
And then, when he went inside, he found he could not say most of them. Nicole had brought Dr. Leonard O’Doull home for supper. O’Doull, a skinny, sandy-haired man with eyes as green as a cat’s, was a good fellow, but he was also, to some degree, an outsider.
“Your leg, it goes well?” he asked Galtier after they shook hands. He spoke Parisian French like Major Quigley; unlike the major, he tried to adapt his tongue to that of the folk among whom he found himself.
“It goes very well, thank you.” Lucien walked around to show how well he could move. “I have not even a limp, not unless I am on it for the whole day. When I went into Riviere-du-Loup today, I did not take the stick you gave me, and the leg held me as if it had never been hurt. I am in your debt.”
“Not for that,” O’Doull said. “It is I who am in your debt for your friendship to me when, after all, my country occupies yours.”
“You speak straight,” said Galtier’s elder son, Charles. “That is good.”
“Of course he does,” Nicole said indignantly. Lucien and Marie exchanged an amused look. Nicole defended Dr. O’Doull because of who he was, not because of what he said.
“Dr. O’Doull, you’re so wonderful.” Georges, Lucien’s younger son, spoke first in worshipful tones and then wickedly imitated his sister: “Of course he is.” He let out a sigh full of longing and molasses.
He’d been an imp since he was a toddler. That was the only reason Lucien could find for Nicole’s letting him live. Even in the ruddy light of the kerosene lamps, O’Doull’s flush was easy to see.
“I think supper is about ready,” Marie said, which distracted everyone better than anything else might have done. Like Galtier himself, his wife was small and dark and a good deal more clever than she often let on.
Supper was a chicken stew enlivened by dried apples. Over it, Lucien told the story of Father Pascal’s promotion. He told it dispassionately, out of good feeling for the American who shared the table with him. His family showed less restraint. “That man knows nothing of shame!” exclaimed Denise, who was only twelve and wore her feelings on her sleeve.
“He comes to the hospital sometimes, to visit the soldiers who are Catholic,” Leonard O’Doull said. “Don’t much care for him. If he were an American priest in Vermont, say, and the British occupied it, he’d suck up to them the same way he sucks up to Americans here. Have I reason, or not?”
O’Doull hefted his glass of applejack. Applejack, especially this homemade stuff Galtier had got from a neighbor, was dangerously deceptive-sweet and mild and with a kick like a mule’s. “And you,
Galtier thought about that for a while; he was a few knocks into the applejack himself. “My country has been made not my country,” he said, one word at a time. “Should I be happy at that?”
Marie gave him a warning glance. Too late: the words were said. Dr. O’Doull considered them. At last, he replied, “If you think you were free as a chunk of the British Empire, no. If you do not think so, you may wish to see what you become after the war. What do you think, if it does not bother you that I ask?”
“Why should it bother me?” Galtier said lightly. “I need not answer.” And the reason he did not answer, not that he would ever have admitted it, was that he was no longer sure what to think.
Nellie Semphroch went outside the coffeehouse in the bitter cold of early morning and flipped the sign on the boards that covered the space where her plate-glass window had been from CLOSED to OPEN. She had connections among the Confederates who occupied Washington, D.C., who could have got her more glass, but saw no point in using them. The next U.S. bombing raid, or the one after that, would only shatter the new window, as three-or was it four? — windows had been shattered already.
“Mornin’, Ma,” Edna Semphroch said when Nellie went back inside. The two women-one in her early twenties, the other in her early forties-looked very much alike, with long, oval faces and high foreheads that seemed higher because they both wore their hair pulled back. Edna painted her face; Nellie didn’t. With a sneer on her red lips, Edna added, “Good morning, Little Nell.”
Although Nellie had been cold, her face heated and congealed like an egg left too long on a frying pan. “Don’t you ever call me that again,” she said in a low, furious voice. “Ever, do you hear me?”
Edna’s sneer got wider. “I hear you-” She visibly debated throwing kerosene on the fire, but decided against it. “I hear you.”
With grim determination, Nellie took what was left of the previous day’s bread off the icebox and started slicing it for the toast and sandwiches she’d be serving. Every stroke of the serrated bread knife made her wish she were drawing it across Bill Reach’s throat.
Reach had been an annoyance from her past for a couple of years. A former reporter, he had, in Nellie’s much younger days, been in the habit of putting a price down on a nightstand in a cheap hotel and partaking of her services. She’d escaped that life and attained modest respectability. Edna had never known she’d been in it-till Reach, hideously drunk, lost a quarter of a century in what passed for his mind and tried to buy her in the coffeehouse when it was packed with Confederate officers.
Edna started whistling, not too loud. Nellie ground her teeth and sliced even more viciously than before. The tune Edna was whistling had come up from the Confederate States the year before. It was called “I’ll Do as I Please.”
Edna had largely done as she pleased before that night, but Nellie had been able to enforce some respect for the proprieties on her. Now-now Edna lived as fast as she chose, and laughed when Nellie protested. Nellie couldn’t protest much. Edna, at least, had a fiance. What had Nellie had? Customers.
“Ain’t seen that Reach character since that one night,” Edna remarked. “Wonder what the devil happened to him?”
“I hope he’s dead,” Nellie said grimly. “If he’s not dead, he ought to be. If he ever shows his face in here again, he will be, too, fast as I can kill him.”
“He didn’t do anything but tell the truth,” Edna said. She was still very young, too young, perhaps, to realize how deadly dangerous incautious doses of truth could be.
The door opened. The bell above it jangled. Resplendent in butternut, in strode Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid. The big, handsome Confederate officer planted a kiss on Edna’s smiling mouth. His hands tightened greedily on her. “Mornin’, darling,” he said when they broke apart. Her lipstick branded him like a wound. He turned to Nellie. “Mornin’, ma’am.” He was polite. Very few Confederate officers were anything but. It did little to make her like him better.
“Good morning,” she said, her own tone grudging. Edna looked daggers at her. Kincaid was not a man to notice subtleties. His smile reminded Nellie of a happy, stupid dog’s. She sighed. Against such an amiable idiot, what hope had she? Sighing, she asked, “What can I get you today?”
“Couple of scrambled-egg sandwiches with Tabasco on ’em and a big cup of coffee,” he answered.
Nellie made the eggs and toasted the bread while Kincaid and Edna sat at a table and gazed into each other’s eyes. Nellie was convinced that, had Edna gazed into one of his ears, she could have gazed out the other, there being nothing but empty space between the two. But she did not want him for his brains. Nellie knew that. She wanted him for the bulge he’d had in his pants when they’d separated after their embrace.
Nicholas Kincaid’s eyes widened when he took his first bite-Nellie had plied the Tabasco bottle with vigor. He gulped scalding coffee. Nellie smiled. But then, enthusiastically, he wheezed, “Good!” The smile vanished.
Edna said, “Ma, he wants us to tie the knot on the twenty-fifth of March. It’s the first Sunday of spring. Ain’t that romantic?”
“Are the Confederates still going to be in Washington on the twenty-fifth of March?” Nellie asked. “Fighting sounds closer every day.”
“You’d best believe we’ll still be here, ma’am.” Kincaid sounded positive. “Yankees won’t have any luck, not even a little, knockin’ us out again. Just to help make sure they don’t, we’re gettin’ more troops, whites and niggers both. This here is our town, and we aim to keep it.”
The bell above the door rang again. Kincaid was usually the first customer, but then, he had an ulterior motive. He rarely stayed alone with Edna and Nellie for long. In came a couple of field-grade Confederate officers.
