really will open in two weeks. He says, 'Cross my heart and hope to die.' '
'Do you think it will happen?' Mary asked. Freddy Halliday had been trying to bring a public library to Rosenfeld for years. He hadn't had much luck till lately. Now he actually had a building a few doors down from the general store. He had it because the pharmacist who was supposed to come up from Minneapolis had got cold feet, but he did have it. Whether he had anything besides the building was a subject of much speculation in town.
'He says he has a permit from the occupying authorities in Winnipeg and a budget and books,' Mort answered. 'I don't know if he really does. If he doesn't, we ought to ride him out of town on a rail, to teach him not to get our hopes up.'
'My hopes are up,' Mary said. 'You can have as much fun in a library as you can at the cinema, and it doesn't cost you anything.' She turned to Alec. 'I wonder if it'll have any children's books for you.'
'Read me a story?' Alec asked, cued by the word books.
'After supper,' Mary said. That made Alec shovel food into his mouth like a stoker fueling a fast freight. Mary hoped most stokers had better aim than her little boy did.
It began to look as if Freddy Halliday had all the things he claimed he had. A brass plaque that said rosenfeld public library went up above the door to the forsaken pharmacy. A formidably stout maiden lady, a Miss Montague, moved into a ground-floor flat in the Pomeroys' block of flats and began spending all her waking hours in the building. A large truck brought crates of something to the place. If those crates didn't hold books, what was in them?
The promised opening day came… and went. Everybody in town joked about it-everybody except Freddy Halliday, who remained resolutely upbeat. A week later, the Rosenfeld Public Library did in fact open its doors.
Mary wasn't there for the opening. Alec came down with a cold, which meant he had to stay home, which meant she had to stay home, too. She didn't get to the library for another week. It was a bright spring day, the sky a deep, almost painful, blue overhead. The few white clouds dappling it only made the glorious color deeper. Out on the farms beyond the edge of town, people would be taking advantage of this glorious weather to plant. Mary could just enjoy it. Walking along with Alec's little hand in hers, she felt guilty about not doing more.
In the library, Miss Montague sat behind a large wooden desk and under an almost equally large quiet, please! sign. She did smile at Alec, and pointed to, sure enough, the children's section. She didn't even breathe fire when Alec whooped with delight at finding books he hadn't seen before.
Mary arranged to get a library card for herself and one for Mort. She stole brief glimpses of novels and nonfiction books, encyclopedias and magazines and newspapers. 'Look at all the telephone books,' she said, trying to keep Alec interested so she could go on looking around. 'You can find out the telephone number of anybody in Canada or the United States.' She refused even to name the Republic of Quebec, stolen from her country as Kentucky and Houston had been stolen from the CSA.
'Why?' Alec asked her.
'So you can call them if you want to.'
'But we don't got a telephone.'
'Don't have a telephone. But if we did, we could.'
'Why?' Alec asked again.
That string of questions could go on all day. Knowing as much, Mary said, 'And here's a book of maps of the whole world.' The big, colorful atlas distracted Alec.
It also distracted Mary, but only for a little while. If I could call anybody, who would it be? What would I say? The thought was enough to make her dizzy. She'd used a telephone only a handful of times in her life. The diner had one, but the flat didn't, and of course there hadn't been one on the farm. If she had a telephone, and if the farm had one, too, she supposed she would talk to her mother whenever she got the chance. She couldn't think of anyone else except her sister Julia she wanted to call. The people she knew in Rosenfeld she could visit whenever she pleased, while no telephone would ever let her talk with her brother or her father.
But even if she didn't have a telephone, lots of people in Canada and even more in the USA did. The telephone book for Toronto, for instance, had to be an inch and a half thick. Mary pulled it off the shelf-she didn't care even to open a telephone book from the United States. The first name she looked for was McGregor, the one she'd been born with. She found almost a page of McGregors, each name with not only a telephone number but also an address beside it. That must be handy, she thought, especially in a big city where you don't know where everybody else lives. After the McGregors, she checked the Pomeroys. There weren't so many of them-only a little more than a column's worth. She smiled at the obvious superiority of her own birth name. But then, when she saw the seven pages of Smiths, she decided quantity didn't make quality.
Alec got impatient watching his mother flip pages back and forth. 'Want to go home,' he said.
'Hush,' Mary told him. 'Don't talk loud in the library.'
'Want to go home.' Alec didn't care where he was, and knew where he wanted to be.
'All right,' Mary said. She was ready to go, too. But then, as they were on their way out, she suddenly stopped. Alec tugged at the pleats of her skirt. 'Wait a second,' she told him, and went over to the librarian's desk. 'Excuse me, Miss Montague, but could I borrow a pencil and a little piece of paper?'
'Why, of course.' The librarian gave them to her.
Alec's face clouded up when she went back. 'It'll only be a minute,' she said. 'I want to see something.' He didn't burst into tears on the spot, which was something. If he had, she would have had to take him home-and she would have warmed his fanny, too.
As things were, she found what she was looking for inside of two minutes. She wrote down what she needed to know, gave the pencil back to Miss Montague with a nod of thanks, and walked out of the library. Alec behaved on the way back. Why not? He was getting what he wanted. As Mary walked past the building that housed the Rosenfeld Register, she gave the newspaper a nod of thanks, too.
Lucien Galtier started up his motorcar. The Chevrolet roared to life right away. He'd finally had to replace the battery. The new one was much stronger than the old one had been, but he still grumbled at the expense. When he was driving a horse, he hadn't had to buy new pieces for it every so often.
Once the motor warmed up, he put the auto in gear and drove up toward Riviиre-du-Loup. Today was his sixty-somethingeth birthday (he didn't care to contemplate the exact number), and Nicole and Dr. Leonard O'Doull had invited him to their house for supper to celebrate.
Part of him wondered why people celebrated getting older. Another part, the part that still ached for Marie, told him the answer: because the alternative was not getting older, and that was dreadfully final.
It had been a quarter of a century now since war's clawed hand raked across the countryside. Young men said you couldn't see the scars any more. Lucien knew better. Time had softened those wounds, but they were still there if you knew where to look. And shells still lay buried in the ground. Every so often, they worked their way to the surface. Most of the time, dйmineurs took them away and disposed of them. Once in a while, one of them went off when a plowshare struck it or it suffered some other mischance of that sort. The Great War was still killing people, and would go on killing for years to come.
He drove past the post office. The Republic of Quebec's fleur-de-lys flag fluttered in the breeze in front of it. He was used to that flag now, but it still didn't feel like the flag of his country. He didn't suppose it ever would, not when he'd spent his first forty years in the province of Quebec rather than the Republic. Were things better now? Worse? Or just different? For the life of him, he had trouble saying.
There was the house where Nicole lived with Leonard O'Doull. He parked in front of the walk that led to the front porch. The grass on the lawn was green again. When he got out of the auto, he took the key with him. On the farm, he left it in the ignition half the time. That probably wouldn't do here in town, where a stranger might hop in and decide to go for a spin.
The door opened before he could knock. There stood his oldest grandson. By what magic had Lucien O'Doull grown taller than the man for whom he was named? 'Happy birthday, mon grandpиre,' he said. 'Come in.' That same magic, whatever it was, had given him a man-deep voice, too.
'Merci,' Lucien Galtier said, and then, after an appreciative sniff, 'What smells so good?' An instant later, he held up a hand. 'No, don't tell me. I'll find out.'
He followed his grandson down the short entry hall to the living room. As soon as he got there, a flashbulb went off in his face. What sounded like a million people shouted, 'Surprise!'
' 'Osti,' Lucien muttered, flinching with what was indeed surprise-shock probably came closer. With a large
