Prudence (10 page)

The pilot announced a new bearing and the Kansan banked as they turned back to San Angelo. Frankie sat up and stretched and then rested his back against the fuselage. The pictures would tell the official story but he knew it had been a successful run. He closed his eyes and breathed
deeply.

THE DANCE—CHRISTMAS EVE, 1944

M
ary, the cripple, was literally run off her foot. Hardly had she shut the door to the Wigwam behind another group arriving for the Christmas party when Harris shouted to her from behind the bar to get more wood because the stove was going out. So she clomped out the back door, breathing through her nose because, with the temperature at minus thirty according to the alcohol thermometer, the dry, cold air threatened to singe her lungs. Then the bell tinkled again—not that Mary needed the bell with Harris yelling, “Get the door, Mary, get the door!”—and the sudden in-suck of cold air announced the arrival of yet more Indians and loggers and their families, and Mary set off for the front. No one wanted to hang their coats—not that there was any place to hang them—because it took a while to warm up. But soon the seat backs and bar stools grew great mounds of woolen fur, and the melting frost dripped in puddles on the floor. Mary went after the broom and ushered the water and clumps of snow back toward the front door around the legs of the guests. Just when that was finished, Harris said she had to find a crate of eggs because the ones he had had frozen, and if she didn’t find some good ones, there’d be no Tom and Jerrys later and, goddamnit, that was tradition! Harris turned and wiped a glass with the rag over his shoulder and, drying his hands, put a new
record on the player behind the bar. The first bars of the song rolled out over the drinks lined up there, barely heard over the din.

Down went the gunner, a bullet was his fate

Down went the gunner, and then the gunner’s mate

Mary, her short leg clomping over the pine boards of the dance floor, was almost to the storeroom when another breath of icy air shot into the bar. The bell tinkled and Harris shouted, “Mary!” Once again she turned and headed back to the front.

This was the end of a very long year and no one was sure what to make of the year or its end. The weather, the war—everything, really—had been turned upside down. The whole country had been battered by below-zero weather for all of February, floods through April and May that brought the Mississippi as high as it had ever been, then drought in the summer, hurricane after hurricane up and down the East Coast in the fall, heavy snow in November and early December that made it nearly impossible to get about in the woods, and now, at Christmas, a deep freeze so sudden, so sharp, that it cracked harness leather, froze diesel fuel into solid blocks, and split tires (which was especially dire, since rationing made it impossible to get new ones). The war was essentially won. Was “in the bag,” according to the gossip at the depot and articles in the paper. Africa was won. Italy had been liberated past the Gothic Line, D-Day had been the greatest military feat since Hannibal crossed the Alps, and the Allies had landed in southern France virtually unopposed. Everyone had said “home by Christmas,” but now it was Christmas and no one was home and the Germans were pushing back in Belgium when everyone expected to see, printed in the papers, the Stars and Stripes flying over the Reichstag.

Mary, eyes down on the floor, was almost to the front door as it banged shut, opened a crack, and banged again without latching
because of the accumulated frost, frozen slush, and snow rimming the frame. Prudence stood in the entryway, her coat belted tight around her waist. Her feet were clad in black suede peep-toe Mary Janes and her slender brown legs were bare, as were her hands and head. There was no way she could have walked from the Pines—six miles in the dark if it was an inch—dressed like that.

Mary moved past her. Prudence barely looked down at her, her eyes searching the crowd for something or someone else, her chin high. The rim of her nose was red and moist-looking. Mary lifted the door and put her shoulder into it to force the latch past the striker.
“Gisinaamagad ina?”
she asked, still looking down at the floor, as she moved past Prudence back to the bar.

“Sweet Christ, is it ever,” said Prudence.

“Now, now,” said Father Paul, who stood by the bar, a brandy in his hands, his usual vestments replaced with a sweater buttoned up to his chin, its shawl collar so stiff and plump it looked like a yoke for an ox. His cheeks were red and his hair slicked to the side with macassar.

Prudence took off her coat, folded it in her arms, and held it in front of her. She wore a black wool dress with a wide collar and ivory buttons up the front. Some of the seams were done in white thread but not all of them. The dress made her neck seem very long and her hair was pulled back from her face with a hair band.

The door opened behind her and Dick Bolton and some of the men from his lumber camp—all of them wearing scotch caps with earflaps and red-and-black-checked jackets—tried to come in, but Prudence was blocking the way.

“In or out, for Chrissake,” Dick said through the crack.

“Now, now,” said Father Paul again, in the same tone, as though his job were to monitor the swearing on the eve of Christ’s birthday rather than to accept drink after drink from his flock as they got well on their way to massively drunk.

“How’s them Tom and Jerrys?” asked Dick over Prudence’s shoulder.

Prudence stepped forward into the room to let Dick past.

“Not till later, just the usual till then, Dickie. Just the usual swill till then,” said Harris. He turned to put on a new record.

“Then make it whiskey and make it warm,” said Dick as he shucked his coat and stowed it on the floor next to the inside door. The music started up again, Helen Forrest singing “Long Ago (And Far Away).”

I dreamed a dream one day

And now that dream is here beside me

“Ain’t that the truth, Prudy?” asked Dick.

“Dream on,” she said, as if coming out of a trance. She stamped her feet and walked across the bar and set her coat on top of the jukebox, which had been broken since 1941 and with the war on wasn’t likely to be fixed. In any event, Harris had taken out all the 78s and stacked them behind the bar.

Prudence stood next to the darkened juke with her arms crossed in front of her. The crowd—which comprised pretty much the whole current population of the village except for some of the pregnant women or new mothers—was antic somehow. Maybe it was just that it was Christmas and a time to look back over the year. Or maybe it was the novelty of Indians being allowed in the Wigwam at all, and the absence of men. The war had changed many things. There wasn’t a man here younger than twenty-seven except for Dave Gardner, who couldn’t be a soldier, what with his eyes and his heart, and a few of the kids from farms outside the village, who were exempt from the draft.

The farm boys were all gathered in the corner under the deer head, sipping beer cautiously, making it last. Many of the women
were gone, too—down to Austin to work in the canneries or to Minneapolis to work at General Mills. The lumber camps were full of women now. Women with spuds and picaroons. Earlier in the fall, women had been out picking potatoes and beets and corn. Everybody, it seemed, was doing something different from what they usually did, or from what they should. Even Mary, whom Prudence remembered vaguely from those first days at the Pines—now she was a barmaid? It was pitiful the way she hurried back and forth, goaded by Harris’s yelling. He smiled under his black bowler, occasionally lifting his patch to dab at the eye he liked to intimate he’d lost in the Great War, though everyone knew it was to a case of shingles. There were a few women at the tables with their husbands, sipping slowly on whiskey drinks—beer just didn’t go down right when it was that cold—waiting for the Tom and Jerrys so they could go home and get ready for the holiday. The land was emptying of people and matériel—all the boys gone, and all the horses, leather, gasoline, rubber, plastic, copper, lead, typewriters, toasters, sugar, corn, beets, and timber gone, too. Meanwhile, the camp across from the Pines was swelling, full to bursting with German prisoners. Unequal pressure, like you felt before a storm. That was the feeling. It had to give somewhere, it had to give. Just one more push, one more great, collective lunge, and they’d be over.

Little colored lights had been hung around the edge of the tin ceiling and someone had put a party horn in the mouth of the whitetail under which the farm kids were hiding. An empty Schlitz bottle was stuck in the open jaws of the pike above the bar. The lights were kind and it was warm in the bar, but that didn’t dispel the general feeling that they were all waiting, waiting for the weather—the malign, frigid weather of the war—to break. They knew it would. It had to. Every week, Harris posted the reports he got from the draft board on the door of the Wigwam. Every week there were fewer names of the wounded, missing, and dead. The war was grinding down.
Everyone knew it. But that almost made it worse—who would be the last? Who would be the last to die before it was over?

Prudence checked the list as often as she could, as often as she could get away from the Pines and into town on foot. Even if something happened, Frankie’s name wouldn’t be on the list. He wasn’t registered up here, so any news about him would go to Chicago. But she checked when she could, anyway. She begged Felix to move to town but he wouldn’t hear of it, and begged him again to buy a radio, surely he could afford a radio, but he said, “Hmmm,” and that’s all he said. It was so awful lonely at the Pines. The big house was boarded up and the small cabins behind were locked tight; the snow drifted across the doors. Emma had come up in the summer but only for a few weeks. She’d brought with her some clothes for Prudence and said they’d have to last the year. Frankie still wrote, or at least letters still came from Frankie, though, from the dates on them, she judged that they arrived all out of order. But they still came. And that meant that Frankie was still out there and someday, someday soon, he’d be coming home and Prudence would be waiting for him.

Prudence smoothed the dress. She’d gotten it in Grand Rapids in October. Grand Rapids was the farthest she’d traveled from the Pines since that day in August when they pulled her kicking and screaming from the leaves. The dress fit her well, she made sure of that. Emma sent her ten dollars a month and the rest she made up by picking pinecones and knocking rice with Felix in the fall. It was from Sears, but all the same it fit her well, and no one would ever see the label anyway.

That ten dollars a month, that ten dollars and Frankie’s letters had to mean something. She straightened up and looked around the bar some more. Yes, it was all so clear, everyone sensed it, it was the end of something, the end of something terrifying and grand and she’d be free, they’d all be free so very soon.

You’d be so nice to come home to,

You’d be so nice by the fire

“For the love of Christ,” said Dickie, as he approached Harris at the bar, “you trying to make me cry? How about playing something else?”

“Either start buying drinks or start dancing, Dickie,” said Harris, with his back to him.

“Now, now,” said Father Paul again, rocking back on his heels but grinning a bit. By God, he’d probably been the first one in the door.

The farm boys under the deer’s head giggled, anxious to be in on the joke, till Dickie turned and fixed them with that stare of his—the one he used with surveyors and timber agents and the like, and they quickly looked down at their drinks. Two of Dickie’s men, not really from the village, obliged Harris and started cavorting around the dance floor together in their boots, shaking off clumps of ice with each step. Mary, holding two flats of eggs, weaved between the dancers, her face expressionless. She held them to her chest, and ducked and then lifted them high as the loggers careened across the floor.

“Atta girl, Mary,” said Harris. “Now that’s what I call dancing.”

Mary clomped across the dance floor and began emptying the ash pan.

“A round, then,” said Dickie, “till Harris loosens up with them Tom and Jerrys.”

“Need more beer, Mary. And more wood, too!” shouted Harris across the dance floor.

She looked up and then ducked as Dickie’s men veered close to her and kicked the ash bucket on their way around.

“Your boys already been at the bottle?” asked Harris.

“Oh, they mighta had a nip or two on the way over. It’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey out there.”

Dickie scanned the room.

“Hey, Prudy, what you drinking?”

“Nothing yet,” she said.

“Well, what to start, then?”

“Brandy sour,” she said.

“And so it is,” he said, and nodded at Harris, who looked closely at Prudence from behind the bar.

“Felix let you outta your cage?”

“He don’t got a lotta say in the matter,” she said.

“Leave her be, Harris,” said Dickie. “It’s Christmas and all.”

Harris raised his eyebrows.

“You walk here in those shoes?” asked Dickie Bolton, looking down at her feet.

“I’ve walked farther in worse,” she said.

“Easy now, Prudy,” said Harris. “Easy now. Dickie here was just paying you a compliment.”

“Amen,” said Dickie. “You just look nice, is all. Don’t she look nice, Gardner?” Dave Gardner sat at the end of the bar. He was handsome enough, but he looked very studious in his thick glasses.

“That she does. Merry Christmas, Prudy.” He raised his glass and then looked away and licked his lips and looked back at her and then away again.

Prudy raised her glass and made a study of the bottom of it.

“Merry Christmas, Dave.”

A group of girls came in the front in mid-laugh. One of them mule-kicked the door shut. Everyone turned to look.

“Mind my door!” bellowed Harris. “Or you’ll be fixing it.”

There were three of them. Prudy had seen them around the village but didn’t know their names. They had the raven hair and light olive skin of breeds. One of them laughed and her teeth flashed in the bar light. They were pretty but not as pretty as Prudence. They stood and surveyed the room. The one who kicked the door looked
at the farm boys and said, “Well?” And the boys scurried over and took their coats and, not knowing what to do with them, held them in their arms. One of the boys made for the bar and ordered three beers and brought them over quickly, bent slightly at the waist with exaggerated care. The girls picked up their beers and sipped. The leader made a face.