The Major's Daughter (31 page)

“He'll never surrender,” August said. “It's not in his character. He has promised to shoot anyone who speaks of surrender.”

“That's what the American news reports say,” Gerhard said. “We can't believe everything that we hear.”

“Do you doubt the Germans are on the run? The Allies have crossed the Rhine now. It's a matter of days or weeks.”

“The Russians will retaliate,” Patrick said. “My grandfather said they have tails, some of them, like wolves.”

“Your grandfather has read too many fairy tales,” August said. “But they
are
wolves, true enough. They'll rape anyone they can.”

“The German girls cover their faces with grime and coal dust to make themselves look older,” Gerhard said. “The Russian authorities will do nothing to prevent the rapes. It's always been that way between us.”

“Between the Germans and Russians?” Patrick asked.

Gerhard nodded.

August ate a piece of sausage wrapped in a mouthful of stale bread. He had not remained in the woods through lunch hour to hear yet another account of atrocities. In the beginning there had been a dreadful fascination to the subject, but now it seemed ghoulish to speculate about the circumstances in Germany. The conditions were dire, certainly. No one disputed that any longer. The last residue of Nazism had disappeared from the barracks. No one performed the
Deutsche Gruß
, the Nazi salute, with anything less than irony. It was humiliating to see it, to think that it ever held significance.

It was a fine noon, August made himself note. That was something for which to be grateful. He was always on the lookout now for something to count on the positive side of the ledger. Many of the men agreed that New Hampshire was a place they had come to love. Perhaps
love
was too large a word to apply, August reflected, but he admired the land, the green woods, the mountains that stretched off to the east. As a sort of parlor game, the men had often asked one another: if the authorities permitted it, would they remain in the United States rather than return to Germany or Europe? August had always answered in the affirmative, although only under the proviso that he could travel home to see his mother and father and his brother first. That would be his primary mission once the war ended.

“We should go to Canada,” Gerhard said absently, tapping a stick on one of the logs they had cut that morning. “We've talked about it. We've talked it to death. We should go. Others have made it.”

“And others have been shot dead in escaping.”

“Who has gone to Canada?” Patrick asked.

August eyed Gerhard. It was a plan they had talked about repeatedly, and he wasn't sure whether they should take Patrick into their confidence. August doubted the boy would tell, but you never knew. War had taught him to shut his mouth. Nevertheless, the cat was out of the bag, and it was not exactly a secret that the men had talked of Canada as if it possessed the answers to everything, a Shangri-la where life could regain its flavor. August shrugged. Gerhard explained it to the boy.

“Some of our countrymen have worked their way north to Canada. At least that's the word leaking around camp. The Canadian government is more forgiving than the Americans'. We are not far from the border,” Gerhard said, raising the stick and pointing to the northwest. “It's not a mere dream. It's tangible.”

“A couple days' walk,” August added.

“There's talk they will send us to England when we leave here. For more labor,” Gerhard said bitterly. “More forced labor. In Canada you can ask for political asylum and it will be granted.”

“Do you know that for a fact?” Patrick asked.

“No,” August said, “and that is part of the problem. We can't know for certain. Too many questions will raise too many suspicions. Much of what we are telling you is rumor. It may all be a story we use to give ourselves hope. Some men have been shot on the way.”

“I'd go with you,” Patrick said. “Anything is better than staying in prison.”

“Canada could be a prison, too,” August said. “We can't know.”

August heard the guards and the other men returning from lunch. He lay back on a comparatively dry spot of soil and watched the sun move through the treetops. As always, he thought of Collie. He had kissed her twice in the last week, both times briefly and with great nervousness that they might be discovered, but he could call the moments to mind with infinite detail. Once, it had been outside the kitchen in the early evening when everyone else had gone off to wash before dinner; another time it had been close to the river in the morning's first hour. The risk was all hers. She would be vilified if their meetings came to light; her father would feel betrayed.

Gradually sleep overcame him. The sun felt wonderful on his skin. He caught the scent of horses now and then, and underneath it the unmistakable breath of mud and water mixed. Spring, he thought. Then he felt himself slowly spinning down, his body letting go, and he jerked twice as his muscles relaxed. Canada, he thought with his last bit of consciousness. That was the solution. Two days of hard hiking. Maybe three. They could keep to the back roads, keep to the woodland game paths they knew from their work on the cutting teams. It was a dream, but it had begun to pull at him. As he fell asleep, he felt himself circling down, falling, and it was always toward Canada and the image of Collie waiting for him there, her hair lifted in the wind, the sound of war washed away and left behind forever.

 • • • 

Collie knelt for a moment and placed a fan of irises on Marie's grave. The grass over the grave had grown in and joined with the surrounding plots so that, except for the newer headstone, one would not have known how recently Marie had joined them. Still, it was a pretty place; wildflowers, small bluebonnets, had already speckled the ground. A section of the cemetery held the brown headstones of the town settlers. Down a slope, overlooking the mountains, a newer section had been carved free of the pressing woodlands. Marie had been buried in the third row, her dates deeply chiseled into the gray granite. Here she had lived, and here she had died, Collie realized. What a vigorous, beautiful life Marie had led. Collie smiled and felt a mist of tears cover her eyes for a moment. The sweet, sweet girl. How she missed her.

She stood for a moment and didn't do much of anything. It was a fine day. She glanced at the other gravestones, most of them familiar at least by name. She took deep, even breaths and let her eyes roam up the mountainsides. Marie could rest here, she thought. If one had to die, one had to leave life, then this was as good a place as any to rejoin the soil. Small consolation, she reflected, but true nonetheless.

She took a seat on the stone bench located inside a scatter of Patch family gravestones. The Patches, she knew, were a prominent family in the area, and they multiplied and spread their interests everywhere, and it did not surprise her to discover the bench positioned among them. She sat and drew out the letter she had collected from the secret hiding place near the twitch horses' pole barn. It served as the drop box for August; once each day she swung by on the pretense of seeing the horses and made a quick exchange: her letters for his. He had never disappointed her.

She smiled when she opened his letter and saw his declaration of love. Marie, she thought, would have adored the secrecy of the situation. For Collie, however, each exchange of letters made her revisit her guilt over betraying her father. It was impossible to stay away from the letters, naturally, but she wished fervently that they could communicate open and honestly. She would have given anything to stand before the community as two lives joined, but that was out of the question.

His letter touched on the usual themes: food, the work, the scent of pine in the morning, something amusing someone said. His English had improved as had her German, and sometimes he gave her small assignments to translate, usually a phrase that contained a delightful surprise for her. His last paragraph he spent in telling her why he loved her. She read the sentences slowly, one at a time, letting each one ring like a finely cast bell before its tone faded away. When she finished she held the letter against her chest and wondered how she had not known love could feel this way. With all the heated talk, the songs, the movies, the sentimental poetry she had consumed, she had not realized love could be the common back-and-forth between a man and woman, “every day's most quiet need, by sun and candlelight
,”
as Elizabeth Barrett Browning had promised. That was what she felt. His love and attention did not surprise her so much as give structure to her day, to her thought, to her hope.

She stayed a while longer, then made the mile walk back to the boardinghouse. She found a good twig to serve as a walking stick and carried it at her side, slapping at bushes and branches that sometimes intruded on the path. Her father waited on the porch. He smoked a cigarette and had a newspaper open on his lap. It was against the rules to drink in the boardinghouse, but Collie smelled whiskey laced in with her father's coffee. She imagined Mrs. Hammond turned a blind eye on the minor transgression.

“There you are,” her father said. “I wondered where you got to.”

“I went to the cemetery.”

“Well, good,” he said, and patted the chair beside him. “Have a seat.”

“Some coffee you have there,” she whispered.

“Don't spoil it. Mrs. Hammond and I have come to a truce. I drink only out here on the porch. That way she can preserve the dignity of her establishment and claim with honesty that there is no drinking inside the boardinghouse. See? The root of all diplomacy is equal parts hypocrisy and deliberate ignorance.”

“Well, I intend to hold it over your head if I ever need to get on Mrs. Hammond's good side.”

“Oh, she likes the evilness of it. It gives her something to fret about. Listen, dinner should be ready shortly. Henry Heights stopped by a few minutes ago. I invited him to join us, but he said he couldn't spare the time. He's on his way up north to get his brother.”

She nodded. She watched her father take a sip of his coffee. He held the liquid in his mouth for a moment before swallowing it.

“What do you think of him anyway?” he asked, trying his best to be casual about it.

She looked at him carefully.

“Why do you ask?”

“Just curious. Just a father's curiosity, that's all. He's always been very . . . very polite in our dealings. He does seem set on you, Collie. You know that, don't you?”

“That's nonsense.”

“You know very well it's not. What don't you like about him? I've tried to put my finger on it, but I haven't been able to do it.”

“I don't dislike him,” she said, feeling uncomfortable, profoundly so, with the letter from August fresh in her mind. “He's a perfectly nice young man.”

“Oh, I guess it's none of my business.”

“No, it isn't.”

He looked at her, appeared worried for a moment, then laughed.

“Okay, okay, okay,” he said. “Enough of that. I know when to retreat.”

“I'm going to run in and wash before dinner.”

“Yes, and I'll finish my coffee. Beautiful evening.”

“How about you, Papa? When are you going to find a woman to your liking?”

“Oh, please. I deserved that, but let's agree to a truce.”

“You seem to need to strike truces with the women in your life.”

“Surrender is more like it.”

“I was being charitable,” she said, and rose to go inside.

Mrs. Hammond met her at the door.

“Dinner in five minutes,” Mrs. Hammond said.

“Dinner in five minutes,” Collie repeated for the benefit of her father. “Hope that coffee left you with an appetite.”

Collie smiled at Mrs. Hammond, then hurried up the stairs. She had ascended half the staircase before she remembered she still had the walking stick in her hand.

 • • • 

Estelle felt she had come to rely on cocktails. It amused her to discover her taste for booze. Of course, she mused as she set out the bar things for the evening get-together, she would never call it
booze
, or
hooch
, or any of the words George liked to hide like small explosives inside his genial conversation. He had changed that much, at least; gone were the British phrases he had employed to distraction in the beginning of their courtship, replaced, she noted, by a sort of film noir talk. He spoke from the side of his mouth now, aping actors in those dark, venetian-blind dramas popular among a certain segment of the population, though he just as often spilled out into general American boosterism. He was Babbitt, really, the character made famous by the Sinclair Lewis novel of the same name, a backslapping, joke-telling, inveterate joiner. A Lion, an Elk, an Odd Fellow, a Mason, a Knight Templar, for all she knew . . . she could not keep track of his associations. She did not ask what that made her, naturally, and so she had come to rely on cocktails, an evening medicine that made the days tolerable.

It was nearly five thirty. Cocktails to six fifteen, then the short drive to the Duck Pond, then more drinks, dinner at seven or seven thirty, a dance or two—or a lap around the track, as George would likely call it—and then back home. It was much the same every Friday night. She looked at the bar things one more time, checked the ice in the bucket, then went and lighted a fire in the brick hearth. The logs were laid and the flames came right up. The fire was supplemented by construction pine, bits of two-by-fours and trim that George cut up on Saturdays. Everything to a purpose, he liked to say, and perhaps he was right about that.

Car doors sounded in the driveway, almost, she thought, as if conjured by the flames of the fire. She went to the window and peeked out. Two couples, three vehicles. She recognized the first couple: Polly and Missy Kent. They were two old shoes, but the second couple, bright and blond and obviously looking around at George's domain—customers, Estelle knew—stood on Persimmon Drive and ran their eyes over the various houses that had been built and inhabited in the last few months. Prospects, George would say. Everyone, he liked to claim, sold something. Everyone was buying or selling, sometimes both, and this latest couple, unannounced before arriving, surely came to look.