“What could happen, Daddy?” Janie tried.
Just then the mail truck drove up, and there was the postman, holding out an envelope. Mrs. P. let go of her husband’s wheelchair and ran to retrieve the letter. The rest of them stood there, watched her take it, watched her move swiftly toward the house. In his lap, Mr. Porter’s left hand quivered. His coordination had gone before his strength, but if you put a rubber thimble on his finger, he could still flip the pages of a book. When Bea had first come to the family, he had been walking. Now, on a good day, he could move his chair around inside but not on grass, though he still swam nearly every day (in Grace Park, they had built him an indoor pool; they took him to Bermuda every winter), Stewart hauling him in and out. She felt the air grow quiet the way it always did before one of his rages came on and nudged Janie across the lawn.
“Get that letter from your mother, girls,” Mr. Porter said. “What always gives her the first right?”
Helen and Dossy froze.
“
Get it
,” he told Helen.
She looked once at her father, then ran toward the house. Bea was at the porch by then. She opened the screen door and ushered Janie upstairs. She could hear Helen calling, a door slamming, maybe two, and the sound of Mr. Porter’s voice, aimed everywhere and nowhere at the same time—a roar of sorts, a howl.
“Bath time!” she said to Janie, though it was not.
In the vast bathroom with its small claw-foot tub, Bea started up the bath, readied the towel, found the bar of soap. Unprotesting, Janie stripped, climbed in. With the water running, you could not hear anything. Once the bath was full, the water off, the child lay on her stomach and plunged her head, staying under for what felt to Bea like a beat too long. When she came up, Bea handed her the soapy washcloth. It was quiet outside by then, except for the noises from the base. It was quiet downstairs.
“I’m hungry,” Janie said.
Bea scrubbed behind her ears. “That’s fine. And you’ll be shiny clean for lunch.”
Jane looked up at her. With her curls wet and forehead bare, her eyes looked bigger than usual, and the sadness in them was a sea all to itself.
Bea readied her robe. “Come, poppet.”
As Bea wrapped, Jane leaned, and they stood there rocking, the child’s hair spreading dampness across the front of Bea’s dress. For a moment Bea found herself grateful for the trouble in the family, grateful, even, for the war. For here was Janie babylike again, letting her full weight cave in. And if it all exploded? If the war arrived, Germans climbing from the sea onto the shore? If it happened, it happened; she had long ago given up trying to steer life’s course. She would be a shield to Janie, that above all. She would take her away somewhere, just the two of them if necessary; she knew country life well enough from her grandparents and could get by on almost nothing—a house built into a hillside, greens taken from the beach and fields. Once as a child on tattie holidays, her grandmother with a broken wrist, her grandfather in the fields, she had wrung a chicken’s neck.
Janie moved away and shook out her hair, sending spray.
“I need to give it a quick brush,” said Bea.
“Not now. I’m too hungry.”
“We don’t want a rat’s nest, do we?”
Janie ducked. “I’ll do it myself.”
“Good.” Bea held out the brush. “Go on, then.”
“After lunch.”
“Sit
down
.” Bea leaned forward, brush in hand, but already Janie was heading for the door, robe flapping. Bea grabbed the child by the hood and pulled her back, her own anger blooming suddenly, and bigger than the moment.
“Before lunch, I will brush your hair and dress you,” she said, and when Janie jerked away again, Bea grabbed the brush and rapped her three times on the bottom.
And then the child was weeping—real, loose, gulping tears, not the practiced kind. “You hit me!” she said between gasps. “I’m not a baby, you can’t hit me—I’ll tell Mummy!”
It was not a hard rap, nor on bare skin, nor was it the first time Bea had done it—perhaps the third or fourth; Janie was a girl who rarely needed spanking. Still, it unsettled Bea, because she had not planned it. Her father had given her the willow rod when she broke a rule (no talking back, no wiggling of her ears in church—it was her special talent, and she often did it without knowing), though Callum had gotten it more. What reason here? Something had snapped; her hand had closed over the brush.
“Sit,” she said, her voice more a plea than a command.
Janie folded herself onto the squat white stool, knees pressed together, arms around her knees. She bowed her head. They did not speak. The girl would not tell her mother; both of them knew that. They were in this together—whatever this was, wherever they were. Outside, three shots sounded, and Blackie barked three times as if in answer. In the bathroom, Bea brushed, working slowly at the knots, and after a time, Janie relaxed. Bea would bring lunch up on a tray, with a rosebud tucked inside the napkin. No need for Janie to go downstairs.
Such curls the child had, a gift from God. If you started at the ends and worked your way up, it would not hurt.
A
FTER THEIR FIRST
meeting, Bea often saw Smitty on the road. He seemed to do a lot of walking, away from the base, off the Point, or he’d be in an army truck, heading into town for supplies, or on evening leave. Hullo, Nurse Beatrice, he’d say if he was on foot. Or Hello, ladies, when she and Agnes were together, and if Janie was there, he’d kneel down and let her try on his cap, or toss a stick for the dog, or tell jokes.
What’s the best kind of story to tell a runaway horse? A tale of whoa. What do you call a pony with a sore throat? A little hoarse.
Since neither Janie nor Bea tried to answer the riddles, he soon came to deliver both question and answer at once, and both Bea and Janie would break into a grin.
“What does it mean if you find a horseshoe?”
(Good luck, no joke, thought Bea.)
“It means some poor horse”
—Smitty snorted, and Bea laughed too, before the punch line—
“is walking around in his socks.”
Why were all his jokes all about horses? She always meant to ask; she never did find out. Janie was shy of him; they both were. He was a large man, and in uniform, his hair shaved close to his head, and he had a flat, nasal accent and a cigarette often tucked in the corner of his mouth, and, if he was on guard duty, a bayonet gun at his side. Later, at home, Janie would repeat the jokes to her sisters, and if they laughed (fondly, or automatically, or with real pleasure, it didn’t matter), she shone.
At the beginning of the summer, Bea had assumed they shouldn’t talk to the soldiers, but as the weeks passed, it became clear that this was not true. “Our boys,” Mrs. Porter called them, even as she complained about the noise from the base, and Annie made snacks for the sentries, and Helen and Dossy brought them pitchers of ice water and sometimes lemonade, and one night Mrs. P. had ten soldiers (had they been chosen, or volunteered? Smitty was not among them) over for dinner, and Annie made shepherd’s pie and corn on the cob and a sad green salad from the little victory garden Mrs. P. had put in (the big girls had planted a sign that read “Victory for the Rabbits,” until their father made them take it down), and Stewart used up gas rations to drive to New Bedford for a keg of beer. Bea would not have known that she wanted Smitty to be part of that dinner until he wasn’t, and then she felt a little stab of disappointment, followed by a bigger stab of irritation at herself.
Usually she ate supper with Jane upstairs, and the other help ate in the kitchen, but that night everyone sat on the back porch together—on chairs and boat cushions and the steps, with three soldiers sprawled in the hammock, and the older girls wore flowered skirts and sleeveless eyelet tops and ballet slippers with winding ribbons, too pretty for their own good. Mr. P. had his dinner on his card table and talked about the Great War, and Mrs. P. asked the soldiers small questions—Where are you from, Do you have brothers and sisters, How’s the food on the base?—and Helen asked them big questions—Do you think people will always wage war, Does religion do more harm or good in the end?—and Dossy crossed and recrossed her legs and said, “Oh,
stop
it, Hellion! Leave them be!” and Mr. P. said, “She’s all right, Doss,” and then, to the group, “Helen’s smart as a whip, top of her class,” and Helen wrinkled her nose at her sister. The soldiers talked and talked and drank and drank, and as dusk came and the fireflies blinked (the porch lights out, no lanterns or candles lit, though nearly a full moon), Annie brought out shortbread, then blackberry pie and huckleberry pudding; she must have used up the sugar ration for a week. “Enough to feed an army,” she’d say each time she or Lizzie set down another dish, and each time, the soldiers would salute her and applaud.
Bea and Janie sat together to one side. Agnes sat closer in, talking to this one or that one, and as Bea watched her, she had a sudden flash of fear: Agnes would marry one, leave. While they were both from Forfar, they had come over separately, not knowing each other, but over the years, they had grown as close as sisters. “Tweedledee and Tweedledum,” the big girls liked to tease, and it was true that Bea and Agnes bickered like a married couple, mostly over the children, for Bea was cozier, less strict, although still stricter than the parents, who couldn’t seem to bother much with rules. Once, when Dossy was younger, she had told Bea that it was her bosom that made her cozier than Agnes; Bea’s was wide and pillow soft, while Agnes was narrow like a boy. “That’s nonsense,” Bea had said, blushing, but she’d been secretly pleased, her body mostly a weight for her to haul around, though she did enjoy the feel of a baby on her hip. Dossy was the moodiest of the children—quick clouds came over her, replaced by gusts of joy—and Agnes didn’t understand that it was sometimes best to simply let her be, or that Helen, who had an opinion about everything, was more likely to do your bidding if you pretended she was boss. “If you nagged less, they’d mind you more,” Bea would say, and Agnes would snap back: “Ach, if I nagged less, they’d burn down the house!” Or they’d switch sides. “You know, Agnes, Janie likes to know what’s expected—a little regularity can’t hurt with the big girls, too.” “What’s expected?” Agnes (pin neat, clock regular; she made Bea look slovenly) would answer. “What’s expected around here is nothing at all!
You
try to change it”—for Agnes had been there longer and could lord it over Bea. “And wake me when you’re done!”
Now Agnes was leaning, talking, her chin cupped in her hand. Years before, in Scotland, she’d had a fellow, but he’d gone to Australia, and Agnes (“Did he really think I’d set up with the thieves?”) had come to America instead. Since then, nobody, for either of them. Funny how when you were small, you assumed it—
when I marry, when I have children.
All the girls did, even as all around them, the men were without work or booking passage or lost—body, soul or both—to the war. Then along went your life until you were smack in the middle of it and had stopped expecting, without quite realizing it, and your life was nothing like you’d pictured, but a good life—an entirely good-enough life—nonetheless. Agnes was pretty, and on the clever side, but it was hard to see her married, too full of her own ways, and what man would marry a Scots nurse past her prime and met on an outpost army base?
The soldiers were bored—that’s what everyone kept saying. They were away from home, from jobs and girls and wives (more than a few had wedding bands), and most disliked Ashaunt, the beaches rocky, the wind stiff, the air cold in winter, muggy in summer and always damp. Oh, they knew how to laugh and have a good time, but this made Bea suspect them, for it all seemed too much like a holiday, and they were American in a way that seemed, well,
coarse
. She reached for a glass of beer and took a sip. She didn’t like it, never had; still, she sipped again. Leaning against the house, she felt the shingles rough beneath her arms. The ocean was flat calm. Every few minutes, the searchlight made its sweep. One soldier kept stuttering, and she had to stop herself from supplying the jammed word. Another fellow played a Jew’s harp, the music twangy, grating, without melody. Her father had played the Jew’s harp when she was small, and suddenly she missed him—not as he’d been when she’d left home, but as he’d been back then: harp to mouth, head bobbing side to side, the buzzing, tuneless tune. “But
can
we see the path of history while we’re inside it?” Helen asked, fixing her gaze on a soldier a good five years older than herself. Would the child ever stop?
As they finished dessert, the soldiers starting singing again
—
“
Beer, beer for Battery B! Shake up a cocktail, shake one for me!
”—and chanting—“
Hey Abbot! I’m a b-a-a-a-d boy!
”
—
and that was when Bea told Janie it was past bedtime, and the girl went to her mother and father for a kiss, and then she was being passed around from soldier to soldier, all of them kissing her cheek or tousling her hair, Jane cringing, giggling, and finally back to Bea. Upstairs, as Bea closed the muslin and dim-out curtains, turned on the light, and readied the child for bed, she could hear the soldiers singing on
—
“
Say goodbye to them all, to the
long and the short and the tall!
”—and the Porters singing with them. Unconsciously, Bea began to hum along, until Jane interrupted for her lullaby.
After Janie fell asleep, Bea might have gone back down—Agnes was still there—but somehow she did not want to. Instead, she took out her shellflower box in her room, sorting stamens, gluing on a shell or two, triple-twisting wire stems; the green would have to wait, for she’d run out. She worked even more slowly than usual, drawing out the time. Ordinary shells were everywhere on the beach, but the rest of her supplies were hard to get in wartime and the hobby itself felt slightly wrong, not useful enough, though she’d been knitting too, muffler after muffler for the soldiers. She might send a shellflower to her brother or father, or to Charlie, or to the aunt in Arbroath who’d taught her how, but they’d likely get damaged in the post. Setting her supplies back in their tin box, she went to do her washing up. Then, closing the window to the noise outside, she said her prayers and went to bed.