The Grapple (26 page)

“You look tired,” Jeanne told Leonard O’Doull. She was a farm wife with a flock of children, and she was telling him
he
looked tired? If that wasn’t madness, damned if he knew what would be.

O’Doull managed a—tired—shrug. “I’ve been busier than I wish I were,” he said, and let it go there. Coming back to a country of peace, a country at peace, felt surreal. He’d got used to the tensions of emergency surgery, to the cries of wounded men, to the smells of ether and alcohol and pus and blood and shit, to washing gore from his hands more often than Lady Macbeth ever did. The only familiar odor on the platform was tobacco smoke. Perfume? For all he’d smelled it lately, perfume might be a Martian invention.

“You look like a man who needs a drink,” his wife said.

“Amen!” he exclaimed. Everybody laughed except Nicole, who understood he wasn’t kidding. They’d known each other for more than a quarter of a century now. If one of them didn’t understand the other, nobody ever would.

“Let’s go back to the house,” Nicole said. With the six Galtier children and their spouses and progeny leaving, the platform lost a big part of the crowd on it.

A house with a lawn in front of it. No broken windows. No bullet holes. No chunks bitten out by artillery or bombs. No craters in the front yard. No gunshots close by. No soldiers stumbling by with numb, stunned faces and thousand-yard stares. No, this wasn’t Mars. It seemed more alien than that.

Instead of decay, O’Doull smelled cooking of a sort he’d almost forgotten. He knew Nicole would do herself proud when it came to food. But…“Will we have enough to drink?” A lot of his nieces and nephews were getting old enough to hoist a glass. And Georges always seemed to have a hollow leg.

But Nicole said, “Don’t worry about it.” He
did
worry, till she went on, “For one thing, I bought twice as much as I thought we’d need. And, for another, the farmer across the road from Charles makes the best applejack in Temiscouata County. He makes a lot of it, too.”

When Leonard O’Doull heard that, he stopped flabbling. A lot of people with apple orchards turned out homemade Calvados. Quality varied widely from one farm to another, often from one batch to another. None of it went through the tiresome formalities involving taxes. The Republic of Quebec loved distillers no more than the Dominion of Canada did before it, and had no better luck bringing them to heel.

O’Doull took packs of Raleighs and Dukes out of his suitcase and distributed them to his wife, his son, and his in-laws. They would have repaired his popularity had he lost it. Quebec got U.S. tobacco, and not enough of that. No one had tasted mild, flavorful cigarettes like these since the early days of the war.

“How did you get them through Customs?” Georges asked. His face was wreathed in smiles, and in smoke.

“I’m in U.S. uniform.” O’Doull tapped the gold oak leaf on one shoulder strap. “I speak pretty good French, too. And I let the inspectors have a couple of packs apiece, so they didn’t bother me a bit.”

“Such things are wasted on those swine, but what is a man to do?” Georges said with a philosophical shrug.

If the man was Leonard O’Doull, he was to eat too much and to get drunk. He wasn’t loud and boisterous, but he felt the applejack buzzing in him. He’d feel it in the morning, too, but he didn’t worry about that. He ate, he drank, he talked—and he didn’t tell war stories. His Quebecois extended family didn’t know how lucky they were not to know much about what he did, and he didn’t intend to enlighten them.

A lot of relatives stayed at the house. They slept in the front room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. O’Doull didn’t mind. Even now, not everybody had a motorcar. For those who didn’t, going back out to a farm and then coming into town again for the wedding the next day would be slow and inconvenient. All the same, he whispered to Nicole, “You didn’t ask one of your sisters to share the bedroom, did you?”

“Why would you want to know that?” his wife asked archly.

“Ha!” he said. “You’ll find out.”

“With so many people here?” Nicole said. “It’s upstairs, remember. If we’re not careful, the bed will squeak, and they’ll laugh at us.”

“We’ll just have to be careful, then, won’t we?” O’Doull said. Nicole was laughing at him, but she didn’t say no.

She didn’t say no later that night, either, though she did lock the door first and she did insist on turning off the light. After nearly two years away, O’Doull felt almost as if he were having his wedding night all over again, just ahead of his son’s. He didn’t have the stamina Lucien would doubtless display, but he had the sincerity.

“I’ve missed you more than I know how to tell you,” he said afterwards.

“Why did you go, then?” Nicole asked.

“It needs doing,” he answered. “I’m a doctor. I’m good at putting people back together. A good many men are alive because I happened to be there.”

“So they can go back to the war and get killed somewhere else instead,” Nicole said tartly.

He shrugged. That made the bed squeak, where their side-by-side lovemaking hadn’t, or not very much. It made Nicole squeak, too, in alarm. Laughing a little, O’Doull said, “I can’t do anything about that. God puts them where He wants them. I just patch them up when He looks the other way for a second.”

After the things he’d seen, he wondered how he still believed at all. Granny McDougald didn’t, not so far as he could tell. But his own faith survived…as long as he didn’t lean on it too hard. And he was strong-willed enough to make his own choices. As he usually did, he wore a rubber tonight. Nicole wasn’t likely to catch; she was close to fifty. But why take chances? And if that made the Pope unhappy—O’Doull didn’t lose much sleep about it.

He didn’t lose much sleep about anything. He couldn’t begin to guess how far behind he was. Nicole had to shake him awake the next morning. When he did come back to consciousness, the smells of coffee and of frying bacon helped reconcile him to the world. He found fried eggs and fried potatoes to go with the bacon. Susanne and Denise had been busy in the kitchen.

“Thank you, my dears,” he said after he finished breakfast. “You’re just about as wonderful as your sister.” They laughed. Susanne made as if to throw a spatula at him. He made as if to duck. Everybody laughed then. After flying shell fragments and machine-gun bullets, a spatula didn’t seem very dangerous.

He thought about wearing uniform to the wedding. He might have, if it were in the USA. In Rivière-du-Loup, he didn’t want to remind people he was a foreigner. He didn’t want to remind himself, either. His tailcoat smelled of mothballs, but he put it on anyway. It didn’t match Lucien’s hired suit, but that was all right: the groom was supposed to be noticed, while his father was perhaps the most easily disposable person in the wedding party. He wasn’t even footing the bill—Alphonse Archambault was.

Doctor and dentist greeted each other at the Église St.-Patrice with a handshake and identical words: “Hello, quack.” They laughed and clapped each other on the back.

Bishop Guillaume celebrated the mass. He wasn’t a patch on the former Bishop Pascal, who’d returned to secular life, but his lady friend hadn’t had twins, either, which was why the former Bishop Pascal had returned to secular life.

Lucien lifted Paulette’s veil and kissed her. The O’Doulls and the Archambaults stood in a receiving line and shook enough hands to make politicians jealous. Then everyone repaired to the Archambaults’ house—only a few blocks from the O’Doulls’—and ate and drank with as much abandon as people had the day before. Archambault had either talked with Charles or knew somebody else who made damn good applejack.

Rivière-du-Loup didn’t have a hotel. O’Doull and Nicole went down to old Lucien’s farm—run by Charles these days—to give Lucien and Paulette the privacy they needed for their first night. In the morning, the newlyweds would catch a train to honeymoon at Niagara Falls—on the American side, not the Canadian. The Canadian side was under martial law.

Nicole squeezed O’Doull’s hand when they rolled past the hospital built on what was once Galtier land. “If the occupiers hadn’t wanted to punish your father by putting the hospital there, we probably wouldn’t have met,” O’Doull said.

“See how many things we can blame on them?” Charles said from behind the wheel, his voice as dry as if he were Georges.

“Since Father did eventually get paid, I suppose we can forgive them now,” Nicole said.

“You don’t have any other reasons?” O’Doull asked, and she poked him in the ribs.

The farmhouse hadn’t changed much with Charles living there. Even most of the furniture was the same as it had been. “So many memories,” Nicole murmured.

O’Doull nodded. He had a lot of memories of this place, too, though not so many as she did. But he also had other memories, more recent ones, darker ones. All too soon, he would have to get back on a train for himself, not for a honeymoon but to return to nightmare.
What was I doing? What was I thinking?
he wondered. Even though he saved lives, even though he wanted to save lives, he also wanted to stay here. He knew he couldn’t, and got drunk again so he didn’t have to remember.

S
pring in Georgia. What could be finer? Mild air, occasional showers, everything green and growing, the countryside full of birdsong, hummingbirds flitting like bad-tempered jewels from flower to flower. Everything was lovely.

Cassius noticed none of it. He cared about none of it. All he wanted to do was stay alive one more minute, one more hour, one more day.

Had he gone to church with his family in Augusta that Sunday morning, he wouldn’t be wandering the Georgia countryside now. When his father and mother and sister didn’t come back, he went looking for them—and almost ran right into the cops and Freedom Party stalwarts who’d rounded them up. The ofays were still laughing and joking about their haul, and didn’t notice him in the shadows. Every once in a while, a dark skin came in handy.

Of course, if he were born with a white skin, he wouldn’t have ended up shut in behind barbed wire in the Terry like a zoo animal. He would have been on the other side of the wire—probably with a submachine gun in his hand and a Freedom Party pin on his lapel.

He didn’t dwell on that. He did realize he had to get out of the Terry, and right away. If he didn’t, the whites would nab him in a cleanout before long. Off he’d go to a camp. People didn’t come out of those places.

He waited till after midnight that night. He had two weapons when he headed for the wire—a pair of tin snips and the biggest, stoutest knife from his mother’s kitchen. If anyone spotted him, he aimed to fight. If he could kill somebody with a gun, then he’d have one. He didn’t think about dying himself. He was too young to take the idea seriously.

All the heroics he imagined ahead of time evaporated. The tin snips cut through the wire well enough. Come morning, people would have no trouble figuring out where he’d got away, but he didn’t care. He’d be long gone by then.

And he was, heading west. He couldn’t very well stay inside Augusta. It wouldn’t be thirty seconds till he heard,
Let’s see your papers, boy!
Nothing in his passbook said he had any business being out and about. Again, they’d ship him off to a camp—or maybe they’d just kill him on the spot.

Out in the country…There’d be more Negroes there. Maybe he’d fit in better. And then he could start paying the Freedom Party goons back for everything they were doing.

He’d had connections with the resistance in the city—had them and lost them as people kept dying or getting seized. Now he had to rely on his wits and on the kindness of strangers: black strangers, of course. He’d long since given up on expecting anything from whites. His father always said he got on well with Jerry Dover. He even said Dover had kept their whole family safe more than once. Maybe so—but Dover was in the Army now, and the rest of Cassius’ family was in a camp.

When the sun came up, Cassius was walking along a road heading west. He didn’t know where he was going. All he knew was that he’d made it out of Augusta alive, and that he was getting hungry and getting thirsty. All the money that had been in the apartment was in his pocket. How long could he make $27.59 (he’d counted it to the last penny—counted it twice, in fact, hoping it would be more the second time around and absurdly disappointed when it wasn’t) last? Well, he’d find out.

Maybe he’d find out. On the other hand, maybe he’d get killed before he came close to going through his meager funds. Every time he saw a motorcar, he ran for the pine woods through which the road ran most of the time. Nobody stopped to go after him. None of the vehicles that went by was an armored car, so nobody sprayed the woods with machine-gun fire.

That was good luck, as good luck for Negroes in the CSA ran these days.

Cassius didn’t see it so. Aside from being hungry and thirsty, he had sore feet. He couldn’t remember when he’d done so much walking. He didn’t think he ever had. He wondered if he ought to throw his shoes away. For a while, he didn’t. He didn’t want to look like a shiftless country nigger. He might have argued with his father, but his attitudes faithfully respected the way he was raised.

He did a little thinking.
Why
didn’t he want to look like a shiftless country nigger? Wasn’t that his best bet for survival? Away went the shoes, and his socks, too.

Don’t go barefoot. You get chiggers, an’ hookworm, too.
His old man’s voice still rang in his ears, or rather, between them. Ignoring it wasn’t easy, but Cassius managed. The blisters on his heels sighed with relief. Before long, though, his soles started to complain.

And his luck ran out with the pine woods. For miles ahead, the road ran through fields: cotton, peanuts, tobacco, even rice. He couldn’t stay where he was. Living on what he could grub out of the ground—mushrooms and maybe berries—and on the squirrels and rabbits he killed with rocks wasn’t living. It was just starving a little more slowly. For better or for worse, he’d grown up in the city. No doubt there were tricks to living out here. Only one trouble: he didn’t know them.