We Five (8 page)

“You mean the fact that he only hires conchies?”

Ruth nodded. “After losing both of his sons at Dunkirk. Naturally, a father would be consumed with anger over his family being so cruelly singled out. And he's
very
bitter,
frightfully
angry. But rather than direct his anger at the ones really responsible for taking his boys from him, he's decided, instead, to abhor war in the abstract—
all war
, including the very one we're in the midst of fighting. And become a violent pacifist. I say violent because he fired all the men who'd been delivering coal for him who refused to join him in taking a stand against the war. He wanted them to sign statements of conscientious objection. Those who wouldn't, he sacked.”

“How does this concern
you
?”

“Those five lads who go to the pub together—they look to be our age, maybe a little older. They are each of them
proud
conchies—happy to go to Mr. Matthews and present themselves as replacements. And they seem to have taken an interest in the five of
us
. They watch us from the pub windows as we wait together for the factory bus.”

“There's no crime in that, Ruth.”

“Of course not. Nor is there crime in whatever scheme they're devising to put themselves in our way.”

Jane laughed. It was not a laugh of derision but only one of disbelief. “How do you know they are—as you put it—set to put themselves in our way?”

“I'll tell you. Mr. Andrews, the Scotsman who opens the pub so early in the morning—not only for these lads but for the other night workers who are known to pay a premium for their cockcrow pints—he came out to speak to me one morning last week, before your arrival. He said he'd overheard the five talking amongst themselves about their interest in the five of us. One of them said it was kismet the numbers should come out even and that we should all be in the same vicinity two or three mornings a week, and they were planning to divide us up amongst them, as if it were all some kind of game, to see who could get the farthest.”

“The farthest. Now what exactly does
that
mean? I should hope it doesn't mean what you
think
it means, Ruth. I fancy it's about winning our favour—winning our
hearts
.”

“Jane Higgins, you cannot be that naïve.”

“Mr. Andrews knows their character, and if
he
believes the thing to be all quite innocent…”

“
Innocent
? Being pursued by men with conquest clearly on their minds?”

“To be pursued by
any
man, Ruth, when there are so many of
us
and so few of
them
round these days, should be taken as flattery at first pitch.”

“
Flattery.
Are you potty? It's definitely sport, though. You have that much correct, at least.”

“But isn't love in its early stages a kind of sport, Ruth? Pursuit and conquest. It
is
a game, rather. People don't just bump into each other at a Lyons Corner House, fall instantly in love, and then go skipping off to the vicar to marry.”

Ruth's brow furrowed. “How can you make light of such a serious matter?”

“Because I ain't yet seen the
serious
part of it. These are, no doubt, five lads what spend their dismal days delivering coal to housewives and housemaids and grumpy old men in cardigan sweaters, and then spend half their nights freezing their bums off on draughty rooftops watching for incendiaries, and where and when, I ask you, are they ever to meet interesting girls—that is, girls what haven't had all the life crushed out of them by falling walls and timbers? You must admit, myself excepted, that the five of us are quite dishy to look at—and very much
alive
—and who
wouldn't
want to take us out for a whirl on the dance floor some night?”

“First, Jane, I so tire of hearing you denigrate yourself. You are pretty in your own way and let's have done with
that
! Second, these boys don't know a thing about us except for what we look like.”

“But isn't that what the male species considers first? How a woman looks. Later a bloke will have himself the chance to discover if the girl who attracts him's got a charming personality or a sharp mind or find out if she be C of E or Presbyterian, or—or casts her vote for Labour or Tory, but not until later. I should be rather
pleased
if they're looking at us and talking about us and scheming over some way to meet us. There's only one chap in my life in the bloody here and now, and he is, according to all those who meet him, a worthless invertebrate. I will confess to you, Ruth, that sometimes I come to the parsonage pretending to drop in and visit with you, when it's really Mr. Mobry I most fancy seeing—not that I find him especially attractive or got himself any more personality than a goat, but what he
does
have to commend him is this: he's a
man—
and
not
a man what also happens to be my brother, and I should like to have the privilege, at this stage in my young life, to simply sit and exchange a fine how-do-you-do with any
man
who just happens to be halfway
male.
I've even given thought to darkening the door of that Fatted Pig myself, but I hesitate to do so, as I know the sort of woman who most often mooches into London pubs alone, and I'm not keen on being put in her league. Nevertheless, I hunger for the companionship. You do not. I know it. I've always known it. I don't judge you for it. But you shouldn't judge me for
craving
it.”

Ruth sat quietly for a moment, digesting what her friend Jane had just said. “And does it not bother you,” she finally said, “that these men, who've taken such a curious interest in us—that they're conscientious objectors? That they refuse to risk their lives for their country as so many other young men are doing these days?”

Jane shook her head. “There are those who don't think that war should be the cure for all the evils of the world. They believe God created man for a much higher purpose than slaughtering other members of his species.”

Ruth nodded. “There
are
those conscientious objectors who believe exactly as you say. They have my respect, they do. But there are also conchies who are conchies for one reason only: cowardice. They won't take up arms because they're frightened witless by the possibility of getting themselves killed. They think they have a better chance of surviving this war if they can keep themselves off the battlefield and out of the Navy and R.A.F. altogether. These men I do
not
respect.”

Jane tried not to laugh, but she simply couldn't help herself. “Of course, Ruth, any one of these conchie cowards could get hisself gassed to death or blown to bits in his very own bed by the Luftwaffe on any night of the week. They're dropping the most insidious bombs now. Some are timed not to go off until after the firemen and rescuers arrive! You can be just as dead here on the home front as you are in the trenches fighting for a cause. And then there's this, lovie: the fact of what it is that you and I and Maggie and Carrie and Molly do sixty hours a week: we help make the instruments of war. In the end, any of these five conchies might woo—and who knows?—perhaps even
win
the hand of a girl what helps Britain do that very thing he's supposed to be against!”

“Life is full of ironies,” Ruth sighed. “
And
delusions. We could all be dead tomorrow, you know. And yet we go to bed each night expecting that fate will be kind to us for one night more—that we'll rise the next morning to gather ourselves together to take the six-thirty to the Filling Factory. Your brother passes out after his binges, assuming that he too will rise to drink another day. Life goes on—life beautiful, life ugly and unseemly, and most people can only follow the pattern of life most familiar to them and act upon the instincts that go along with it. But I am not ‘most people.' I am not the instinctive creature you are, Jane. I fancy something different from my life, something that has nothing to do with the men I've told you about—something which I cannot put into words. There is something missing inside me, but I don't know how to fill the void.”

“Friendship with the four of us ain't enough for you, Ruth—at least for now?”

Ruth patted the top of Jane's hand—sweetly, not condescendingly. “For the present, you're all
more
than enough, but it can't be that way forever.”

“I understand. I do, Ruth. I understand because sometimes I feel the same way—about the five of us, that is. That we're all just circling and circling and waiting to land. But whilst
I'm
circling I can't help wondering if there just might be some fine-looking bloke inside the Fatted Pig Tavern what might like to get to know me a little better, seeing's how we're all just passing the time.”

Ruth frowned. “Oh, I'm sure there is. I'm sure those five have already divided us all up like Christmas crackers.”

“Don't talk about Christmas. It's just going to make me hungry. I scrambled some powdered eggs this morning, but I couldn't eat a bite. I detest powdered eggs, Ruth, I do.” Jane sighed. She looked out the show window past the items Lyle had hung there, which seemed to make sense only to him: a small (and broken) Wilkinson Sword lawn mower, several rusty tools and other largely unidentifiable metallic oddments, and a broken pushchair without tyres. “It would be just our luck if we all ended up missing the six-thirty by only a minute or two. Then We Five would have to wait a full hour until the straggler bus comes along. Of course, I know a good place to
spend
that hour.” Jane raised an eyebrow impishly.

“Jane Higgins, sometimes I think you're no better than your ne'er-do-well brother.”

“That is absolutely the worst thing you've ever said about me!”

At that moment said brother rose, with a stretch and a groan, from his royal couch. He stumbled toward the front of the shop, blinking his eyes against the bright sunshine flooding in through the window and combing his fingers through his matted hair. Glancing at a clock on the wall—an antique Victorian clock diminished in value by its cracked glass cover—he declared, “It's getting on for six thirty and you're still here.”

“That's right, Lyle, we're still here,” replied Jane in a dull voice.

“Then you've missed your bus by my guess, and should have plenty of time to put on a pot of coffee.”

“There's no coffee, Lyle,” said Jane, still without any show of exasperation. “There was none at the market. We are apparently in the middle of a coffee shortage.”

“Tea, then.”

Ruth eyed her friend, wondering how she would respond.

“I'm rather engaged, Lyle. Be a love and make tea for all three of us if you would.”

The novelty of this idea struck Jane's brother as something quite intriguing. “I could certainly do that. But you'll have to direct me to the proper cupboard.”

“Shall I tell you first where you'll find the kitchen?”

“How can you be such a bloody lark so early in the morning?” he grumbled.

Ruth and Jane waited until he had left the room to collapse into hysterics.

Ruth heard a knock at the trailer door. She had been watching Katie Couric talking to a woman Ruth didn't recognize. There was no sound coming out of the television because the volume knob had fallen off when she hit the set with the closet door. It was an old Sylvania portable black-and-white the Mobrys had given her when she moved into the trailer.

Ruth had been living with the now-retired minister and his younger sister since she was fourteen. Before this, she'd been housed in two different orphanages and then parked with six different foster families. The Mobrys, Ruth's very last foster guardians (they couldn't be called foster
parents
because they weren't husband and wife), had been very kind to her, as had the congregation of the small non-denominational church the Reverend had shepherded. The Church of the Generous Spirit was unique among the Protestant churches of northern Mississippi. Not only had it been racially integrated from its inception—this in a part of the country in which integration, while the law of the land, wasn't always the law of the heart—the church had an unusual take on Christ himself. For Reverend Mobry's flock, Jesus was an unabashed, unapologetic liberal. Kind of like Hubert Humphrey, if Humphrey had been the son of God.

It was a small congregation, but a well-knit one, and in it Ruth had found the loving extended family she'd always wanted. She knew nothing of her blood family—only that her mother, a migrant worker thought to be from Appalachian Kentucky, had died in an automobile accident. The near-term baby she'd been carrying at the time was pulled from her corpse and saved, but circumstances—Ruth's mother had no traceable relatives—required that Ruth make her entrance into the world as a ward of the state.

Ruth had now reached the age at which she was no longer a ward of the state.

And
she was no longer the responsibility of the Mobrys. And though she was very fond of the brother and sister who had taken such good care of her for the last seven years, Ruth was ready to spread her wings. She'd been the first of We Five to notice the ad placed in the local paper by Lucky Aces Casino, which was about to open up in Tunica County, right on the Mississippi River. (The Mississippi state legislature was very specific in crafting the 1990 law that permitted gambling in the state: its casinos had to be docked either along the Mississippi River or on the Gulf of Mexico.) Lucky Aces needed cocktail waitresses, and Ruth thought this was something she and her friends could do.

By choice, Ruth had never gone to college, choosing instead to pursue a path of “self-education.” The term she used for herself, but which she never said aloud, since most people would think it had something to do with an interest in cars, was “autodidact.” Whenever Ruth wasn't assisting Ms. Mobry around the parsonage (the house where the Mobrys lived was called the “parsonage,” though it was owned by the siblings free and clear) or helping out at the church, Ruth read. She'd set out at the age of fifteen to read from cover to cover every book at the Bellevenue Library, as well as all the hundreds of other books which she'd bought at garage sales and second-hand book stores throughout Desoto County. (Except, that is, for the bodice-ripper romances; these she got for Ms. Mobry. It was a secret passion of Lucille's, which no one at the church was supposed to know about.)