Blood and Iron (65 page)

“I know you don’t,” Camp Hill Alderford answered. He held out his cup. “If you’d fill that up for me, I’d be obliged.”

“I sure will,” Nellie said, and did, after detaching Clara from her skirt. Alderford was the only customer in the place; of course she’d get another nickel out of him. She kept looking at all the zeros on the bill he’d given her for Clara. A sigh escaped her. If only it were U.S. green instead of C.S. brown!

The bell above the door chimed. Nellie looked that way with a smile of greeting on her face—someone else to spend money. But it wasn’t: it was her son-in-law. Alarm ran through her. “Merle!” she exclaimed. “What are you doing here this time of day? Why aren’t you at work?”
Why did you have to come in when this goddamn Reb’s here?

“Edna just telephoned me from the doctor’s office,” Merle Grimes answered. “Since you don’t have a telephone, I figured I’d come over and tell you the news—you’re going to be a grandmother.”

“Oh,” Nellie said, and then, “Oh,” again. She would have been more excited about the news if she hadn’t been afraid Camp Hill Alderford would start running his mouth. “Won’t you get in trouble for leaving your job in the middle of the morning?” she asked, hoping to get Grimes out of the coffeehouse as fast as she could.

But he shook his head. “My boss said it was all right. We’re pals—we were in the same company during the war. Small world, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it just?” Nellie said tonelessly.

“Congratulations, ma’am,” Alderford said. He turned to Merle Grimes. “And to you, too, sir. Children make everything worthwhile.”

“Er—thank you,” Grimes said. He couldn’t help realizing Alderford was a Confederate—and probably couldn’t help wondering why a Confederate spoke as if he knew Nellie so well.

Nellie decided to take that bull by the horns: “Mr. Alderford was Major Alderford during the war, and used to stop by here a good deal.”

“Oh,” Grimes said, not in surprise, as Nellie had, but more for the sake of saying something. He had a way of holding his cards close to his chest. Nellie had trouble telling what he was thinking.

“That’s right,” Alderford said. Nellie sent him a look of appeal to keep him from saying any more. She hated that; she hated asking any man for anything. And she feared the ex–Rebel officer wouldn’t even notice, or would notice and decide to pay back some damnyankees for winning the war.

But Alderford never said an untoward word. He set coins—U.S. coins—on the table and went on his way. Nellie let out a quiet sigh of relief. She’d got by with it. But if more Confederates came to visit, could she keep on getting by with it?
One
more thing to worry about,
she thought, as if she didn’t have enough already.

Lucien Galtier reached out and pressed the starter button on the dashboard of his Chevrolet. He’d bought the automobile in large measure because it had a Frenchman’s name on it; a Ford would have been easier to come by.

The engine coughed before coming to noisy life. The motorcar shuddered under him, then settled into a steady vibration different even from the motion of a railroad car, the closest comparison he could find.

His feet were still clumsy on gas and clutch and brake. Charles and Georges had taken to driving more readily than he, which infuriated him. “I
will
learn to do this, and to do it well,” he muttered. He did not talk to the automobile, as he had to the horse. He was talking only to himself. He knew it, and felt the lack.

He stalled the motorcar the first time he tried to shift from neutral up into low gear. Naturally, Georges had taken the moment before to come out of the barn. As naturally, Lucien’s younger son laughed at his father’s fumbles, and did not even try to keep that laughter to himself. Galtier called the automobile several names he would not have used on the horse even in the worst of moods. Then, still wishing he had not bought the machine, he started it once more and succeeded in driving away.

As he drew near Rivière-du-Loup, he came up behind a horse-drawn wagon—one very much like that which he had driven himself up till a few weeks before. The cursed thing crawled along at a snail’s pace. Galtier squeezed the horn bulb again and again. The stupid farmer sitting up there like a cowflop might have been deaf. He refused either to speed up or to pull over.

At last, seizing an opportunity, Lucien shot around him.
“Mauvaise calisse!”
he shouted, and eked out the malediction with gestures. The other farmer smiled a smile that, to Galtier, proved his feeblemindedness. “Some people have no consideration,” Galtier fumed. “None whatsoever.” He never once thought how he had behaved when driving a wagon rather than a motorcar.

Traffic in Rivière-du-Loup was far heavier than he recalled from the days before the war. Automobiles had been rare then, with most people traveling by wagon or carriage or on horseback. Now everyone seemed to have a motorcar, and to drive it with a Gallic disdain for consequences that matched Galtier’s own. He cursed. He shouted. He waved his arms. He blew his horn, and blew it and blew it. He fit right in.

Finding a parking space was another adventure, one made worse because the streets of Rivière-du-Loup had not been designed with the automobile in mind. A good many motorcars were parked with two wheels in the road, the other two up on the sidewalks—sidewalks were none too wide, either. At last, Lucien imitated that example.

When he got out, money jingled in his pockets. Some of the coins were from the USA, a few from the Canada of before the war, and some from the Republic of Quebec. As they were all minted to the same standard, merchants took one lot as readily as another. A newsboy was hawking papers on a street corner. Galtier gave him a couple of pennies—one, a U.S. coin, said
ONE CENT
on the reverse; the other, an issue of Quebec, featured the fleur-de-lys and announced its value as
UN SOU
—and took a newspaper.

FRANCE IN CHAOS
! shouted the headline. He read the accompanying story as he walked back to the automobile. Police and soldiers had turned machine guns on rioters in Paris furious about the worthless currency and about the country’s forced subservience to the German Empire.

The reporter didn’t seem to know what tone to take. Germany was the USA’s ally, and so was also the ally of the Republic of Quebec. But the Quebecois sprang from French stock, and nothing would ever change that. The ambiguity made the writer take almost no tone at all, but set forth what he’d learned from the cable as baldly as if it were going down in a police blotter.

Galtier sighed. He didn’t know how to feel about France’s troubles, either. He wished she were not having such troubles. But if the only way for her not to have troubles was for her to have won the war…Galtier shook his head. “Too high a price to pay,” he murmured.

He would not have said that during the war. He shrugged. He’d had the same thought many times before, in many different contexts. The world had changed, too. Taken all together, the changes pleased him. He would not have said that during the war, either.

When he knocked on the door to the house where Nicole and Leonard O’Doull lived, his daughter answered almost at once. Tagging along behind her was little Lucien. Staring gravely up at Galtier, he asked, “Candy?”

“No, no candy today, I regret,” Galtier answered.

His grandson clouded up and got ready to cry. “You know you aren’t supposed to do that,” Nicole said, and, for a wonder, little Lucien didn’t. Nicole smiled at Galtier. “And what brings you here today, Papa?”

“Nothing much,” he said grandly. “I was just out for a drive in my Chevrolet, and I thought I would stop in.” Was that how a gentleman of leisure should sound? He didn’t know. He’d never met a gentleman of leisure.

“Ah,” Nicole said. “You have the motorcar here, then?”

“Here in Rivière-du-Loup, yes. Here in my pocket”—Galtier peered into it, as if to make sure—“here in my pocket, no.”

Nicole wrinkled her nose. “It certainly isn’t hard to see sometimes where Georges comes by it,” she remarked.

“Comes by what?” Galtier demanded. He was perhaps a sixteenth part as annoyed as he pretended to be.

His daughter knew as much. “Will you let me drive your new motorcar, Papa?” she asked.

“What’s this?” Now Galtier’s surprise was genuine. “How is it that you, a girl, a woman”—he added that last with the air of a man granting a great concession—“can drive a motorcar?”

“Leonard showed me, Papa,” Nicole answered, very much a woman and very much a woman of the new century. “It isn’t very hard. I’ve driven our Ford any number of times. It’s a handy thing to know, don’t you think?”

“What if you have a puncture, and your husband is not there?” Lucien asked.

“I fix it,” she answered calmly. “I’ve done it once. It’s a dirty job, and not an easy job, but I know I can do it again.”

“Do you?” Galtier muttered. Nicole hadn’t yet mentioned her driving to Marie or to Denise. He knew that for a fact. If she had, his wife and his next eldest daughter would have been nagging him to learn to drive, too. With Charles and Georges always wanting to go courting or just gallivanting around in the machine, where would he ever find time to use it himself if his womenfolk were taking it, too?

“Yes, I do.” Nicole answered the question he hadn’t quite aimed at her, and answered it with arrogant confidence a man might have envied. “And so, may I drive your automobile?”

Thus directly confronted, Lucien found no choice but to yield. “Very well,” he said, “but I will thank you to be careful of the delicate machine—and of your delicate father as well.”

Nicole laughed, for all the world as if he’d been joking. She reached down and took little Lucien’s hand; evidently, she was not afraid to trust his life to what she knew behind the steering wheel. Galtier’s heart had not pounded so since the war crossed the St. Lawrence. Nonetheless, he led her to his mechanical pride and joy.

She slid into the driver’s seat, but then stopped in consternation. “Everything is different, Papa!” she exclaimed. “On the Ford, the spark knob is on the left side of the steering column, the throttle on the right. I have a lever on the floor to my left for the emergency brake and clutch release and the pedals on the floor seem different from these, too. On the Ford, they are the high- and low-speed clutch, the reverse pedal, and the foot brake.”

“Here, they are the clutch, the brake, and the gas pedal,” Galtier said gravely. “And this lever here shifts the gears. I did not know motorcars were so different, one from another. I do not think you had better drive the Chevrolet after all.”

“I don’t, either.” Nicole looked so unhappy, he reached out and touched her hand. She went on, “Leonard told me Fords were—
eccentric
was the word he used. I did not know how eccentric they were.” She brightened. “You must teach me to drive this motorcar, too, so I will be able to use whatever sort there is. I already know how to steer; everything else should be easy enough.”

“Should it?” Galtier said. He still found it hard himself; he hadn’t got used to it, as he had to managing a horse. But Nicole seemed to have been driving longer than he had. He wondered why she hadn’t told him. She probably hadn’t wanted him to feel bad when he had no automobile of his own. Maybe she also hadn’t wanted him to know she could do anything so unladylike.

They traded places in the Chevrolet; Nicole took charge of little Lucien. Galtier started the motorcar and bounced it down off the curb and onto the street. “Tell me what you are doing while you do it,” Nicole said. She was trying to watch his hand on the gearshift and his feet on the pedals at the same time.

Galtier did explain as he drove. He thought he might have trouble doing that, but he didn’t. He’d learned so recently, everything was still fresh in his mind, and came bubbling forth like a spring from out of the ground. After a while, he said, “You will want to try for yourself, eh?”

“Of course,” Nicole replied.

And it was indeed
of course
; Galtier would have been astonished to hear any other answer. He said, “In that case, I will drive out of town before I let you back behind the wheel. Better you should learn where there are fewer targets.”

“The idea, Papa, is to
miss
the other automobiles and the wagons,” Nicole said.

“Oh, yes. I understand. And the people and the walls, also,” Lucien said. “But if you are learning, you do not yet hold the idea firmly in your mind.” He almost ran down a pedestrian, proving he did not yet hold the idea firmly in his mind, either. The man jumped back and to one side, then shouted angrily at him.

Nicole said nothing at all. She would have been bound to when she was living back at the farm.
Has marriage taught her restraint?
Galtier wondered. It hadn’t done any such thing for Marie…or had it? Better not to think about that, perhaps.

Once he got out into the countryside again—not a long drive, Rivière-du-Loup being anything but a metropolis—he stopped the Chevrolet, shut off the engine, and got out. Nicole slid slowly and carefully across the front seat to take her place behind the wheel, then, when he got in on the passenger side, handed him little Lucien, who had fallen asleep in her lap. The boy stirred and muttered, but did not wake.

“Now—to start I have only to press this button?” Nicole said, and hit the starter. Sure enough, the engine awoke. “This is easier than with the Ford. Next, I let out the clutch and put the motorcar in gear.” Nicole stalled a couple of times before she managed to get the automobile moving, and her shift from low to second was abrupt enough to wake up Galtier’s grandson, but Galtier praised her anyhow. Why not? He too had stalled, not long before. And she did know how to steer; once she got going, she piloted the Chevrolet with confidence.

“Very good,” Galtier said after she’d churned up dust along several miles of country road. “You were not fooling me after all. You really can drive.”

“Of course I can,” Nicole said. She was shifting gears a bit more smoothly now, learning to ease off the gas pedal as she came down on the clutch. “And this car is easier in nearly every way than Leonard’s Ford. I see no reason at all why Mama and Denise should not also learn.”