"Yes, it is so," he told her, and wondered where to go from there. Discovering he had no idea, he kept quiet till he had driven the wagon into the barn. "Go on to the house," he said then. "I'll see to the horse and be in with you in a few minutes."
Brushing down the animal and making sure it had food and water-but not too much of either-was a routine he took for granted. He had heard that rich farmers had motorcars of their own, and tractors and threshers with motors, too. He wondered what they thought of doing without horses. He shrugged. He was not a rich farmer, nor likely to become one.
As he often did, he sighed with pleasure on walking into the farmhouse. Not only was it warm, it was also full of the good smells of cooking. "Is that chicken stew?" he called in the direction of the kitchen.
Marie's voice floated resignedly out: "Yes, Lucien-chicken stew. One day, I swear, I shall buy a zebra or a camel, so I can roast it in the oven and not have you know at first sniff what it is."
"Zebra would probably taste like horse," their son Georges said, and then, exercising his gift for the absurd, "although it could be the meat would have stripes."
"Thank God we have not been hungry enough to have to learn the taste of horse," Lucien said. "Thank Him twice, for the beast we have is so old, he would surely be tough."
Charles said, "I have read in a book on the French Foreign Legion that the roasted hump of a camel is supposed to be a great delicacy."
"Since a man has to be a fool-a brave fool, yes, but a fool-to join the Foreign Legion, I do not think he is to be trusted in matters of taste," Galtier said. "And I do not think a camel would do well in the snow."
"You do not have reason, Papa," Charles said, glad to show off knowledge at his father's expense. "Not only are there camels that live in the desert, there are also others-Bactrians, they are called-that live in cold countries."
"But not in Quebec," Lucien said firmly. He caught the evil gleam in Georges' eye and forestalled him: "Nor, for that matter, have we any great herds of zebras here." Georges pouted; he hated having his father anticipate a joke.
Over the supper table, they talked of camels and zebras and of more practical matters like the price chickens were bringing in Riviere-du-Loup, whether the kerosene ration was likely to be cut again, and what a good bunch of applejack this latest one from their neighbor was. "Warms you better than the fire does," Charles said, sipping the potent, illegal, popular stuff.
And Nicole, as had become her habit, talked about the work she did at the hospital. "The officer had a wounded leg full of pus, and I helped drain it," she said. "I did not do much, of course, as I am so new, but I watched with great care, and I think I will be able to do more next time." Her nose wrinkled. "The smell was bad, but not so bad that I could not stand it."
Susanne screwed up her face into a horrible grimace. "That's disgusting, Nicole," she exclaimed, freighting the word with all the emphasis she could give. The rest of her sisters, older and younger, nodded vehemently.
Gently, Marie said, "Perhaps not at supper, Nicole."
"It is my work," Nicole said, sounding as angry as Lucien had ever heard her. "We all talk about what we do in the day. Am I to wear a muzzle because I do not do what everyone else does?" She got up and hurried away from the table.
Lucien stared after her. When he had hesitated over letting her take the job at the hospital, it had been because he feared and disliked the company into which she would be thrown there. He had never thought that, simply by virtue of doing different things from the rest of the family, she might become sundered from it-and might want to become sundered from it.
He knocked back his little glass of applejack and poured it full again. The problems he had expected with Nicole's job had for the most part not arisen. The problems he had not expected…"Life is never simple," he declared. Maybe it was the applejack, but he had the feeling of having said something truly profound.
"Gas shells," Jake Featherston said enthusiastically. "Isn't that fine? The damnyankees have been doing it to our boys, and now we get to do it right back."
Michael Scott grinned at him. "Chokes me up just thinkin' about it, Sarge," he said, and did an alarmingly realistic impression of a man trying to cough chlorine-fried lungs right out of his chest. After the laughter at the gallows humor subsided, he went on, "When they going to have 'em for the big guns?"
"God knows," Jake said, rolling his eyes. "Best I can tell, we got our factories stretched like a rubber band that's about to break and hit you a lick between the eyes. There's a war on, case you haven't noticed, so they got to make more stuff than they ever reckoned they could. They got to do that with most of the men who were workin' in 'em before totin' guns now. And they got to do it with half the niggers, maybe, up in arms instead of doin' the jobs they're supposed to be doin'. Damn lucky the Yankees ain't ridden roughshod over us."
That produced a gloomy silence. It also produced several worried looks toward the north. The first U.S. attacks after the Red uprising had been beaten back, and the damnyankees, as if taken by surprise that they hadn't easily overwhelmed the Confederates, seemed to have paused to think things over. Signs were, though, that they were building up to try something new. Whenever the weather was decent, U.S. aeroplanes buzzed over the Confederate lines, spying out whatever they could. Confederate reconnaissance reported more activity than usual in the Yankee trenches.
Featherston added one thing more, the artilleryman's tipoff: "Their guns been firing a lot of registration shots lately." When a few shells came over, falling around important targets, you started worrying. That usually meant the other side's artillery was taking exact ranges. Before too long, a lot more than a few shells would be dropping thereabouts.
"Sarge, we got these gas shells to go with the rest of what we shoot," Michael Scott said. He glanced around. Nobody was in earshot of the gun crew. Even so, he lowered his voice: "With things like they are with Captain Stuart and all, we gonna be able to get enough of 'em to shoot to do any good?"
"That's a damn fine question," Jake told him. "Wish to Jesus I had me a damn fine answer for it. Way things used to be, we had shells the way a fellow been eatin' green apples gets the runs-they were just fallin' out of our ass, on account of Jeb Stuart III was Jeb Stuart III, and that was plenty to get him everything he wanted. Nowadays…" He sighed. "Nowadays I reckon I'd sooner have me Captain Joe Doakes in charge of the battery, or somebody else no one ever heard of. We might not get a whole raft o' shells, but we wouldn't get shortchanged, neither. And I got the bad feeling we're gonna be from here on out."
Everybody in the gun crew sighed. Jeb Stuart III wasn't Richmond's fair-haired boy any more. Now he was under a dark cloud, and that meant the whole battery had to go around carrying lanterns. Sooner or later, Stuart would pay the price for not having kept a better eye on Pompey. Trouble was, the rest of the battery would pay it along with him.
Featherston filled his coffee cup from the pot above the cook-fire. The coffee was hot and strong. Once you'd said those two things, you'd said everything good about it you could. Nothing was as good as it had been before the Negroes rose up against their white superiors, not the chow, not the coffee, not anything.