More shells rained down. He wouldn't have done an infantryman's job for a million dollars. If there were any heroes in the war, the foot sloggers were the ones. They laughed when he said so.
"This is a letter from your father," Sylvia Enos said to George, Jr., and Mary Jane. "See how it says NAVAL POST on the envelope by the stamp?" George, Jr., nodded impatiently. He knew his ABCs, and he could read a few words. To Mary Jane, the rubber-stamped phrase didn't mean anything.
Sylvia opened the envelope and took out the letter. She read aloud in a portentous tone: "'Dear Sylvia'-that's me-'I hope you and the children are well. I am fine here. We have done some fighting on the river. I came through it fine and so did the ship. We hit the enemy and he did not hit us.'"
"Boom!" George, Jr., yelled, as if he were a shell going off. Then, as best he could on the floor of the front room, he imitated a stricken warship capsizing and sinking, finishing the performance with a loud, "Glub, glub, glub!"
Mary Jane thought that was very funny. So did Sylvia, till it crossed her mind that the Punishment could have been the vessel going to the bottom as easily as its foe. "Do you want to hear the rest of the letter?" she asked, more sharply than she'd intended. She wanted to finish it; George didn't write so often as she wished he would. With a touch of guilt, she realized her own letters were also fewer and further between than they should have been.
"Yes, Mama," George, Jr., said, Mary Jane chiming in with, "Rest of letter!"
"'I miss all of you and I wish I could come back to Boston,'" she resumed. "'Here in the middle of the country you cannot get any fish that is very good. The cooks do up catfish we catch in the river but no matter what you do to it it still tastes like mud.'"
"Yuck!" George, Jr., exclaimed. Mary Jane stuck out her tongue.
"'I love all of you and hope I will get some leave one day before too long,'" Sylvia finished. "'Tell the children to be good. I bet they are getting as big as can be. Your husband, George.'"
"George," Mary Jane said in tones of wonder. She pointed to her brother. "George."
"That's right," Sylvia said. "George, Jr., is named after his papa-your papa, too, you know."
"Papa." Mary Jane dutifully repeated the word and nodded, but she didn't sound convinced. She hadn't seen her father for months. Sylvia wondered if she remembered him. She said she did, but then she said all sorts of things that had only the vaguest connection with reality. Seeing her, remembering George, Jr., at the same age, Sylvia was convinced two-year-olds lived in a very strange world. She wondered if she'd been like that at the same age. She probably had.
George, Jr., asked, "Will Papa ever come home before the war ends and we've beaten the Rebs all up?"
Where does he hear such things? Sylvia wondered. At home, she didn't talk much about the war. That left Brigid Coneval and the other children she watched. Sylvia shrugged. She supposed war needed hate, but wished it didn't. The question deserved an answer, though, no matter how it was framed. She said, "When Papa talked about getting leave in his letter, that meant he hoped he could come for a visit before he had to go back to his ship."
"Oh," her son said seriously. "Well, I hope he can, too."
"I'll get supper going now, and then we'll wash you two and put you to bed," Sylvia said. That drew mixed responses. Her children were hungry, but unenthusiastic about baths and even more unenthusiastic about bedtime. She told them, "If you eat all your supper up and you're good in the bathtub, maybe you can play for a little while afterwards."
They wolfed down fried halibut and potatoes, they didn't do anything too outrageous when she took them out of the apartment and down the hall to the bathroom at the end (a good thing, too, with her carrying hot water to mix with the cold), and they didn't splash up the place too badly. She brought them back swaddled in towels, and changed George, Jr., into pajamas (which made him look very grown-up) and Mary Jane into her nightgown.
George, Jr., played with toy soldiers, the U.S. troops storming trench after Confederate trench. Sylvia wished it were really so easy. Mary Jane gave her doll a bottle, then climbed up into Sylvia's lap and fell asleep there. Not even the bloodcurdling explosions her brother kept producing did anything to stir her.
Maybe so much warmaking had worn out George, Jr., too, for he didn't put up his usual complaints about going to bed. That left Sylvia the only one awake in the apartment, which seemed, as it often did at such times, too big and too quiet.
"I should write to George," she said. She found paper and a pen soon enough, but the bottle of ink had escaped. She finally came upon it lurking in her sewing box. "I didn't put it there," she declared, and wondered which of her offspring had. Mary Jane would say no to everything on general principles, and George, Jr., knew better than to admit to anything that would get him spanked.
Dear George, Sylvia wrote, I got your letter. It was good to hear from you. I am glad you are well and safe. I saw Charlie White's wife on T Wharf and she says he is out to sea on a cruiser. They will have good food on that ship. Despite his name, Charlie was black, not white, and had been the cook on the Ripple. Reinking her pen, she went on, I am well. The children are well. We all hope you do get leave so we can see you. We miss you. I love you. Sylvia.
When she was done, she read the letter over. It seemed so flat and empty. She wished she were a better writer, to be able to say all the things she wanted to say, all the things that really mattered. Maybe she could have done that if she'd had more schooling. As things were…it would have to do. More searching scared an envelope out of cover. Seaman George Enos, she wrote on it. U.S. Navy. Central River Command. St. Louis, Mo. She went on one more scouting expedition, this time through her handbag in search of a stamp. She found one, stuck it on the envelope, and put the letter in the handbag so she could mail it in the morning.
In the chaos of getting the children ready and over to Mrs. Coneval's and then of getting herself off to work, she forgot about the letter. She remembered only when her machine stuck the first label on a can of mackerel. Can after can followed that first one. She had to pull three levers for each can, keep the machine full of labels and paste, and clear the feeding mechanism when it jammed, as it did every so often.
After a while, she noticed Isabella Antonelli wasn't at the machine next to hers. The foreman, Mr. Winter, was running it instead. Mr. Winter was fat and fifty-five and walked with a limp from a wound he'd got in the Second Mexican War. The Army didn't want him, which made him a godsend for the canning plant.
When she asked him where her friend was, she thought for a moment he hadn't heard her over the rattle of the lines that sent the cans moving from one station to the next. Then he said, "She called on the telephone this morning. Western Union visited her last night."
"Oh, God," Sylvia said. Isabella Antonelli's husband had been a fisherman on a little boat that operated out of T Wharf. Then the Army had taken him and sent him off to Quebec. The newspapers did their best to be optimistic about the fighting north of the St. Lawrence, but their best wasn't all that good. The going was hard up there, and bad weather liable to last till May.
Mr. Winter nodded. He was bald, with a fringe of gray hair above his ears; the lights shone off his smooth pate. "She'll be out a few days, I'm afraid," he said. "They'll put a temporary on the machine here tomorrow, I expect, till she can come back."
Sylvia nodded, too, hiding a flash of fury frightening in its fierceness. Yes, Mr. Winter was a godsend for the canning plant, all right. He thought of getting the mackerel out before he worried about the people who got it out. Keep the machines running, no matter what, she thought. Antonelli was one more line in the casualty lists? So what?