I hurried along the street, the snow crunching beneath my galoshes, anxious to return to my comfortable desk. But when I came around the corner and stepped onto the platform, I forgot about the cold.
A small crowd stood shivering in the clouds of steam gushing from the engine. I said hello to Laura Guthrie, who was dressed to the nines — brilliant lipstick, high heels, and fox-collared coat — but she didn’t even notice me. Her eyes were fixed on her boyfriend’s face as if she were trying to memorize it. Old Mrs. McGill clung tightly to her only grandson. One father whacked his son on the back as if he had something stuck in his throat. Several of my former classmates clowned around, punching each other’s shoulders, pale and feverish with excitement. Their breath was ghostly in the frigid air.
They’re so young. I had heard my mother’s words a dozen times but never truly understood what she meant. I was the same age as these boys, and I was ready to experience life to the fullest. But for an accident of birth, I would be leaving with them.
Yet I couldn’t help thinking that they did look awfully … immature. That boy’s face was so smooth you could tell it had never felt a razor. The one beside him was wearing a baggy uniform whose sleeves fell to his fingertips. I remembered MacTavish’s words: “The army issues their uniforms too damned big because most of them haven’t even finished growing yet!”
I lifted my camera to focus on a young man standing with his mother before I realized that his chin was trembling, and he was wiping his nose with the back of his hand. She handed him a handkerchief. “Blow,” she said, as if he were still a toddler. I lowered my camera and turned away before my own tears began.
“Hey, Charlie, bring me a Jerry’s helmet!” shouted someone in the crowd.
I turned to see Charlie Stewart lumbering up the steps, wearing his old brown plaid jacket with the corduroy collar pulled over his ears, duffel bag in hand. “Charlie! What are you doing here?”
“The same thing as everybody else, Rose.” He spoke in his usual low voice, his eyes on his feet. It had been several years since Charlie looked at me directly. “I’m off to do my bit.”
My jaw dropped. “But … what about the farm?”
“I stayed long enough to finish the fall work. My cousins from town are going to help Dad with the seeding next spring.”
“I’m just, just, flabbergasted, Charlie. I was sure you’d ask for a deferment because you’re an only son.”
“Yeah, I could have done that, but it didn’t feel right. Somebody has to stop the Krauts.” He squinted down the tracks toward the eastern horizon. “Besides, I’ve always wanted to fly.”
I didn’t know what to say. Charlie Stewart, of all people. We had known each other all our lives, built snow forts together, helped each other catch frogs in the slough. After Charlie’s mother died when he was only ten years old, he spent a lot of time at our house. We were playmates until people started pairing us off and I suspected he was getting a crush on me. That was the kiss of death for our friendship.
I gazed at the puffing train while I tried to imagine how Charlie, so bashful and awkward, would fare across the sea, a stranger in a strange land. The poor boy was so clumsy he couldn’t walk through a classroom without crashing into a desk. I couldn’t picture his massive shoulders squeezing into the cockpit of an airplane.
Then I gave myself a mental shake. He should do as well as everyone else. After all, he wasn’t stupid — just the opposite. He finished school with the highest mark in geometry.
I raised my eyes to find him still staring into the distance with an unreadable expression. Then he said a curious thing: “You know, Rose, I’ve never cared much for farming.”
That was all. A gust of icy wind tore across the platform and I held my skirt down, freezing and miserable. The whistle blew and the men began to move toward the train. Behind us, a woman broke into sobs.
“Well, best of luck, Charlie!” I held out my red-mittened hand and he squeezed it so hard that my grandmother’s gold signet ring cut painfully into my little finger. The pain ran up my arm and into my chest.
I felt a sudden sense of loss. For the first time in my life I wasn’t going to have him in my back pocket, my ace in the hole. Now that I might never see him again, I was sorry that I hadn’t been nicer to good old Charlie.
For once, he was looking into my eyes, and I realized that he wanted to kiss me. I hesitated, then stepped forward and lifted my face. Charlie’s big arms came around me in a bear hug that drove the breath out of my ribcage. He gave me a noisy smack on the mouth. His lips were warm in the frosty air.
The whistle blew for the second time, and without another word Charlie bounded up the steps onto the train, hitting his head with a glancing blow on the doorframe. While I waited on the platform with the other women and children and old men, he appeared at the window, his shaggy hair flopping over his forehead and a huge grin on his face.
The last thing I saw as the train chugged away across the endless white prairie was Charlie’s big hand waving goodbye. I ran to the end of the platform and waved back, almost frantically, until the train was out of sight.
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, I joined almost every soul in Touchwood at the cenotaph, observing two minutes of silence while I shivered in my thin stockings. I envied the butcher’s wife, who had the nerve to show up in trousers.
The silence seemed to go on forever. I thought about my Uncle Jack, killed at the Somme before I was born, but oddly enough I didn’t cry. Usually I cried at the drop of a dead leaf. This year I remained dry-eyed, counting on my gloved fingers the number of able-bodied men who were still at home. I felt annoyed that nobody was taking the war very seriously. Farmers and townsfolk alike were so ecstatic about the recent bumper crop that war seemed no more threatening than a black cat running across a distant future.
Nothing much was happening overseas, either. The enemy had advanced as far as the French border before setting up camp. Two rows of steel pins faced each other on our map: the British Expeditionary Force and the German Army in a standoff. No wonder they call it the “Bore War,” I thought. I stamped my feet to keep them from freezing.
At least the women were doing their part. MacTavish still refused to allow me to cover anything except the powder-puff beat, as he called it, but this was a moot point. Women’s work now jammed the home print pages as the good ladies of Touchwood sprang into the war effort with a will.
The Order of the Eastern Star launched a knitting crusade, and my mother taught me how to knit. It was harder than it looked. Either my stitches were so loose they fell off my needles, or so tight that I had to pry them off. I almost gave up, but then I imagined some soldier marching through the snow with purple, swollen feet inside his leather boots, and redoubled my efforts.
The Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire began to collect used clothing and blankets for bombed-out civilians. “Bundles for Britain” read posters on every store window. I ransacked my meagre wardrobe, then climbed into the attic. “I was saving these for my grandchildren,” Mother said when I asked to donate a box of baby clothes. She stroked a tiny crocheted blanket. “I guess I can always make more.”
The Red Cross held regular blood donor clinics. I went down to the Legion hall and gave blood so often that Mother warned me I would become anemic. But I loved lying in the chair with my eyes closed, imagining my life’s blood pouring into the veins of an injured soldier.
Now the silence was broken by the mournful sound of the bugler playing “The Last Post.” My father sniffed and I wondered if he were crying. I slipped my hand into his coat pocket, where he gave it a squeeze.
My jovial father rarely spoke of his years in the trenches or of his only brother.