Curtis looked thoughtfully at him. "I've been talking with Mary about whether I should enlist."
Fritzi, alarmed, looked at Mary. "What did you tell him?" She met her father's gaze. "That it's up to him."
"What about the little one?"
"It will be all right. And so will Curtis."
Her father grunted. "Bullets and shells do not select their victims. If someone is in their way, the person is dead." He turned to Klara. "Talk sense to them, Mama!"
The old woman's jaw clenched. She too met her son's gaze. "If Curtis wants to go, he should. If Hitler and those Japaner win the war, we will learn how bad things can be, even here."
Snorting, Fritzi put down his knife and fork. "They can never win. We are too much for them here."
Klara sat taller, straighter, more stem. "They will win if we do not do what we can. And if Mary wants to go to work at Saari's, making-whatever it is they make there, I can cook. I can even keep house; a little dust never hurt anything." Curtis grinned in spite of himself. For years Klara had made war on dust, even when she had to wage it by proxy. So much for the unchangeable."
Fritzi subsided. It hadn't occurred to him that his mother would side against him. Now it seemed to him that if Curtis hadn't already made up his mind, Klara's declaration might well make the difference.
That night Curtis and Mary lay in bed listening to a cold winter rain beat on the porch roof beneath their window They'd just agreed-Curtis would go. Not in the Maritime Service or Navy-he'd said that in battle he'd feel trapped on a ship at sea-but in the Army. Now she reached, took his hand in her's.
"But you'll wait till the baby's born? It will only be a couple of months."
He raised himself on an elbow and kissed her. "Of course I will. Unless the draft takes me."
"And long enough afterward that you can make love to me again. I know it's selfish of me, but I'm going to miss you terribly, especially lying here alone when you're far away."
He kissed her again, then they both lay staring at the ceiling, each with their own thoughts. The last time he'd seen Axel Severtson, the logger had reminisced on their first meeting, then added, "You know, you ain't changed any at all. Vhen you first come here, you looked like a big kid, a big strong kid vhat had got his nose broke somevhere, and vhen I stop to really look, you look yust as young now." He'd laughed. "Maybe you been drinking from that fountain of youth. Vhat vill you charge to get me a bottle?"
And at work, Lute Halvoy had commented, "Macurdy, you better start showing your age, or people will think you're a draft dodger."
How long, he wondered, did they have, he and Mary, before they had to go somewhere else? Before people really began to wonder? Mary understood, of course. Sometimes when she looked thoughtfully and a bit wistfully at him, it seemed to him she was thinking about a future when she was old and he was "still young." Eight years ago it hadn't seemed fully real. Now it had begun to.
Sometimes he wondered if he'd done her wrong by marrying her. Once he'd even wondered out loud. "If you'll remember," she'd answered, "I was the one who proposed. And if you're still young when I'm old and dried up, it's you who's likely to regret." She'd paused. "I read that in China, a wife who's gotten old will sometimes select a ripe young girl and bring her home, to help around the house and keep her husband company in bed. I might not want one in the house with me, but if you were seeing a girlfriend now and then, I'd understand. When I'm old."
He'd closed her lips with a kiss. "Don't say such things," he'd whispered.
The love behind her saying it should have touched him, warmed him. Instead, her words had been like a large stone on his chest, and when he remembered them, they still were.
Three days later, Mary miscarried.
Dr. Wesley didn't show the seven-month fetus to the parents, though he would have if they'd insisted. He told Curtis it would never have been remotely normal; that they, and it, were lucky it was stillborn. "I'm surprised she hadn't miscarried a lot earlier," he said. "I suspect it lived as long as it did because your wife was so determined to have a child."
She'd probably have three or four of them by now, Macurdy thought, if she had a normal husband.
That night, for the first time since he'd returned home to Farside, to the United States of America, he dreamed of Melody. The details were as clear and normal as in his recurring dreams with Varia, but the setting was different. Instead of a gazebo beside a sea, they met in something that reminded him of pictures he'd seen of the Jefferson Monument, though much smaller, and she wore a flowing robe of what seemed to be silk.
Afterward he didn't remember much she'd said in the dream, but he remembered her last words the rest of his life. "Curtis, your Mary loves you deeply and selflessly. Accept her love as offered, and don't ever imagine you're not deserving. She's much happier for having married you."
He wished afterward that he'd made love with Melody before he awoke, as he did in his dreams with Varia. Probably, he decided, the souls in heaven didn't have sex, even in dreams.
In mid-February, Macurdy enlisted. He told himself it wasn't a matter of wanting to, but of patriotism. But in fact, once he'd signed up, he felt a focus he hadn't felt since the end of his war with the Ylver.
Three weeks later he was on a train, enroute to infantry training at Camp Joseph T. Robinson, Arkansas.
He knew this would change his life, but he hadn't a notion how greatly, how powerfully. Or how well he'd prepared for it.
PART TWO
Airborne!
11
Infantry Training
The Camp Robinson military reservation seemed big as a county. Its red-clay hills were covered mostly with scrub oak. The more moderate terrain had mixed woods of larger trees, laced with creeks and interspersed with abandoned fields. Part of the camp itself had new, cream-colored frame buildings, but most of the trainees lived in squad tents boasting wooden floors and a small round sheet metal stove. It was the second week in March, and winter had launched a counteroffensive against encroaching spring. The tent sides were tightly secured to keep out the wind, rain, sleet and snow.
At the end of each row of tents was a coal bin from which they took their fuel. The real problem was lighting it. Even with the draft and damper closed, fire in the little knee-high stove burned out in a few hours and had to be restarted, which was hard to do without wood for kindling. And usually there was no wood. The men did the best they could, using cookie cartons, newspapers, and lighter fluid. A few of the more adventurous foraged in the night, hunting for kindling in the bins of other companies. On the third night, four men from Company B were caught stealing wood from the fuel bin at D Company's messhall, and the resulting fight sent three of them to the dispensary with minor injuries, notably split lips.
In the nine years since returning from Yuulith, Macurdy had mostly avoided showing his powers. Except for that night in the jungle outside Miles City, he'd let no one but Mary see him use magic to light a fire. On Macurdy's fourth morning in 2nd Squad, 2nd Platoon of Company B, and with the grass crisp and white with frost, the stove was out as usual. While several other trainees looked on, he knelt before it. Poking a finger through the opened draft, he drew on the Web of the World and directed a thin stream of white hot plasma into the coal. None of them could see what he did, but within seconds they could hear the fire, and stood variously gawping or frowning. Then one asked, "How the hell did you do that?"