Grantville Gazette-Volume XV

  Pam shook her head. "Tina had a right to live in Fred Logsden's house, just like Susan does. He was their grandpa. He left it to them. But if I went over and moved in there with Susan, you know as well as I do that Mom would be down at the probate court the next day saying that I was battening on her and trying to get my hands on my sister's inheritance. No way. I'm staying at my apartment and Cory Joe is bunking on my couch while he's here."

  Ben Hardesty nodded slowly.

  "Then who is staying with you, Susan?" Aunt Betty asked.

  "I'm by myself."

  Betty opened her mouth again.

  "And I'm not going home with you, in case you were thinking of saying that, Aunt Betty, just so all your church lady friends can tell you how kind it is of you to take in your sister Velma's obnoxious kid." Susan looked around the table defiantly. "I've been at the house by myself ever since the night Tina drowned. I've already been down to Judge Tito and petitioned to become an emancipated minor. I'm as old as Tina was when she did that. Mom isn't going to get her hands on me again."

  She sank down between Pam and Cory Joe again. What right did she have to hate Aunt Betty for despising Velma and not having anything to do with her? She despised Velma herself and didn't want anything to do with her.

  Maybe she was exactly like Aunt Betty.

  And that would be the worst thing in the world.

  She lifted her chin. "I'm okay by myself at Grandpa Fred's house. Everybody understands that, right? I'm okay. Don't be trying to mess up Pam's life, Aunt Betty. She's done fine on her own, since she walked out on Mom, and I will, too. Neither one of us needs for you to be trying to push her into taking care of me now that Tina's gone."

  Ben Hardesty sighed.

  June 1634

  Veda Mae Haggerty was heading for the afternoon shift. If she had to face one more bit of good cheer, she thought that she would chuck everything. Lettie Sebastian had talked her into dropping off snacks for the Methodist Vacation Bible School. There must have been two hundred kids noisily singing

  Adam, Adam, can you tell me,

  How was life in paradise?

  God provided all we needed.

  While it lasted, it was nice!

  She had been inclined to tell them to stuff it.

  Stinking Ring of Fire. Up-time had been nice. Nicer, at least. While it lasted. Work all your life. Go back and take classes in office management after your kids are grown. Get a decent job, even if you do have to commute for forty-five minutes, winter and summer, rain or shine. Expect to retire on Social Security, enough to see you through, if you can just make it to sixty-five.

  Flash of lighting and bam! There won't be any Social Security, any more. Go back to work, Veda Mae. You're healthy. No, nobody needs you in an office. You can go out into the fields and harvest chick peas this summer. Or be a CNA again; that's what you did before you took those classes. Go back to what you did before you went to school. The Assisted Living Center needs you. After all, you're only sixty-four years old, here in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. Turn patients, deal with incontinence. Oh, yeaaay, now you get to deal with it without disposable diapers. Hoist them up into their chairs. Let's all pull together and make a brave new world.

  Three years later, now, she was sixty-seven, and she was still emptying bedpans.

  Gag me. Yep. While the twentieth century lasted, it had been nice. At least by comparison with the seventeenth.

  Magnificent seventeenth-century victory. Hah! Gustavus Adolphus triumphant. Congress of Copenhagen. Newspapers all over the "exciting" seventeenth-century betrothal of Princess Kristina to some Danish prince. The kid was what? Seven years old? Younger than a lot of the ones sitting over at the Methodist church, singing. What were the odds that she'd actually marry this fellow some day? Low, probably. Stupid newspapers.

  Then her daughter-in-law Laurie had decided that she wanted to go to nursing school. Well, Veda Mae had let Gary know just exactly what she thought of that. What was a mother for, if not to advise her son? Anybody who wanted to go into nursing was a fool; he should put his foot down. So he put his foot down. Laurie divorced him. Now he was a two-time loser, some people said, but it was still better than having Laurie go back to school and get degrees where she would have been so far above him.

  She might have been better off herself, when she decided to go back and take that business course, if John had just put his foot down in the beginning, instead of saying that it was okay and then making her life miserable about "uppity women" for the next twenty years. But he'd died just over a year after it happened. She didn't miss him, much. His emphysema had been too bad for him to go back to work and the Ring of Fire had taken away his miner's pension and health benefits, so she'd been stuck supporting him, too.

  But that Laurie! Worse than Jennifer, and Jennifer had been bad enough as a daughter-in-law, and then got herself left up-time, so Gary had to take their kids in again. Jennifer was probably living in Fairmont, flirting with rich guests at that motel where she worked. While Marcie was at the school, spending her days teaching English to Kraut kids and Blake was training to be a policeman, working with a Kraut partner. Having the gall to tell their own grandma not to be prejudiced!

  But at least she'd told Gary to put his foot down when Laurie wanted to take up nursing. A wife shouldn't get above her husband and Gary was a dropout. Which she wasn't going to let him forget. Even Vivian had gone back and gotten her GED, as dumb as she was. Well, not dumb, maybe, but Viv was never going to set the world on fire, if it was her own mother who said so.

  And Glenna, the best of the three kids, with a decent job as a telephone lineman, had been killed by the damned Krauts. They cut her head off. People had tried to tell Veda Mae that they were something else, called Croats, who had raided the town that day, but she knew better. They'd been Krauts when her father fought them back in World War II, and they were still Krauts. Not that Glenna had been perfect either, marrying that Catholic boy. But Veda Mae had put a stop to that—not to the marriage, but she'd managed to raise enough of a ruckus that he stopped going to church and didn't make Glenna have their kids baptized in it, either. She'd heard what went on in those convents! Her grandma had a book—the liveliest book she'd ever read, back when she was twelve. She would never have dreamed. . . .

  No way was Veda Mae going to learn Kraut. Not a word of it. She hadn't liked it at all when they started admitting Krauts to the assisted living center. Since they were there, if they wanted something from her, they could speak English.

  Well, after she dropped off the snacks at the church, she'd picked up this week's newspaper. The Times, not that Kraut rag, the Free Press. Even so, half the news items were about Krauts. And one about Cameron. Laurie's son. Assigned to the personal staff of Colonel Jackson, up in Magdeburg. At least, they'd demoted him. "General"—now that had been a laugh. She'd known Frank Jackson since the day that he was born. He'd been a sergeant, back in Viet Nam. If he was qualified to be a general, even if just of Grantville, Veda Mae was the Queen of Sheba. Thank God there weren't any Japs in town. Just that one little Vietnamese slant-eyed woman, who General (HA!) Frank Jackson married. And everyone knows she was a whore anyway. Little slant doesn't deserve even a faker like Frank Jackson after all. Couldn't she find some little slant guy of her own? Had to steal one of ours.

  And a few Chinks, full of college degrees. And Johnnie F. Haun's little adopted slant from Korea. The town was turning into the pits even before the Ring of Fire happened.

  Cameron. Damned little bastard upstart. Literally a bastard upstart. When Gary married Laurie, he'd made noises about adopting the boy. She'd put a stop to that, quick enough. Bad enough that Gary had paid for the kid's food and provided him with a bed for fifteen years, just to have Laurie divorce him once her charming little woods colt was out of high school.

  It was enough to make a person sick. She couldn't call in sick for her shift, though. Someone was bound to have seen her dropping those blasted snacks off at the ch
urch. Keeping up a good front and all that—people said it was just wonderful, the way that Veda Mae was bearing up since Glenna Sue drowned at the graduation party. Nearly half the kids at that quarry had been Krauts. Who was to say that one of them hadn't had something to do with it. And the police covering it up—they made up more than half the force, now.

  If she wasn't a Methodist, she would cuss them all.

  John's will had been a slap in the face to her. Leaving a full child's share to Glenna's widower, Ronnie Bawiec, just like the girl was still alive. Veda Mae had gone right down to the Probate Court and filed a challenge to the will. The old coot must have been out of his mind. Oxygen deprivation from the emphysema, or something. Ronnie and Glenna's kids had been left back home; he could just take his share and marry some Kraut, have more children. If Lucille Cochran let that will through probate, she didn't deserve the title of probate judge. Not that she did anyway. She'd been nothing but an assistant clerk in the county probate office before this happened. She was a probate judge like Frank Jackson was a general. Not.

  "Hi, Veda Mae."

  Ardis Carpenter, blast her hide. Why did Gary have to go into partnership with Duck and Big Dog? Not that Garbage Guys weren't doing well, as a business. All three of them were making more money than they'd ever hoped to see, now that Duck and Big Dog had decided to go straight. Or, probably, sort of wavy, but not as crooked as they'd been before. They still took the chances that came their way, but they didn't go looking for them, any more.

  They'd gotten Ardis a house, now. Down-time construction; up-time houses that came on the market were bringing more than they could afford. But compared to the shacks that Ardis had lived in most of the time her kids were growing up, they'd dropped her in the lap of luxury. With a Kraut woman coming in once a week to clean it up. Protecting their investment, probably. They'd kept the title in their own names and just given Ardis the use of the house. If they gave it to her, it would be gone—some smooth talker would con her out of it in no time.

  Which would be no more than she deserved, the stupid, feckless, welfare queen, bringing up her kids on the taxes the government squeezed out of people who worked.

  She needed coffee. She turned into Cora's. Half-full of Krauts. She backed out again, without ordering. She'd get some from the kitchen at the center. She bumped into Henry Dreeson, who was coming in. Knocked his cane out from under him. Well, she wasn't about to pick it up. Marrying a Kraut woman and still claiming to be the mayor of a decent American town. And now she had taken off on some damn fool errand having to with her first husband and left the old goat to take care of her whorish granddaughter's crew of orphans. Served the old goat right.

  Letting them run schools. Bad enough to let them into the Grantville schools, without letting them run their own. Not just Dreeson's wife. There was a whole Kraut school out there, now, just beyond where the highway ended. Using the Kraut language. Teaching un-Americanism, probably. And another one going up on the other side of town.

  "Good morning, Mrs. Haggerty."

  Another Garbage Guy, a foreigner. Jacques-Pierre, his name was. Not a Kraut, though, so she waved back. He did the route with Gary, sometimes. A Frenchie, but spoke English. He'd spent time in London, growing up, when the Catholics made it hot for his family in France.

  Sometimes it seemed that of all the people in Grantville, he was the only one who understood how Veda Mae felt about things. She was happy to be able to answer his questions—make him understand how things really were, these days, here in Grantville. Tell him about how her niece Kimberly was married to Andy Yost who was in bed with those Committees of Correspondence Krauts—Commies for a sure thing. And her cousin Nat making all those machines and things for the Stearns regime—Commies too, all of 'em.

  She made it to work on time.

  * * *

  "I've never been so humiliated," Velma Hardesty unwrapped the silverware from the cloth napkin and slammed it down on the table. "In public. Just last week. My own father treated me like I was some kind of tramp. Someone to be ashamed of. At my own daughter's funeral. I'm not going to stand for it. And the kids, too."

  Veda Mae Haggerty nodded. "Yes."

  "I won't let those little bastards get away with it."

  Too good to pass. "Actually," Veda Mae said in a precise voice, "only Pam is a bastard. You were married to Cory Joe's father when you had him. And to Tina and Susan's father, when you had them."

  Velma was so focused on her own injustices that she hadn't even been listening, Veda Mae noticed with regret.

  "What gave him the right?"

  "He didn't have any right, Velma. You're the mother. He's just a grandparent." Not, of course, that a mother necessarily knew better than a grandparent, Veda Mae thought. Take her ex-daughter-in-law Laurie, for example . . .

  The waitress took their order before she could even verbalize a complaint, which didn't improve her mood.

  Of course, they were at the hotel. The reopened and renamed Willard, right downtown, not Delia Higgins' pretentious new one. Neither of them was any longer welcome at Cora's, where the food was both better and cheaper. However, there were advantages. Willard Carson kept an eye out to see that his old friends were taken care of properly. It wasn't fair, Veda Mae thought, after he'd invested all that money, that Delia Higgins had opened a brand new one and would probably tempt away a lot of the high-end trade. It wasn't as if Delia needed the money. And Ramona married to that Kraut from Badenburg.

  She found some mild comfort in thinking that Delia had a daughter who was no more satisfactory than Viv. Though why Ramona should get a rich husband while Viv had to make do with a glorified gardener—no matter what you called teaching ag at the VoTech school, that's what Alden Williams was—and Viv had always behaved herself, while Ramona had that little bastard. . . . God didn't play fair. At least not on Earth.

  "I think," Velma was saying solemnly, "that it was Meant. That you should be there to see it. To see how they treated me." She paused for a bite of her lunch. Fish sandwich on rye. Ugh.

  "Meant?"

  "Yes. By the Stars. You are Veda and I am Velma. Although you were born with a different surname, you were Guided to marry John Haggerty. So now you are Haggerty and I am Hardesty. It was the intent of Fate that our Paths Should Come Together. It's very Symbolic that you were at the funeral, too."

  Veda Mae was not so sure about that. Symbolic, that was.

  She'd been at the funeral because the other girl who died in the swimming accident at the quarry was her own granddaughter, which appeared to have slipped Velma's mind. Velma Hardesty was a trashy piece of work—always had been and probably always would be. Presbyterians weren't supposed to rattle on about things that were Meant by the Stars. That was astrology. Superstition. Not that Velma was in good standing at the Presbyterian church. Unlike Veda Mae, who was quite conscientious about being Methodist, although she sometimes doubted that the Reverends Jones appreciated that. Reverends—Mary Ellen, female minister. Veda Mae only took communion when the Reverend Simon had the service.

  But Velma was right about one thing—it had been nasty of Ben to toss her out of her own daughter's funeral. No matter what else you could say about what Velma had been wearing, at least, spandex and all, at least it had been black. A lot of people didn't even bother to wear black to funerals, these days. Why right in her own family, for Glenna Sue's funeral, Laurie herself—Glenna Sue's own mother—hadn't bothered to wear black. Just a plain navy blue dress. Marcie had worn a white blouse and a tan skirt—and when Veda had told her that it wasn't suitable, said, "Put it aside, Grannie. Just for one day. Save it for another day. Just once." Then she had changed places, to the other side of Gary.

  When Gary had come to pick her up, he had been wearing a tie, but no jacket. She had made him put on one of John's old sport coats. It didn't fit him very well, but respect for the dead was respect for the dead.

  She had worn black to Glenna Sue's funeral. She had worn that dress to every funeral
she had attended for the past twenty-five years. She kept it in a plastic zipper bag from the cleaner's, just for that. You needed to pay your due respects to the dead. No matter what you had thought of them when they were alive. Like Glenna Sue dancing with those pansies in Bitty Matowski's ballet. And Laurie encouraging it.

  She started to say, "And I told Ben Hardesty . . ." but Velma interrupted.

  Not that Velma was wearing black this morning. Veda Mae thought that the other woman was getting a bit long in the tooth for bare-midriff styles; she'd definitely been letting herself go the last couple of years. The belly was distinctly pudgy, and there were love handles hanging over the low-slung Capri pants. Velma was waving one hand and proclaiming, "There has to be something that I can do about it." She ran her hand through her hennaed hair.

  Veda Mae remembered that the hair had been bleached blond before the Ring of Fire. She also remembered Velma's first experiment with a down-time bleach concoction after the Grantville salons ran out of supplies. It had made Velma's hair so brittle that the first time she put her curling iron to it afterwards, a lot of it broke off, all uneven. Veda Mae had seen the results. She smiled briefly at the recollection. Then, somewhere, Ken Beasley's wife Kim had gotten a supply of henna. Veda Mae hadn't wanted Kim to use Kraut stuff on her hair, but she didn't want gray hair, either. Kim said that it came from Venice. Veda Mae couldn't see that Eyetalian goop was much better than Kraut goop, but she'd let Kim use it. She sneaked a glance in the mirror. It looked pretty good. Actually, it looked better on her than it did on Velma; the reddish color clashed pretty bad with Velma's complexion.

  Velma had kept right on talking. ". . . and the judge, and the juvenile officer, and all of them," she wound up.

  Veda Mae leaned forward. "It's a conspiracy. Listen, Velma. I know this guy, Jacques-Pierre Dumais. He works with Gary. He's a foreigner, but he understands what we're all being put through by Mike Stearns and his cronies. I know that Stearns is your cousin, but if some of the other UMWA men like my husband John had taken a stronger stand when all this started, they could have kept him from taking over. The way he makes up to the Krauts is disgusting. It really is. Putting Grantville under this Kraut, first as Captain-General and now as Emperor. As if anyone thinks this USE will last. Talk about jerry-built. People must have been crazy to adopt that sick excuse for a constitution."