Maclean Read Free

and a round face set in an expression of perpetual concern lest something she could do to help might slip by undone. Her plump barrel of a body was mounted on short, plump legs, and even crossing a room, she gave an impression of furious activity as if she were struggling to walk fast up a steep bank.
    When she was a young woman, sometime just after the Great War, she had had a baby which she had had no husband for and which had died after only a few weeks. A blessing, everyone said, but Miss Audrey hadn’t thought so, and she had tried to kill herself by drinking something. Over the years, there had been much witty, sometimes blasphemous, speculation about who the father might be, but she never said, and no one ever knew. Now she was beginning to seem a little odd, maybe because of all that, maybe just because of her time of life.
    She always addressed Maclean as “Mr. Maclean,” and he wondered sometimes whether some of the sweet of Sweet Audrey might not be directed at him. He had even wondered once or twice late at night, when the rigid bonds of the daylight world had loosened a little, whether the two of them might not do worse than set up together.
    There flickered momentarily into his mind the remembrance of a great wall of lighted windows, a courtyard with some kind of monument in the middle like a melted candle. Masses of people, soldiers, civilians, tremendous noise, talk, shouts, engines, a line of parked ambulances with red crosses on the sides and roofs. A faint mist of rain. And a girl in the shadows just inside the archway saying to him in a low voice as he went past towards the station, “A little comfort, soldier, before you go back over there?”
    Seated in one of the wicker chairs on the front porch, Maclean rolled and lit his first cigarette of the day and began to cough.
    â€œEveryone one of them cigarettes is another nail in your coffin,” Henry MacDade said from the wicker chair next to him.
    â€œThere ain’t room for any more nails in my coffin,” Maclean said.
    Every morning when Maclean lit his cigarette, Henry made this same remark about the nail. Every morning Maclean made the same reply, and every morning Henry laughed and slapped his thigh as if it were all being said for the first time.
    Henry was a plump little man, always smiling, always talkative. He was interested in history, geography, and science. He had a card to the library and a small brass telescope that he used to take out to the riverbank sometimes at night, where he would sit for hours on a big rock with a book and a flashlight keeping tabs on the goings-on in the heavens.
    â€œDid you know that Napoleon Buonaparte was an Eyetalian?” he said to Maclean.
    â€œNo,” Maclean lied. “No, I didn’t.”
    â€œThat’s right,” Henry said. “Not a Frenchman at all. An Eyetalian.”
    â€œWell, well,” Maclean said.
    He was trying to think through his day, and right now he didn’t have time for Napoleon no matter where he came from, but he didn’t want to hurt Henry’s feelings. Henry was a simple, good-hearted soul who often gave him liquor coupons at the first of the month. He didn’t drink and had no need of them himself, but he could have sold them for a quarter or two at the first of the month and for just about anything to some people at the end.
    â€œEyetalian,” Henry said. “Born in Corsica, which is an Eyetalian island in the Mediterranean Sea.”
    â€œWell, well,” Maclean said.
    He was going to need a dollar at least, maybe a dollar and a half. A bottle of wine for himself and a birthday present for his mother. He might pick up some beer bottles, but they wouldn’t amount to much. He was going to have to get a couple of hours’ work somewhere, maybe at Jim Gartley’s stable. Then before dinner go to the high school and get the god-damned ration book.
    From the door beside them, Miss Audrey came out with