The Wooden Shepherdess Read Free Page A

about skunks (if you scared them, their smell could drive you out of your house and your senses). Porcupines ... Squirrels even were mostly gray ones and black ones, seldom the squirrel-color ... Birds of strange plumage and voices ... Only the deer coming down to the creek at dusk seemed anything like the same (but now he nearly fell over while trying without stopping walking to slap at his ankle).
    Woods that were paradise—almost: that is, apart from plants which brought you out in a rash and these bites (for now the brutes were biting him right through his shirt, and he twisted an arm back trying to scratch exactly between his shoulder-blades). Funny that nobody here would admit they were bad even here, in hilly Connecticut: “Ah, down in Jersey they’re real mean!” they said.
    But unlike as these were to English woods, in spite of the pines they seemed even less like the serried echoing boles of those man-made Bavarian forests like endless insides-of-cathedrals....
    Here he reined in his wandering thoughts with a jerk: for hadn’t he made up his mind to put Bavarian Mitzi right out of his mind altogether?
    A rustle of leaves in a rare breath of breeze.... Did these woods hold other small dryads like Ree? For they don’t have children in France, and he’d missed them: those German children were really the last he’d made friends with for ages—till Ree....
    This set him once more wondering just how old little Ree really was (for “growing girls” one doesn’t go near with a barge-pole!). That ominous crêpe-de-chine ... And “I don’t drink liquor” did seem a funny remark for a child (a funny thing children should even bother to say so, he meant). However she must be a child still, Augustine decided: for only an absolute child could have gone on touching a man in that innocent way little Ree had kept touching him.
    â€œI don’t drink liquor....” But all Americans seemed to be funny that way about drink: Prohibition had made it a kind of obsession, they talked about drink all the time like the English talk about weather! New York (so they told you, with relish) was fuller of speakeasies now than ever there’d been saloons; and many were pleasanter places, which meant that any restaurant not serving liquor (in teapots or something) soon had to put up its shutters. All over the city the little stills bubbled, and “London Gin” which had cost ten cents the quart to distill (they printed their own English labels) retailed at twenty-five cents the shot. Why, even out here there was hardly a farmer who didn’t distill his own rye or corn....
    Prohibition had split America—split her as nothing had split her since slavery! This was democracy’s ultimate nightmare, a nation attempting to tyrannize over itself with The People’s Will plumb-opposed to the people’s wishes.... No wonder “a-law-is-a-law-is-a-law” had completely ceased to apply over here where drink was concerned, and the whole Enforcement Machine was corrupt right up to the White House. But poor little Ree—what a country to bring up a child in!
    *
    With the Canada border a mere dotted line on a map, imported liquor still trickled through by the truckful. Enforcement Patrols were unpredictably venal or violent: times cash passed and the convoy passed, times both sides shot it out to a finish—but either way, plenty got through.
    Then those other road-convoys, which also were armed with machine guns—the ones which came thundering in from the thousands of miles of beaches where fast “contact-boats” outstripping the revenue-cutters had landed the “Rum Row” stuff.... Three weeks ago, that traveling salesman who gave Augustine a lift out of Hartford had downright insisted the stranger must sample the “genuine Scotch” in his flask: for it came, so he proudly declared, “from Rum Row” (in fact it was palpable