The sheriff stood and took the phone. “Onni,” he said, “you really think it’s that bad? … That will make problems–hundreds more people not working. Hundreds more eating on credit or the county, or not eating at all…. All right, if it’s that bad, we’ll shut them down. Maybe the state will hire them to fight the fire…. Okay, I’ll tell them you said it.”
Fritzi hung up and turned to Macurdy. “So now the logging is shut down for a while, and you got to find something else. Probably fighting fire day and night. The deputy job is yours if you want it, unless we find something wrong. Now I’ve got a lot of phone calls to make. Come to my house at 6:30 for supper, and we talk.”
Macurdy bought a watch, and it was 6:30 sharp when he knocked on the sheriffs door. A girl answered, in her late teens he thought, fair, blonde, and slender, not remarkably pretty, but nice-looking in a flowered print dress. Her eyes in particular took his attention. They were blue, with a tilt that reminded him of Varia’s, though she’d hardly have Varia’s pointy ears.
“I’m Curtis Macurdy,” he said. “The sheriff told me to be here at 6:30.”
She stepped aside, motioning him to enter. “Come in, Mr. Macurdy. I’m Mary Preuss. Dad just phoned. He’ll be here in a few minutes.” She was poised, her voice quiet, her aura reflecting–not self-deprecation, just modesty, he decided. And maybe a little shyness around men she doesn’t know. An elderly woman stood in the living room, square-framed like Fritzi, wearing an apron, her gray-blond hair braided and coiled. She nodded, then exchanged words with Mary in a foreign language. His name was part of it.
“My grandmother doesn’t speak English,” Mary told him matter-of-factly. “Her name is Klara Preuss; she’s dad’s mom. She came from Germany-East Prussia, actually-after my mom died. To keep house and take care of me.” She gestured toward an upholstered chair, straight-backed with wooden arms. “Won’t you sit down?”
Macurdy sat. Mary took a similar chair opposite, while her grandmother chose a wooden chair close to the kitchen door, as if to keep an eye on the stove. For an awkward moment no one spoke, then Mary broke the silence.
“Dad told us what you did, the day before yesterday at Severtson’s camp. That was pretty remarkable.”
“So’s your dad. Getting shot and his arm broken like that, and back at work again already.”
The girl turned and spoke to her grandmother in quick German. The old woman grinned and spoke German back to her, then turned and looked at Macurdy, sharp-eyed but smiling. “She says,” Mary told him, “that you’re a bloodstopper-a kind of magician. That’s something country people believe in where she comes from. Dad said when you touched his arm, the bleeding stopped, just like that. To her, that makes you a bloodstopper. And to him too, but he’d never put it that way.”
Uncomfortable with the subject, Macurdy shifted away from it. “It’s a good thing your dad’s tough. He’s had a lot to do today, with that big fire. I hiked out to Severtson’s office; they’ve sent their whole crew to fight it. I’d have gone, too, except I’m supposed to talk with your dad this evening.”
The two of them talked for nearly thirty minutes, with occasional brief pauses while Mary summarized in German for her grandmother. They talked about the Hard Times and Roosevelt, the PWA and the NRA. Macurdy knew little about government programs; his parents, to save money, had stopped subscribing to the Louisville paper. And of course, he’d been out of the country till four months earlier, though he said nothing of that.
He decided Mary was older than she seemed. Her looks suggested seventeen or eighteen, but her poise and maturity suggested several years more than that. “What do you do?” he found himself asking. “You sure know a lot about what’s going on.”
“We get the Portland paper, and my grandmother can’t read it, so she has me read the major parts to her. In German that is, translating. She’s really interested. She…”
There were footsteps on the porch, then the front door opened and Fritzi came in, slumped and gray-faced. “Hello, Macurdy. Hello Mary. Heda, Mama. I’m sorry to be so late. All hell has broke loose in the woods. It is already the worst fire since 1910, and no one knows how much bigger it will get.”