In the summer of ’38 she swam too far out in the river, and went under before she could make it back to shore. Her husband swam out to rescue her, while someone drove to a phone and called an ambulance. Macurdy, hearing the siren, sped after it in his patrol car.
When he arrive the trauma of Melody’s drowning kicked in, and he brushed aside the ambulance driver, who was about to begin artificial respiration. After Curtis’s futile efforts to revive Melody, not so many years before, he’d talked with Arbel about how to revive drowning victims. He’d never before had an opportunity to test Arbel’s advice, but he soon had Margaret Huseby conscious, and she was taken to the hospital for observation.
And that, Macurdy thought, was the end of that, because he seldom went to church. But seeing him in his ’35 Chevy one day, getting gas at the Sinclair station, she asked him for a lift home-she’d just left her car for a major tuneup-and he said sure. Before he got her home, she was groping him. She wanted to repay him for saving her life, she told him, and her husband was out of town.
What realy shook him was how tempted he’d been. He told himself he wouldn’t go to church again till after Pastor Huseby was transferred to another parish. Something else would happen first, however, that made his resolution irrelevant.
10
War!
Macurdy awoke one Friday-September 1, 1939-to a kid shoutin in the street: “Extra! Extra Paper!” The only time he coup recall the Oregonian distributing an extra edition in Nehtaka was when Bruno Richard Hauptman was executed for the Lindbergh kidnaping. Pulling on his pants, he hurried outside, called to the boy, and bought a paper.
The Germans had bombed Warsaw and invaded Poland. There was war in Europe! Not civil war in Spain, or Italians fighting somewhere in Africa, but an invasion of one European country by another, with France and England almost sure to get involved. It was the war people had feared might happen and spread, maybe even to involve the United States.
That noon he read it to Klara, translating into German. Her thin old lips were a grim slit. Like Hansi Sweiger’s dad, she’d disapproved early and emphatically of Hitler and his policies. Two of her four brothers had been killed fighting for Germany in World War One. A quarter of the village’s men of military age had died, and others had been maimed. All because of war, she said, war and crazy rulers!
At first the war in Europe didn’t affect life in Nehtaka. The depression had already eased a lot; local men had left to work on dam construction in Washington state and Montana, and projects of other sorts. Now shipbuilding boomed all along the coast, and logging increased. Jobs were easy to find. People listened more to the news on radio, read the papers with greater interest, and talked about the war. In the logging country there was particular interest in the Nazi invasion of Norway and the Soviet invasion of Finland.
But the changes were neither deep nor difficult, let alone painful. America was at peace.
The war became more troubling when the Nazi Wehrmacht ground its way through the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Balkan peninsula. The British army, badly mauled in the defense of northern France, was driven from the continent at Dunkirk, leaving behind its armor and heavy weapons. Afterward came night after night of German bombing attacks on English cities. And Britain, an island nation dependent on shipping for many of its needs, had more than three million tons of merchant vessels sunk by German submarines in 1940 alone.
But though some people believed that America would be in the war before it was over, so far it was foreign, and not fully real.
In September 1940 that reality level jumped. With passage of the Selective Service Act America’s first ever peacetime conscription law-millions of American men registered for potential military service. Curtis wrote to Indiana and got a birth certificate. His birth year was given as 1904, which startled Fritzi but not Mary. Curtis had written 1914 on the employment form, by accident, he said. He still looked 25, give or take a couple.