Snopes: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion

Or hope perhaps. Anyway, that’s how it stood until in fact the Battle of Britain saved her; otherwise all that remained was simply to go to him and say, “I want that card,” which would be like walking up to a stranger and saying Did you steal my wallet. So the Battle of Britain saved her, him too for a time. I mean, the reports, stories now coming back to us of the handful of children fighting it. Because during the rest of that spring and summer and fall of 1940 she was getting more and more restless. Oh, she was still doing her Negro Sunday school classes, still “meddling” as the town called it, but after a fashion condoned now, perhaps by familiarity and also that no one had discovered yet any way to stop her.

This, until June when Chick came home from Cambridge. Whereupon I suddenly realised—discovered—two things: that it was apparently Chick now who was our family’s representative in her social pattern; and that she knew more than even he of the R.A.F. names and the machines they flew: Malan and Aitken and Finucane and Spitfire and Beaufighter and Hurricane and Buerling and Deere and the foreigners too like the Americans who wouldn’t wait and the Poles and Frenchmen who declined to be whipped: Daymond and Wzlewski and Clostermann; until that September, when we compromised: Chick agreed to take one more year of law and we agreed to let it be the University over at Oxford instead of Cambridge. Which was perhaps the reason: when he left, she no longer had anyone to swap the names with. So I should not have been surprised when she came to the office. Nor did she say I must do something to help, I’ve got to do something, I cant just sit here idle; she said:

“I’m going away. I’ve got a job, in a factory in California where they make aircraft to be sent to Europe,” and I scribbling, scrawling Wait. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all settled. I wrote them that I couldn’t hear but that I was familiar enough with truck engines and gears to learn what they needed. And they said for me to come on out, just bring a few papers with me. You know: letters saying you have known me long enough to assure them she is moral and doesn’t get too tight and nobody has caught her stealing yet. That’s what you are to do because you can even sign them Chairman of the Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, Draft Board,” and I still scrawling Wait, or no, not writing it again because I already had: just gripping her with one hand and holding the pad up with the other until she read it and stopped or stopped long enough to read it or at least hushed and I could write:

at this factory all factories an individual of limitless power called Security whose job position is the 1 thing on earth between him if being drafted into the and ripped that sheet off, already writing again, her hand, her arm across my shoulder so I could feel her breathing and feel smell her hair against my cheek army which naturally he will defend with his life by producing not too far apart provable subversives so that sooner or later he will reach you & fire you you’re and ripped that one off, not stopping member the Mississippi coast Biloxi Ocean Springs you were there

“Yes. With Mother and”—and now I thought she would stop but she didn’t even pause—“Manfred. I remember.”

I wrote Pascagoula a shipyard where they are building ships to carry airplanes guns tanks if California will take you so will they will you go there

“Yes,” she said. She said, “Russia.” She drew a long breath. “But the Security will be there too.”

I wrote yes but thats close I could come there quick if even if Security I could probably find you something else

“Yes,” she said, breathing quiet and slow at my shoulder. “Close. I could come home on weekends.”

I wrote you might have to work weekends they need ships

“Then you can come there. The draft board is closed on weekends, isn’t it?”

I wrote we will see

“But together sometimes now and then. That’s why I was afraid about California, because it’s so far. But Pascagoula is close. At least occasionally now and then.”

I wrote Of course

“All right,” she said. “Of course I’ll go.”