Brad Hudson cut the lights, turned off the ignition of his Chevrolet pickup outside his house, and pressed his forehead to the steering wheel’s cold frame. His gut felt like a bait bucket of writhing worms, but not from the beer at Murphy’s Tavern that he’d drunk with the boys after work when they sent off Joe Carlyle to the U.S. Marines. Smoke curled from the chimney, a white plume against the dark sky, and when he’d rolled down the truck window to let in fresh air to clear his head, he could smell the faint waft of sautéed meat. He’d missed supper, and this was the evening his mother had planned to serve Wiener schnitzel, the veal bought on sale at Shreve’s grocery. Mr. Shreve had thrown in an extra cutlet when his wife wasn’t looking—“so ve have plenty available for family feast in celebration of being together,” Joanna Hudson had announced to her family at breakfast in her German-accented English. She’d looked as if she could have swooped them all to her bosom, but only Beata, sitting nearby, received a rough yank to her mother’s voluptuous front. “It’s a gift so many udders not be enjoying now.”

Brad knew she spoke of her relatives and friends either dead or divided from their families throughout Germany and Poland and France, but the last thing he wanted to celebrate was “being together” in wartime, when other men were out doing their bit to keep their families and his safe. His draft card designated him as III-D and read “Registrant deferred because of extreme hardship and privation to dependents,” a bitter pill to swallow.

Certainly he wanted to see after his family, both his birth and adopted ones. With his father gone, he was the only one to do it, thus the reason for the deferment. But it ate at him that he, hale and hearty, young and perishing to fight the Nazi bastards who’d caused his mother so much grief, would be left behind with the cowards who’d finagled exemptions from service in the armed forces. It turned his stomach to read of men who should be eligible for military draft swelling the priesthood, divinity schools, firemen and police ranks, and labor forces “necessary for the war effort” to avoid defending their country. He was not one of those, but he would be forced to sit out the war in safety and bear the stigma as if he were. God, he’d give anything to take a gun against the arrogant, goose-stepping monsters bent on cleansing the world of the Jewish race.