“I hate them!” she sobbed, hysterically.

“Who? Who?”

“Those men in the office.”

“What men?”

“Those men in the office. Years ago. They thought I didn’t hear. They were talking about you. Grampa Czar was with them. I hate them. And the ones you just talked about—–” She was hardly coherent, she was weeping again.

“Don’t, my little one. I didn’t realize. I was thinking about my book. I’d forgotten you were here. Forgive me.” The merry pink face was stricken.

The tear-drenched eyes looked at him accusingly. “Why don’t you finish it, instead of talking about it! You’ve talked about it and talked about it for years and years and years.” She was, suddenly, the older wiser one chiding the younger.

Thor Storm covered his eyes with his hands. “What have I done to you! Maybe Czar was right. You should have young people and fun and luxury. An old man on a stinking fishing scow in the wilderness. I’ll send you home. Bridie will know what to do. Forgive me. Oh, Christine, forgive me.”

She wipped her eyes, she blew her nose, there was about her the air of finality which marks not only the close of a scene but the end of a period in a life. “You can’t send me back now. It’s too late.”

“How, too late?”

“You should have thought of that fifty years ago, when you first came to Alaska. You’re stuck with it, Grampa Thor. You’re stuck with Alaska and you’re stuck with me.”

17

SEATTLE SAID that Bayard Husack hadn’t adjusted. They did not phrase it that way. As Seattle put it, “That young Husack—Bay, they call him—hasn’t taken hold since he came home.”

He had returned from the War in late 1945, handsomer than ever, feminine Seattle agreed. And not a scratch on him, male Seattle added. But six years had gone by, he was thirty-one, and whatever it was that he had been supposed to take hold of had eluded him. Millions of young men had endured pain and shock and had inflicted pain and shock and death on other millions of men. They had seen wholesale horror, they had known fear that turned the blood to water and the bones to mush. They came home from the War and changed their clothes as they might after a hard day at the office or the shop. They pretended the past four or five years had never been, they appeared to drop the memories of war with the garments of war, they functioned, it seemed, normally.

… I’m going to wash the car before supper.… No, look, diaper the baby first, will you, while I dish up, supper’s almost ready, the Gabbetts are coming over after, I forgot to get some Coke, she don’t drink, jump in the car and go down to the corner for some Cokes, will you?

Bay’s mother said to Dave Husack, in defense of their son, “It takes time to get used to everyday life after an experience like that.”