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The Summer of Our Discontent

Written by Virginia DeMarce

Grantville, May 1634

Susan Logsden sat in the front pew of Grantville's rebuilt Presbyterian church, flanked on one side by Grampa Ben and Grandma Gloria and on the other by her half-sister Pam Hardesty and half-brother Cory Joe Lang. She couldn't stop the tears from flowing down her face as she looked at the twin coffins. "First Grampa Fred died and now Tina has drowned," she said in a low voice. "What am I going to do now?"

Grampa Ben put his arm around her and held her tightly. "You've still got us and you've got Pam and Cory Joe. Don't worry, darlin'. We'll be here when you need us."

He looked toward the front of the church. Enoch Wiley would be coming out any minute now to start the service. Susan buried her face in his shoulder and cried. After a few minutes of heartbreaking sobs, an uproar at the back of the church made her look up. The vision that appeared at the doors was appalling.

"Oh, my God," Pam said. "What does she think she's doing?"

Ben Hardesty turned to look and his face paled. "How did this happen?" he asked himself. "What did we do wrong? How could she do this?"

His daughter Velma, Susan, Pam, and Cory Joe's mother, walked down the aisle, tricked out like the "Bride of Satan."

"Where in the world did she find that much black spandex," Pam wondered. "I wouldn't have thought there was any left in Grantville."

"There isn't," Ben said. "Looks to me like Velma cornered the market.""

Susan, heartbroken and bereft, couldn't stop herself. "I'm not going to let her do this. I'm not. I know we're her kids, but I'm not going to let her do this. Grampa, I'm sorry. We can't let her turn Tina and Glenna Sue's funeral into a circus."

"Susan, honey, just stay right here," Ben said. "I'll take care of it."

Ben was an old man, heart sore from his granddaughter's death. But he wasn't going to take this from Velma, not this time. As a girl, she had gotten her way too often and she'd never learned how to take no for an answer. Ben had hoped that losing custody of Susan and Tina would have taught her a lesson, but it hadn't. Working at the 250 Club had made her even worse.

He stood and left the pew, Cory Joe following him. Intercepting Velma who was on her way down the aisle, he grabbed her arm and forced her to turn around and walk back to the door. "Velma, you're not going to do this. I can't believe you'd even try it."

He practically dragged her out the doors of the church, ignoring her protests. Those protests were loud and somewhat profane. "God damn it," Velma screeched. "How can you throw me out of my own daughter's funeral? Tina was my daughter, you know."

"She wasn't some kind of toy, Velma," Ben answered. "She'd gotten herself declared an emancipated minor because of the way you've been acting the last few years. Cory Joe and Pam left home the minute they could. The courts gave Fred custody of Susan. This drowning is not an excuse for you to make a show like this. You look like a whore, you're acting like a whore, and you're not going to make this kind of scene. Just go home, Velma. Go home and don't even try to contact us or the kids again."

She looked at Cory Joe. He moved closer to his grandfather, saying nothing. The two of them turned and went back into the church together.

Velma stood there, seething. "I'll be damned if they get away with this. I'll show the bastards. I'll show them."

Inez Wiley, the minister's wife, came out of the sacristy. With one thin hand, muscular from years of playing piano, she grasped Velma's arm firmly, leading her away from the building.

****

Susan pushed her supper around her plate, hanging onto Cory Joe's arm with her left hand. "So soon? Already?"

"Tomorrow morning, kid." He swallowed a deviled egg. "Boy, these are good, Aunt Betty."

Susan, huddled between Cory Joe and Pam, an image of sixteen-year-old miserable hostility, glared across the table at her aunt.

"Not as good as Grandma Lily's used to be. I use her recipe, too—but there's just something missing." Betty Wilson looked gratified in spite of her protest.

Snarky, Susan thought. Why did Grandma Gloria have to invite Aunt Betty and Uncle Monroe, anyway? Aunt Betty was always playing "good daughter" to Mom's "bad daughter"—well, "perfect daughter" to Mom's "horrid daughter." And Grandma Gloria always fell for it. Of course, when Grandma invited her, Betty brought something special, that took a lot of time and fussing to make. Like deviled eggs. Just to show how perfect she was. When everyone knew that she really despised Mom. And despised all four of them, because they were Mom's kids. And now Tina was drowned and Aunt Betty was sitting here alive.

Pam scooped the last two eggs from the platter before Cory Joe could reach across the table for them. He gave her a reproachful look.

"Well." She sighed dramatically. "Since there's a war on." She slid her plate to him.

Maybe Aunt Betty was the kind of person who had something inside her that just made her bring those eggs to supper. But did Pam and Cory Joe have to eat them? And like them? And be polite about it all?

"Do you really have to go already, Cory Joe," Susan chimed in again.

"First thing in the morning. Jackson let me come because it was my sister's funeral, but Pam's right, even if she was making a joke. There's a war on. If that mess up at the quarry had happened two weeks ago, I couldn't have come at all. Now, after Ahrensbök, it's mainly a matter of mopping up. But I've still got to get back."

"All the way up to Denmark?"

"Just as far as Magdeburg. I'm Colonel Jackson's liaison to Don Francisco Nasi, now."

"Mike Stearns' spook?" Pam giggled. "My brother the baby spook. Like Laurie Koudsi is a baby lawyer. That's what they call her, now that she's passed her exams. Why Magdeburg? Don't you have to go out and spy on somebody?"

Monroe Wilson, Aunt Betty's husband, frowned. "You shouldn't be talking about this. Intelligence work, I mean. Not even at a family dinner. 'Loose lips sink ships.' I remember that from school. It was a motto in World War II."

Cory Joe shook his head. "Anybody who wants to can find my name on a personnel list. Nasi doesn't go out scrabbling around his spiderweb in person, any more. He sits in the capital and collects reports from other people. Just another bureaucrat. Think of me as a baby bureaucrat, not a baby spook."

Susan put her head on his shoulder. "At least, you're not likely to get shot at. But I wish you could stay home."

"At least, Pam will be staying with you, Susan," Aunt Betty said.

Pam shook her head. "Tina had a right to live in Fred Logsden's house, just like Susan does. He was their grandpa. He left it to them. But if I went over and moved in there with Susan, you know as well as I do that Mom would be down at the probate court the next day saying that I was battening on her and trying to get my hands on my sister's inheritance. No way. I'm staying at my apartment and Cory Joe is bunking on my couch while he's here."

Ben Hardesty nodded slowly.

"Then who is staying with you, Susan?" Aunt Betty asked.

"I'm by myself."

Betty opened her mouth again.

"And I'm not going home with you, in case you were thinking of saying that, Aunt Betty, just so all your church lady friends can tell you how kind it is of you to take in your sister Velma's obnoxious kid." Susan looked around the table defiantly. "I've been at the house by myself ever since the night Tina drowned. I've already been down to Judge Tito and petitioned to become an emancipated minor. I'm as old as Tina was when she did that. Mom isn't going to get her hands on me again."

She sank down between Pam and Cory Joe again. What right did she have to hate Aunt Betty for despising Velma and not having anything to do with her? She despised Velma herself and didn't want anything to do with her.

Maybe she was exactly like Aunt Betty.

And that would be the worst thing in the world.

She lifted her chin. "I'm okay by myself at Grandpa Fred's house. Everybody understands that, right? I'm okay. Don't be trying to mess up Pam's life, Aunt Betty. She's done fine on her own, since she walked out on Mom, and I will, too. Neither one of us needs for you to be trying to push her into taking care of me now that Tina's gone."

Ben Hardesty sighed.

June 1634

Veda Mae Haggerty was heading for the afternoon shift. If she had to face one more bit of good cheer, she thought that she would chuck everything. Lettie Sebastian had talked her into dropping off snacks for the Methodist Vacation Bible School. There must have been two hundred kids noisily singing

Adam, Adam, can you tell me,
How was life in paradise?
God provided all we needed.
While it lasted, it was nice!

She had been inclined to tell them to stuff it.

Stinking Ring of Fire. Up-time had been nice. Nicer, at least. While it lasted. Work all your life. Go back and take classes in office management after your kids are grown. Get a decent job, even if you do have to commute for forty-five minutes, winter and summer, rain or shine. Expect to retire on Social Security, enough to see you through, if you can just make it to sixty-five.

Flash of lighting and bam! There won't be any Social Security, any more. Go back to work, Veda Mae. You're healthy. No, nobody needs you in an office. You can go out into the fields and harvest chick peas this summer. Or be a CNA again; that's what you did before you took those classes. Go back to what you did before you went to school. The Assisted Living Center needs you. After all, you're only sixty-four years old, here in the middle of the Thirty Years' War. Turn patients, deal with incontinence. Oh, yeaaay, now you get to deal with it without disposable diapers. Hoist them up into their chairs. Let's all pull together and make a brave new world.

Three years later, now, she was sixty-seven, and she was still emptying bedpans.

Gag me. Yep. While the twentieth century lasted, it had been nice. At least by comparison with the seventeenth.

Magnificent seventeenth-century victory. Hah! Gustavus Adolphus triumphant. Congress of Copenhagen. Newspapers all over the "exciting" seventeenth-century betrothal of Princess Kristina to some Danish prince. The kid was what? Seven years old? Younger than a lot of the ones sitting over at the Methodist church, singing. What were the odds that she'd actually marry this fellow some day? Low, probably. Stupid newspapers.

Then her daughter-in-law Laurie had decided that she wanted to go to nursing school. Well, Veda Mae had let Gary know just exactly what she thought of that. What was a mother for, if not to advise her son? Anybody who wanted to go into nursing was a fool; he should put his foot down. So he put his foot down. Laurie divorced him. Now he was a two-time loser, some people said, but it was still better than having Laurie go back to school and get degrees where she would have been so far above him.

She might have been better off herself, when she decided to go back and take that business course, if John had just put his foot down in the beginning, instead of saying that it was okay and then making her life miserable about "uppity women" for the next twenty years. But he'd died just over a year after it happened. She didn't miss him, much. His emphysema had been too bad for him to go back to work and the Ring of Fire had taken away his miner's pension and health benefits, so she'd been stuck supporting him, too.

But that Laurie! Worse than Jennifer, and Jennifer had been bad enough as a daughter-in-law, and then got herself left up-time, so Gary had to take their kids in again. Jennifer was probably living in Fairmont, flirting with rich guests at that motel where she worked. While Marcie was at the school, spending her days teaching English to Kraut kids and Blake was training to be a policeman, working with a Kraut partner. Having the gall to tell their own grandma not to be prejudiced!

But at least she'd told Gary to put his foot down when Laurie wanted to take up nursing. A wife shouldn't get above her husband and Gary was a dropout. Which she wasn't going to let him forget. Even Vivian had gone back and gotten her GED, as dumb as she was. Well, not dumb, maybe, but Viv was never going to set the world on fire, if it was her own mother who said so.

And Glenna, the best of the three kids, with a decent job as a telephone lineman, had been killed by the damned Krauts. They cut her head off. People had tried to tell Veda Mae that they were something else, called Croats, who had raided the town that day, but she knew better. They'd been Krauts when her father fought them back in World War II, and they were still Krauts. Not that Glenna had been perfect either, marrying that Catholic boy. But Veda Mae had put a stop to that—not to the marriage, but she'd managed to raise enough of a ruckus that he stopped going to church and didn't make Glenna have their kids baptized in it, either. She'd heard what went on in those convents! Her grandma had a book—the liveliest book she'd ever read, back when she was twelve. She would never have dreamed. . . .

No way was Veda Mae going to learn Kraut. Not a word of it. She hadn't liked it at all when they started admitting Krauts to the assisted living center. Since they were there, if they wanted something from her, they could speak English.

Well, after she dropped off the snacks at the church, she'd picked up this week's newspaper. The Times, not that Kraut rag, the Free Press. Even so, half the news items were about Krauts. And one about Cameron. Laurie's son. Assigned to the personal staff of Colonel Jackson, up in Magdeburg. At least, they'd demoted him. "General"—now that had been a laugh. She'd known Frank Jackson since the day that he was born. He'd been a sergeant, back in Viet Nam. If he was qualified to be a general, even if just of Grantville, Veda Mae was the Queen of Sheba. Thank God there weren't any Japs in town. Just that one little Vietnamese slant-eyed woman, who General (HA!) Frank Jackson married. And everyone knows she was a whore anyway. Little slant doesn't deserve even a faker like Frank Jackson after all. Couldn't she find some little slant guy of her own? Had to steal one of ours.

And a few Chinks, full of college degrees. And Johnnie F. Haun's little adopted slant from Korea. The town was turning into the pits even before the Ring of Fire happened.

Cameron. Damned little bastard upstart. Literally a bastard upstart. When Gary married Laurie, he'd made noises about adopting the boy. She'd put a stop to that, quick enough. Bad enough that Gary had paid for the kid's food and provided him with a bed for fifteen years, just to have Laurie divorce him once her charming little woods colt was out of high school.

It was enough to make a person sick. She couldn't call in sick for her shift, though. Someone was bound to have seen her dropping those blasted snacks off at the church. Keeping up a good front and all that—people said it was just wonderful, the way that Veda Mae was bearing up since Glenna Sue drowned at the graduation party. Nearly half the kids at that quarry had been Krauts. Who was to say that one of them hadn't had something to do with it. And the police covering it up—they made up more than half the force, now.

If she wasn't a Methodist, she would cuss them all.

John's will had been a slap in the face to her. Leaving a full child's share to Glenna's widower, Ronnie Bawiec, just like the girl was still alive. Veda Mae had gone right down to the Probate Court and filed a ...