• 31 •

BEULAH WAS ALL too happy to skip the bed-making course. She allowed Nurse Cartwright to diagnose her with a severe case of dyspepsia, attributed to the heavy camp meals of beans and sausages, when Beulah was accustomed to cucumber sandwiches and light soups (or so the nurse was led to believe). She was put on a diet of salt crackers and chicken broth, which was about all she could eat anyway, as the memory of those weeks in jail kept floating back to her and turning her stomach.

There was something about the confinement of camp, and the regimented life it demanded, that recalled the last time she’d lost her freedom. In jail the guards’ eyes were always upon her. She used to wake up and see their dim silhouettes outside her cell, just standing there, breathing heavy through the bars as she slept.

That was jail: a pair of eyes always upon her. Her misdeeds — whether real or accused or imagined — were always laid bare for anyone to see. She never knew what the guards thought of her, or what fresh rumor had reached their ears the night before. She was a circus animal to them, on display to be mocked and gaped upon. The camp was starting to feel that way too, in spite of her best efforts at concealment.

It was a relief, then, to turn herself over to the camp nurse, a sturdy, wide-bosomed woman with a helmet of tightly curled silver hair around a face that could be stoic and unsmiling when circumstances called for it, but uncommonly warm when she had a patient to tend to. Beulah surrendered utterly to the nurse’s care, and allowed her to sit alongside the bed (a proper hospital bed, with two pillows and a pile of blankets, so much more luxurious than her canvas cot), and to issue, in addition to the pronouncement about dyspepsia, a further diagnosis of homesickness, for which she prescribed a daily letter home to Mother.

“I see you in the assemblies,” Nurse Cartwright said. “All the other girls are writing their letters, but you never do. You won’t miss home so much if you write to them and tell them a little about what your life is like here. Paint a picture of it for them.”

“I did,” Beulah muttered, “but that only made it worse. We only have a few weeks to go. I’ll see them soon enough.”

“That’s the spirit,” Nurse Cartwright said. “Now, how’s that cough of yours?”

Beulah had almost forgotten to cough. “It’s so much worse when I lie down,” she said. To demonstrate, she settled back down to her pillow and offered up a few convincing hacks and wheezes.

“I’ll put a kettle on,” the nurse said, and reached for her bottle of medicinal brandy. “I might feel a cough coming on myself.”

Beulah passed a peaceable day and a half in the infirmary, sampling Nurse Cartwright’s curatives and working her way happily through one tin of salted crackers after another. She accepted cool washcloths when they were handed to her, and took a hot water bottle under the covers whenever the nurse decided she looked peaked. No one had ever nursed Beulah before, and she found it delightful. Would a hospital be even better, she wondered. Some sort of minor operation, with a long period of recuperation, sounded luxurious to her at that moment.

Beulah departed reluctantly, and only when another patient came in: Ginny, from the tent next to hers, doubled over with monthly pains, which in her case were accompanied by fiery headaches and constipation of such intransigence that Beulah made haste to depart before the full explanation was proffered. With Ginny in greater need, she would have to surrender her comfortable bed and the hot water bottle tucked between the sheets, so that was reason enough to rally to full health and return to her tent.

Before she left, the nurse put her cool hands on Beulah’s neck, and then on her forehead. She did this habitually to any girl within reach, perhaps to feel the pulse and check for fever. Beulah found it marvelous.

“You’re a good girl,” Nurse Cartwright said, “and your people back home love you. That’s why I know you’ll be fine.”

Beulah thought about telling the nurse how wrong she was, but there was Ginny with her innards in knots and she thought better of it.

AT BEULAH’S REQUEST, the nurse had refused to allow visitors. That gave her a little break from Fleurette and her sisters. She only wished the break could’ve been longer.

When she returned to the tent, she learned that Hack had gotten himself tangled up in some kind of argument with Norma over her pigeons. The woman was irrationally attached to those birds and convinced that they were capable of military heroics. The idea of a pigeon serving in the Army struck Beulah as about as comical as a chicken steering a ship in the Navy, but she kept her opinions to herself. The more she said in Norma’s presence, the more that woman’s distrustful eye would be trained upon her. In her weakened condition, Beulah might just wither under the scrutiny.

“Private Hackbush owes me five pigeons,” Norma was saying as Beulah settled down on her cot.

“They flew home!” Fleurette said. “They’ll be waiting for you when you get back. You have the boys from the dairy looking after them. Hack doesn’t owe you anything.”

“I have five fewer pigeons with which to conduct my training,” Norma said, “and it’s his fault.”

“If he did bring you five pigeons,” Constance put in, obviously aiming to further annoy her sister, “would you even accept them? What if they weren’t of good stock?”

“Oh, they wouldn’t possibly be of good stock,” Norma said, dismissing Hack’s imaginary pigeons before they’d even been presented to her.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Sarah said when she saw Beulah. “Has Nurse Cartwright returned you to fighting form?”

“I believe so,” Beulah said.

Fleurette gave her a little smile and said, “You missed quite a performance. Hack said that pigeons wouldn’t fly through gunfire, and Norma wanted to prove it to him. She set five birds free, and we were all made to go out in the field with pots and pans —”

“I wondered what all that clanging was last night,” Beulah said.

“Yes, that was us, making fools of ourselves, banging wooden rifles around and smashing pot lids together and any other kind of racket we could get up.”

“How did the birds do?” Beulah asked.

“Heroically,” Norma said.

“They flew home, which is what they do if you turn them loose,” Fleurette said. “The trouble was, Hack wasn’t at all convinced. He said that gunfire is a hundred times louder, and the birds would spook.”

“Then why didn’t you shoot at them?” Beulah asked.

“Oh, you missed that, too,” Fleurette said. “Someone heard the shots from camp. Rifle practice is over.”

“What a shame,” Beulah said. Although she tried to sound light about it, she regretted deeply that there were to be no more training in firearms. Beulah had been paying a little more attention at rifle practice. She hadn’t been allowed to touch the guns, but that didn’t stop her from watching, and watching closely.

Each time training was held, she and Fleurette sat in the grass at the edge of the clearing, nearly concealed by darkness, the lanterns illuminating only the girls and their targets. Beulah loved to watch them go through their paces. The rifles practically glowed from years of enthusiastic oiling and polishing. When the girls pulled the bolts back to load more cartridges, the mechanism slid open and closed with the satisfying clang of a heavy lock. Beulah couldn’t imagine firing one herself: the rifle was almost four feet long, and the smaller girls, Fern especially, struggled to keep hold of it.

But the revolver — that looked like something Beulah could manage. From a distance it appeared to be black, but if she crept a little closer and caught it in the light, she could see a deep blue sheen to the steel. The cylinder slid out so easily that most of the girls could flip it open one-handed, a move so sharp and elegant that Beulah found herself imitating it, off to the side where Fleurette couldn’t see, in the dark.

That gun was dead simple to shoot, too. While Margaret and Sarah took great care aligning their feet just so and adjusting their stances to match Constance’s precisely, the younger girls developed a little more flair. They’d jut their hips out, put a fist against their waists, and lift their chins so high in a posture of defiance that they could hardly put the target in their sights. Constance corrected them every time — this was not a joke, this was not a pageant — but Beulah loved how brash and bold they looked.

She came to love the sound, too. It had terrified her at first, recalling as it did that awful night with Henry Clay, but after the first time, she wanted to hear it again, and again.

It was the decisiveness of a gunshot that satisfied Beulah. A bullet had the power to end something when nothing else would. She gave herself over to the fantasy of being in brutal, terrifying command for just a moment. She swam around inside of that dream, and imagined how it would feel to be the one who had the final say.

Fleurette didn’t notice the way Beulah drifted off — she never did notice when her audience had stopped listening, or perhaps she didn’t care — and went right on chatting. “You also missed Hack telling Norma, right to her face, that pigeons couldn’t be counted upon to reliably transmit military communications.”

“He didn’t,” Beulah said in mock outrage, trying to keep up with the conversation.

“He did, and now he owes me five pigeons,” Norma said. “If I’d known he wasn’t willing to believe his own eyes, I never would’ve released them.”

“Well, it’s over now,” Constance said briskly. They’d obviously rehashed this incident more than once already.

Norma wasn’t finished, though. “He had the nerve to tell me that even though the telephone lines are abysmal in France, the soldiers prefer them, because at least they get to talk to a girl every now and then.”

“That’s exactly what Jack says,” Sarah put in, happy to be back in correspondence with her brother, whose earlier letters might’ve been sunk by the Germans, but who remained unscathed himself, “except that he says he wishes they’d send some American girls over to work the switchboards. The French operators don’t even make an effort to say hello in English.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” Norma said, as if she knew all about French telephone operators.

“We might find out soon enough,” Sarah said. “Clarence told me they mustered a thousand men to the Armory in New York last night.”

“Why did they want them on such short notice?” Norma asked.

“Nobody knows. They were sent home and told to return at eight this morning. But he also heard that an order’s been given to enlist another six thousand men in the Navy.”

“They’re going to need more than six thousand, for all the ships they’re building,” Norma said. “We could be at war within a matter of weeks at this rate.”

Fleurette rolled off her cot and went to stand over Beulah’s. “I made some posters for May Ward’s show,” she said, and unfurled a sheaf of papers. They were surprisingly well-done: carefully lettered in black ink, with a border of stars around the edge in gold paint. Plenty of bills pasted up on the street in New York were only half as good.

“Come and help me put them up,” Fleurette said. She held out her hand with absolute certainty that it would be accepted, and Beulah could think of no good reason not to.