Free Someone to watch over me by Jill Churchill Page A

temples and said, “Mrs. Anderson’s husband has been found dead in the woods near the railroad tracks.”
    Roxanne, who had been clinging desperately to Lily, and keening like a fatally injured animal, sank to her knees.

    Jack Summer spent Saturday night in the tent with Joe Wyman and his granddaughter and her children. Old Joe was so tired and sick with the heat that he didn’t even notice. Mary made Jack a thin pallet on the floor in the corner out of a couple of their extra blankets and some clothing. It was unbearably hot, and he was as far from the open tent flap as it was possible to be.
    He hardly got any sleep at all. Joe snored like a freight train, gasping and snorting horribly all night long. About two in the morning the baby started crying, and Mary accidentally stepped on Jack’s hand in the dark. She took the child to the opposite corner of the tent, sat down on a stool with her back to everyone, and started nursing the baby. The sound made Jack unbearably uncomfortable when he was already miserable. He’d slept in all his dirty, sweaty clothing, feeling this was only decent in the presence of a woman, and could hardly bear his own smell.
    He had finally dropped into a fitful nap about dawn when some idiot with a bugle played reveille—badly—just outside the tent, almost making Jack’s heart stop. The camp came awake. There were sounds of people calling to each other and dishes and pans clanking in the mess hall across the way.
    Jack gave up on sleeping and went in search of Corporal Snelling. “Where can I wash out my clothes and clean myself up?”
    Snelling, who already looked as bright and tidy as a button, pointed the way but said, “You should go to the mess hall first before they run out of food.“
    “I’d rather be clean,“ Jack said, sounding surly even to himself.
    When he’d washed and shaved as well as he could in a basin of tepid water, put on fresh clothes, rinsed out the clothing he’d worn the day before, and hung his shirt and trousers and underwear on a handy clothesline among many other people’s laundry, he started feeling a little bit better. As the smell of the food drew him to the mess tent, he realized he was lucky to be housed in a tent. Most of the other “structures“ were big cardboard boxes, packing crates, tar paper stretched over branches and sticks, and even a piano case, most of which had been foraged from the city dump.
    The first person he spotted in the mess tent was Edwin McBride. Edwin had served in the Great War as a very young man and formerly was an accountant, but now he worked as a porter at the Voorburg train station. He was one of the gabbiest people in town.
    “Why, if it isn’t Jack Summer!“ he called. “Come sit yourself down. What the hell are you doing here?“
    “Looking for you and the other men and their families from Voorburg,“ Jack said, sitting down on the army-issued plank bench beside Edwin. “I want to interview each of you about why you’re here.”
    Edwin bellowed across the room to three other local men and gestured to them to bring their plates over to talk to Jack. Not that they had much luck, because Edwin never stopped to let anyone else speak.
    “I suppose you know who started this?“ he said to Jack, and before Jack could reply, he went on. “Back in May a former medic in Portland, Oregon, organized about three hundred other vets thereabouts, and they stole a train engine and couple of boxcars and set out for Washington. The guy’s name was Walter Waters and the group named him their leader and headed clear ‘cross the country, picking up more vets and trains as they went. That Waters guy’s a good speaker. We’ve taken to calling him General Waters. He’d stop at every little town along the way and fire the men up about what they’d taken to calling the Bonus Expeditionary Force, or BEF. Clever, eh? Like the AEF—the American Expeditionary Force in the war.”
    Edwin shoved a piece of toast in his mouth