Read Online Quartet for the End of Time by Johanna Skibsrud - Free Book Online Page A

shrugged. He doesn’t go in much for Waters and that lot.
    Sutton held on to Felicity for a time while the child slept. An hour passed, then two. She was about to give up (she would soon be missed, she knew, at home—where it was becoming increasingly difficult to explain her long absences), when Arthur ducked through the door of the tent. Chet, then Douglas, followed. They greeted her kindly, but—as Aida had said—they seemed exhausted, and sad. Even the plate of food Sutton had managed to beg from Germaine that morning did not seem to revive their spirits—though they thanked her sincerely for it, and began—hungrily, if rather mechanically—to eat.
    There was not much; it did not take long.
    The march, Arthur said, after they had finished and the plate had been wiped clean, had proved a disappointment—to say the very least. It was a long weekend holiday (a detail Waters had somehow overlooked); by the time they’d arrived at the Capitol, everyone had already gone home. Well, they’d stayed four hours anyway. Waters shouting the whole time about the change of tide the new President would bring.
    Arthur raised his hands, then let them fall. I don’t know what to believe anymore, he said. I don’t.
    Then the child began to cry, and Sutton was reminded of how late it had become. She handed the child back to Aida, gathered the empty dish, and—expressing her regret that it had not been more—took her leave as quickly as she could.
    I T WOULD BE MANY years before she came to learn with any sort of accuracy what took place between that moment—as she bade them all, Chet and Arthur, Douglas, Aida, and the child, a hasty goodbye; then turned, in order to make her way for the last time through the rutted streets back home—and when, three weeks later, “all hell broke loose,” just as her father had promised it would. Or how it was that Alden had managed, in that brief interim, to find himself in possession of a powerful explosive, at (depending upon how you looked at it) precisely the right, or precisely the wrong, place and time; or that Arthur had found himself, the afternoon following, wearing another man’s ill-fated hat.
    Many years before she would learn, for example, of how—on the morning of the twenty-eighth of July—Waters read aloud the eviction notice he’d received, which ordered the immediate evacuation of the Bonus Army. The Penn Ave. as well as the Anacostia camps would need to be cleared, read Waters—his voice shaking with rage—by no later than ten o’clock that morning.
    Or of how—at exactly ten o’clock—Glassford and six members of the United States Treasury arrived at the armory building off Pennsylvania Avenue, which now housed Pace’s men. The building—along with an adjacent concrete block once owned by the Ford automobile company— had been slated for demolition since early spring, in order to make room for the new Federal Triangle. That morning, however, as the first cranes and wrecking balls came into view (looming up suddenly in the distance, from behind the approaching Treasury men), it still belonged to the Bonus Army.
    This armory is not for sale! shouted a veteran posted out front, when Glassford and the first of the Treasury men drew near enough to hear. It’s the headquarters of sixteen hundred men of the Sixth Regiment of the BEF! All of whom have been honorably discharged, and eighty-five percent of whom have served in France!
    Aside from this—single—show of resistance, however, there was little dissent as Glassford and the Treasury agents pushed past, thenentered the building; or as they returned, only a few minutes later, with the first startled veterans, their wives, and a few children. Once more, then, Glassford and the agents turned and plunged inside—this time making their way up a rickety flight of stairs, left exposed due to the building’s