In the fall of 1937 they got a new young preacher at Holy Redeemer, Pastor Jacob Huseby. Pastor Huseby's wife, Margaret, was said to have an eye for men. It was even rumored that in

Huseby's last church, she'd seduced a teenaged parishioner, who'd become so guilt-stricken, he'd run away. Macurdy was skeptical; wishful thinking, he told himself. Margaret Huseby was well-built and sexy, and he'd heard men say they wished she'd seduce them.

In the summer of '38 she swam too far out in the river, and went under before she could make it back to shore. Her husband swam out to rescue her, while someone drove to a phone and called an ambulance. Macurdy, hearing the siren, sped after it in his patrol car.

When he arrive the trauma of Melody's drowning kicked in, and he brushed aside the ambulance driver, who was about to begin artificial respiration. After Curtis's futile efforts to revive Melody, not so many years before, he'd talked with Arbel about how to revive drowning victims. He'd never before had an opportunity to test Arbel's advice, but he soon had Margaret Huseby conscious, and she was taken to the hospital for observation.

And that, Macurdy thought, was the end of that, because he seldom went to church. But seeing him in his '35 Chevy one day, getting gas at the Sinclair station, she asked him for a lift home-she'd just left her car for a major tuneup-and he said sure. Before he got her home, she was groping him. She wanted to repay him for saving her life, she told him, and her husband was out of town.

What really shook him was how tempted he'd been. He told himself he wouldn't go to church again till after Pastor Huseby was transferred to another parish. Something else would happen first, however, that made his resolution irrelevant.

10

War!

Macurdy awoke one Friday-September 1, 1939-to a kid shouting in the street: "Extra! Extra Paper!" The only time he coup recall the Oregonian distributing an extra edition in Nehtaka was when Bruno Richard Hauptman was executed for the Lindbergh kidnaping. Pulling on his pants, he hurried outside, called to the boy, and bought a paper.

The Germans had bombed Warsaw and invaded Poland. There was war in Europe! Not civil war in Spain, or Italians fighting somewhere in Africa, but an invasion of one European country by another, with France and England almost sure to get involved. It was the war people had feared might happen and spread, maybe even to involve the United States.

That noon he read it to Klara, translating into German. Her thin old lips were a grim slit. Like Hansi Sweiger's dad, she'd disapproved early and emphatically of Hitler and his policies. Two of her four brothers had been killed fighting for Germany in World War One. A quarter of the village's men of military age had died, and others had been maimed. All because of war, she said, war and crazy rulers!

At first the war in Europe didn't affect life in Nehtaka. The depression had already eased a lot; local men had left to work on dam construction in Washington state and Montana, and projects of other sorts. Now shipbuilding boomed all along the coast, and logging increased. Jobs were easy to find. People listened more to the news on radio, read the papers with greater interest, and talked about the war. In the logging country there was particular interest in the Nazi invasion of Norway and the Soviet invasion of Finland.

But the changes were neither deep nor difficult, let alone painful. America was at peace.

The war became more troubling when the Nazi Wehrmacht ground its way through the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Balkan peninsula. The British army, badly mauled in the defense of northern France, was driven from the continent at Dunkirk, leaving behind its armor and heavy weapons. Afterward came night after night of German bombing attacks on English cities. And Britain, an island nation dependent on shipping for many of its needs, had more than three million tons of merchant vessels sunk by German submarines in 1940 alone.

But though some people believed that America would be in the war before it was over, so far it was foreign, and not fully real.

In September 1940 that reality level jumped. With passage of the Selective Service Act America's first ever peacetime conscription law-millions of American men registered for potential military service. Curtis wrote to Indiana and got a birth certificate. His birth year was given as 1904, which startled Fritzi but not Mary. Curtis had written 1914 on the employment form, by accident, he said. He still looked 25, give or take a couple.

Now great military training camps had to be built, and the demand for lumber really boomed. Within weeks, the first drafts of young men were loaded onto trains and hauled away. But at age 36, and as Nehtaka County's undersheriff (Earl had left to be police chief in Manders, California), Macurdy was marginal as far as the draft was concerned.

Meanwhile times got better as the defense industries grew. In Nehtaka, the Saari Brothers greatly expanded their machine shop, retooling it to build bomber parts for the Army Air Corps. There were so many jobs, they had to hire women!

And in the summer of 1941, Mary, now 25 years old, was visited again by morning sickness.

By then the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union, and advanced so rapidly, it seemed they'd defeat the Russians before winter. Meanwhile there were major diplomatic differences with the Japanese, but most Americans paid much less attention to those. Asia was farther off than Europe, geographically and culturally, and anyway, diplomatic problems seemed a long way from warfare.

Of more immediate importance was the basketball game between Nehtaka and Saint Helens high schools, on Friday evening, December 5. Nehtaka won in overtime, 36 to 34.

Two days later, at about 10:30 AM, Curtis was in the kitchen drinking coffee, reading the funnies, and listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on the radio. The music was interrupted by an announcement: Japanese bombers had just attacked Pearl Harbor.

The war was no longer someone else's.

A lot of Nehtaka County's young men enlisted. The Severtson Brothers lost quite a few of their loggers, and advertised for men. On the Monday after New Year's Day, 1942, two of Fritzi's deputies enlisted, one in the Marines, one in the Maritime Service. That evening after supper, Fritzi commented (in German, of course) that he was glad Curtis was 37 years old. "Otherwise the draft would be after you for sure."

Curtis looked thoughtfully at him. "I've been talking with Mary about whether I should enlist."

Fritzi, alarmed, looked at Mary. "What did you tell him?" She met her father's gaze. "That it's up to him."

"What about the little one?"

"It will be all right. And so will Curtis."

Her father grunted. "Bullets and shells do not select their victims. If someone is in their way, the person is dead." He turned to Klara. "Talk sense to them, Mama!"

The old woman's jaw clenched. She too met her son's gaze. "If Curtis wants to go, he should. If Hitler and those Japaner win the war, we will learn how bad things can be, even here."

Snorting, Fritzi put down his knife and fork. "They can never win. We are too much for them here."

Klara sat taller, straighter, more stem. "They will win if we do not do what we can. And if Mary wants to go to work at Saari's, making-whatever it is they make there, I can cook. I can even keep house; a little dust never hurt anything." Curtis grinned in spite of himself. For years Klara had made war on dust, even when she had to wage it by proxy. So much for the unchangeable."

Fritzi subsided. It hadn't occurred to him that his mother would side against him. Now it seemed to him that if Curtis hadn't already made up his mind, Klara's declaration might well make the difference.