Читать книгу The Last Government Girl - Ellen Herbert - Страница 7

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Thursday, February 17, 1944

Saltville, Virginia

The town of Saltville lay wedged between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains in a valley not green, but gray. A sea of hungry salt marshes hid below the surface, sometimes sucking down miner’s shacks, any structure foolish enough to be built on the flats. Things of value must be set up high, the company store, the train station, and the two-story houses with roofs of tin.

In front of one such house, a young woman named Eddie, short for Edwina, stood inside the boxwood hedge beneath a star-tossed sky. She held her breath. She waited for wonderful.

No light burned in the house behind her. Upstairs, her twin sisters in their double bed, content in their double life, tied rags in each other’s hair, so they would have curls for school tomorrow. They needed no light. They read each other’s heads like Braille. Across the hall, Mama lay terrified, sinking like shacks on the marsh. Behind the house, the garage sat dark and empty, its doors flung wide. Dad, a night supervisor, was at work mining salt.

Eddie heard the 9:13’s long shrill whistle, her favorite night music. She breathed its delicious coal smoke and scorched iron smell, as it sped past to cities she had only read about. “Washington, Washington, Washington,” she whispered like a prayer.

Next came the best part: the dining car. Golden light spilled from its windows. The diners’ happy faces passed in a blur. How did she know they were happy? They must be. They were going somewhere.

If she stayed here, she would sink like her mother. She vowed to leave by summer. There was a war on and office workers needed in Washington.