How I Live Now

19

Before we started angling to get into the wide world again the first question I wanted answered was this whole smallpox epidemic thing.

Major McEvoy looked kind of uncomfortable when I asked him and said It was Not a Likely Danger to the Population at Large at the Present Time, and when I put on my best shocked face he said Now Daisy, how would Things Be if there was nothing to stop people wandering around Spreading Rumors and Getting Hysterical and trying to organize raids on The Enemy and that sort of thing, hmmm?

And then he gave me his Name, Rank and Serial Number look and changed the subject.

Not being entirely witless I got the picture that if we were going to die it wasn’t going to be from smallpox.

What was interesting about this little insight was that I could see the army had a point, but it still seemed like a sneaky trick to perpetrate on all those simple country folk.

With that worry sorted out I started trying to figure out a way for Piper and me not to spend the rest of our lives rotting in Reston Bridge when we could be out in the world possibly running into some of our long-lost relatives.

So after a few days sitting around twiddling our thumbs and going pretty much stark raving stir-crazy trying to have a sensible conversation while Alby whacked us on the head with a plastic sword every six seconds, we asked Major McEvoy to find us something to do because we were Hard Workers and wanted to Help People which was not a total lie except the people we wanted to help were us. He looked kind of pensive for a minute and said he would think about it and get back to us.

You can imagine that the good Major had a lot of thinking to do given that even in the best possible light we were still a fairly useless pair, but then I remembered JET, and that was a STROKE OF GENIUS because a well-trained sheepdog and someone who knew how to get him to do things were just about priceless at the moment what with most of the local farmers dependent on herding their animals with big off-road bikes and there no longer being any fuel.

Piper knew dog training from Isaac and the two of them were the world’s foremost natural Animal Whisperers and could make dogs and goats and sheep and probably bugs too do pretty much whatever they asked just by looking at them in a certain way and whistling a little low whistle which for Isaac especially was extremely useful, given the limits of his conversational aptitude.

Major McEvoy kind of perked up at this brainstorm and asked for a sheepdog demonstration. So with a couple of whistles, Piper sent Jet out into the garden and what do you know he was off like a shot, crouching down low when he got to Alby and then very gently without being obvious moving him little by little toward us until poor old Alby was standing right in front of his dad looking confused and wondering why every time he turned around to run back out to play Jet was blocking his path.

Piper gave him a pat and looked as smug as she was ever likely to look and I thought YES we are on our way, now if only I can figure out some possible use for me before they stick me in some out-box marked Cannon Fodder.

But it turned out that Major McEvoy was pretty nice after all and also he probably knew that walking off with someone else’s pretty nine-year-old girl even in the middle of a war wasn’t totally kosher and so he asked me to come along too and I gave Piper a mental thumbs-up sign and she smiled.

It turned out that our place wasn’t the only one that had been sequestered and Major M started taking us every morning to Meadow Brook Farm which was the largest dairy farm for fifty miles in any direction and should have been renamed Fort Dix Acres since the Meadows and the Brooks were teeming with soldiers all trying to take the place of machines.

The problem was, the cows had to go out every day to graze because there wasn’t enough hay to feed them and they had to be brought in to be milked twice a day which sounds simple enough until you think about three hundred cows all coming and going, and a lot of army guys milling around the farm like bulls in china shops.

Jet was a miracle to watch in action and he had most of the remains of the occupied British Army in love with him after the first day and Piper was right behind him in their affections. She could get him to separate out ten cows and bring them in to be milked by the army guys and in the meantime have the next ten ready while he took the first ten back.

All the big hunky army types couldn’t get over sweet serious little Piper whistling her magic whistle and this black and white blur of a dog running exactly where she told him to and she must have reminded every single one of them of their little sister back home or the one they wished they had back home or possibly just the Virgin Mary. Whenever they weren’t doing something else they kind of lurked around with moony expressions watching Piper and Jet in action and you could tell most of them felt happy just being near her and that Old Family Magic.

Piper acted like she didn’t even notice all the attention but I could tell she liked the way everyone asked her serious questions about Jet and treated her like something special. In the average morning at least three or four big guys would hang around for ages and finally get up the courage to say He reminds me exactly of my dog Dipper back home, or How does he know which whistle means what?

But I got the feeling that what they all wanted to say was just You have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen in my life.

I guess this was fairly obvious, given that she had the same effect on most people, but with all those quirky brothers getting in the way she probably didn’t get as much chance to be noticed as you might expect.

The fly in the ointment was that there was too much work for Jet and not enough for me. Having Gin around to help Jet would have solved the first problem and been an all-around godsend but that still left the second. I spent some of my endless hours of leisure learning to shoot a gun, which I thought might come in handy someday, if not in the war then back on the streets of New York. It was a lot harder than it looked but after a while I got pretty good thanks to all the expert marksmen hanging around disguised as milkmaids.

I tried raising the subject with Major McEvoy of getting Gin drafted into our section of the British Army and you could tell for a minute he forgot that he was supposed to keep us out of trouble and away from thoughts of Regrouping because he just looked sort of absentminded and said No, it wouldn’t be possible to get Gin right now because of the Situation on the Roads and also she’s probably as useful to Gateshead Farm as Jet is to us.

Thank god I have years of Emergency Deadpan Practice because you wouldn’t have guessed that Gateshead Farm meant anything more to me than Porridge Oats but like any good undercover agent I now had two names to put together to make an address and Major McEvoy thought we were still talking about dogs.

I didn’t tell Piper just yet because I was hoping for divine intervention about how we were going to get to Gateshead Farm, near Kingly, East of Here, and when.

Back to the dogs, in the end they compromised and managed to find a silly border collie named Ben who wasn’t much more than a teenage puppy to work alongside the Master only it didn’t work out as well as you might have hoped since he wasn’t the brainiest dog on earth and besides was afraid of cows.

It got so that Jet knew his job so well that either one of the army guys or I could take over some of the time while Piper tried to train some sense into dim Ben, practicing over and over again until he was just this side of useless. He still ran away bleating if any of the cows took it into their heads to look at him sideways, but most of the time they couldn’t be bothered and he managed to muddle through.

Sometimes I caught Jet giving him a look that was totally unimpressed and I could almost see Jet thinking Excuse me, but who invited this blockhead to the party?

And sometimes I wondered if he might be thinking the same thing about me.