To get the cases together, uncrate and put together the cars, and put them in running condition took four days’ very hard work. . . . Our chauffeurs worked tirelessly and cheerfully.
Many more American uniforms are to be seen in the streets than French. We were delighted to see the “Sammies” and they to see us. Miss Englund found a brother.
—Mrs. Ambrose Rutherford （née Betsy Hayes）， ’96, Director, to the members of the committee
September 1917
Saint-Nazaire, France
Liza stuck a grease-stained hand out from under the truck. “Could anyone hand me that cup of grease?”
“I’ll get it.” Kate set down her hammer, stretched her sore muscles, and shoved a small cup of grease into Liza’s hand.
“Marvelous!” Hand and grease cup disappeared together under the truck, and Kate took a step back and stared at their handiwork.
It looked like a truck.
Which was, in itself, nothing short of amazing. When they’d gotten to Saint-Nazaire, woozy from sleeplessness after a night standing up on a packed train, they’d found their trucks on the docks, not in one piece, but in boxes.
Kate hadn’t even been aware trucks could come in boxes. She had assumed, if she had thought about it at all, that someone had driven the truck into the ship’s hold and left it there. It had never occurred to her that it might have come from the factory in parts or that they would be expected to put it together.
“Well, of course you can,” Mrs. Rutherford had said, and handed Kate a toolbox, no doubt cadged from their unsuspecting innkeeper, who had had no idea that his yard was about to turn into a garage. She had given Kate an encouraging pat on the shoulder. “It’s hardly alchemy. You just follow the instructions and put the pieces together. If a man can do it, so can we.”
By “we,” she meant them. Kate had been left holding a hammer and wondering what on earth she was to do with it.
It was a commonplace at home that Kate was too educated to do anything useful. “Don’t let Katie near the stove” was the family mantra. “She’ll burn the bread while her nose is in a book.”
Which was a little ridiculous given that her mother didn’t bake her own bread; she bought it from Losher’s bread factory, day old, at a discount.
Kate had always accepted that she was singularly useless, accepted it because they all seemed to believe it—but now, three days later, she was standing here with a sore back and sore fingers and a truck that had a top because she had hammered it on. She’d screwed on the supports and hammered on the cab and realized it was backward and cursed and pried it all out again but she’d done it and no one had mocked her for slowness or made fun of her for hitting her own fingers.
Kate stretched her arms up over her head. Liza was still under the truck, applying grease—they’d all had way too much to do with grease over the past three days, and she’d probably still be sanding rust in her sleep for weeks to come—but it was only the finishing touches now. The truck was together. It was done. It might even go. She wished she could take a picture of it to send to her mother and stepfather and brothers to show them that this was something she had done with her own hands, something which had nothing to do with putting words on paper or being clever in an examination.
“Almost done!” came Liza’s voice from under the cab.
Liza trailing around after Maud, Kate found deeply wearisome. Liza wearing an old slicker and squashy felt hat, covered with grease, was a surprisingly good companion, especially when one was flat on one’s back under a car and not saying much more than “Could you pass that whatchamacallit, please?” Liza never seemed to tire and had a cheerful obliviousness to sarcasm, possibly as a defense against a decade of friendship with Maud. Whatever the cause, Kate found it strangely restful.
“No hurry,” said Kate, and wandered over to see how Alice Patton and Frances Englund were getting on with the Ford truck.
That had been a revelation too. Not Fran Englund—she was just as she had always been, levelheaded and even-tempered and with a wonderfully dry sense of humor that came out under adversity—but Alice Patton, who, it turned out, beneath the flutters and the giggles and the doubtful taste in haberdashery, had a positive genius for anything mechanical.
Kate had been amazed to find herself—well, not enjoying herself precisely. Or maybe she was. It was good to be out in the early September air, in the sun and the wind and the salt of the sea, doing something with her hands and seeing it actually work, in the company of people who didn’t ask more of her than to pass the nearest wrench.