More than two million people had been hurt that way, besides, and as many more driven mad.
But things were getting better everywhere, and fast, now.
When he finished the edge of the walk, he went around the house, limping a little, for a bushel basket. His mother had set one out on the back porch. Before he picked it up, however, he stood on the porch, looking north.
Nora had been right: you could just see the top of the new Farm Industries Building that was being erected near the devastated area—Green Prairie’s fourth huge postwar structure. It wasn’t going to be a skyscraper, just an immense, horizontal building, with parking zones around it. Not that there were too many cars to park, as yet, Ted thought; or that there was much gasoline to run them.
The bushel basket, when he picked it up, seemed odd. It wasn’t made the regular way and it didn’t appear to be the right size. He saw faded stencil marks and read: Produit de France. The good old Frogs! he thought. In the “Aftertime,” they’d kicked through—the French and, of course, the English, the Italians and Belgians and Dutch and the Latin-Americans and about everybody else except the Russians—who almost didn’t exist—and the satellite countries.
With America bathed in blood, martyred, crucified, a flood of aid began. In that first dreadful winter, unreckoned millions of Ted’s fellow citizens were saved by European bounty.
He even recalled foreign labels on some of the medicine bottles at his bedside, when he’d been smashed up.
Now, the basket was another example. Everybody in U.S.A. owed something tangible to lots of people abroad. He chuckled a little, thinking what hell that had raised with the old “isolationists.”
Then he went around in front of the dilapidated house, raked up a green mound of fresh-cut grass and carried it, in the French hamper, to the chicken yard. The Conners now had more than sixty chickens and five pigs. Henry was even angling for a cow; some of the Crystal Lake people had offered grazing room on their estates.
His mother came down the street, walking slowly because of the heat and because of her mood. But when she saw the mowed grass, saw her tall, broad-shouldered son mopping his sweaty light-brown hair, she moved faster and she smiled.