The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

the hour before bed. Harry shook a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it, his eye on a pair of headlights moving slowly toward him from the houses on the other side of town. The lights shone along the wooden fences and then, for an instant, lit up the whitewashed flagpole on the post office, rising high above the town like a ghost finger pointing in the night. Harry frowned. With lights on it like that, the flagpole clearly marked the town’s center. He ought to speak to Iris about lopping off the top, he thought, lifting his hand in a wave to the car. Honking as he passed, the doctor’s face flared briefly in the reflected light of the gas station sign, and then it was darkness behind him, darkness pulling the two red tail-lights away with him up the hill.
    Iris. Harry grinned stupidly. He could almost hear her— you want to cut off my flagpole, Mr. Vale? He nodded, still smiling, but it wasn’t a joke. Across the road lay the swath of harbor beach. Past the gray sand it was black. And past that—in the space of eighteen months, Hitler had snatched Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France, and whether he would cross the twenty-one miles of the Channel, marching triumphant up the Dover Road to London, remained to be seen. Harry stared across that vast dark and tossed his cigarette into the gutter. He turned in the direction Dr. Fitch had driven, but it was pitch-black, the red lights long gone—the town hidden again in darkness. And then Harry turned and stared back out across the water, where the war was waiting for all of them.

3.
    A T THE REAR of the post office, the wind whipped straight off the water into the high-ceilinged sorting room, and Iris found herself stiff with cold after a couple of hours of work. An inlander, she was used to winter snow, but the wind blasting unchecked across the Atlantic found its way inside and gripped hard at anything it could. She drew the school map out from its mailer and unrolled it on the table. The green, demarcated world before the war spread out.
    There was France and Germany. Austria. England. Poland. Letters printed in straight lines in the comforting typeface of school, the world ordered as neatly as the men now were. Since the draft had begun in October, each man’s number pulled by hand from the War Department’s glass fishbowl and recorded, the roads and rails were full of American boys being sent all over the country, leaning over books and maps in their olive drab, sprawled in the too tight seats moving from Ohio to Omaha. Tennessee. Georgia. The Carolinas. From town the two Snow brothers would go first, then a Wilcox, a Duarte, and a Boggs. Johnny Cripps and Dr. Fitch had numbers so high, it was as good as if they hadn’t been called. They’d never be needed now.
    But Iris James had ordered a map nonetheless. And now Florence Cripps, owner of the largest B&B in town, stopped right where she was in the doorway of the post office lobby and put her pocketbook down on the floor. Large and handsome with blond frizzed hair in a good silk dress, Mrs. Cripps stood like a striped tent without an occasion, studying the scene before her. Full attention must be paid. For here was Franklin’s most public official, stepped away from her window and standing on a stool, carefully tacking up a large school map of the world, blithely covering the faces of the Most Wanted.
    “Iris! What are you doing?”
    “Putting up a map,” replied the postmaster, giving a good solid bang upon the last tack with a hammer.
    “But—Iris,” Mrs. Cripps said reasonably, wishing only to point a gentle finger, certainly not to wag. “What if one should come through here ”—she advanced upon Iris—“then we’re lost. We’ll never know the criminal element in our midst.”
    Iris stepped off her stool and unlocked the door in the heavy oak partition between the lobby and the sorting room at the back of the post office. “In all your life, Florence, have you ever seen one of the men in