Chapter 6

By the second week of February 1917 Sammy was very impatient to get the cast off his right leg. He sat with his foot propped up at work and did what he could to make sure the offset press was properly installed. Once his right hand had healed properly and he had gotten the splints off his fingers, he had mastered his crutches and was able to get himself to the streetcar without help and to hop up into his co-worker's Dodge on M Street in Georgetown.

Now as the shiny press rumbled to life for the first time and the man the manufacturer had sent to oversee its installation stood at his side, wiping his hands on a piece of waste, Sammy allowed himself to smile. The first inked sheet slid noiselessly out, and one of the pressmen brought it to the young man. It was a halftone photograph of him, crutch, cast and all, standing beside the gleaming press. Sammy handed it to the man at his side. "Looks pretty decent," he said.

The gray haired man put a loupe in his eye and held the printed page in the sunlight. He nodded. "Might use a different screen next time."

Bill Birch, cigar clamped in his teeth, hurried down from his office. "I heard it; I heard it run. Did it work? Did it work? Why didn't you call me?" he cried.

"Turn that knob to three and push the green button," Sammy said.

Birch set the indicator, punched the start button and the press rumbled and flicked in three sheets of paper from a big stack and then slid them out, warm but nearly dry.

"Hot damn," yelled Bill Birch. "Hot diggity damn. Look at that. Sharp as sin. Fast as greased lightning. By golly, ain't that something? We're going to get rich, boy." Birch shook Sammy's hand, making him wince, and then pumped the hand of the technician from Cleveland. "Gotta call Lucinda," he cried, hurrying away, waving the printed sheets.

"You did a good job, young man," the factory man said, shaking Sammy's hand a bit more carefully, "I'll tell the higher ups back home that you are competent and confident. They may want to hire you. I think they've been looking for a man in Washington to represent them."

"Well, thank you," Sammy said, mulling that possibility, "but the way things are going, we might be in a war pretty soon."

The big man nodded. "The damn submarines,"

"You heard about the Housatonic?" said Sammy.

"Yep, and Wilson recalled our ambassador. Paperboy was yelling that on the corner this morning."

"My brother is talking about joining up, Maryland Guard not the army, and if there's conscription, well, I'm barely twenty. They're sure to get me."

"I thought we'd stay out, but not now. Folks in my part of the country, a lot of them's German you know, they're dead set against it." He handed Sammy a clipboard. "Just sign there, if you will. I got to be on a train tonight."

"Thanks for your help," Sammy said, screwing the top back on the man's fountain pen, "couldn't have done it without you."

"Not sure about that," said the factory man with a wave.

Sammy rotated to his desk, picked up the top folder and began preparing the first job to be run on the new press.

On the last Sunday in February, Robert, Sammy and their father sat in the parlor after supper with the sliding doors closed. The older man lit his gnarled pipe and when it was drawing, looked at his sons and nodded. They gave him a new pipe almost every Christmas but he kept going back to his old, smelly one that was crusty with age.

"The First Maryland got back from Mexico some time ago," Robert began. "I think you knew that."

Seth Williams nodded and glanced at his youngest child, awful big for a baby, he thought. Sammy avoided his eyes, feeling his look.

"We," said Robert, "both of us, we're planning on signing up with the Guard on the first of March. They're opening the rolls then."

Seth took a deep breath and very briefly the frightening excitement of 1864 played through his crowded memory. "That won't put you in the army, will it?" If he closed his eyes, he knew he would hear Jubal Early's cavalry.

"No, sir," said Sammy quickly, "not exactly, but if war comes, the Maryland First is sure to be called up, just like it was before."

"They won't take you with your leg barely healed. How long's the cast been off, a week?" Seth asked.

"Nearly two weeks now," Sammy told him, slapping his thigh. "And its good as new, maybe better the doctor said, just awful white."

"Those two fingers are working all right, are they?" asked the boy's father.

"Almost," said Sammy, holding up his hand and flexing them so his father could see. He wished he felt as sure about this decision as his brother seemed to be, but now he was committed to it.

"And you," Seth said turning his attention to his older son, "you'll be thirty in a month or so, right?"

"They take men eighteen to thirty-five I believe," Robert said, knowing he sounded officious.

"Aren't they giving preference to those who have served?" Seth puffed deeply, wishing they were talking about peaches, pears or dairy cows.

"Of course," said Robert. "They might turn us down."

"What's this about?" asked Caroline Williams, coming from the kitchen and taking her chair near the hearth and then easing her feet out of her shoes.

"These two lamebrains are going to join the army," said Seth with a wave of his pipe.

"Oh," said Caroline with a sniff. "I'm not surprised. All the nasty stories we'd heard. It sure looks like war." She sighed, "If they have to fight, I'd rather it was with their friends, boys from Maryland rather than as conscripts with a bunch of strangers."

"That's what they're going to do, mother," Seth said. "Join the Maryland guard; militia we'd call it in the old days."

Caroline looked at her sons and took a deep breath. "Well, they have my blessing."

"I must say I am surprised, Mrs. Williams," Seth said, setting aside his smoldering pipe. "I thought you were a rock-bound pacifist. a peace at any pricer. Aren't you suffrage women hard against the war?"

"Not since the Lusitania," said Caroline Williams. "And those stories out of Belgium, I don't see how anyone can be neutral."

"That's been two years," said Seth, snorting in exasperation. "You never told me how you felt."

"You never asked," said his wife.

Robert and Sammy looked at each other and concealed their smiles.

Sammy was mustered into the First Maryland National Guard regiment without undue fuss, but Robert failed his physical because of his flat feet and impaired hearing in one ear from a childhood accident. On weekends, Sammy began attending training sessions with a company organized in Prince Georges County, going down to Marlboro on the train Friday night and coming home through Rockville late on Sunday.

Then things began to happen very rapidly, so fast that Sammy sometimes felt his life had speeded up like one of those Keystone-cops films. First there was the Zimmerman note and all the hullabaloo that went with that. One Sunday night in early March, while stories and rumors flew around the Capital, Sammy in his worn and ill fitting uniform, his loosely wound puttees sagging, sat with Millie in her parlor, aware that he looked a bit ridiculous and feeling ill at ease. A single oil lamp stood on a corner table but the dying fire lighted their faces. Millie held both his hands and Sammy found he had a lump in his throat that made it difficult to talk.