My country's part

“MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF”

What can an American boy or an American girl do for our country?

The ways are many. Every man, woman, and child in the United States has the duty of defending the nation. In time of war every American must be in spirit, if he cannot be in actual duty, a soldier. A soldier’s part is to guard his nation. An American’s part is to guard America. The guarding may be done by saving the food that the government asks its citizens to save, by buying War Thrift Stamps, by buying Liberty Bonds, by working for the Red Cross, or for other patriotic organizations; but it must be done with the idea that our country is our first concern, our first care.

Every American must be watchful for his country’s welfare. How may he do this duty? By remembering always that he is, first of all, an American. No matter what country his father or mother, or grandfather or grandmother came from, he is American, with the rights and privileges and obligations of his citizenship. And he must have no divided allegiance.

The story of what one American boy could do for his country is told in the story that follows. Some people call this a fiction story. But the root of it is truth. For every boy and every girl in the United States can hold to the love of country that John Sutton’s grandmother put into his soul through the incidents that make up the tale of

“MY GRANDMOTHER AND MYSELF”

My grandmother was at the basement window, peering into the street as if she were watching for some one, when I came home from school. “Is that you, John?” she asked me as I stood in the hall stamping the snow from my boots. “Sure!” I called to her. “Who’d you think I was? A spirit?”

She laughed a little as I went into the room and flung down my books. My grandmother hasn’t seen any one in ten years, though she sits day after day looking out on the street as if a parade were passing; but she knows the thump of my books on the table as well as she knows the turning of my father’s key in the lock of the door. “’Tis a lively spirit you’d make, Shauneen,” she said, with that chuckle she saves for me. “No, ’twas your father I thought was coming.”

“What’d he be doing home at this time?”

“These are queer days,” she said, “and there are queer doings in them.”

“There’s nothing queer that I can see,” I told her.

“I’m an old, blind woman,” she said, “but sometimes I see more than do they who have the sight of their two eyes.” She said it so solemnly, folding her hands one over the other as she drew herself up in her chair, that I felt a little thrill creeping up my spine. “What do you mean?” I asked her. “Time’ll tell you,” she said.

My mother came in from the kitchen then. “Norah forgot to order bacon for the morning,” she said. “Will you go to the market, John, before you do anything else?”

“Oh, I’m going skating,” I protested.

“It won’t take you five minutes,” said my mother. She seemed tired and worried. The look in her eyes made me feel that there was trouble hanging over the house. My mother isn’t like my grandmother. When things go wrong, my grandmother stands up straight, and throws back her shoulders, and fronts ahead as if she were a general giving orders for attack; but my mother wilts like a hurt flower. She was drooping then while she stood in the room, so I said, “All right, I’ll go,” though I’d promised the fellows to come to the park before four o’clock.

“And look in at the shop as you go by,” my grandmother said, “and see if your father’s there now.”

“Why shouldn’t he be?” my mother asked.

There was a queer sound in her voice that urged me around past my father’s shop. My father was there in the little office, going over blue-prints with Joe Krebs’s uncle and Mattie Kleiner’s father and a big man I’d never seen before. I told my grandmother when I went home. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it. And I dreamed last night of my cousin Michael who died trying to escape from Van Diemen’s Land.”

“You knew what?” I asked her, for again that strange way of hers sent shivery cold over me.

“Go to your skating,” she bade me.