The Last Government Girl. Ellen Herbert

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      The Maryland Writers’ Association (MWA) is a voluntary, not-for-profit organization dedicated to supporting the art, business, and craft of writing in all its forms. The MWA strives to:

      • Bring together aspiring, emerging, and established writers of all genres and disciplines;

      • Serve as an information and networking resource;

      • Help members make contacts that lead to publication;

      • Encourage writers to reach their full potential, and;

      • Promote writing within Maryland communities.

      In keeping with the MWA’s mission, a national novel contest was held in 2014. The submitted excerpt from The Last Government Girl won against forty novel entries and is published here in full. We are grateful to all the judges who participated in evaluating the submissions:

      Lalita Noronha, MWA President

      Holly Morse-Ellington, MWA Vice President

      Brandi Dawn Henderson

      Shenan Prestwich

      A special thanks to the judge of our finalists:

      Dean Bartoli Smith

      We’d also like to thank Apprentice House Press for this partnership with the MWA contest. The MWA couldn’t achieve its goals for its members without such a supportive community of writers, editors, and publishers.

      The Last Government Girl

      The Last Government Girl

      Ellen Herbert

      Apprentice House

      Loyola University Maryland

      Baltimore, Maryland

      Copyright © 2015 by Ellen Herbert

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission from the publisher (except by reviewers who may quote brief passages).

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

      First Edition

      Printed in the United States of America

      Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-62720-086-8

      Paperback ISBN: 978-1-62720-087-5

      E-book ISBN: 978-1-62720-088-2

      Design by Apprentice House

      Published by Apprentice House

      Apprentice House

      Loyola University Maryland

      4501 N. Charles Street

      Baltimore, MD 21210

      410.617.5265 • 410.617.2198 (fax)

      www.ApprenticeHouse.com

      [email protected]

      In memory of my mother,

      Helen Smith Klarpp,

      a government girl

      1

      Thursday, February 17, 1944

      Saltville, Virginia

      The town of Saltville lay wedged between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains in a valley not green, but gray. A sea of hungry salt marshes hid below the surface, sometimes sucking down miner’s shacks, any structure foolish enough to be built on the flats. Things of value must be set up high, the company store, the train station, and the two-story houses with roofs of tin.

      In front of one such house, a young woman named Eddie, short for Edwina, stood inside the boxwood hedge beneath a star-tossed sky. She held her breath. She waited for wonderful.

      No light burned in the house behind her. Upstairs, her twin sisters in their double bed, content in their double life, tied rags in each other’s hair, so they would have curls for school tomorrow. They needed no light. They read each other’s heads like Braille. Across the hall, Mama lay terrified, sinking like shacks on the marsh. Behind the house, the garage sat dark and empty, its doors flung wide. Dad, a night supervisor, was at work mining salt.

      Eddie heard the 9:13’s long shrill whistle, her favorite night music. She breathed its delicious coal smoke and scorched iron smell, as it sped past to cities she had only read about. “Washington, Washington, Washington,” she whispered like a prayer.

      Next came the best part: the dining car. Golden light spilled from its windows. The diners’ happy faces passed in a blur. How did she know they were happy? They must be. They were going somewhere.

      If she stayed here, she would sink like her mother. She vowed to leave by summer. There was a war on and office workers needed in Washington.

      2

      Sunday, March 26, 1944

      Three miles outside Washington, DC

      In that gray in-between when night has slipped away and dawn waits on the doorsill, Vernon Lanier found the girl on the towpath beside the C&O Canal. She lay stomach down, her head to one side, her skirt hiked up, showing her thighs. Lines had been drawn on the backs of her bare legs to look as if she wore seamed stockings.

      “Miss?” His own voice startled him. “Miss?”

      She didn’t move. Her coal black hair had unraveled from the roll that wreathed her head. A high heel dangled off one foot, her other foot bare, her sole pink as the inside of a seashell.

      A well of sorrow rose in Vernon. What had brought her to this place? But he knew, oh he knew. He was young once, full of sap and desperate to be alone with Bess.

      He knelt beside her, dampness seeping into the knees of his overalls. Around him, the world went silent, even the doves hushed, and the skin on the back of his neck prickled. He brought his fingertip to her face. Her skin felt cold and firm and dead.

      He leapt to his feet. He could not help her. He picked up her baby blue coat lying nearby and read its label: This garment was sewn with love for Doris R. Reynolds by her mother. He covered Doris in her coat made with love.

      From the towpath something glinted. He dug out a piece of jewelry, two joined silver bars, familiar somehow. High boy voices sounded behind him. Probably kids going fishing, but he wasn’t waiting to find out.

      He dropped the pin in his pocket, flung his feed sack over his shoulder, and took off, splashing through swampy woods a few hundred yards until he reached the Potomac, the river he loved like a friend. Here it was wide, studded with rocks, its current treacherous. Fog rose from it as if the river were breathing heavy.

      He skittered along its shore and scrambled up the embankment to the Chain Bridge.

      While he felt awful about Doris, he wished he hadn’t walked so close to her on the towpath, its dirt soft from recent rain. Mud had seeped into the bottoms of his work boots. He’d pushed tacks through their soles to keep from slipping when he shingled the roofs of tempos on the National Mall. He’d taken the tacks out, but tiny holes remained. His soles were like fingerprints. They identified him.

      Just as the sun pushed up from the horizon, he ran onto the bridge.

      “What’s your hurry, mister?” called a fisherman, his hat stuck with lures, fishing line angled into the rapids. “Seen you running hell bent for leather upriver.”