The Wooden Shepherdess by Richard Hughes Page B

to be half in love with this terrible guy right now, even since ... could it even be really because of the way he’d behaved?
    But how could those two make it up, when each of them felt so grossly ill-used and insulted by someone without any morals at all? Janis could never forgive his brash assumption that she was the stuff unmarried mothers are made of: Augustine could never accept the idea of a man being used as merely a “thing,” without any nerves or needs of his own—as just an impersonal post for a girl to rub herself on....
    But the Pack had plenty to think about other than sex. The problem of getting their drink, for example. That Trooper whose ominous call at the store had scared Augustine so much: it wasn’t Augustine at all he was after. Normally Troopers were not concerned with enforcement (Troopers were State police, Prohibition was Federal law and Connecticut one of the only states where the Eighteenth Amendment had never been ratified): this was a nosey fellow however, and hand-in-glove with the Federal agents—as soon appeared when a number of farmers’ stills were discovered and seized, farmers whose names he had found in the ledger as billed for those sundries “useful for various purposes.”
    Troopers should never know more than is good for their health. One night this Trooper crashed a trip-wire suddenly tautened across the road: his machine was wrecked, he broke two ribs and his nose and the fat was properly in the fire. It was proved to the hilt that none of those raided farmers had done it; and yet it seemed odd if they really knew nothing that every last one of them had such a cast-iron alibi just for the night it occurred.
    Thus for a time the Pack went thirsty. Their usual sources had suddenly dried and it took them a while to discover the Dew Drop Inn, that road-house ten miles out on the New Milford Road.
    Prohibition was commonly blamed on the late war in “Yurrup”: American Mothers (they said) had wangled it through while their sons were fighting in France. Ree’s cousin Russell agreed in blaming the War, but argued more subtly: “Your darned War packed in too soon,” he complained to Augustine, “with hardly a shot fired” (he meant, an American shot). With an army of four million men—nearly twice the whole population of Wales—there were probably fewer American soldiers killed in total than Welsh ones.... General Pershing had done his best but he hadn’t had time: thus America found herself left with a wealth of hatred minted for war still nowhere near spent, yet suddenly robbed of its object. “To cap it,” said Russell, “the country was acting just like a turtle with bellyache (Boy, you could hear her gut rumble right through the horn!) blaming the world outside for her pains and drawing back into her shell, poor nut, to escape them!” In short the country had gone Isolationist, putting herself out of arm’s-reach of any outsider to work off hostility on: thus America had to divide against herself, to work off all this excess war-emotion (and surely safer this random way Prohibition provided, than any more rational fission of class-against-class or Black-against-White). “Just like a lonesome old monkey reduced to fighting front legs against back, his hind feet doing their best to scratch out his eyes and his teeth sunk deep in his own private parts....”
    If Russell was right, thought Augustine, the pundits would call this whole Prohibition behavior-pattern “Play Therapy.”
    Hardly indeed was “peace” declared before left-wingers began letting bombs off: all over the country a million men at once were on strike—and in Boston even the City Police struck. What Russell called a “Kilkenny-concatenation” of squalls of hurricane force and from every point of the compass soon had the Washington law-makers tossing around like corks. “Those days, if a