And So It Was

In 2021 the U.S. Census Bureau accidentally omitted Michigan’s Upper Peninsula from one of its maps. That wasn’t an uncommon mishap. Because despite its geographic size the “U.P.” had always been an isolated, generally-forgotten place, even after the bridge spanning the Straits of Mackinac opened in 1957.

So it was, that the people there called themselves “Yoopers” and developed a distinctive accent, and tended toward independence, and often felt as though they didn’t really live in Michigan.

And so it was, that when the bombs began savaging much of the world in 2049, and all five miles of the Mighty Mackinac were blasted into Lake Michigan in 2050, and there ceased to be a Michigan soon thereafter, life for many Yoopers wasn’t so terribly different as it was for what remained of humanity elsewhere.

Things changed, certainly. Their cars got parked when the gasoline ran out. Electricity and propane were novelties from the war’s inception. But in their isolation between two of Earth’s largest lakes, without anything that anybody wanted to destroy or plunder or conquer, the Yoopers abided. They looked after each other, surviving on what they had. They didn’t prosper. But they made do.

And, so, oddly, as the third world war raged, the U.P. was remembered even less than it had been during World War II. This, we know, because in the 1940s the federal government had thought to establish five prisoner-of-war camps to hold captured Germans, in some of the most out-of-the-way places within that out-of-the-way place.

And so it was, that Pauline Kowalcyzk came to be.

Of course, the P.O.W. camps closed 87-some years before her birth. But Pauline knew that her great-great-grandfather had taken his first and last breaths on a farm about a mile from Camp Pori, where his father, Karl, had been imprisoned. She knew Karl had decided to remain after the war, and never returned to Germany. And these things, she knew, because she’d spent her own 19 years on that same farm.

So it was, that Pauline was behind a horse at daybreak on a crisp-cold Tuesday. She was driving an old two-wheeled sulky one of her forebears had built. And when she passed the weathered roadside sign commemorating the site of the camp, she wondered what it must have been like for the men there, interned so far from home and so far from anything else.

Pauline shifted both reins to one hand and lifted an assault rifle from her lap with the other, brandishing it up where she hoped someone unseen might respect it. Her family’s farm, hers by that time, was in as rural a place as rural places get, 25 miles east of Ontonagan. But even though most of the horrors of war were passing it by, she knew, from experience, that there was nothing truly safe about that remote countryside anymore.

As her horse walked and the sun rose and the frost gave way to dew, Pauline tried to quell her unease by recalling the family’s stories about her three-greats grandmother, Ivy. Much had been lost over generations, but she knew Ivy had been a spy in the last world war.

The harrowing stories about Ivy’s dangerous assignments and near-miss escapes in a disintegrating Europe soon helped Pauline rally some fraction of her own taxed, bedraggled courage. She wondered yet again, for lack of real knowledge, what could have been so important about Karl, that the government had flown and ferried and driven Ivy so many miles to interrogate him at Camp Pori. And as young ladies will, she marveled at the mystical power of love at first sight, which reunited Karl and Ivy after Germany’s surrender and brought their family into being.

But inevitably, her thoughts returned to why she was venturing to Ontonagan, and to what she alternately hoped and dreaded she’s retrieve. And so it was, that Pauline watched the tree lines, and raised her gun often, and urged the horse to gallop through abandoned burgs like Wainola and McKeever, until there were 25 miles behind her and buildings on the horizon ahead.

Despite being a county seat, Ontonagan never really did bustle. In better times it only had 1400 people scattered through its four square miles. Because of the war’s privations, Pauline could feel, as she navigated its streets, that about half its residents were gone; it would never bustle in the future.

But there had been a few people and wagons on the streets as she passed. So by the time she stopped her sulky at the courthouse, she wasn’t quite so fearful as she had been in the countryside.

From perches amid stacks of sandbags and strands of razor wire near the entrance, two armed men in mismatched blue jackets and camouflage pants watched her arrival. They were down the sidewalk and at her side before she could alight.

The taller man smiled at her. The shorter one pointed at her rifle, and began with an attitude.

“Yah, checkpoint, hey? Let’s have that.”

Pauline handed over the weapon. “Don’t worry. Doesn’t have bullets.”

The taller man took the rifle and removed its magazine. “Yah, Randy, how ‘bout a little less rude, hey? This is Pauline Kowalcyzk.”

Randy regarded her for a moment. He glanced at the empty magazine, and then stepped back so Pauline could dismount. He shrugged in her direction and replied.

“So? We still got our orders, Toivo, don’t we, hey?”

Toivo replaced the magazine and handed the rifle back to Pauline with another, broader smile.

“So, uh... I’m pretty glad to see you’re up ‘n around.”

Pauline hadn’t planned on meeting anyone’s eyes, let alone some deputy’s. But as she slung the rifle over her shoulder, she glanced up at Toivo and felt... something. It took her an extra moment to speak.

“Do I know you, sir?”

Toivo nodded and smiled again, and extended his hand cordially. “Yah. Ah, prob’ly not, exactly. I, uh, I was one of the deputies who was out to your farm, there. Last fall. I was the one who found you, ya know. Went back later n’ fixed the door.”

Pauline shook his hand. She found herself in no hurry to let go. Toivo was in no hurry, either. He continued.

“Yah, hey, I’m sorry about your parents. We tried pretty hard, but, ya know, there wasn’t anything... They were gone when we got there.”

Randy interrupted, with much too much glee for the subject. “So that was you, hey? Yah, me and Toivo and a couple guys, we caught the bastards who done it. Tracked ‘em alla way over t’ Baraga. Got ‘em sellin’ your stuff. We got back most of it, prolly. And then I strung ‘em up myself! Right up there!”

He pointed over Pauline’s shoulder at the town’s gallows. She’d already seen the macabre structure, with its nooses swaying in the breezes from Lake Superior. But she turned to look anyway, mostly for an excuse to release Toivo’s hand. Toivo sounded embarrassed about Randy when he spoke.

“So, yah, we’ve still got the evidence up in the courthouse. You’re here to pick it up, eh?”

Pauline turned to Toivo and nodded. “Sorta. There’s just one thing I want.”

Toivo turned for the courthouse. “Right this way, ma’am. Randy? You tie off her horse, hey?”

Pauline followed Toivo up the walk, and past the razor wire, and then up the worn marble steps into a candle-lit foyer. A balding, rotund man in a blue jacket sat at the room’s lone desk and fiddled with an unlit cigar; he stood when the two arrived.

“Who’s this, Toivo?”

Toivo saluted him. “Sheriff Kovacs, Pauline Kowalcyzk’s here. For her family’s belongings, hey?”

The sheriff put down his cigar and smiled. “Miss Kowalcyzk! Very pleased t’ meet you, finally. Say, I’m very sorry about your loss. Glad to see you out and about, though. Did my guys say what happened to those lowlifes?”

Pauline nodded. “Thank you, sir.”

The sheriff shook his head and smiled. “I’m not the one to thank, ma’am. Toivo here, he brought you to town. Doctor told me, another hour and you mightn’t have pulled through.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Pauline finally spoke up.

“Sheriff, all I came for, if it’s here, is a locket. Kinda small. Heart-shaped. It was my great-great-great-great-grandmother’s. She wore it in her war. The rest, you can donate it to somebody, ya know.”

The sheriff thought, then nodded, then turned and went straight to the end of a shelf. He found the locket immediately, and brought it to Pauline with a quizzical look.

“Ma’am there’s... some valuable items here. Couple guns, even. I can have a deputy bring it out to Pori if –“

Pauline shook her head and interrupted politely. “No, thank you so much, though. But I’ve just got the sulky, and I have to get home before dark. Honestly, if I see that other stuff again, I’m just gonna be reminded of everything, so...”

The sheriff nodded. “Understood. I’ll keep it a while, ‘case you change your mind.”

After handshakes all around, Pauline and Toivo turned to go. They’d just reached the front steps when the sheriff called from behind them.

“Miss Kowalcyzk? One more thing, hey?”

Pauline turned to see him offering a ribbon-bound, football-sized bundle of folded papers. The way he handed them to her, she couldn’t have refused.

“I didn’t read but one or two of these letters. Just for identification, ya know. But I think you should keep ‘em. Safe travels, hey?”

Toivo walked her back to her sulky, and he gestured for Randy to untie the horse. As they waited, he removed the clip from his own assault rifle and swapped it for Pauline’s empty one.

“Don’t tell the sheriff I’m givin’ away shells, hey?”

Pauline smiled. Toivo gathered the reins for her, and continued as he handed them over.

“So, I don’t mean anything, ya know, creepy, or nothin’ like that, hey? But if it’s OK with you, one day this week I’d like to, ya know, maybe stop by? See how you’re doin’? I could prob’ly fix that front door a little better, hey?”

Pauline demurred. She wanted to accept. In the end, what she did was smile, and shrug, and meet Toivo’s eyes again, and snap the reins to start her horse homeward.

And so it was, that Pauline’s return trip to the farm felt, to her, like the quickest she could remember. She’d never seen the old letters, and her mind swam with theories about what might be in them. She had thoughts of Toivo, and his eyes, and his smile, and how he’d saved her life. And with a full clip of .223 shells in her rifle, she had so much rekindled courage that, twice, she decided against making the gun easy to see.

At home, near sundown, with her horse fed and watered and the sulky in the barn, Pauline didn’t go upstairs to bed. She took the letters and the locket to the kitchen, where she found a lantern and decided to spend some precious, hard-bartered kerosene sitting up a while.

She opened the locket to see two old photos of strangers. Ivy was a spy; chances were, they had been strangers to her, too. What Pauline sought, and what she needed a penknife to reveal, was hidden behind one of the pictures. It was a glass capsule, about the size of a pea, with a badly-deteriorated rubber covering.

She removed the covering and regarded the capsule in the lamplight. Her original plan had been to keep it handy, like Ivy had, so as never to be captured again. Then after so many fearful nights alone, waiting for the door to be kicked in again, she’d intended to bite down on it and end her terrors.

But now, there were letters to read tomorrow, and Toivo might visit soon. She decided the capsule could wait a few days.

And so it was, that thereafter, Pauline was.