Abbeville Read online

  Unfortunately, it did not. The market kept falling. Young entrepreneurs who had been worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper were suddenly worth no more than the recycle value of the paper. Companies that had been the market’s darlings sent out broadcast e-mails to their employees, informing them that their jobs no longer existed.

  Partners’ draws at Bishop & Dodge went to zero as the firm attempted to preserve its capital. I was able to turn a few of the securities in my private account into cash so I could continue to pay the bills. Nothing else was liquid unless I was willing to lose a hundred dollars to get one. At some point my equity in the firm sank below the equity we had in our home.

  Even though I would ordinarily have preferred to spare Julie, the situation was so grave that I had to talk to her. As I explained our circumstances, she looked at me with such trusting eyes that I thought the full import of the news was not penetrating.

  Then she said, “Are we in trouble?”

  “Everybody we know is,” I said.

  In the weeks that followed, a feeling of utter helplessness came over me. I tried to take measures to economize, such as shopping for groceries armed with coupons from the Sunday paper. I cut them out in my office; there was not much else to do there. Meantime, I put feelers out to a number of commercial banks, hungering for a proper salary again, no matter how modest. I never received so much as an e-mail in reply.

  All the while the memory of Grampa kept coming back to me, and eventually I decided I had to return to Abbeville.

  I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the big old house where he had spent most of his life. The steps still creaked in the same places they had when I was a boy. The hall at the top was still a gallery of portraits. Large, ceremonial photographs looked down, the ones that had seemed to sit in judgment of me during my adolescent years. Over there were Grandma’s parents, looking fresh off the boat. Next to them Grampa and Grandma themselves, probably barely into their twenties, as relaxed as a neck brace. I went to the bedroom where I had always slept, hung my garment bag in the armoire, slipped off my shoes, and lay down on the big, white-painted iron bed. The feather mattress enveloped me. At some point I heard ticking from downstairs. My cousin must have thought to have someone come in and wind the heavy ceramic clock that had chimed every hour I had spent in Abbeville.

  I quickly drifted off to sleep and dreamt of fleeing something I could not name. When I awakened, the crossing bells were calling the approach of a train. My legs slid off the bed. The whole house began to rumble, a tremor of the earth.

  Tiny raindrops were gathering on the rattling window. I slipped my shoes back on, got my Gore-Tex jacket and a pair of rubber overshoes from my bag, and went downstairs. When I pulled the car up to the crossing, I looked down the tracks at the retreating lights of the caboose, port and starboard. The whistle fell as if being borne into the past.

  As I drove by the church, I felt a little pang as I recalled the time I had broken a stained-glass window. Then the town fell away, and the flat, endless fields spread out on either side of me. At the rutted road to the cemetery I turned and bounced up a slight incline to what Grampa used to say was the highest point in Cobb County. He should have known, since he had been the one to fence it in when his father had donated the land.

  It wasn’t hard to locate my father’s grave, even though I had not visited it often during the twenty years since we had buried him. He lay near the back fence with the extended family: the Schumpeters, the Vogels, and assorted others. This was my mother’s choice. She wanted us all to be together in the end. When she talked about this to my father, his Irish came out. He said that being planted in Abbeville was fine with him; he was pretty sure he’d have nowhere better to go.

  I had always changed the subject when my mother started going into her ultimate plans for Julie and me. But now I found it reassuring that our plots were in a trust my mother had established, so there would always be at least one asset left.

  My father’s gravestone was flat to the ground. In fact, it seemed a little sunken, perhaps the effect of the disturbed water table. Behind it stood a small plastic American flag in a VFW holder with his World War II rank (sergeant) and dates of service (1940–1945). I got down on one knee and soon found myself speaking aloud.

  “I tried my best,” I told him. “But everything is falling apart.”

  Then a memory rose from the dead. From kindergarten we had drilled for nuclear war so much that it had become a wolf cried too often. But then came the Cuban Missile Crisis, and suddenly the beast was at the door. I was sure that soon I would hear the sirens pierce the air, and all I would be able to do would be to count down the seconds until all life expired.

  In the midst of it my father came into my bedroom one night as I tried to go to sleep.

  “It is probably hard for you to believe,” he said, “but I have known some of what you are feeling. A lot of things happen in this life of ours. Some are very personal. Some are so big it’s no wonder folks attribute them to the devil or the wrath of God. This country has been through hell. Most of it probably seems long ago to you, but some of the worst happened not much before you were born. The Depression. Pearl Harbor. There were times that made me wonder how we’d ever get through. But we did. Or at least most of us did. Life does go on, George. It always does.”

  With the Cold War over now, at least my son didn’t have to live with the nightmare of death hurtling out of the sky. For my father, of course, it hadn’t been a dream. When the kamikazes aimed their Zeros at his troop ship, he was as awake as a man can be.

  I stood up at his grave. The drizzle had stopped, and the sun came heavily lidded beneath the far edge of the clouds near the horizon. Off to the right rose the monument with Grampa and Grandma’s names on it, along with their dead infant son. It was imposing in such a small place; Grampa must have bought it when he was still flush. It had ample room for his father’s and mother’s names, his brother’s as well, Grampa’s act of unconditional, unaccountable love for a man who had led him into disaster.

  I stood before the monument for a time. The limestone angels had lost their faces to the wind and rain, the point of the obelisk gone as dull as a worn pencil. I tried getting down on my knees again, but this time no words came. I did not know where to begin.

  2

  THE DRY, GRAY EARTH CRACKED UNDER THE blade. Every inch came hard. It would have been much easier to put in these fence posts in April, when the rain-dampened soil had been as black as night and the weeds had not yet woven their roots into a shield. But nobody had needed burying in the spring.

  The young man looked over the patch of ground he was supposed to enclose. A generous amount, more than three acres, it seemed absurdly large for the purpose, especially since his father had given him posts—which seemed as big around as tree trunks—on which to string wire delineating exactly what he had donated and what he had not.

  Old Rolf Schlagel was going to be mighty lonely up here. Eventually, of course, he’d have company. But the young man, in a collarless, hand-me-down Sunday shirt that had been worn to patches under his father’s only suit, could not imagine it ever filling up.

  When his father had given the land, memorializing it in several stiffly worded documents in his perfect Germanic hand, he had held back twenty plots for his immediate family. Twenty! There were only four of them in Abbeville: Mother and Father, himself, and his brother, Friedrich. Twenty plots would take the Schumpeters into the next millennium, which seemed to a young man as distant as the last.

  Karl took out his blue bandanna and wiped his face, then the band of his straw hat. A little breeze would be all right about now. Or somebody stopping by to lend a hand. But he supposed that everybody was at the crick, swimming or fishing for the big cats that lived on the mud. Probably getting a laugh at his expense, too: fencing in ghosts, eh? That barbed wire better be mighty sharp.

  His father’s plan was to have the job done before they planted old Rolf on Saturday. T
hat meant putting in every post today, then wrestling with the wire tomorrow, giving himself a day to spare in case of weather. As his father always reminded him, “I’ve never once known anyone to win an argument against the rain.” Nor against Karl’s father either. Stubborn as this fence pole, and sometimes twice as thick.

  Karl dug deep to anchor the fence against the upthrust of the winter freeze. When he got a post situated, he filled in around it and stomped on the soil until the ground was tight.

  Sometimes after a day’s labor was done, he rode off on a horse and did not return until past the hour when everyone in Abbeville was in bed. Folks said it must be rutting season. But if that were it, he would simply have found a gypsy woman, who the boys said would touch you anywhere you wanted for a price. And anyway, he saved his fancy for a respectable girl, Cristina Vogel, whose father farmed a spread a mile west of the Schumpeters’. Karl was not alone in his interest. Harley Ansel, who was a year younger than Karl and a year older than Cristina, clearly had hopes for her as well. Karl did not have much experience with the way the opposite sex saw things, but he felt sure Cristina would not reciprocate Ansel’s attentions. The boy had a jagged edge that did not come from breaking earth.

  A fence does not get built this way, Karl thought. It was foolish to drive oneself idle with ideas. But whenever he saw the gypsies crossing the prairie in their strange caravans—not living by the rhythm of the seasons but cutting straight through them toward something beyond—he could not help wondering what they aimed to find.

  He increased the vigor of his digging until the hole reached the proper depth, then slid a post from the back of the horse cart. His father had felled it and stripped it of its bark, but he had left the bulbous knots where the limbs had been, which gave the post the look of a prehistoric bone. Karl thought of trying to hoist it to his shoulder, but the distance to the hole was short, so it was easier just to drag it.

  The bottom end scraped along, seeming to get hung up on every stone, but eventually he got it to the lip of the hole and heaved it vertical so that he could get around it with both arms. It slid down his front haltingly. Knots tugged at his belt. Finally it hit bottom, sending a shudder up through him. He had to look around to make sure no one coming up from town had seen him dancing and thrusting as if he were a dog on somebody’s leg.

  Karl scraped the piles of fertile earth back into the hole with his boot, then began to stomp it down. There were girls at the barn dances in the Coliseum who would let you brush up against them ever so briefly as you wheeled by in the square. You could feel the softness of them, but even the most wanton permitted no more than this. And if a boy ever did manage to lure one of them outside, he found the farmers out there waiting for them, smoking their pipes in the dark like sentries.

  Cristina was not such a girl. She had a dignity and seriousness of purpose far beyond her years. He was sure she was the kind who would let only one man touch her, the one she decided to wed.

  Work, Karl. Work. The wind had picked up enough that when he lifted the next post, he had to take it into account. More shoulder and less embrace made this encounter a mite less incriminating. The post slid down the shallow trough he had cut to make the process easier. When he had one whole side completed, he checked the alignment: as straight as the numbers in one of his father’s ledgers.

  The wind blew his sweat cold as he admired his work with the devil’s pride. The proper antidote, of course, was the same as for desire: redoubled labor. He worked steadily through the afternoon until, with three sides of the rectangle complete and the fourth started, Friedrich showed up, collar and hair still wet from the crick.

  “Do any good today?” Karl asked.

  “Robert got him a few,” said Fritz. “Fat ones, too.”

  “See any water moccasins?” Karl asked.

  “Naw,” said Fritz, as if it wouldn’t have scared the bejabbers out of him if he had.

  “Were you the only two there?” Karl asked.

  “Andrew Schwarz and Harley Ansel came later,” Fritz said.

  “Harley give you any trouble?” Karl asked.

  “Naw,” said Fritz. “When I told him what you was doing, it gave him a good enough laugh that I guess it satisfied him.”

  “Don’t ever let him bully you,” Karl said. “I’ll have a talk with him if you need me to.”

  “Aw, Harley ain’t so bad,” Fritz said, and Karl could not help thinking that Fritz had probably laughed right along with him.

  He went to the horse cart to pull down another post from the dwindling pile.

  “I’ll help,” said Fritz.

  Karl could have asked his father to assign Fritz to assist him, but it was the elder’s lot to shoulder the burden.

  “Dad sure did give them enough land,” said Fritz, gazing down the long-side fencerow.

  “Got to last till Judgment Day, I guess,” said Karl.

  The younger boy walked over to the empty hole and looked down. The wind had abated, and bees flitted at the dandelions.

  “You suppose he’s fixing to bury himself here?” said Fritz.

  “He’ll probably be looking for a little help from the two of us,” said Karl.

  “I mean him and Ma, they’ll both be here?”

  “Don’t get too far ahead of yourself, Fritz,” said Karl.

  As he began to lift the next post from the pile, Fritz leaped to help.

  “It’s all right,” said Karl. “I got it.”

  Fritz disregarded Karl and managed to get the butt end off the ground. The quiver of his exertion expressed itself down the whole length of the log.

  “Steady, boy,” Karl said.

  That only made the log wobble so much that Karl could feel it working out of his own grasp.

  “Just let me know if you’re going to have to drop it, Fritz,” he said, using all his will to keep up his end for fear that if he lost it, the weight would crush his brother’s hands.

  Without warning Fritz simply let go. This broke Karl’s grip, and the heavy log crashed against his shin.

  “Almighty!” he cried as he went down.

  The pain did not come immediately, but when it did, it radiated from the spot of the blow upward and downward until it hurt as much as a part of him could.

  As he held his shin between his hands, the feeling began to center itself where he could test it. When he realized that the wound was more likely a bruise than a break, the question of Fritz began to intrude into his selfish pain.

  He was nowhere to be seen from the ground where Karl lay curled.Karl straightened his leg against the hurt, rolled off his hip, and pushed himself upward to a sitting position. It was only then that he saw the retreating form. Fritz’s impulse to flee was as much a part of his nature as a rabbit’s.

  Karl leaned on an arm opposite the injury and pushed up against the burden of the earth. When he got upright he listed, but he was able to stand.

  “Fritz!” he called out, waving his arms. “It’s all right.”

  Fritz turned, but trouble was trouble, and it never went away. So you had to. Just that simple, said the rabbit.

  Karl’s leg ached something fierce. It gave him sharp notice whenever he put too much weight on it. But still he found that if he stood correctly, canted away from the weak side so he could take the burden on his good leg, he could still lift. It did test his back, but no more than hay bales in tight quarters in the loft. He used the tool to brace himself as he leaned over, then used the pole itself for balance as he slid it.

  Getting the fence post upright proved to be another matter. He pushed his bad leg as far as he could, but still the angle was wrong. The log would not slide into place. It began to wobble, and he had to throw it from him. At this point he really could have used his brother’s help. But that was an idle thought. He tried again and again until he succeeded. Eventually he was able to master how to work hurt so he could keep going until the posts turned the empty land sacred.

  There had been jeopardy, but he had go
tten through it. Danger was always present, whether in building a fence or running the sharp-bladed implements in the fields. It was there even in pleasure, climbing a tall lookout tree near the crick or touching a girl at the dance who you could tell wanted to come back around to be touched again. It was the way of the world to put obstacles in the path between a man and the things he wanted or was obliged to do. Otherwise, Karl supposed, a soul would never be measured. Maybe this then was the reason God made moccasin snakes and swimming holes and gypsy women and little brothers.

  3

  WHEN KARL LIMPED INTO THE HOUSE, he did not mention Fritz’s role in his injury. He had just lost his balance, he said.

  “That is the cause of all human misery,” Karl’s father observed.

  Karl could think of quite a few other causes—starting with severe fathers—but he stood silently, wondering what punishment his father would mete out to him for a job well done.

  His father began to pace.

  “Success in agriculture today takes more than a knee for the weather,” he said.

  Was this a test? It was not his knee that he had hurt.

  “Your mother and I have decided.” His father stopped and straightened himself at every joint, as if he were lifting whatever it was he was trying to say. Then he finally spoke again. “It is time you were exposed to the world.”

  Karl’s mind leaped up. Chicago. Grain and livestock pouring in from all over the plains. He could hear the animals’ frightened cries, see throngs of people as numberless as the Bible’s multitudes.

  “You will be going to the North Woods to work with your uncle,” his father said.

  It was as if Karl had been tackled and brought to earth.

  “Why send me so far?” he complained. “What do I need to know of the forest?”

  “He is my brother,” his father said.

  KARL WENT BY TRAIN, switching lines he forgot how many times, until he found himself in a freezing boxcar with a dozen ruffians who, to his dismay, all got out at the same bleak rail crossing he did. From there they were taken by open oxcart mile upon bumpy mile until they reached a scar in the forest that turned out to be the camp of Schum-peter Logging Co.