Abbeville (10 page)

There was a slight murmur as they moved into the sepia, kerosene-lighted hall. Karl saw Fred Krull's red face appear in the doorway. The crowd hushed as Harley Ansel walked down the aisle toward Karl.

He was back from Urbana and almost finished with his apprenticeship in a law office in Potawatomi, the county seat. They said he planned to run for Cobb County prosecutor once he had established himself in private practice. Karl and he had exchanged greetings once or twice, but they generally stayed out of each other's way. Ansel's face had no use for bygones. Karl's did not expect forgiveness, or need it.

If apologies were due, they should have come from Ansel. In the midst of the project Fritz had complained that Ansel had told him Karl was making him a laughingstock by forcing Scott on him, that everyone in Abbeville could see that Karl had no respect for him, that Karl was taking every good business opportunity for himself, then throwing Fritz the scraps. He made fun of the way Fritz dressed, said he looked like a rooster. “A rooster that can't find the chicken coop,” he said.

“I told him I'm just waiting for the right woman,” Fritz told Karl. “And he said, ‘Better watch out or your brother will take her, too.'”

Karl advised Fritz not to pay Ansel any mind, but this was not Fritz's way. Instead he tried to ingratiate himself with the man, flattering him in public, giving him legal business from his road construction company. He would have had him do the contract for the dynamo building if Karl hadn't talked him out of it.

As the crowd in the Coliseum watched, Ansel stepped close to Karl but did not accept his hand.

“Hello, Harley,” Karl said. “I didn't expect to see you here. I heard you were in Potawatomi.”

“Where I live is none of your concern,” said Ansel.

“There are plenty of seats,” Karl said.

The murmuring in the room commenced again as more and more townsfolk and farmers filed in. Karl went to the door to see how many more were on the way. There was no moon, so it was difficult to see very far. Karl smiled.

Henry Mueller stuck out his hand when he entered with young Henry Jr. in tow.

“Hello, gents,” Karl said as they shook hands.

“'Lo,” said Henry Sr.

Cristina's brothers came next, finding chairs in the next-to-last row.

“What in thunder did you drag us all here for, Karl?” Will Trague's voice boomed out as if he were calling hogs.

“I'll tell you once everyone is seated,” Karl said.

There was only a little grumbling.

The rows were filling up quickly. There was George Latour and, remarkably, Simon Prideaux. Behind them came a half-a-dozen of the French. This was good. What Karl brought to Abbeville, he brought for all.

As soon as everyone was seated, Karl looked over toward the elevator, where a red train lantern glowed near the engine house. He took one of the kerosene lamps off its shelf and moved it in an arc in the window. Once, twice. Then a red lantern in the invisible hand of one of Mr. Pryor's men swung twice in response.

Karl put the kerosene lamp back and went to the front of the room.

“Gentlemen,” he said as the rustle subsided, “you have all noticed that my brother has been doing a little building.”

“He's been doing damned little of it himself,” said Ansel, which set off a flutter of laughter.

“What we've been working on will save time unloading at the elevator,” said Karl, “and the faster we can move you through, the less money and trouble it costs us.”

“You talking about taking on more farmers?” asked Will Hoenig.

“There's still quite a few French north of us who cart their harvest all the way to Versailles,” said Karl. He pronounced it Ver-
SAILS
, the way everybody did. Karl made no mention of Prideaux's French customers
to the south. “The more business Abbeville does, the better it is for everyone.”

“The better for you,” Ansel said, touching off the glottal laughter of the French.

Karl went to the window, picked up the kerosene lamp again, and moved it back and forth three times before replacing it on the ledge. Shortly thereafter came a sound that drew everyone's ear. Some pulled out their pocket watches in confusion, though it really sounded nothing like a train. Then, above the sound of the steam turbine, rose a high-pitched whir, the like of which none of the men facing Karl, save Mr. Pryor, had ever heard. Brows furrowed. Wind through a loose board in the barn? The cry of a wounded animal? Nothing in nature could make quite such a sound because nothing in nature rotated as fast upon itself as the flywheel of the dynamo, except perhaps a heavenly orb.

As the tone ascended, it gave the illusion of approach, like the rise of a train whistle. Karl thought he could actually hear the future racing toward them.

Some men fidgeted. A strange glow began to rise behind Karl like the dawn. It flickered. The men blinked.

“Well, I'll be damned,” someone said.

“Can you beat that,” said another.

“So that's what you was doing, you old fox.”

The electric bulbs, which had been resting cold and unnoticed before three sconces, now beamed an even, golden hue.

“Gentlemen,” Karl said, “I bring you light.”

“Ain't it dangerous?” asked Georges Chartiens.

“No more than a mule,” said Karl. “It won't kick you unless you approach it wrong.”

“I heard tell of some trouble,” said Simon Prideaux.

“People burning up,” said Ansel. “There'll be liability there.”

“Hell,” said old Henry Mueller, “a lantern'll burn you if you knock it over.”

Mr. Pryor stepped forward as the crowd began to break down into muttering knots.

“You are right to be concerned,” he said. “Without due care, what warms can burn. What creates can also destroy.”

“Amen,” said George Loeb.

The farmers laughed.

“We'll leave that to the Rev. Johann here,” said Karl. “The fact is, the dynamo will drive the elevator. It will light the Coliseum. It will exalt the church. It will show our way home at night. Tomorrow we begin installing streetlights.”

“Next you're going to say you can make it rain,” said Prideaux.

“It isn't natural,” said Ansel.

There were a few agreeing grunts.

“It's as natural as lightning,” Karl said. “And like a spring storm, it will bring increase. This is only the beginning, gentlemen. Together we will build Abbeville strong.”

“You running for office again, Karl?” said Fred Krull.

“It's just that we've got to defend ourselves,” said Karl.

“Haven't you heard?” said Ansel. “The Injuns are all dead.”

“They got chased straight off the plains, didn't they,” said Karl. “And do you know why?”

“Because they didn't have dynamos?” sneered Prideaux.

“Because they wouldn't change,” said Karl.

M
R
. P
RYOR DID NOT
run a line to Karl and Cristina's house until the elevator was operating completely under artificial power, the church was aglow, and the streetlights had done their magic. By the time
Karl's house lit up, nobody said a thing about it, except Fritz, who thought Karl should have included his house, too, even though he was unwilling to put in the wiring to take advantage of it.

The streetlights turned out to be a form of entertainment. Often farmers would bring their wagons and teams into town at dusk. The sun would set, the lights would come on, and they would haul out the
Chicago Tribune
and read it in the middle of the street, just because they could. Only at the Coliseum was opinion mixed, as young folks now had even more trouble eluding the eyes of their elders.

Except on days when there were square dances, the dynamo only operated from 6
A.M
. until 9
P.M
., when every self-respecting person was in bed. Each night at that hour Karl left his house, walked across the prairie, stepped over the tracks, and entered the engine house to disengage the clutch, close down the big valves, and bank the coal fire. The lights on the street would flicker and die. The windows of the Schumpeter house would darken. And then there would be silence— and for Karl, a feeling of things still to be done.

After turning out the electricity Karl always made one last check of the bank, lighting a kerosene lamp with a kitchen match as he entered. The building had only one room, apart from the vault, which was in effect a separate structure at the rear. A single large table dominated the center of the room. On it men laid their hats when they came to Karl asking for a little help. The tabletop was always strewn with papers—reports from the Board of Trade, new state banking regulations, flyers from implement manufacturers.

Fritz also used the bank as his office, so on one wall hung charts showing the cost of various building materials and pictures of the big road-building implements for which Fritz had acquired a capital-intensive taste.

This was of no direct concern to the Schumpeter Bros. partnership, which had come into being when painters put the big black letters
across the whitewashed wall of the elevator. There was no formal agreement between Karl and Fritz. Karl simply grew tired of Fritz's complaints and cut him in on the elevator, general store, and implement lot, though he never let him into the business of the bank, which would have required the approval of state banking authorities. Fritz for parity kept the paving business for himself.

When Karl divided the partnership income each month, he invested most of his share with Uncle John. Fritz spent his as soon as he got it, then started asking for advances. There was no mystery why. Fritz had finally taken a bride. Or, as Cristina said, had been taken.

Karl rarely brooded over any of this. But sometimes, late at night, after he returned to the silent house, he would sit at the kitchen table totting up the day's numbers and thinking about the action in the pits, the way the prices rose after they fell and fell after they rose, how the seasons came and went and Cristina's blood flowed every four weeks, and with it the sadness. Then he would snuff out the oily flame of the lamp and go to bed to wait for the morning.

W
HEN
I
RETURNED FROM THE CEME
tery to the house Grampa had built, it was still early. I had bought some food on the way down from Chicago so I wouldn't have to go chasing all over Cobb County for my dinner. As I went inside I heard the birds in the trees and remembered the summers of my boyhood, when we would spend weeks in Abbeville. Every morning I woke up to the mourning doves. With nobody my age to play with, I was sure they were mourning me.

I was in just such a mood one day when the flicker of spinning blades outside scared the birds silent. It was Grampa pushing the mower over the sparse lawn in front of the house. Strictly speaking, he could have let it go. In farm country nobody admired or criticized another on the basis of a crop you did not harvest. But Grampa was out there with his hand mower once a week anyway, as if for sport.

I swung my feet over the edge of the high bed and slid down until they touched the cool wood of the floor. My heel encountered something hard and icy. It was the milk-glass chamber pot that Grandma placed there during our visits for my convenience during the night. It
was true that it was easier to kneel down and relieve myself into it than to grope my way downstairs in the dark. But in the morning the thing mortified me, especially having to carry it past everyone to the bathroom, the yeasty smell coming up like shame. With my heel I pushed the pot farther back under the bed.

I dressed and went downstairs empty-handed. Grandma was moving about the kitchen—having heard me stirring above her—putting Butternut slices into the old chrome toaster that only did one side at a time, retrieving a box of cereal from the pantry, pouring juice and milk.

I sat down at the table where a plate of white-frosted cinnamon rolls lay on the shiny oilcloth table covering. I tore a chunk off one of the rolls and let it sweeten my morning.

“You can sit down, Grandma,” I said. “I'll take care of myself.”

“If I sit down too much, I'll rust,” she said.

I grabbed a spoon out of the drawer and a paper napkin from a tin holder decorated with engravings of the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Then I wolfed down a bowl of brightly colored Kix and drained the pastel milk. I was done just as Grandma finished buttering the toast, which I snatched as I scooted out of the room.

“Mind the crumbs,” Grandma called.

I bounded up the stairs again, eating as I did and leaving a trail straight out of Hansel and Gretel. When I got to the bedroom, I put on my Keds and tied the laces. I was halfway down the stairs before I remembered the chamber pot. Even more awful than emptying it myself was the thought of Grandma or my mother doing it. So I returned to the bedroom, knelt down, and pulled it out. There wasn't much inside, but I carried it carefully anyway, holding it out from my chest like a chalice. When I reached the back bedroom, I put it on the bureau and opened the window, looking in every direction to make sure nobody was watching. Then I lifted the pot over the sill and dumped its contents into the bushes below.

That done, I raced back downstairs, past Grandma, and out the door. My destination was a shed next to an unused outhouse that stood next to the chicken coops. All these many years later, I can still smell those birds. I breathed through my mouth as I flipped open the latch and slipped into the shadows. When my eyes got used to the dark, I saw the weapons leaning against the plank wall: the plastic-and-tin Daisy Red Ryder BB gun that my father had taught me how to shoot on the prairie along the tracks and next to it the beautiful, wood-stocked, blued-barrel CO
₂
pellet gun my parents had gotten me for my birthday. It could have passed for a .22, and over the first fifty yards or so it packed the wallop of a hunting rifle. It also had a clear advantage when it came to stealth, since the only report it made when it fired was a little puff of breath.