Abbeville (17 page)

“Just like you lost everything lending to the farmers,” she said.

“And to Fritz.”

“The farmers couldn't help it,” Karl said. “

Nor could a man as good and steady and competent as Karl Schumpeter,” Cristina said.

But he could have been more careful. He had believed in being
bold. He had believed he could modernize Abbeville and protect it. He had believed that what conquered adversity was confidence. Confidence. Now he knew why they used that word for a swindle.

The boxcar shook as the engine began to brake. Karl crawled to the door against the momentum and looked furtively through the opening. They were still in the middle of farm country. In the distance the two familiar church steeples reached upward to a place beyond fear that no living being had ever inhabited.

At least there was no danger of railroad detectives here, even if the train came to a stop, which in the end it did not do. Soon the engine began to accelerate again, adding to Karl's weight as he pulled himself back deeper into his corner.

Harley Ansel did not approach Karl directly. Karl only heard that something was up from a friend at the Bank of Potawatomi, with which he had made the deal. His friend told him that Ansel had subpoenaed the records of the sale along with all the files and ledgers that had gone with it.

“You'd better get a lawyer, Karl,” Cristina had said.

“And pay for it with what?” Karl said. “Corncobs?”

Instead he simply waited, going every day to the abandoned bank, passing the rusting dynamo in the shack with its stove-in roof, waiting for Harley Ansel to come. Months passed with no activity. An eerie calm fell over the town, everybody keeping to themselves because it was no use telling your troubles to someone with as many as you. The house was quiet, too, with Betty away at high school, earning her way by keeping house for the folks who owned the paper in Potawatomi. Karl and Cristina sat at the dinner table every evening until it was time to go to bed. Sometimes neither said a word.

The train ticked along steadily now, and the draft made Karl draw his overcoat tighter around his suit and pull up over his ears the wool
scarf Cristina had knitted him out of remnants she had found in drawers in the attic warming the mice. He looked down at the shoes he had bought years before at the Fair Store, beautiful hand-tooled leather, now cracked. Shining them the night before, he had thought of what an odd hobo he was, half-looking like he was going to dinner on the Gold Coast.

Well, you got used to contrasts these days: women working, their men idle; farmers unsure their harvest would fetch enough to cover the cost of the seed; Fritz's roads so broken and overgrown they seemed like trails left behind by the Indians.

Cristina had been a strength to Karl throughout the trouble. She would simply not hear him talk of failure. She always brought him back to what endured: faith, love, their daughter, the friendship of their neighbors.

“Would you trade those to get the money back?” she asked.

“I guess I never thought we would have to,” Karl said.

“Occasionally,” she said, “a man can be wrong about the weather.”

The second winter after the Crash brought heavy snows, which made folks' isolation almost complete. Betty could not get home. Karl even stopped going to the bank each morning. At church only a scattering of parishioners listened in the pews as the preacher told the story of Job. When hymn time came, Karl's monotone so dominated that it threw off the organist. So instead of four-part German harmony lifting everyone beyond Job's suffering, the song limped to a close like a broken soul.

With the thaw, Otter Creek flooded. In the interest of his creditors Karl shored up the high-side bank with old railroad ties so the road to his cabin would not collapse. The process by which his debts would finally consume cabin, house, and other worldly goods moved as slowly as Ansel did. The system was so clogged with rotten loans that when institutional creditors looked at what Karl had left and
what they could get for it, they put the file at the bottom of the in-box.

Through the door of the boxcar farmland was giving way to city. Karl hoped the train would push straight into the hub and not beach itself in some remote switchyard, where he would have to avoid the railroad dicks and hitch a ride downtown.

There was always a Samaritan ready to give a stranger a hand. In fact the hard times seemed to make folks more giving. Rose Stroeger had trudged through the snowdrifts one day to deliver Karl and Cristina a casserole she claimed she would never be able to finish herself. Old Henry Mueller showed up another day with a load of cobs he pretended he needed to dispose of. And when the gypsies came through, Cristina always found some little bit of food to give them.

Then there was Fritz. To outward appearances he was holding up better than anyone else. Karl was glad that Betty hadn't been there the day he'd shown up at the house, because she blamed him for everything. Karl supposed it was natural. When you are young you want to think that bad things happen because of bad people, which is easier to bear than the fact that they just simply happen, like God's snow bringing down the roof of a barn. Nor did she understand, because they had been unable to give her a sibling, how the instinct to resent could yield to the urge to protect.

“To what do I owe the honor?” Karl said, rising from his rocker as Fritz let himself in.

Fritz pulled off his boots and put them on some papers Cristina had left at the door for the purpose. Then he unwound himself from a muffler and heavy coat that looked as soft as cashmere.

“A brother needs a reason?” said Fritz.

“Of course not,” said Karl. “But he usually has one.”

Fritz bellowed with laughter, which brought Cristina into the room. She said hello, smiled, and left.

“Well, you got me there, Karl,” Fritz said. “Here. I brought you a decent cigar to chew on.”

He handed it to Karl, who rolled it between his thumb and fingers as carefully as if it were an ancient artifact.

“Don't ask who I got it from,” Fritz said.

Karl put the cigar down on the marble-topped humidor next to his rocker.

“Go ahead and enjoy it,” Fritz said. “It's not going to incriminate you.”

“You getting any business?” Karl said.

“It's starting to come,” said Fritz. “That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Things happen when the money starts moving again.”

“I'm not involved in that,” said Karl. “For me the money has stopped cold. And whatever paper there was between us belongs to the State Bank of Potawatomi now.”

“I've heard from them,” Fritz said. “They're not the bankers you were.”

“You mean they expect to be repaid,” said Karl.

“I've heard from Harley Ansel, too,” said Fritz.

Karl rocked in his chair a few times, then lifted the cigar off the humidor and held it out to Fritz.

“It is better that this stay between you and him,” Karl said.

Fritz made no move to accept its return.

“Harley's never given me anything but trouble,” Fritz said.

Karl put the cigar back down.

“There was a time you thought you could get on his good side,” he said. “You gave him one of Father's fancy pony bridles once, remember? You got a whooping for it.”

“I don't know why Father put up such a fuss,” said Fritz. “We didn't have any ponies anymore.”

“Maybe because he knew that tribute would only make Harley demand more,” said Karl.

“You ended up having to fight him, as I recall,” Fritz said. “And then Father whooped you for bloodying your shirt.”

“He didn't have much use for the argument that I was defending the family honor,” Karl said.

“‘If you always do the right thing,'” Fritz said, imitating their father's accent, “‘the family honor will be strong enough not to need to hide behind your fists.'”

Karl pulled the wrapper off the cigar, leaving on the ring, and put the uncut end in his mouth. It had been a long time since he had held such richness between his lips. The leaves were dark and strong, and a pleasant feeling went straight to his head.

“What would Father say now, eh?” Karl said.

Fritz's eyes dropped to the paper Karl had on the floor to catch the juice he spit out.

“I'm the one he would say it to, Fritz,” Karl said, “not you.”

“Ansel has subpoenaed my business records,” Fritz said. “He's building a case.”

“What kind of a case?” Karl said.

The tobacco suddenly had an edge.

“It could be any number of things,” Fritz said. His left hand with the heavy wedding band on it worked his right, as if they ached from actual exertion.

It would have been better, Karl thought, if they had both stuck to the farmer's life their father had envisioned for them. Family honor had its most secure residence in black dirt beneath fingernails.

“Maybe we'd better be careful what we talk about here,” Karl said.

“If we're not, he'll have me on the witness stand against you.”

“It's the other way around.”

And as soon as Fritz said it, Karl knew that it had to be so. He rocked back and forth.

“He says he'll go easy on me if I testify against you,” Fritz said.

Karl looked at him and saw a rabbit ready to run.

“Testify to what?” he said.

“About the bank,” said Fritz.

“He already has all the records of the bank,” said Karl.

“Not the loans you didn't record,” said Fritz.

Karl kept rocking. The floorboard beneath him sounded off under his weight. Tick-tick.

“He says I'm going to jail one way or another,” Fritz said. “It's only a matter of how long.”

“You won't go to jail, Fritz,” Karl said.

“Harley Ansel is a vicious man,” said Fritz.

“You won't go to jail.”

The sun directly overhead had warmed the boxcar enough that Karl could open his coat. He pulled his watch from his vest pocket and saw that it was lunchtime, so he unwrapped the sandwich and followed it with a juicy apple that Cristina had polished to a warm red glow. For an instant he felt like a rich man, because even when he was a rich man he had never gotten as much pleasure from an apple.

The engine began to brake heavily. Karl stood, bracing himself against the planking, and made his way again to the sliding door. The train was already in the city. It rolled past great gray factories, past gigantic grain elevators that Karl had once been strong enough to tame. He smelled the stockyards. The train was very near the main rail yard now. He could ride all the way in, but then he would run a great risk of being arrested by the railroad dicks. So he gathered up his things and pushed the door open as the train swayed slowly over some switches.

He sat in the doorway, then jumped. When he hit the ballast, his
feet slid out from under him and he found himself rolling. The bed of clinkers where he came to a stop was made to steady the rails, not to comfort a human body. When he stood, he saw that he had ripped out one knee of his pants, which already showed the dampness of blood. It was just a scrape. He tore off a corner of his lunch bag and wiped away what he could. Cristina would be able to repair the fabric adequately, and the stain would come out well enough. But at this moment he felt more like a man who was coming apart than one who was on his way to a center of high finance.

At the road his luck changed, and the second car slowed for his thumb.

“You have a flat or something?” asked the driver, who wore the coveralls of someone who worked with machines. “I didn't see your car back there.”

“Don't have one anymore,” said Karl.

“Man like you usually does,” said the driver.

“I came by freight,” said Karl. “That's the kind of man I am.”

“Well, this mess don't respect class much, does it,” said the driver. “Least I have a job, praise God.”

“I praise God for it, too,” said Karl.

The driver turned and looked at him.

“Otherwise,” Karl said, “you wouldn't have a car either, and I'd still be walking down the side of this road.”

“Now that is a healthy attitude,” the driver said.

He generously delivered Karl directly to the Rookery Building, where Uncle John still had his office.

“Thank you kindly,” said Karl.

“Keep your chin up, brother,” said the driver.

Nothing had changed upstairs but the receptionist behind the glass. She was about the same age Luella had been when Karl had first come out of the woods. She looked Karl up and down until he said his
name. Then she raised a penciled eyebrow, plugged a line into the switchboard, and said simply, “Well, he's here.”

Before Karl sat down, the door opened.

“You can come in,” the receptionist said. “He says you know the way.”

“I worked here once,” Karl said.

“A lot of people used to,” she said.

As he moved down the corridor, two of every three offices were vacant. He wondered whether Uncle John might let him sleep in one of them tonight.

“Come in,” Uncle John said when Karl knocked on the burnished wood door frame at the end of the hall.

Karl moved forward and put out his hand. Uncle John stood but kept the desk between them.

“Sit. Sit,” he said.

Karl was relieved to be able to hide his torn knee beneath the rim of the desk.

“Thank you for seeing me,” he said.

“It has been too long,” said Uncle John, looking somewhere else.

“I don't have any business to offer you,” Karl said.

“I'm sorry the investments you had with us did not work out,” said Uncle John, “but in this you are in excellent company.”

“Your business survives,” Karl said.

“Barely, as you can see,” said Uncle John bitterly. “My losses have been staggering. But fortunately, people still need to eat, so the promise of grain is still bought and sold, though at a much reduced rate.”