Abbeville (18 page)

Karl shifted uncomfortably in his chair, which seemed designed to bite into his back.

“I came for advice,” he said.

He was prepared to meet his uncle's eyes, but Uncle John was still not ready to meet his.

“Risk is a medicine like mercury that in the wrong dosage kills,” said Uncle John. “But my advice is the same as it always has been. Move against the current.”

Karl leaned forward until his hands touched the front edge of the desk.

“I am drowning,” he said.

“I sincerely hope you put by some seed corn over the winter,” Uncle John said.

“How could I have done that?” Karl said. “Everything was swept away.”

“Only gold has sufficient weight to anchor itself,” Uncle John said.

“Gold?” said Karl. “But what about the creditors?”

“That is what attorneys are for,” said Uncle John, “to study ancient texts like kabbalists and find incantations that make dense gold invisible.”

“I used whatever magic I had in me to protect the people who trusted me,” said Karl.

The look on Uncle John's face was the one he gave to loggers and secretaries, the face with which success always gazes upon failure.

“Someday perhaps you will learn not to dissipate your strength,” he said. “Spread it, and it withers. Keep it for yourself alone, and it can be preserved. Do you ever see that girl I fired?”

“Occasionally,” Karl said. “For a cup of coffee.”

“It is all right to sip the coffee now,” said Uncle John. “You are married. And in need of stimulant.”

“It is nothing like that,” said Karl, standing. He would not ask for a place to sleep. Not even for the coins it would take to get a meal.

“If you go to her,” Uncle John said, “do remember about the mercury.”

As he left the building, he wondered why he had ever thought Uncle John would have anything worthwhile to tell him. He walked what
felt like miles toward the place where Luella worked, punishing himself the whole distance for imagining that the conversation with his uncle would turn out well. But when he drew near, his spirits lifted. He hadn't seen Luella since everything had fallen apart, and he hoped it might be easier now to be friends. Perhaps she would not feel obliged to lecture him on the rise of the proletariat and they could talk about important things.

When he reached the building, the sign of the realty firm still hung out over the sidewalk, but the windows were boarded up. Next door a cobbler was at work saving shoes that in other times would have gone into the trash.

“Do you know where Southwest Real Estate moved to?” Karl asked.

The cobbler took the nails from his mouth and set them on his bench.

“Same place the car dealer did a few months before,” he said.

“Busted Boulevard.”

“What about Luella Grundy?” Karl asked. “A redheaded woman. You couldn't have missed her.”

“Oh, I miss her, all right,” the cobbler said. “Seeing her coming and going was the light of my day. She went somewhere with that lucky fella of hers.”

“You wouldn't know where,” said Karl.

The cobbler picked up the nails.

“Nowadays people vanish, like everything else,” he said.

T
HE DOOR OF THE VAULT SEEMED HEAVIER
this evening as Karl put his shoulder into it. Locking the safe was a daily ritual, even though the cash was long gone. He went to his desk, which was no longer cluttered. The lights flickered, the way they had back in the days of the dynamo. Why had he ever thought he could chase away darkness, even from this one small place? Always at the end of the day comes night. And in the end of the ends, it takes you with it.

The building stayed lighted now only because it fell under the protection of the bankruptcy court. The notice of auction had finally appeared. Everything would go under the gavel within a month. He would not be there to see it, but he had assurances that no one would be bidding against Fred Krull for the house and its contents, and Krull promised to rent it to the family for a dollar a month until, little by little, Betty was able to buy it back.

It hardly seemed possible that so much time had passed—the good years when business boomed and Karl kept his promises, then the terrible
fall, how it compounded on the way down faster than it had on the way up. Then did not stop.

“What do you want from me?” Karl had asked point-blank in Ansel's office in Potawatomi.

“What do you have to offer?” Ansel replied, not even deigning to stop arranging and rearranging the things on his meticulous desk.

“I know what I want,” Karl said.

“We've all had unrequited desires,” said Ansel.

“I need you to understand one thing first,” Karl said. “You had no right to claim Cristina. It was her life, not her father's or yours or mine.”

“But she got yours, didn't she,” Ansel said. “For better or for worse.”

“Fritz goes free,” Karl said.

“That will cost you,” said Ansel, hands flitting from here to there as if he were tending a web.

“Whatever it takes,” said Karl.

“Well then,” said Ansel. “Let's get down to business.”

And so later tonight Karl was leaving for the county jail to await transport to Stateville to serve a two-year sentence. He turned off the lights and locked the door behind him. The air outside was brittle. He had gone to the bank with his coat unbuttoned to take in the sunshine of the morning. Now it was winter dark, and as he stood at the door a chill went down to his belly.

The Coliseum was shuttered. Abbeville could have used a little high-kicking fiddle music right now. You could probably get somebody to play for pennies. But who had pennies? Karl stopped and looked into the window of the general store that he had sold to Will Hoenig. The new owner sat in his white apron on a pile of empty wooden Coca-Cola crates, blood from the butcher block dried brown at his waist, one hand rubbing the other. The chill of the meat locker
had always made Karl's hands stiffen, too. He squeezed his right hand into a fist and shivered again. Even in the meat locker he had never felt like this.

He stepped back from the window and began moving toward the rail crossing again. Up ahead he could hear laughter. Someone had probably just misplayed a pinochle hand, and the others were letting him know it.

At the doorway of the garage, Karl stopped and looked in. Fred Brock was dealing. They all turned except Brock, who finished flipping the cards then squared the deck. Now that Karl had been seen, it wouldn't be right just to slink away. He opened the door and took one step inside to face them.

“Well,” old Henry Mueller said, “are you just going to stand there like the Grim Reaper or do you have the guts to sit down and play?”

“You fellas look a mite too accomplished for me,” Karl said.

“He looks like he's quaking in his boots, don't he?” said Will Trague, who had started the garage out of his blacksmith business with money from Karl's bank.

“We're playing for matchsticks,” said George Loeb. “Pull up a chair. We need someone to be the banker.”

The others suddenly started studying their cards.

“I've got chores up to the house,” Karl said. “You know how it is.”

“Be sure to tell Cristina that if she needs anything . . .” said Loeb.

“To call any of us,” said Mueller.

It touched Karl that he could count on these men. But he wondered if it crossed Henry's mind, as it kept crossing his own, that Cristina would have been better off if she had stuck with Henry's nephew.

He left the garage and walked quickly toward the rail crossing, whose lights had just begun to flash. He pulled out his pocket watch. The moon was new, so he had to move closer to the crossing signal
and hold the watch up to catch the red, blinking light. He felt the rumble of the train beneath his feet as his finger felt for the catch. In the distance he saw the train's swinging light. The watch's hands stood at 8:09. The freight was right on time.

He had talked to Cristina before going to Harley Ansel. He had laid out the alternatives, none of them good.

“It tears at me,” he said, “but Harley will be able to send me away no matter what. Now all I can do is try not to pull anyone down with me.”

“You do what's right, Karl,” Cristina said. “That's all any man can do.”

Across the tracks stood the church where Karl had prayed often for the dead German's soul. How many nights had he gone there to ask God for guidance? At first how to protect those who depended on him. Then later how to do the least harm. He stepped past the lowered counterweight of the crossing arm. The bells were sounding the two-note warning:
It's wrong. It's right. It's wrong. It's right.
The rail curved beneath his shoe as he stepped forward and looked south again. The ground shook, and the light on the engine flickered like a flare.

People had been hit at this crossing several times before. Kurt Handke had gotten his wagon stuck. The engine had hit behind him as he'd tried to pull loose, then dragged him and the horses back under the wheels of the tender, heavy with a fresh load of coal. Maude Goebel, whose husband had died a month before, had been late to church one Sunday and tried to beat the streamliner. Some whispered that she hadn't really tried.

The track beneath his foot began to pulse. Tick-tick. He stopped.
In this life God's grace is nothing you earn, nor is punishment the proof of sin. This is the first great mystery, and it is only made bearable by the second, which is love.
As he shifted his weight to move forward, his foot slipped. His shoe wedged itself between the rail and the planking of
the crossing. He looked down the track. The light was closing in on him. The engineer blew the horn. It was as if the bobbing light had hypnotized him. He could not move. Then he looked away from it, reached down, found the lace, and pulled it. The power of the train sucked all the breath from him as he fell.

The next thing he knew he was lying on the ground, one foot shoeless, as a hundred freight cars passed.

When the caboose rolled by, one of the trainmen was looking out the window. Karl picked himself up and waved so the man would not be alarmed. The shoe now was nothing more than a strip of torn hide. He pried it loose from the rail.

The bells had stopped, but the sound of the train was still so full in his ears that he barely heard the voice behind him.

“Are you all right?”

It was Will Hoenig.

“I almost ended up on the cowcatcher,” Karl said, limping a step in his direction.

“You need a hand walking?” Hoenig asked.

“God seems to want to keep me going,” said Karl. “To what purpose is a question only He can answer.”

“Anyone in Abbeville can answer that one, Karl,” said Hoenig.

Karl hobbled away from him toward the house. At night you could not see that it had grown shabby for want of paint.

“Karl, what happened?” Cristina said, looking at his one bare foot, the dust all over him.

He took her in his arms and could feel her breath coming in sobs, though she was not letting herself make a sound. Maybe a man could only live if he didn't fight the forces that tossed him about. Maybe he could learn to love them as he was supposed to love God.

“I'm so afraid,” Cristina said as he pressed himself against her sorrow.

“I will be able to handle whatever comes,” he said, “if I know you can.”

And as he held her, he could actually feel them both giving in to the greater mystery.

“I guess I'd better get ready,” he said.

“So soon?” she said. She increased her hold on the whole length of him.

“I don't want anybody saying we couldn't face it,” he said.

The sheriff arrived late. When he appeared at the door, Karl's valise was sitting outside, packed. The sheriff did not take off his widebrimmed hat of natural straw or open his tan jacket. Around his waist hung a belt with a pistol and a pair of handcuffs in a leather case. He did not wear a star. He did not have to. Just by looking at him, anybody would know to respect this man's authority.

“Had a little trouble up to Milford,” he said.

“It's all right, John,” Karl said. “I've got nothing but time.”

John Hawk had been an acquaintance of Karl's for years. He had succeeded Karl as Abbeville's sheriff when Karl had gone to France. Karl had spoken for him at several campaign events when Hawk had run for sheriff of all of Cobb County. That was back when Karl's endorsement had been something candidates wanted.

“Well, I guess it's time you come with me,” Hawk said.

Karl took the old leather bag his father had gotten him mail order when he had sent him off to learn the ways of the world. It carried the marks of that journey and many others. Water spots, scuffs, a sticker from the World's Columbian Exposition.

As he passed the bureau in the foyer, he put his hand into the big old ceramic bowl that Cristina kept filled with sweets for him. He offered Hawk a stick of gum.

“That's mighty good of you, Karl,” said Hawk.

“I'm still a Republican,” said Karl, “even if I can't vote anymore.”

Hawk went to the car first to let Karl make his farewell.

“Good-bye, my love,” he said to Cristina. “Please forgive me.”

Cristina held him.

“The one thing I will not be able to bear,” she said, “is your being sorry.”

“For abandoning you again,” he said.

“Don't you think I can tell the difference between running off and being taken?” she said. “Go now and number the days. Each will be one less.”

Karl started to leave, then turned and gave her hand one last touch—leaving in it the gold watch. After that he could not look back.

Outside, the sheriff had the car running. Karl opened the door and slipped in next to him. The heater was cranked up so high that Karl had to open his coat. Then he offered his wrists for the cuffs.