The Gillespie Country Fair

by Marc Hess

  “Yeah, I got that.” Carel shrugged it off. “And that’s what I’m here to talk about. How to get you paid off. The sooner I can get this fifty, the sooner I can get back into the good graces of your illustrious financial institution.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.” Schrubb turned his attention to something that had popped up on his computer monitor.

  “I’m making good on a letter of intent to buy the Ortner Gingerbread Trim shop.”

  Schrubb shot up like a jack-in-the-box. “The one that’s still on fire! You are unbelievable, Carel.” He leaned forward and pushed a button on his desk phone. “Beverly. Are you there? I have Carel Geische in my office. You have to hear this. And I need a witness. Bring a tape recorder.”

  Beverly had become the senior loan officer when Schrubb became branch manager—she moved up when he went down. She stepped into the room now with a tin smile and a dry “Good morning, Carel.”

  “Bev.” He nodded. They had dated once. Just once.

  Neither offered a handshake, but Carel scooted to the other chair, offering her the seat next to him. Beverly, however—a little overdressed for mid-August in South Texas—preferred to stand, probably to keep the wrinkles out of her crisp business suit.

  “This is about the Ortner family, who just lost everything they ever worked for.” Carel put on his best puppy-dog face. “A while ago I signed an LOI with Heinie. To buy the land under his shop. Now, after what happened this morning, I just can’t go back on it.”

  Beverly was studying him with an acrimonious look that reminded Carel of the end of that one date. Carel turned to Schrubb. “We graduated high school with him. You dated his sister.”

  “His cousin.” Schrubb was quick to set the record straight. “And that was just for one football season. We just went out so she could see his games.”

  Carel waved away Schrubb’s comment. “The Ortners have been family here since forever. When this was your daddy’s bank, it took care of the families who founded this town.”

  “That’s why it’s not my daddy’s bank anymore.” Schrubb filled his cheeks with air and let it out slowly as he leaned back in his creaky leather chair. “This is not the bank it used to be. Our loans are underwritten in Houston now.”

  Carel leaned in. “It’s not about the money, Chuckie.”

  Schrubb winced at Carel’s use of his grade-school nickname.

  “This is about who we are and whose side you’re on,” Carel continued. “Are we really going to sell out the founding fathers of Fredericksburg for some quick tourist dollars?”

  “It’s not like that at all, Carel.” Schrubb gestured to a neat stack of file folders on his desk. “We’re the local bank. Most of our loan dollars go right back into this community.”

  “That’s what your Houston-printed brochures say, but look at ’em.” Carel reached across the desk, almost touching the file folders on his desk. “Any local family names on that big stack of approved loans? Or is it all just tax write-offs and hobby wineries for the rich yuppies who come down here and don’t really cotton to the gritty side of quaint. While we,”—he pounded his chest—“the families that built this town, are going extinct.”

  Carel caught Beverly trying to disguise her smirk by turning her attention to the customers meandering into the lobby now that the bank was open for business.

  Schrubb leaned across his desk, looking Carel in the eye. “Not that we’re going to put up any money, Carel, but just out of curiosity, what were you going to do with Ortner’s place?”

  “Historical restoration!” Carel’s arms flew into the air. “I am doing what I can to hang on to our way of life.”

  Schrubb was shaking his head. “Noble causes don’t make good investments, Carel. It’s a—”

  Before Schrubb could finish, Carel’s phone rang. He stood and drew it from his holster, quick as a six-gun, then flicked it open while pointing a finger at Schrubb. “That’s Houston talking, alter Freund.” Then, into his phone: “What?”

  Beverly looked at her watch, then stepped right up into Carel’s face. “Take your call outside. We conduct bank business here.”

  Carel covered his phone with his hand. “Excuse me, Bev, but it was you who busted into my meeting.”

  “You’re not in a meeting,” she hissed up at him. “You’re talking on your phone.”

  Ignoring her, Carel returned to his call, louder than before. “They’re a bunch of old Krauts, for God’s sake. You don’t get paid to speak to the Historical Society. You get paid to pound nails. Remember that!”

  Schrubb spoke up from behind his desk. “I have to get to work here.” He flapped his hands in shooing gestures directed at Carel, who re-holstered his cell phone and picked his hat up off the desk.

  “I gotta run, buddy. I got some ass to kick.” He pointed down at Schrubb. “But you need to do me right. Don’t talk to Houston. You make the decisions right here in Gillespie County, just like your daddy did. Fifty grand.” As he stormed out of the office, his voice rose loud enough for the whole lobby to hear. “I have to go do battle with the Gott verdammt Historical Society.”

  Carel’s confidence fell to the floor when he saw her standing at a teller’s window, one of the first bank customers that morning, turning just in time to catch the drama rolling out of the branch manager’s office. His daughter.

  He took a breath to stave off the swell of nausea that accompanied these surprise encounters with her, these random ambushes that happened again and again over so many years: picking out vegetables at the Farmers Market, riding her bicycle down Austin Street, in the congregation at a cousin’s wedding. He should be used to it by now—watching her grow up, but having no hand in raising her …

  Carel took a moment to quell the tightening knot in his stomach before approaching her with a casual greeting. “So, wie gehts, Willow?”

  “Hi, Dad.” She spoke in a quiet tone, maybe even embarrassed.

  Just Hi, Dad—that was the next pang to hit Carel. Hi, Dad, as if everything was all right with them. As if these weren’t the first words she’d spoken to him since she graduated high school two years ago.

  Carel argued, to all who would listen, that he had made an effort to fit into her life: He’d given her his old work truck. He’d remembered her birthday most of the time. And he’d hoped that the success of his business, his enhanced stature in town, would somehow bring her running back to him, at least when she grew up and needed a job. But Willow didn’t seem impressed with any of this. Now here she was, at the bank and looking all grown up, and he didn’t really know her at all. That pauperized him.

  He didn’t fancy that piece of jewelry she had stuck in her nose, but he tried not to let on to that, either. Other than that, she looked like every other unmarried girl in town, with a billowy blouse, denim shorts (way too short), and her mom’s jet-black hair intentionally falling in her face, like she wanted everyone to know she’d just gotten out of bed. There were no tattoos—that he could see.

  “So, what are you up to?”

  “Gettin’ change,” she answered. “Me and Mom, we got this yard sale comin’ up. What you been doin’?”

  “Just … fixing some history.”

  She shrugged approvingly. “Cool,” she said, but the blank look in her eyes told Carel that she didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Did you walk down here? Need a ride?”

  “Nah. I got the truck.” She hesitated and put out a coy smile. “I mean … yeah. The truck you gave me.”

  “That old starter solenoid still holding up? It used to give me problems.”

  “Yeah. It’s all running real good.”

  “That part is bound to go out on you one day. When it does, let me know. I’ll fix it for you. I could write it off as a business expense.” He paused, but Willow gave no response. “You know, I drove that truck a long time. It’s a good one.”

  “Been good to us, too. But yeah, okay. Thanks. We’ll take ya up on that.”

  “An
ything I can do to help you with your yard sale? I have a lot of expensive stuff I could throw in. You could keep the money.”

  “What we got is too much stuff. That’s why we’re havin’ a friggin’ yard sale.”

  Carel bristled at the profanity. Her mother’s mouth, he thought. I could have fixed that.

  “Okay, then.” He nodded in acceptance. “You call me if you need anything, liebling.”

  Willow pushed a deferential smile toward him and returned her attention to the teller. Carel slipped out the bank door, having reached the full extent of his parenting.

  • • •

  To get that old truck started, Willow had to lean on the key four or five times. It had been going on like that for a while, and her mom fussed at her about not tromping on the gas while she was cranking it. “Wouldn’t help,” her mom would say. “Got nothin’ to do with the gas. It’s a bad starter.” Eventually the solenoid would catch and the old Ford Super Duty would roar to life. It was a pain in the ass, but Willow wasn’t going to ask Mr. Carel Geische to fix it for her. As far as she was concerned, she’d settled with him a long time ago.

  In Fredericksburg it was hard for a child to tell, exactly, when it was that her father had left. He’d keep coming around on weekends for a while. He’d show up at occasional family gatherings. And then she’d be seeing him around town for the rest of her life, like just now at the bank. But Willow knew exactly when she had been done with him.

  It was in the summer before her fourteenth birthday, late one night, alone in her bedroom up on the second floor of an empty house. She’d been sitting on the floor cross-legged, wearing only panties and a large T-shirt, a razor blade in her hand. And she’d felt no trepidation or sense of wickedness the first time she’d pushed that rapier into her thigh.

  Bending over her legs, the same way she folded herself to paint her toenails, Willow had pressed the keen tip against the softest part of her leg. At first it just pushed the skin down, making a dimple but not breaking through the surface.

  What’s with this? were the words that scrolled through her mind.

  Bravely she’d increased the pressure, fighting off an instinct to pull her hand away, until the tip of the razor broke through the surface and the pliable flesh rose up on either side of the blade to take the thin blue steel into her body. She had paused with the tip sticking in her just the tiniest bit, waiting for the pain. It didn’t hurt, really, and there was not much blood at all.

  “That’s weird,” she’d whispered to herself.

  Carefully, she had drawn the scalpel through the surface of her skin, as smooth as the pull of a zipper, all the way up to the elastic band of her underwear. Flesh had fallen open on either side of the cut, looking something like a slice made in a marshmallow. It wasn’t messy at all.

  Now what?

  Her second laceration, slow and deliberate like the first, went just a tad deeper and ran around the circumference of her thigh, intersecting the first cut at a right angle. This cut, too, was trailed by a tiny furrow of white flesh that slowly filled with a line of her own blood. Willow had given this cut a name.

  “Llano Street,” she’d declared aloud.

  Naming that cut meant that her first stroke was Main Street. With two streets named, Willow had gotten her mind around the pattern she would carve into herself. The next cut, a slice that wasn’t quite straight, was Travis Street. Another quick slash made Washington Street. At this point, blood was seeping out of the earlier lines.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit!” a more rational voice had cried through her clenched teeth. Willow had used the tail of her T-shirt to dab at the little crimson drips. Not a lot of blood, but she’d known those stains would be hard to get out, and she didn’t want anyone to know.

  On the inside of her left thigh had appeared a blood-scrawled street map of the route her father had driven to drop her off at home earlier that night. She had leaned in to make one last cut, a small and haphazard x to mark the spot where she was right then, on Washington Street: her safe house, her place in the world.

  She didn’t want to see him anymore, and she had told him so. He’d insisted that they go out for brats and currywurst on his visitation day—the one day that the Gillespie County divorce court made fathers visit the children they had walked out on. She hated it. It was like he was supposed to be her babysitter, taking her out every other Wednesday so her mom could go out drinking with her friends.

  “I’m old enough to be home alone, you know.” Willow dropped the hint as they sat across from each other at Friedhelm’s Bavarian deli, out where Main Street forked off to the west.

  Her dad did the worst thing a parent could do: He didn’t get mad. He didn’t lecture her. He just let her words sail right over his head. “Come on now. You love brats and currywurst. Right, liebling?”

  Willow hated that old German nickname. He had branded her with it when she was a toddler. Can’t you see I am not your liebling anymore? But she couldn’t bring herself to be mean to him out loud.

  Her father had one of his everything-is-all-right kind of smiles hung across his face as he leaned across the plate of German fast food he had ordered for them to share. “I was a teenager too, you know,” he said. “I understand how you feel.”

  No, you don’t! she didn’t say. Willow sat paralyzed, biting into her lip, hoping that a waitress would come over, or that her father would just give it up, or that the whole deli would explode in one great ball of flames. But none of those things happened.

  “I don’t want to do this anymore.” The words just kind of tumbled out of her mouth. She had wanted to say that to him for a long, long time. She had waited her entire life to get revenge on him for leaving her and her mom, for leaving them poor and her mom pissed off all the time. So often she had imagined how great it would feel when she finally got to tell him off—but now, with it out, it didn’t feel so good. Talking just made her feel worse.

  Without raising her head, Willow peered up and saw his face flushed with indifference. He went on talking, but Willow was already gone. The only time she gave him a response was when he said, at long last, “Do you want to take the rest of this currywurst home with you?”

  Willow shook her head. No.

  “Sure you’ll be okay home alone?”

  She nodded eagerly. Please get me out of here.

  Later, alone in her bedroom, Willow had breathed in the sense of relief that accompanied the numbing sensation, that drifted through her body while the blood on her thigh coagulated along its designated streets. The few places where tiny red rivulets crept down her leg had given her a palatable tickle, like a breeze blowing hair around her sweaty neck, before leaving tiny drops on the rug. Lying back on the floor, Willow had felt better then, much better—ebbing on an aberration of light warm air and letting her thoughts flow to other places, other times, days long ago when she was, indeed, her daddy’s little liebling.

  • • •

  The stone house at the very end of Washington Street, where the countryside broke upon the town, was the only place Willow had ever lived. Her mom, too, had spent her entire life within these venerable walls that Willow’s opa had built long before either of them were born. From the side facing other houses along the street, this gnarled slice of the Texas Hill Country looked like all the other old German farmsteads in Gillespie County: solid and practical, with a knot of outbuildings hidden from the street by five short rows of freestone peach trees. On the backside of the house, a treeless pasture fell away from a long wooden porch and rolled easily under the occasional hooves of black-headed Dorpers, all the way to the rocky bottom of Palo Alto Creek, where the barefoot days of so many summers had slipped carelessly through the tender fingers of Willow’s childhood.

  Fredericksburg itself endured as a rock-rimmed town of country-wide streets joining each other at precise right angles and held in place by tidy buildings made from limestone blocks. Many of the round and pleasant people who greeted each other in their singsong, German
-English dialect were related in one way or another. It was hard for a kid to get in trouble in a community so intact. Willow couldn’t ride her bike down Main Street without running into one of her cousins, her pastor, a teacher, or a friend of her mother. All these people would smile and look right through her, each of them seeming to know more about who she was than she did.

  The worst day of Willow’s life came somewhere near the end of her first year in high school, and it was her own fault. She found out how really stupid it was to start cutting on her arms. Of course her mom was going to find out sooner or later, and maybe that’s what Willow really wanted. Her mom did find out, and after a tantrum to beat all, she dragged Willow off to have a talk with their pastor, where she pulled up Willow’s shirt sleeve right in front of Father Huschmann. Laid bare in front of the poor bewildered pastor, she might as well have just shown him her nipples.

  The cut marks above her elbow bore the indisputable evidence of her sins. Willow was sure she was going to descend into hell right there on that spot. Father Huschmann would pull a lever, and she would fall though some trap door. Or flamethrowers would light up and fry her, right in front of the crucifix that the nervous man twisted in his fingers while her frantic mother raged. But the more her mother ranted and the more Willow cried, the more obvious it became that Father Huschmann didn’t have a clue what to do. He just told them to pray on it.

  “Seek the guidance of our Lord,” he said. If anything, he sort of laid the blame on Willow’s mom when he said that “a broken family is the Devil’s open door.”

  Willow was well aware that her mom had enough problems and didn’t need this one. Soon after the inquisition with Father Huschmann, the short attention span of Willow’s mother was hijacked by yet another crisis: Their water heater went out, right at the time that the property taxes came due. And Willow had gotten off scot-free with something that should have been the absolute end of her.