Abbeville

by Jack Fuller

  “The prices bob around so,” said Fred Krull. “How can a man know he’s being treated square?”

  “Trust me,” said Karl. Increasingly, they did.

  A horse team inside the elevator turned a wheel that lifted the grain high into the air, where it went into a chute that led to a great common bin. In Prideaux’s elevator, each farmer had a separate bin dedicated to his grain. To sell, he had to ship the grain to an elevator in Chicago, which charged gouging prices to house it until brokers in cahoots with the elevator finally sold it. When a farmer went to Karl’s elevator, he received a negotiable receipt for his grain, which was not segregated from other farmers’. Sales were made on the telegraph, the receipts went out by mail, and transactions were consummated before the grain was shipped. The cost of storage in Chicago fell on the buyer.

  Trains chugged up, bisected themselves, attached the full rail cars, and left empty ones in their place. Gravity pulled the work of Abbeville’s hands down the chutes and into them, ready to go off to the world beyond. Then winter came and the men retired warm to their farmhouses, as confident as anyone could be who lived close to the forces that relentlessly turned life into death and death into life again.

  Meanwhile, Simon Prideaux’s elevator went gray in the cold sun for lack of paint. He told his customers they should beware of Karl’s fancy ways. He is German, Prideaux said. He’ll take and take and take.

  Karl did not let this bother him. He tapped at the telegraph key, and everything tame in the world fell away, just as it had when he had stared past his rod at his fly bobbing down a bubble line.

  He was taking on a good deal of risk, but he liked the financial return that debt leverage gave him. You invested a dollar of your own and borrowed four more. If the investment returned 7 percent in a year, that was thirty-five cents on your dollar, minus the bank’s interest of, say, 5 percent on four dollars, or twenty cents, which left fifteen cents on your dollar, more than three times what banks paid. Of course if the investment lost 7 percent, you were out fifty-five cents of your original dollar. But nothing lost money these days.

  He put down bets on land whenever anyone died without heirs. He put money into Uncle John’s hands to buy stocks and corporate bonds. He started up a general store and then a farm implement business on Abbeville’s main street along the tracks. Anyone could have done it, but no one else had the nerve. In time Karl’s interests became so varied that hardly a freight train passed that did not stop to drop something off for him.

  As his level of debt rose, so did his attention to the business of banking. Every payment he made gave some financial institution money it could lend to someone else at a profit. Karl began to think about starting a bank himself.

  “I believe I’d always be worried about robbers,” said Cristina.

  “You don’t hang on to the customers’ deposits,” he said. “You lend the money right back out again.”

  “Lending people money is a recipe for hard feelings,” she said.

  “When you take in deposits, it’s a liability,” Karl explained. “When you make a loan, it’s an asset.”

  “It all sounds backward to me,” said Cristina, drying her hands on a dish towel at the sink. “I think you’d better be cautious.”

  But it had gotten to the point where you just could not afford to be.

  Even the farmers were getting bolder, which made a solid market for Karl’s new bank. Using the new implements Karl was selling on his lot on Main Street, a man could triple the amount of land he could handle. In fact, he pretty much had to because of the equipment’s cost. As George Loeb put it in a note accompanying one of his loan payments, “They should call these infernal things John Dear.”

  At first the farmers had been wary of the internal combustion engine, especially when Karl brought home a Model T from Kankakee that spooked every horse in Cobb County. Soon, though, the advantages of the new type of horsepower became obvious to everyone.

  This created the opportunity to break free of farming that Fritz had been looking for. Building roads would allow him to leave his mark upon the land that had left its mark on him. He wanted to make money. He wanted to have things.

  “I need a stake, brother,” Fritz said.

  “Come around to the bank and we’ll talk about it,” said Karl.

  Fritz was no worse a risk than half the men Karl bankrolled, and with the economy growing the way it was and the Model T catching on, somebody was going to make money paving the way to the future. It might as well be Fritz.

  8

  THE MORE KARL PROSPERED, THE MORE HE wanted to accomplish. Once the bank got rolling, he ran for sheriff, promising to serve for a dollar a year. In his first months in office he managed both to tame the ruffians who sometimes disturbed the peace on Saturday nights and to make the gypsies understand that when they came he was watching. But even in vigilance he sparked with energy and dreams of what Abbeville could become.

  The farmers were thriving. Every train from Chicago brought new evidence of what urbanity offered—fine crystal from Tiffany, stylish Sunday clothes for the ladies, painted ceramics like beautiful shells washed in on the tide. The richest of these went to Karl and Cristina’s home, and Karl never felt the need to apologize because it was the way of today’s world for the man who takes the risk to get the reward. But something was missing. The future, Karl thought, needed some grander expression.

  Then the idea came to him. At the Columbian Exposition, he had seen displays from every corner of the earth—sculptures, dioramas, tapestries, exotic animals in cages. On the Midway rose Ferris’s great wheel. Near it were men and women in costumes from every clime, some barely wearing anything at all. But the most amazing spectacle was what made the whole white world glow: a huge, humming dynamo of copper and iron. In bulk it was to the average farm implement as the Chicago Auditorium was to the Abbeville Coliseum. But size was the least of its wonders. It performed alchemy, turning black coal into bright white light, and all you heard was a rotor humming like a celestial choir.

  One day in the sixth year after Karl and Cristina had returned to Abbeville, a southbound train made a whistle stop. From it emerged a dapper man with a tiny mustache, a bright red silk handkerchief puffing up in his pocket, and a leather valise that seemed almost as big as he was. He stepped down carefully, checking the ground before alighting. It was obvious that his fancy boots had never met the leavings of a horse.

  Karl and Cristina crossed the gravel road and waded heedlessly through the high grass. The little man stood on the edge of it as the train pulled away, looking into the windswept prairie waves as if they were a cold, dark sea.

  “Jonathan Pryor,” he said when they reached him.

  “We’ll just follow this little path,” Karl said. “Cristina will show the way. Can I take your bag?’

  “Absolutely not,” said Mr. Pryor.

  It did not help when Karl pulled up a carriage to avoid the walk back across the prairie and the horse immediately unloaded. Mr. Pryor did not say a thing. He just put his fancy red handkerchief to his nose.

  When they got home, Cristina established him in the big room upstairs. He seemed content, but Cristina whispered to Karl out of his hearing, “I’m a little worried about the chamber pot.”

  That evening she put out a spread—roast beef, fresh corn, of course, and mashed potatoes. Mr. Pryor looked as though all of this was much more than he was used to, but he rose to it. By the time the evening wound down, he sat in the front parlor with the bottom buttons of his waistcoat undone and a fastidiously cut cigar between his tiny fingers.

  “We need to settle on size,” he said. “Machines, like people, exist with a multitude of dimensions. But with machines size is directly related to capability.”

  Karl was not a big man either, so he laughed easily.

  “The decision will turn on how much you can afford, and this will tell us the peak load you will be able to put on the system,” Mr. Pryor went on.

  “Say we w
anted to power the whole town,” Karl said.

  “How many homes and businesses?” asked Mr. Pryor.

  “Say twenty-five,” said Karl, “not counting the outlying farms.”

  “Transmission over distances is very costly,” said Mr. Pryor. “Is there anything unusual in any of the businesses?”

  Karl leaned forward.

  “Other than the elevator,” he said, “there is my general store, my implement lot with a little shack on it, the Coliseum, and a blacksmith shop that is beginning to provide fuel and repairs for horseless carriages.”

  “A fine invention that,” said Mr. Pryor.

  “And, of course, my bank,” said Karl.

  “You seem to be a regular Samuel Insull among the rustics,” said Mr. Pryor.

  “We mustn’t forget the church,” said Karl. “I have always worried about the candles.”

  “Don’t tell me you care for Abbeville’s souls, too,” said Mr. Pryor.

  The next day the engineer inspected the elevator, making a wide berth around the horses, then did some calculations on a pad of paper. As soon as he returned it to his valise, he shook Karl’s hand and picked his way back to the tracks. Within minutes they heard the northbound train.

  When the estimates came back by mail, they showed that lighting the whole town would be prohibitively expensive.

  “I’m sorry,” said Cristina.

  “This is why you run the numbers,” said Karl. “They tell you the future.”

  “The future is so lonely,” said Cristina.

  For all the bounty that had come their way, this part of their dream had failed them. The large house contained no sound of children. It was not for want of trying. Karl went to Cristina’s bed regularly. At first they tasted ecstasy and the joyful promise of the family to which it would lead, but over time this eroded into blank and fruitless effort. Every month Cristina’s blood flowed.

  “There is an alternative to wiring everyone’s house,” Karl went on, because talking about the painful thing only made tears flow, too. “We’ll install electric streetlamps. No more tripping and falling on the way home from the Coliseum. And if someone gets rowdy outside, they will be able to see my sheriff’s star.”

  “Less schnapps would work just as well,” said Cristina.

  “No more stepping in puddles,” Karl said.

  “We don’t even have gaslights, Karl.”

  “It will be quite an improvement, all right.”

  He went to Fritz to propose that he undertake the construction of the engine house.

  “You will be working with Mr. Pryor,” said Karl. “He will be the general contractor.”

  “That prissy little fellow?” said Fritz. “What will people think if they see me taking orders from him?”

  “The machine will be so astounding that just being near it will make you seem a magician.”

  “I guess it would be a feather in my cap,” said Fritz. Karl looked at his jaunty bowler. With a feather in it, he would look like an Indian chief.

  “You’d better keep your head from getting too big for the cap,” said Karl, “before decking it out in feathers.”

  Based on the initial drawings, Fritz brought in an excavation team to dig the footings. Karl thought it might be better to wait until the project settled a little more, but Fritz wanted to get a jump on the weather, so he put together a crew.

  Fortunately, the weather got a jump on them, preventing the excavation for several weeks, during which time the drawings changed substantially, which would have required the original hole to have been filled and redug.

  “We’re a little over budget,” Fritz explained, “due to the idle days of my crew. I don’t know why that little fellow didn’t get the scale right the first time.”

  “Live and learn,” said Karl.

  After the first misstep, Fritz refused to begin digging until he received a final set of drawings, even after Mr. Pryor assured him by telegraph that the foundation dimensions would not change. The final drawings arrived on the very same freight that delivered the great machine, crated against human curiosity in a wooden box as big as a hay wagon and the horses to pull it. Tight as it was against peering eyes, it was not waterproof, so Karl had to have Fritz protect it from the rain by rigging up huge tarps pegged down at the edges like a circus tent. When Mr. Pryor and his crew arrived, the footings were not half done, so the costs mounted again.

  Karl and Cristina turned their back parlor into a dormitory, where one of the workers enjoyed pounding out ragtime on the big upright piano Cristina had ordered from the city for little fingers to play. The racy music reminded Karl of the tavern where Pete Mallory had taken him after his first day in the pit. It reminded him of Luella. He broke out the cigars and schnapps.

  Night after night passed this way. Cristina soon began to resent the conversation that kept her awake in her bedroom on the first floor, sometimes even after Karl had finally repaired to his own bed in the adjoining room. There was no question of sleeping together with the men so near, and you could not make a baby in separate beds.

  To speed things up, Karl persuaded Fritz to take on Samuel Scott from Martindale as his construction superintendent. Scott had been in the business for many years but had backed away as the jobs grew bigger and the need for capital increased.

  “He is averse to risk,” Karl explained to Fritz, “but not to hard work.”

  Karl saw the improvement immediately. But whenever Karl would ask how things were going, Scott would just say, “Getting there. Getting there.”

  Fritz, of course, told a different story. One day it would be that Mr. Pryor had made another change. The next it would be that Scott was slowing things down by always insisting on things being done in a certain way.

  It seemed to take forever, but finally the project was complete. Karl called a meeting at the Coliseum.

  “Come on in, everyone,” he said as the farmers and townsfolk gathered in the shadows outside the door. “Plenty of seats up front.”

  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.