Abbeville

by Jack Fuller

  “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.

  MR. PRYOR 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.

  9

  WHEN I RETURNED FROM THE CEMEtery 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 CO2 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.

  I seized the pellet rifle and trotted off, holding it at port arms the way my father had taught me. We used to go through the whole Manual of Arms together, both the regular Army way and the flashier National Guard style. My father snapped the weapon smartly through right-shoulder, left-shoulder, order, and present arms, ending at parade rest. It was the first time I really could imagine that he had been a soldier. For myself, I liked the National Guard way. This left my father disconsolate.

  As I came out of the shed, Grampa was opposite me behind his mower.

  “Going hunting?” he called.

  “Nah,” I said. “Just messing around.”

  Grampa looked at me as if he still had enough boy in him to know better.

  They said you could find muskrats in the ditches along the cornfields north of town. They said you could find weasels. The bounty on these was higher than on crows, which were in any event too smart to let a boy sight in on them. You received payment by turning in the varmint’s carcass at the general store. At least that was what my second cousin had told me, making it sound as full of glory as the National Guard. So I was determined to bag myself a fierce weasel because anybody had the guts to shoot a bird.

  Behind the church lay an immensity of cornfields cut through by a ditch big enough to require a culvert under the C&EI tracks. I let myself down the bank until my Keds touched the moist matting of grass at the bottom. A few hops from rock to rock carried me across the slow-moving water.

  I saw no sign of weasels in any direction, so I decided to lie in ambush, cradling my rifle across my lap, safety off for speed, finger on the trigger, waiting for the moment when a weasel was foolish enough to show itself. I sat perfectly still for what felt like hours, then the fidgets got the better of me. I brought my rifle up and fired at a stick twenty or thirty yards away. I thought I saw it jump and counted this as a kill. Then I lay back again and waited.

  There were burrows everywhere that must have led to underground quarry. Did weasels live in burrows? I should have asked Grampa, who knew about everything. It had been Grampa who had taught me to recognize the long, curving berm in a lawn that meant a mole. Technically speaking, I guess I had already killed my first mammal when a spring-loaded trap I had set drove a sharp trident into the soil as the mole passed beneath. But this was no more satisfying than catching a mouse. I only knew I had succeeded by the mole guts on the tines.

  Out in the sun nothing was moving except the water. There weren’t even any fish in the ditch because between rains it often completely dried up. I stood and walked downstream in the direction of the railroad tracks. Maybe on the other side, where the ditch ran through a stand of trees, I could find varmints.

  When I got to the tracks, I stopped on the ballast and found a good rock to place on the rail. It balanced neatly on the steel surface that had been polished by the trains. My mother always warned me not to place even so much as an old penny in the way of the big diesels that roared through Abbeville. “You don’t want to be responsible for a wreck, do you?” she said. But I had done it anyway, dozens of times, once Grampa had sneaked me a peek at his collection of coins the trains had turned into foil.

  Down the way, the preacher’s wife emerged from the back door of her house, crossed the clearing, and took the stairs to the church basement. She did not look in my direction. I crossed the tracks and made my way to the grove of trees, sure I would only slay the prize by tracking it to its lair.

  When the ditch entered the grove, it widened, making scummy pools behind fallen tree limbs. I found a small burrow, but it probably belonged to a snake. Beyond lay a thicket that could have served as something’s den. But when I reached it, I found absolutely no sign of life.

  Back home in Park Forest I often retreated to a little woods a block away from our house. Sometimes I would scare up a pheasant in the prairie beyond it or see a rabbit running away. It never seemed particularly wild there, but compared to this it teemed like the African savannah.

  To get to the other side of the water, I had to walk across a fallen log, using my rifle like a tightrope walker’s pole. I was more than halfway there when I started to get into trouble. My toe stubbed on a big knot. The rifle began to teeter wildly. The next thing I knew I was lying in the fetid water.

  It wasn’t deep, but it soaked my pants and one side of my shirt. Thankfully, the barrel of my rifle stayed dry, but the stock had sunk deep into the mud. I leaned on it to get upright and eventually was able to reach dry ground. But as I did, my foot pulled out of my shoe, leaving it mired in the sucking muck.

  Some hunter! I looked down at my pants and could not help thinking of a little boy who has peed himself. Then suddenly I felt someone watching me. I turned. A squirrel had me fixed in its gaze. The first quarry of the day, and it was stalking me.

  As I raised the muddy rifle butt to my shoulder, the squirrel lit out. I fired but came nowhere close to it. Before I had a chance to fire again, it had put a tree trunk between us and scampered up it.

  Losing a squirrel was no reason to cry. Getting my pants wet was no reason. Not having a clean hand or shirt cuff to wipe the tears was the least reason of all.

  Eventually I had the presence of mind to rinse the rifle butt free of mud and get moving again. When I reached the tracks, I heard the preacher’s wife inside the church singing Elvis’s “Love Me Tender.” Up in the belfry I thought I saw the shape of a hawk. Sure, it was a bird, but a big one that would bring a bounty. I raised my rifle and began to plant my feet, but before I could get my sights on the predator I flinched. The rifle fired a puff of CO2. Then came a shattering of glass. The woman’s song turned into a scream.

  When I lifted my burning foot, the bee I had stepped on was writhing. Fear overcame pain, and I limped into the cornfield
as fast as my injury allowed.

  As I fled down the rows, the leaves ripped at my arms. I kept going until I could not even tell which direction the sun was. It didn’t matter. At least I was getting away from the scene of the crime.

  The farther I went, the more the pain forced its way back through the fear. My foot felt as though it had swollen to five times its normal size. It was a surprise when I pulled off my sock and saw that the damage was pretty much localized in my big toe.

  It hurt too much to put the sock back on. When I stood up, I found that I could walk painlessly, though awkwardly, by staying on my heel. The trouble was, I had no idea where to go. The corn loomed two feet over my head. Every direction, the rows looked exactly the same. I began walking, having no idea whether it was toward safety or more trouble.

  Becoming lost was no reason to cry. Shooting the preacher’s wife was no reason to cry. Nor even having to face my mother. I sat down in the middle of nowhere and bawled.

  I only stopped when the ground began rumbling beneath me. The wail of the horn rose in pitch as the train took the turn toward Abbeville and picked up speed.

  The sound showed me the way out of the maze. But when I got up I suddenly remembered the stone I had put on the track. I tried to move fast so I could kick the stone away before the train got there, but my stung foot hobbled me. I reached the edge of the field just as the diesel arrived, and I imagined the big engine’s flat nose rising up and then crashing to earth, a hundred cars behind it flying off the tracks. I slid back a few feet into the corn. The engineer leaned on the horn as it passed over the stone without so much as a shiver.

  As its hundred cars rattled past, I sneaked back to Grampa and Grandma’s house. It appeared that nobody had been in the shed after me, so I was able to wipe the last of the mud off the stock of the rifle and replace it next to the BB gun. When I was finished, I retraced my path. I had to retrieve my lost shoe.

  When I got to the ditch, I crouched so as to be hidden by the banks. When I reached the tracks, I heard the preacher’s voice coming my way. I had no choice but to step into the slimy water and hide in the culvert.