Abbeville

by Jack Fuller

  At first it didn’t scare me. Then I thought I felt something flitting across my ankles, and it was all I could do not to cry out.

  When I had gotten about halfway through the tunnel, the preacher’s voice boomed through it the way it did on Sundays, full of hell’s fire.

  “The wretch must have stood right about here,” he said.

  I froze.

  “Look,” he said. “Some fool kids were putting rocks on the tracks again. I bet it’s the same ones that did the shooting.”

  “You see any other rocks?” said another voice I didn’t recognize. “Because here comes the 11:02.”

  I felt a deep, muffled rumble beneath his words, growing in intensity. Up above, on the beautiful surface of the Earth, I could pretty much judge a train’s distance by the sound. But down here in hell everything echoed and was magnified. When the preacher delivered his sermons, I had never really been able to imagine eternal punishment, but suddenly I knew that it would be just like what I was feeling in the culvert: ordinary things raised to the level of terror.

  I hunkered down more, as if another inch of clearance would save me. The noise became excruciating. I put my hands over my ears, but it did not help. My whole body had become an eardrum.

  Finally the engine passed and the noise abated. Now was my chance to get away, covered by the passing boxcars. I waded out of the culvert and moved toward the grove of trees as fast as my sore foot would let me. I quickly found my lost shoe and rinsed it as well as I could in the stagnant water. It squished as I limped my way back toward the house. The coldness actually made the sting feel a little better.

  This time I went in plain view, hoping to be seen—wet and filthy, but unarmed. When I got near the house, Grampa was hauling fallen twigs to a big pile out back of the school for burning. I suddenly remembered that he had seen me taking the rifle in the morning. I was sunk. He gave me a big wave and that smile of his. Even from a distance I must have looked like one of the condemned.

  When I reached the house, I took off my shoes and went directly to the bathroom, passing Grandma on the fly.

  “Oh, Lordy, what did you get into?” she said.

  I started filling the tub, then bolted upstairs to get fresh clothes. By the time I returned the bath was ready. Of course, there was no way to make the Keds clean again.

  Soon my parents returned.

  “Did you hear about all the excitement at the church?” my mother asked. She was looking directly at me.

  “Excitement?” said Grandma.

  “Somebody put a hole through one of the stained-glass windows,” my mother said.

  A wave of relief came over me. At least the hole hadn’t been in the preacher’s wife.

  “Was it one of ours?” Grandma asked. At some point in the distant past they had somehow been able to pay for three. Sometimes I would look at the plaques under them, Grampa’s name on one, Grandma’s on another, and my mother’s on the third.

  “It was the Schlagels’,” my mother said, “but you can be sure we’ll be called upon to help pay for fixing it.”

  “It won’t take much,” Grampa said, winking at me in a way nobody else could see. “I took a look. A little lead work and it’ll be as good as new.”

  “Do they know who did it?” Grandma asked.

  “Anybody here have any ideas?” my mother said. I had to force myself not to look away from her.

  “I fell into the ditch north of the Hagens’ place,” I said. “In the trees there. My shoes and clothes got dirty. I’m sorry.” I put one true statement after another, which meant I didn’t lie.

  “The ditch runs behind the church,” my mother said.

  “Maybe you saw something,” said Grandma.

  “A squirrel,” I said.

  “Squirrels don’t shoot out windows,” my mother said. As I used true statements to deceive, she used them to annoy.

  “Did you have your pellet rifle?” my father asked.

  Before I had a chance to figure how to answer that one, Grampa stepped in.

  “I saw him come back,” he said. “I’ve seen rats along Otter Creek that looked cleaner. But he didn’t have the rifle.”

  I didn’t look at him for fear that the gratitude on my face would give us away. Today I wonder whether it was his willingness to stand up for a fool that had gotten him in all the trouble.

  “It had to have scared poor Mrs. Rose half to death,” my mother said.

  “She scares kind of easy,” said Grampa.

  “What were you doing in the ditch anyway, George?” my mother asked.

  “Looking for a little adventure,” Grampa said. “Leave the boy be.”

  “Boys mean trouble,” said my mother.

  “George,” Grampa said, “when you are a lad it’s your lot to be under a constant cloud of suspicion.”

  “A good thing, too,” said my mother.

  “When I have a little boy, I’m going to trust him,” I said, guilt and pride all tossed together.

  “That would make me a grandfather,” said my father.

  “It’s honest work,” Grampa grinned.

  10

  THE WAR IN EUROPE TOUCHED ABBEVILLE early, first driving up the price the farmers got for their grain, then tearing the town apart. The French hated Woodrow Wilson and wanted the United States to intervene immediately to take back their homeland from what they called “the Hun.” The Germans, many of whose kin had left the Old Country specifically to avoid conscription, wanted neutrality at all costs.

  Karl tried to stay out of the debate altogether, but he could not avoid its effects. Before the war he had begun to win French farmers from the south end over to his elevator. Now the momentum reversed. Despite the financial advantages Karl offered, the French were beginning to return to their own.

  Meantime, Karl’s situation at home had darkened. Cristina was not barren, but something was terribly wrong. The year before, she had become pregnant. It was a difficult delivery, desperately premature, and though Cristina had summoned the strength to survive it, Karl Jr. was so tiny that he did not have a chance. They buried him in the graveyard Karl had fenced as a young man.

  “It will be all right,” he told Cristina.

  “I think it is because I want it too much,” she wept.

  “We both do,” he said.

  As they kept trying without success, Karl began to feel that somehow he owed a debt to fortune, that Cristina’s grief was the price of his success.

  One spring morning they were having breakfast on the porch, a breeze blowing in the fresh smells of newly plowed soil sprouting with life. Then another smell came. Cristina stood and pointed to smoke rising behind the elevator.

  “Oh, my God!” she said.

  Karl ran down the steps and raced across the prairie. A small crowd had gathered on Main Street, where an oily fire smoldered in front of the bank. Old Henry Mueller stood there, along with Will Hoenig, Georges Chartiens, Pierre Cordeaux, and Robert Schlagel. As Karl drew closer, he saw that their attention was not on the fire but on something beyond it.

  The crowd parted as he crossed the street. That was when he saw it. In a different context the straw figure might not have frightened a crow. The effigy was dressed in a suit, vest, shirtfront, and tie. A sign pinned on the shirt said simply, “La Boche.”

  The thing swung by the neck from a cord strung over the electrical light above the door of the bank. Its head, a simple bag packed with straw and painted with a crude, cruel face, hung limply to one side. Karl walked up and yanked it down. The head pulled off and rolled to Chartiens’s feet.

  “Do you know who did this, Georges?” Karl asked.

  “It does not matter,” said Chartiens. “It is a blot on all of us.”

  Karl threw the figure into the smoldering fire. The straw burst into flame.

  “Go home, everyone,” Karl said. “Let this burn out.”

  “I’m not sure it will,” said Mueller.

  For weeks afterward the mark of that day la
y before his eyes every time he entered or left the bank—a dark scorch upon the earth. Eventually he dug it up and turned it under, leaving a mound of fresh dirt. Within days an idea began to form.

  When he wrote for information, he gave the bank as a return address so Cristina would not be alarmed. One response came from Donellan and Shaw Ambulance Service. A few days later the Trib carried a story datelined Paris about the valiant American lads of the organization, who were putting it on the line on behalf of the British, French, and Italian doughboys in the trenches. Karl took it as a sign.

  He told Cristina that night.

  “You’ve given up on me,” she cried.

  “It will be one year,” he said. “No more. I promise.”

  “I am already past the time,” she said.

  “Maybe what I’m doing will lift the curse,” he said.

  “There is no curse, Karl,” she said. “The curse is me. You will go to France and find someone else.”

  “There will never be anyone but you,” Karl said. “You know that isn’t why I need to go.”

  “To help save the French?” Cristina said. “They’re the ones who hung that awful thing in front of the bank.”

  “It was one or two men.”

  “But they all know who it was,” she said.

  “It isn’t so easy to see into other people’s hearts,” Karl said.

  Cristina spoke her next words so softly that Karl could barely hear them.

  “I can’t see into yours anymore,” she said.

  Opinion in town was divided when Karl let people know of his plan. Simon Prideaux said it was a sly trick to get customers, and it was a fact that a number of the French who had left Karl did come back. The Germans were puzzled.

  “You are almost forty, Karl, too old for such folly,” said old Henry Mueller. “And anyway, it’s not our war.”

  “It will be,” Karl said.

  “I’d worry about leaving a pretty wife all alone,” said Mueller.

  “We’ll be fine,” said Karl.

  “And if you get killed?” Mueller said.

  “I won’t,” said Karl.

  “But why take the risk?” Mueller asked.

  Karl did not even try to explain the intensely physical relationship he felt between the risk and what he hoped would be its reward.

  As the time of his departure approached, he and Cristina somehow rediscovered the closeness and joy that they had lost to trying. It made leaving more difficult, but it was sweeter than anything they had felt since the death of their son.

  11

  KARL DID NOT LEARN WHAT CAME OF IT for many months because Cristina was too superstitious to write him about it. Only when the baby was nearly due did she send him a letter with the wonderful news. In the meantime, Karl had sailed across the Atlantic, passed through Paris, and ended up mired in Verdun.

  When he finally got her letter, his first impulse was to return home immediately, but then he became seized with doubt. If he shortchanged fortune now, what had happened to Karl Jr. could happen again. So he stayed, tending not so much to the living as to the dead.

  Many days he had to drive the stiff, bloating, soul-fled remains of French soldiers wrapped in canvas to their last resting place, a field well behind the lines, to be laid in a neat grid of graves. But then it rained torrentially and there was no way to dig a hole deep enough to keep the corpses from floating to the surface. Still, you could not leave the dead where they fell for the artillery shells to bury and dig up again, bury and dig up.

  “What do you expect me to do with those?” said the French Army corporal at the gate of the cemetery, water cascading off his helmet.

  “What is right,” said Karl.

  His French came easily now that he used it all the time. Flawless would not be the word, sans défaut. The academicians in Paris would have scowled at his soldier argot, but it was good enough for him to pass as Charles Pietre.

  Of course, at first there was no mistaking him as anything but a Yank. The Frenchmen he had come to help had made fun of him, but they never suspected his origins were with the Hun.

  “Do what is right, eh?” said the French corporal. “Nothing is right in this place.”

  The horses shivered and took a couple of steps backward. Karl pulled up on the reins.

  “What do you propose I do with them?” said Karl, gesturing over his shoulder to the cargo in the wagon with its big red cross.

  The corporal looked at him with the expression used by every banker who has ever refused a needy man a loan. Karl climbed down off the wagon. The corporal moved faster than you might have thought the mud would permit and put out his hand to keep Karl from opening the rear door.

  “Do you expect me to take them back to the trenches?” said Karl.

  He pulled sharply on the door of the wagon, surprising the corporal, whose hand slipped on the wet surface. When the door swung open, the smell struck like a blow. As Karl reached in to grab one of the corpses by the boot, he heard the unmistakable tick of metal against metal.

  “Are you ready to die for them?” the corporal said.

  When Karl moved away from the door, it swung shut of its own weight. He climbed into the box and picked up the reins.

  “Tell the others,” said the corporal.

  “Maybe I will tell them to come armed,” said Karl.

  He twitched the reins and got the horses started. They were not eager to move, but he maneuvered them in a wide circle past the corporal, who kept his pistol trained on Karl.

  The rain pinged off Karl’s helmet like shrapnel and rolled frigid down his back. The horses pulled the wagon with as little sense of where they were headed as their driver. Then, through the gray curtain of rain and war smoke, he made out the shadow of a spire. He gave the reins a snap. The horses’ gait picked up for a moment, then settled back.

  When he reached the church, Karl alighted and secured the horses to the trunk of a dead tree. He did what he could on the wet steps to clean the mess off the bottom of his boots, then pulled open the heavy wooden door of the sanctuary and stepped inside. The only light came from the votive candles.

  “Hello!” Karl called. His voice echoed. Beyond it he could hear the rain pounding against the roof high above, the rumble of distant guns. “Is anybody here?”

  Something moved in the shadows.

  “Hello there,” he called again in French.

  “Calm yourself,” came a tiny, ancient voice in reply. “God can hear a pin drop. There is no use bellowing.”

  Now he could see a small figure coming toward him.

  “The guns must deafen Him,” Karl said.

  The man dragged his left foot. When he laughed, it came to Karl from several directions at once, like birds in the rafters.

  “My little trick,” the man said. “I am sure the masons arranged the effect to suggest His omnipresence. And, of course, to frighten and delight the children.”

  When the man stepped closer to the light, Karl could see that he was wearing a long black soutane. The gold cross hanging at his heart was large. It caught the glow of the candles and sparkled.

  “You have come a long way,” said the curé.

  “The battlefield is not so far,” said Karl.

  “You have an accent from nowhere,” the curé said. “I have heard certain Canadians, but it is not even that exactly. You have come such a distance that I have never heard anyone quite like you before.”

  “America,” said Karl, and the word was sweet on his lips.

  “Ah,” said the curé. “Tell me, what were you fleeing?”

  His thin lips bore the slightest semblance of a smile.

  “Fortune,” Karl said. “I have had great success in everything but starting a family. My son died only a week after he was born. I thought maybe it was because I’d had been rewarded too much and risked too little. Now I have received a letter from my wife that she is pregnant. I suppose that by this time the birth has happened. I have no way of knowing.”

/>   “Then why are you here?” the curé asked.

  “I am afraid that anything I do might curse us again,” he said. He was beginning to sweat in his greatcoat. “Do you mind if I take this off?”

  “So long as you also take that metal thing off your head,” said the curé.

  Karl reached up and snatched off the helmet, which had become such a part of him that he had forgotten he had it on.

  “I have the remains of several soldiers in my wagon,” he said. “I need to give them a proper burial.”

  “There are military cemeteries,” said the curé.

  “I was turned away,” said Karl. “The man at the gate said the weather was too inclement.”

  “How ungenerous it was of these soldiers,” said the curé, “to give their lives for France on one of its least attractive days.”

  “I cannot bring them back to the front,” said Karl.

  “Of course not,” said the curé, “but they can find rest anywhere, you know. The soul flies up. What is left is the chrysalis of the moth.”

  At first Karl had trouble with the word in French.

  “The what?” he asked. “Excuse me. My American vocabulary.”

  “You know a moth?” said the curé, patiently, joining his hands backward at the thumbs to make a pair of wings.

  “Like an angel?” said Karl.

  “It lives at night and is attracted to the flame,” said the curé.

  “Ah, yes,” said Karl. “Now I understand. The soul flies upward toward the flame.”

  “Here, come with me.”

  To the right, through a big open wooden door carved with figures, stretched a dark corridor. At the far end light spilled out from a doorway. Half-a-dozen candles flickered in a tiny room. In the corner of it glowed the embers of a cooking fire. Karl felt his collar beginning to dry in the warmth, the feeling coming back into his toes. Above the stove hung an iron cauldron on a pivot. The curé limped to it and looked into its depths, as if he might see the future there. Then he went to a large earthen jar that sat on the floor, covered with a circular wooden cover. From it he ladled a fair quantity of water into the cauldron, which he then lifted off its pivoting arm and placed directly on top of the stove. From a pile of logs he chose two and set them atop the embers, which he blew to life. The sparks flew up.