by Jack Fuller
“Why not just go to the pasture and lift a cow?”
“I’ve got to get this machine to Fritz’s garage where I can fix it up,” said Karl.
“You think you’re going to be able to push that thing a mile all by yourself ?”
“It’ll make the repairs seem easy,” Karl said.
“I have half a mind just to sit down on my porch over there and watch your ornery soul try to get this junk up the crossing grade,” said Krull.
The pain had begun to draw together and localize in Karl’s groin. He put his fingers tentatively on the tender spot and felt a bulge.
Meanwhile, Krull enlisted the two Wills—Trague and Hoenig— along with George Loeb into the effort.
“My garage ain’t good enough for you?” Trague said.
“I’m not going to start taking handouts,” said Karl.
“Well, it sure ain’t that with Fritz,” said Hoenig, “with all he owes you.”
“Nobody owes anybody anything,” said Karl. “It all got washed out, like deadfall in a flood.”
They arrayed themselves around the truck and got it rolling again. Karl steered as they pushed, and even that took his breath away.
When they reached the shed, hot and sweating, Fritz’s roadster was in back. All you could see of it was the grill and fancy hood ornament poking past the far wall. Karl figured Fritz must have left it for one of his boys to tune up.
“I’m sure there’s water around here somewhere,” said Karl as the truck rolled to a stop in front of the closed plank doors of the shed.
“I got to be running along,” said Krull.
“Store needs opening,” said Hoenig.
“Garage, too,” said Trague.
“I wouldn’t mind getting my wind,” said Loeb. “I’ll just sit here in the truck for a while.”
Karl opened the side door of the shed. Inside it was dark. He felt his way to the big front doors and unbolted them. Their bottoms scraped the dry, dead earth.
As the sun streamed in, it revealed benches covered with tools and rags, a foot-pedaled grinding machine, barrels of lubricant, tubs of grease. Belts, gears, and gaskets hung from the walls. The working area of the floor was black with spent oil, which gave the place its odor.
Karl sensed a presence.
“Fritz?” he called.
Loeb was sprawled out in the cab of the truck as if he were fixing to sleep. The other three had started toward the road. Karl went to the workbench and put his foot to the pedal to spin the grinding wheel. He picked up various wrenches and mallets, weighing each in his hand. The heavier ones communicated directly to his groin. He held each of them aloft, testing the pain, learning it.
When he went back to the truck, Loeb was snoring. Karl quietly opened the driver’s-side door and put his shoulder to it. The pain was solid now, a prison wall. He would not be able to get the vehicle into the shed by himself.
He closed the door.
“Fritz?” he said again. Loeb stirred but did not awaken.
Silence.
Karl lifted the hood of the truck carefully. Karl had known little of engines until Stateville. Some enlightened soul at the prison had decided that fixing automobiles would one day be in enough demand that an employer might overlook a good mechanic’s bad record. So prison employees brought their cars into the shop behind the walls— the sedan of the warden, the flivvers of the guards. Karl liked working on the engines the best. Gasoline and air in, energy and waste out: metabolism. While others went to the law books in the library to fashion hopeless appeals, he immersed himself in oil and grease, making something live that had been dead. Summer to winter. Winter to spring.
Under the hood of the truck in the bright sunlight outside Fritz’s shed, he pushed on the hoses, which were brittle, tried to spin the fan, and checked the radiator, which was so rusted he could see the ground through it. He screwed the cap back on, then went around to the back of the garage.
The sun was behind Fritz’s car, so all Karl could see at first was its silhouette. As he drew closer and the angle of the light changed, he noticed that the windows were spotted. It wasn’t like Fritz to leave mud on his car.
Karl took two more steps.
“Oh, Fritz,” he said.
When he opened the door, his brother’s head and shoulders dropped over the edge of the seat. A little blood from the wound in his skull dripped to the dry earth, which absorbed it readily. In the shadow of the running board lay Fritz’s revolver. Karl leaned over and picked it up. He held it in his hand a moment, feeling how small it was against what it had wrought upon the poor, terrified rabbit. Then he put the pistol in his waistband and went to tell the others.
22
HENRY MUELLER HAD BEEN WRONG about Harley Ansel. At the coroner’s inquest Ansel argued that the cause of Fritz’s death was homicide. First he questioned George Loeb, who testified that he had been sleeping in the cab of the truck when he’d heard Karl cry out. When he went behind the shed with Karl a few minutes later, he testified, he found Fritz “stone-cold dead.”
“Was Karl holding anything?” Ansel asked.
“No.”
“Let me try again. Did you see a weapon?” said Ansel.
“Karl had picked up Fritz’s pistol,” said Loeb.
“How did you know it was Fritz’s?” Ansel asked.
“Whose else would it have been?” said Loeb. “Harley, you know whose it was.”
Ansel turned his back on the witness for a moment and consulted a sheet of paper.
“Did you have a watch?” Ansel asked.
“In my pocket.”
“Did you check it?”
“No, sir,” said Loeb.
“Then you cannot be sure how long you slept,” said Ansel.
“I couldn’t have slept through a gunshot,” said Loeb.
“That’s not what your wife says,” said Ansel.
For once in his life George Loeb stood his ground.
“You keep my wife out of it,” he said.
Will Trague, Fred Krull, and Will Hoenig all testified that they were a couple of hundred yards down the road from the shed when they heard a cry, then a minute later saw Karl coming from behind it.
“We went back to see what was the matter,” Krull testified. “That body was cold. It had been dead for quite a while.”
“Are you a doctor?” asked Ansel.
“No, but I’ve seen my share of dead people,” Krull said.
“So yours is a layman’s opinion,” said Ansel.
“Even a horse don’t go stiff the minute you put her down,” said Krull.
Finally Ansel called Karl to testify.
“You don’t have to, you know,” said the coroner. “It’s your right.”
“I’m not afraid to face this man,” said Karl.
“You’re a lot better at looking out for other people than looking out for yourself,” said the coroner. “I’ll let you testify, but I’m going to do the questioning, if that’s all right with you.”
“This is highly irregular,” Ansel protested.
“It isn’t a court of law, Harley,” said the coroner. “Now Karl, I’ve got one question only. Did you shoot your brother?”
“I did not,” said Karl. “I . . .”
“One question, one answer,” said the coroner. “Go back and be seated.”
In his closing statement Ansel theorized that Karl had gone to the garage earlier, killed Fritz, then returned to get the truck and arrange his alibi.
“He had the motive,” Ansel argued. “He went to jail and Fritz went free.”
“Who made that happen, Harley?” shouted old Henry Mueller from the back of the crowd.
“Now, no more of that, Henry,” said the coroner. “I’ve heard enough. The death was a suicide, plain and simple. Everybody knows Fritz was living way beyond what he could afford. And this time he didn’t have his brother there to catch him when he started to fall. I’m sorry about your loss, Karl. You must have loved your brother
terribly to have done for him the way you did.”
AFTER THE INQUEST Karl threw himself back into fixing up the schoolhouse. He started with the ceilings, and right away his neck cricked up. That night he squirmed on the pillow searching for a comfortable position. Cristina heard his restlessness and came in with the liniment.
“You could slow down, you know,” she said, massaging it into his muscles.
“That feels good, Mama,” he said.
“Would you like something that feels better?” she asked.
“What’s got into you?”
“I guess it’s the liniment,” she said.
“I’m going to have to get sore more often,” Karl said.
One day a few months later John Hawk arrived at their door unannounced. Cristina saw him and let out a cry. Betty came running from the kitchen. Karl woke from a catnap in his rocker and looked out the window.
“It’s all right,” he said, rising.
He opened the front door as Hawk was coming up the steps.
“Come on in, John,” he said.
Hawk stayed just inside the doorway, removing his hat and bowing to the ladies.
“What does Harley Ansel want from us now?” said Betty.
“He’s dead,” said Hawk. “Ran a hose from the exhaust into the passenger compartment. I figured you’d want to know.”
“Why?” said Cristina.
“There were debts,” said Hawk.
“Well, at least he found out how it feels,” said Betty.
“Then there were padded invoices to the county and state, fines collected but never delivered to the treasurer. And, of course, the lady.”
“Lady?” Betty perked up.
“A lot of people knew,” said Hawk. “Seemed like everybody did except Louise. There’ll be a paternity suit, I suppose, though I don’t know why. There’s nothing left to fight over.”
“Poor Louise,” said Cristina.
Karl, too, felt for Harley’s wife. Felt for everyone.
Forever after, Betty saw Ansel’s suicide as a myth of guilt hounding a man to his punishment. The town chattered for a time about whether Fritz and Ansel had been in cahoots somehow, about how Ansel’s accusation of Karl at the inquest could have been to cover his own crime.
But Karl knew that Ansel, like Fritz, had simply been crushed by history’s downstroke, and everyone bore responsibility for it. The Depression was the sum of millions of individual flaws. History was as relentless as a force of nature, but in this case what man suffered, he made.
The sheer scale of it drove a person back to palpable things sized to his hands. Brushstrokes on a door frame. Liniment rubbed in where it hurt. For Karl small things became the world, a world he could feel at home in.
Soon he got the old truck running and began taking the vehicle on regular runs to Chicago. He had enlarged his own chicken yard to the limits of the lot. At first he took only his own birds and eggs to market, but soon he was also taking others’ on consignment. Whenever he lifted a crate into the back of the truck, pain pushed against his truss.
Monday through Friday he rose before dawn and took a constitutional up to the cemetery, where he sat with his back to the same tree and watched which part of which stone the sun rose over, solstice to equinox to solstice again. It gave him comfort to know the two days of the year it would eventually rise directly over his.
After opening up the school and tending the chickens, he met the southbound 8:07 as it threw off its leather mail sack, which bounced and rolled until it came to rest near his feet. He put it into his cart and took it to the old bank building, which had been bought for next to nothing at auction by the federal government to serve as a post office. Next he drove to farms around Abbeville picking up chickens and eggs, then returned to sort the letters and occasional packages, usually finishing before noon. He had lunch with Cristina, tended the birds, and delivered the mail by cart to the homes in town, gathering outbound letters as he went. These he put back into the leather sack, which he carried in the cart to the big cast-iron pole. He hung the sack on the armature just in time to be snatched up by the northbound 3:47. By then class was out at the school, and the building was ready for cleaning.
Weekends had a different rhythm. He still rose before dawn. Cristina still made him breakfast. But instead of doing chores, he left for Chicago, loading the eggs and fowl in the morning and returning empty the following evening. In good weather he slept in the truck. When it got cold he stayed in a run-down hotel near the farmer’s market. If the weather was inclement he wore a great sea-green slicker and black rubber hat like somebody from Captains Courageous, which sat on his bookshelf alongside the Zane Greys.
Then war came again. This time there were no effigies. Even before the call went out, French and Germans went to the infantry, to the armored cavalry, to the B24s over Europe and Japan. The demand for everything, including chickens and eggs, began to rise. Eventually the farms had to feed not only the Army but all of Europe.
Abbeville prospered, this time without Karl’s guidance. The chicken business did not require him to drive all the way to Chicago anymore. The government had a supply point in Kankakee that paid top dollar, which meant he could take care of everything on Saturday and on Sunday go to church with Cristina again and sing with conviction in his booming monotone. Forever and ever. Amen.
Karl was glad for Abbeville, glad to be steadily at Cristina’s side, glad that Betty had met Brendan Bailey while she was up in Chicago working in an office. One weekend she brought him home on the C&EI in his Army uniform. Karl took an immediate liking to him. He was an Irishman with perhaps a little too much of the blarney, but he seemed steady on his feet.
When he went off on maneuvers, Betty moved back home and worked at the school across the street, having earned her teaching certificate in Chicago. Every morning Karl laid a fire for her in the school’s two potbelly stoves and opened windows a crack to allow a draft.
Then, a week after Pearl Harbor, Brendan left for California bound for the South Pacific. Betty took a civilian train and followed him. She stayed the whole Christmas break in San Francisco while he waited in the Cow Palace with thousands of others. Cristina worried when Betty returned without a ring.
Then a ring came in the mail. Heaven only knew where Brendan had gotten it or with what. It was small, but to Betty it was the Hope diamond. And she needed all the hope she could muster when she learned that he had shipped out from Hawaii to places the censors did not even let him name. Eventually he reached Okinawa. Then Truman dropped the bomb, and he came home.
They held the wedding in the Evangelical and Reformed Church, catered by the ladies of the town, who would not let Cristina make so much as a pie. It was the only time Karl had ever seen her lose control of a kitchen.
Brendan found a job in radio. Soon he started substituting on the farm report—on the strength, he said, of his agricultural cultivation. When he and Betty came to visit, the town met the train as if they were celebrities.
He was as outgoing as Betty was reserved, with a beefy, smoky laugh, which came from him often, especially after a taste or two of the schnapps.
Karl sensed something dark behind it. One day as they walked along Otter Creek, he decided to ask.
“You still think about it?”
“What’s that, sir?” said Brendan, addressing Karl as if he were an officer.
“What you saw and did,” said Karl.
“It’s over now,” said Brendan.
“I still think about Verdun,” said Karl.
“That was a bad one,” said Brendan.
They kept walking, and Karl did not know whether he had crossed a line he should not have. They reached the shack and sat down on the open porch.
“If you ever want to talk,” Karl said.
“This is a real peaceful spot,” said Brendan.
23
OVER THE YEARS MY FATHER AND GRAND father spent a lot of time together at Otter Creek. When I was old enough, they st
arted to bring me with them. It was not very exciting watching them sit there looking down at the crick.
“You ever dip a line?” asked my father.
“Nothing in there but catfish and moccasin,” Grampa said.
I wandered down the high bank, hoping to see a poisonous snake. The water smelled as if something terrible lay rotting on the bottom. When I climbed back up, I saw that I had gone about a hundred yards downstream from the shack. The two men had their backs to me, smoke rising in puffs in the windless air. I crept up behind them.
“Has Betty cleared her plans for us with you?” Grampa asked.
“I grew up with seven brothers and sisters. Then there was the barracks. We’ll get along fine.”
My father pulled out his pack of Camels, tapped one out, and lit it.
“What does Mrs. Schumpeter think?” he asked.
“She knows it is going to be Betty’s house,” said Grampa, “Betty’s kitchen.”
My father stood up.
“It must have been hard on her,” he said, “having her daughter take over things.”
“It was hard on Betty, too,” Grampa said. “She never had a chance to be young.”
My father lit a cigarette and flicked a fly away from his face.
“You’ve done damned well all on your own so far,” he said.
“Wouldn’t even have a house if it wasn’t for Betty,” said Grampa.
“Is that the reason? That you owe her?” my father said.
“One of them,” said Grampa. “She worries about us so.”
“When you think on it,” said my father, “don’t think about Betty or me or the boy. Do what’s right for the two of you for once. Nobody else.”
As I heard them talking, I didn’t really appreciate what Grandma and Grampa moving in with us might mean to me. Mostly I guess I liked the idea of not having to leave my friends to go to Abbeville in order to be around Grampa.
He and my father sat in silence long enough that I thought about going back down to Otter Creek to see if any snakes had shown up. I may even have started backing away from them when Grampa started to speak in that tone of his that seemed to have a smile in it.
“Before we do anything, there’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long while,” he said.
