Abbeville (14 page)

Karl crawled up out of the hole and followed the Frenchman.
Whenever flares came, the two of them halted, face down, trying to merge with the mud. Eventually they were able to roll over the parapet of the forward trench line.

Karl did not pause even to clean himself. He immediately made his way through the communicating trenches to the Ambulance Corps headquarters, where he wrote out his resignation papers. From there he hitched a ride by lorry to the train station in Verdun. Fortune provided a troop train that was just boarding. The officers did not stand on ceremony when he proved with his papers and his English that he was not a deserter.

I
N THE DISTANCE
a farmhouse slowly fell behind the train until it was out of sight. In its place a pair of plain American steeples slid into view. The cross of the closer church appeared to reach higher into the perfect autumn sky. Karl leaned back in the plush seat and thought of the
curé
, the damp chill in the crypt, the fugitive, all the dead. They inhabited a different world than this vast Central Illinois landscape, which was protected from history by an ocean and hundreds of miles of farmland and forests. He watched the towers glide along beside the train, directing eye and heart to God.

He put his hand into his pocket and took out the watch, running his finger over the gold pattern, then snapping it open with his thumbnail. The inscription inside was in the kind of old-fashioned German cursive that generations of Schumpeters had used on the frontispieces of family Bibles. It simply said, “For Johann on his birthday, April 20, 1915.” The dead German had been hardly more than a boy. Had his father given him the watch? Had it been from his new wife?

The watch said 4:35. Unless the C&EI timetable had changed, this meant that they were only twenty-four minutes from Abbeville, and some of that was for a stop in Kankakee. It had been a long time since
he could say exactly when something was going to happen. He slipped the gold disk back into his vest pocket.

In its day perhaps the timepiece had predicted trains in Germany. Or perhaps Johann had grown up on the coast and used it to figure the tides. Maybe he was a baker, timing his loaves, or a brewer minding the yeast. Or even a farmer, bound by sunrise and sunset, the steady tilt and spin of the earth. Tick-tick. The rails clicked beneath Karl, the watch in his pocket, guiding him out of the past.

He had telegraphed from Uncle John's office the time he would arrive in Abbeville, and in response he had learned that he was the father of a baby girl. As the click of the rails slowed, his heart raced. From the shelf above the seat he pulled down the single, half-empty canvas bag with gifts from Paris. In the swaying vestibule he peered through a small window in the door. The intervals between fence posts lengthened. The church came into view, then his house. It was incredible that nothing had changed.

Then came Cristina's face and the baby, just as he had dreamt. Behind them it looked as though the whole town had come out, German and French alike. Some of the children held tiny American flags.

The crowd cheered as the porter appeared in the door and set down the step. Karl hesitated. Then he heard Cristina's voice.

“Karl!” she called.

Before he could get his footing, her arm was around him, the baby's head touching his face. He dropped his bag and held her, right there in front of everyone, and sobbed. The crowd applauded.

“You'll never go away again, will you?” Cristina said. “You must promise me that.”

“I do,” he said, just as he had the day they had wed.

T
HE FIRST THING THEY DID WAS TO GIVE
the child a name. Baby Schumpeter became Elizabeth. Within an hour they were calling her Betty. Karl loved to play with her, making funny faces, appearing and disappearing behind the edge of her crib. He loved just watching her, and she had an insatiable appetite for his affection, which grew in him the more he gave her.

In the businesses, he quickly fell back into his old routines, opening the bank in the morning, spending time at the elevator monitoring the telegraph when the trading day in the pits began, conferring with his brother, who liked to rise late after spending long nights with the politicians and officials who could influence where road construction contracts went.

“Be careful,” Karl warned him. “Some of those fellas don't seem straight.”

“Watch your own self,” Fritz said. “I'm not the one who's got the county prosecutor's grudge.”

Harley Ansel had done well for himself in private practice before turning to prosecuting criminals, but Karl never saw him, since Ansel now spent all his time in Potawatomi.

“That was a long time ago,” Karl said.

Simon Prideaux sued for peace within a year. Things came together nicely. The deal Karl offered was that he and Fritz would take the French elevator in return for some cash plus a number of parcels of Schumpeter farmland. Prideaux haggled a bit over the cash, then accepted and thus became the first Frenchman to own property north of town. Soon one of his pretty daughters married one of the Hoenig boys and the whole family promptly began appearing in the evangelical church as if they had been born again.

Not long afterward America joined the war. French and Germans volunteered. Soon the hatred that had hung the effigy seemed cleansed in common sacrifice.

Then came the Spanish flu epidemic that put everyone in fear of anyone they didn't know and half of those they did. Because of his experience as sheriff, Karl was delegated to scare off the gypsy bands that showed up from time to time. Old Henry Mueller gave him a double-barreled shotgun to help him make the point. Karl accepted it but always left it at home. Instead he went to meet the caravans with food Cristina had canned and a little money from his own pocket. The gypsies gave Abbeville a wide berth, and folks credited Karl with keeping the epidemic at bay.

Meanwhile, a couple of decent crops and rising prices put money in everyone's pockets. The bank's deposits swelled, and so did its portfolio of loans. One of its bigger debtors was Fritz.

“I wouldn't lend him an umbrella on a rainy day,” said Rose Stroeger, Karl's assistant at the bank. “He just uses the money to lord it over you. Fancy cars. Big vacations. And Edna's clothes. She tries her worst to make Cristina look plain.”

“I am blessed with the love of a practical woman,” Karl said.

Fritz was more than willing to let Karl manage the partnership businesses while he devoted his time to building roads that could handle the heavy implements the Schumpeter Bros. were selling.

“I hope he remembers to leave a little unpaved for tillage,” Karl said.

When the war ended, prosperity did not. Karl ventured up to Chicago from time to time to consult with Uncle John, who assured him that the Republicans would drive the economy to heights no one had ever imagined.

“Imagination,” he said. “That's what a man needs today. We are seeing a great transformation, driven by the gasoline engine and industrial ingenuity. The risk today is not losing your capital but being left behind.”

On one of his trips Karl managed to locate Luella, who he was happy to learn had done all right for herself, landing both a decent job in a real estate firm and a fellow.

“We aren't married,” Luella said.

“Yet,” said Karl.

“As good as,” Luella teased, her red hair lighting her eyes. On one of Karl's visits he met the man. Joe O'Toole was his name: big and brawny and obviously able to handle himself.

She never wanted to talk to Karl about the past, even when they were alone. Instead they would discuss the day's events, about which Luella always had a very un-Republican set of views.

As the years passed, Karl's parents' health began to fade. There was no question who would take care of them. Edna wasn't up to it, Fritz said. Cristina made a place for Karl's folks in the bedrooms where she and Karl had always slept. Her own father was slowing down, too, and Karl expected that he and Cristina would be living upstairs with Betty for quite a while.

But then Karl's father died, and in short order Cristina's father and
both of their mothers succumbed. All this death seemed to cut off the top of Cristina's emotions. It was not that they did not find happiness together anymore. It was just that they did not know joy.

“The way to end her grieving,” Fritz told him, “is to take her to Paris. Edna and I are going in the spring.”

“Beautiful city,” Karl said. “But it's a little dear.”

Instead he began to plan a trip to the river where he had grown into manhood. He ordered maps that showed the roads as tiny capillaries reaching into the great, empty expanses of the north. He ordered from Sears, Roebuck the things they would need—fishing gear, camping equipment, oilcloth bags to keep their things dry in the canoe, clothing that would hold up against rain and thorn.

“The feel of a cold running river,” he said.

“I can get that by putting my hand under the pump,” Cristina said.

He turned to Betty.

“There are eagles,” he said. “American eagles like on the top of the flagpole. There are beavers and badgers. There are bears.”

“Bears?” Betty said, lighting up.

“Not to hug,” Cristina said. “These are real, with teeth and claws.”

“They wouldn't hurt you, would they?” she said.

“Hurt Goldilocks?” said Karl. “I wouldn't let them.”

By the time the weather warmed up, Karl had put his business affairs in order. Rose had a power of attorney giving her authority to act in his stead on any bank or partnership matter.

“For Fritz's sake it would be best if you used it sparingly,” Karl said. “You remember how he resented my turning to you when I went off to the war.”

“For your sake it would be best if Fritz stayed in Paris,” she said.

The car trip north took the better part of a week. As they grew closer to their destination, the plains gave way to rolling hills.

“Are these the mountains?” Betty asked.

“I had no idea there were places like this,” said Cristina.

“Imagine it filled with towering trees,” said Karl.

“It's a pity you cut them all down,” said Cristina.

“Money can be like fire,” said Karl.

The road to the place Karl had rented was, at its best, little more than a path beaten into the grass. The closer they got, the bumpier it became.

“My God,” said Karl. “This is where I paid the Indians.”

He pulled up next to a clapboard cabin. Betty raced in and claimed a room upstairs. Cristina chose the bedroom on the ground floor. To Karl's delight, in it stood only one big cast-iron bed.

When he had brought everything inside, Karl felt his way down a crude set of rock steps to where the river stretched out a full seventy-five yards downstream. Along the eroded banks the trees were thin and whippy. In other places grass had moved into the sunlight where the white pine had fallen. Down the way a high bank had been sliding little by little into the water, spreading a choking blanket of sand over the lovely gravel beds where fish used to spawn.

“Is it what you had hoped?” asked Cristina.

She looked down at a wooden rack where two canoes lay bottom up. A wasp flew out from beneath one of them.

“I pray you don't expect me to handle one of those things on the river,” she said.

“After dark I'd better move that nest so Betty doesn't get herself stung,” he said.

As they stood there, the river whispered.

“I don't know what it is, but it draws me,” Karl said.

Later he strung one of the new fly rods made of split cane. Handing it to Betty, he directed her down to the riverbank, then situated
her so she would have a clean backcast and not need to worry about getting snagged in a bush. He showed her the way you used the weight of the line to flex the rod tip to throw the fly. At first her cast died in a mess in the water in front of her, but very quickly she began to get the knack.

“She's a natural,” he told Cristina afterward as he peeled potatoes for dinner.

The meal was hearty, more farm than forest. They ate on the porch, the lantern drawing in scores of moths to the screens the way the boom was drawing in people. Betty got up to examine one, then went outside to look at it from the other side.

When she returned to where they were sitting, she held out her right index finger. On it was a tiny white patch.

“Let's see,” said Karl.

“It's like a doily sewn by elves,” she said.

Just then he saw a shadow darting nearby. His hand shot out. When he brought it back in front of him and opened it, a large brown insect with a long, curving body slowly stretched its gauzy wings.

“You seem to have let in a mayfly,” he said.

“It doesn't look like a fly,” said Betty.

“That's because you're thinking of houseflies,” said Karl. “For a year this creature grew from its mother's egg into a nymph deep in the river. A few hours ago it shed its casing and swam to the surface. It waved its wings in the current until they were dry, then leaped from the water into the air for the first time. In a couple of days it will mate. The females will lay their eggs on the water and fall dead.”

“How sad,” said Betty.

“A mayfly has only one purpose, which is to change itself from one form to another in order to propagate its kind,” said Karl. “It is not like a person, who needs to change the world.”

Karl handled the cleanup as Cristina went upstairs to settle Betty into bed. When he finished he went outside again, walking as far as the bend in the river, then a little beyond until he could not see the light of the cabin anymore. Above him in the total darkness millions of stars spread across the sky. Down below, the river hush was broken from time to time by the sound of a rising fish.

At a gas station where they had stopped on the way in, Karl had asked the portly mechanic with a thick Dutch accent how the fishing was these days. All the grayling had been destroyed in the logging, the mechanic said. Brookies weren't that easy to find anymore, either. Fat German brown trout had taken over. “Germans,” he said.