Abbeville (3 page)

When his father had given the land, memorializing it in several stiffly worded documents in his perfect Germanic hand, he had held back twenty plots for his immediate family. Twenty! There were only
four of them in Abbeville: Mother and Father, himself, and his brother, Friedrich. Twenty plots would take the Schumpeters into the next millennium, which seemed to a young man as distant as the last.

Karl took out his blue bandanna and wiped his face, then the band of his straw hat. A little breeze would be all right about now. Or somebody stopping by to lend a hand. But he supposed that everybody was at the crick, swimming or fishing for the big cats that lived on the mud. Probably getting a laugh at his expense, too: fencing in ghosts, eh? That barbed wire better be mighty sharp.

His father's plan was to have the job done before they planted old Rolf on Saturday. That meant putting in every post today, then wrestling with the wire tomorrow, giving himself a day to spare in case of weather. As his father always reminded him, “I've never once known anyone to win an argument against the rain.” Nor against Karl's father either. Stubborn as this fence pole, and sometimes twice as thick.

Karl dug deep to anchor the fence against the upthrust of the winter freeze. When he got a post situated, he filled in around it and stomped on the soil until the ground was tight.

Sometimes after a day's labor was done, he rode off on a horse and did not return until past the hour when everyone in Abbeville was in bed. Folks said it must be rutting season. But if that were it, he would simply have found a gypsy woman, who the boys said would touch you anywhere you wanted for a price. And anyway, he saved his fancy for a respectable girl, Cristina Vogel, whose father farmed a spread a mile west of the Schumpeters'. Karl was not alone in his interest. Harley Ansel, who was a year younger than Karl and a year older than Cristina, clearly had hopes for her as well. Karl did not have much experience with the way the opposite sex saw things, but he felt sure Cristina would not reciprocate Ansel's attentions. The boy had a jagged edge that did not come from breaking earth.

A fence does not get built this way, Karl thought. It was foolish to drive oneself idle with ideas. But whenever he saw the gypsies crossing the prairie in their strange caravans—not living by the rhythm of the seasons but cutting straight through them toward something beyond—he could not help wondering what they aimed to find.

He increased the vigor of his digging until the hole reached the proper depth, then slid a post from the back of the horse cart. His father had felled it and stripped it of its bark, but he had left the bulbous knots where the limbs had been, which gave the post the look of a prehistoric bone. Karl thought of trying to hoist it to his shoulder, but the distance to the hole was short, so it was easier just to drag it.

The bottom end scraped along, seeming to get hung up on every stone, but eventually he got it to the lip of the hole and heaved it vertical so that he could get around it with both arms. It slid down his front haltingly. Knots tugged at his belt. Finally it hit bottom, sending a shudder up through him. He had to look around to make sure no one coming up from town had seen him dancing and thrusting as if he were a dog on somebody's leg.

Karl scraped the piles of fertile earth back into the hole with his boot, then began to stomp it down. There were girls at the barn dances in the Coliseum who would let you brush up against them ever so briefly as you wheeled by in the square. You could feel the softness of them, but even the most wanton permitted no more than this. And if a boy ever did manage to lure one of them outside, he found the farmers out there waiting for them, smoking their pipes in the dark like sentries.

Cristina was not such a girl. She had a dignity and seriousness of purpose far beyond her years. He was sure she was the kind who would let only one man touch her, the one she decided to wed.

Work, Karl. Work. The wind had picked up enough that when he
lifted the next post, he had to take it into account. More shoulder and less embrace made this encounter a mite less incriminating. The post slid down the shallow trough he had cut to make the process easier. When he had one whole side completed, he checked the alignment: as straight as the numbers in one of his father's ledgers.

The wind blew his sweat cold as he admired his work with the devil's pride. The proper antidote, of course, was the same as for desire: redoubled labor. He worked steadily through the afternoon until, with three sides of the rectangle complete and the fourth started, Friedrich showed up, collar and hair still wet from the crick.

“Do any good today?” Karl asked.

“Robert got him a few,” said Fritz. “Fat ones, too.”

“See any water moccasins?” Karl asked.

“Naw,” said Fritz, as if it wouldn't have scared the bejabbers out of him if he had.

“Were you the only two there?” Karl asked.

“Andrew Schwarz and Harley Ansel came later,” Fritz said.

“Harley give you any trouble?” Karl asked.

“Naw,” said Fritz. “When I told him what you was doing, it gave him a good enough laugh that I guess it satisfied him.”

“Don't ever let him bully you,” Karl said. “I'll have a talk with him if you need me to.”

“Aw, Harley ain't so bad,” Fritz said, and Karl could not help thinking that Fritz had probably laughed right along with him.

He went to the horse cart to pull down another post from the dwindling pile.

“I'll help,” said Fritz.

Karl could have asked his father to assign Fritz to assist him, but it was the elder's lot to shoulder the burden.

“Dad sure did give them enough land,” said Fritz, gazing down the long-side fencerow.

“Got to last till Judgment Day, I guess,” said Karl.

The younger boy walked over to the empty hole and looked down. The wind had abated, and bees flitted at the dandelions.

“You suppose he's fixing to bury himself here?” said Fritz.

“He'll probably be looking for a little help from the two of us,” said Karl.

“I mean him and Ma, they'll both be here?”

“Don't get too far ahead of yourself, Fritz,” said Karl.

As he began to lift the next post from the pile, Fritz leaped to help.

“It's all right,” said Karl. “I got it.”

Fritz disregarded Karl and managed to get the butt end off the ground. The quiver of his exertion expressed itself down the whole length of the log.

“Steady, boy,” Karl said.

That only made the log wobble so much that Karl could feel it working out of his own grasp.

“Just let me know if you're going to have to drop it, Fritz,” he said, using all his will to keep up his end for fear that if he lost it, the weight would crush his brother's hands.

Without warning Fritz simply let go. This broke Karl's grip, and the heavy log crashed against his shin.

“Almighty!” he cried as he went down.

The pain did not come immediately, but when it did, it radiated from the spot of the blow upward and downward until it hurt as much as a part of him could.

As he held his shin between his hands, the feeling began to center itself where he could test it. When he realized that the wound was more likely a bruise than a break, the question of Fritz began to intrude into his selfish pain.

He was nowhere to be seen from the ground where Karl lay curled.
Karl straightened his leg against the hurt, rolled off his hip, and pushed himself upward to a sitting position. It was only then that he saw the retreating form. Fritz's impulse to flee was as much a part of his nature as a rabbit's.

Karl leaned on an arm opposite the injury and pushed up against the burden of the earth. When he got upright he listed, but he was able to stand.

“Fritz!” he called out, waving his arms. “It's all right.”

Fritz turned, but trouble was trouble, and it never went away. So you had to. Just that simple, said the rabbit.

Karl's leg ached something fierce. It gave him sharp notice whenever he put too much weight on it. But still he found that if he stood correctly, canted away from the weak side so he could take the burden on his good leg, he could still lift. It did test his back, but no more than hay bales in tight quarters in the loft. He used the tool to brace himself as he leaned over, then used the pole itself for balance as he slid it.

Getting the fence post upright proved to be another matter. He pushed his bad leg as far as he could, but still the angle was wrong. The log would not slide into place. It began to wobble, and he had to throw it from him. At this point he really could have used his brother's help. But that was an idle thought. He tried again and again until he succeeded. Eventually he was able to master how to work hurt so he could keep going until the posts turned the empty land sacred.

There had been jeopardy, but he had gotten through it. Danger was always present, whether in building a fence or running the sharp-bladed implements in the fields. It was there even in pleasure, climbing a tall lookout tree near the crick or touching a girl at the dance who you could tell wanted to come back around to be touched again.
It was the way of the world to put obstacles in the path between a man and the things he wanted or was obliged to do. Otherwise, Karl supposed, a soul would never be measured. Maybe this then was the reason God made moccasin snakes and swimming holes and gypsy women and little brothers.

W
HEN
K
ARL LIMPED INTO THE HOUSE
, he did not mention Fritz's role in his injury. He had just lost his balance, he said.

“That is the cause of all human misery,” Karl's father observed.

Karl could think of quite a few other causes—starting with severe fathers—but he stood silently, wondering what punishment his father would mete out to him for a job well done.

His father began to pace.

“Success in agriculture today takes more than a knee for the weather,” he said.

Was this a test? It was not his knee that he had hurt.

“Your mother and I have decided.” His father stopped and straightened himself at every joint, as if he were lifting whatever it was he was trying to say. Then he finally spoke again. “It is time you were exposed to the world.”

Karl's mind leaped up. Chicago. Grain and livestock pouring in from all over the plains. He could hear the animals' frightened cries, see throngs of people as numberless as the Bible's multitudes.

“You will be going to the North Woods to work with your uncle,” his father said.

It was as if Karl had been tackled and brought to earth.

“Why send me so far?” he complained. “What do I need to know of the forest?”

“He is my brother,” his father said.

K
ARL WENT BY TRAIN
, switching lines he forgot how many times, until he found himself in a freezing boxcar with a dozen ruffians who, to his dismay, all got out at the same bleak rail crossing he did. From there they were taken by open oxcart mile upon bumpy mile until they reached a scar in the forest that turned out to be the camp of Schum-peter Logging Co.

“Looking for something?” said the enormous oxcart driver, his words clotted by an accent that was not German but more German than French.

“I'm to meet Mr. John Schumpeter,” Karl said. “I'm to be working for him.”

“Everybody does that,” said the ox man.

“I'm to be his clerk,” Karl said.

“Be you a saw clerk or a wagon clerk?” said the ox man.

“Ledger clerk,” said Karl, who could only guess at the penalty for a smart mouth. “I'm to learn the business from him.”

“You'll learn a lot more than that here,” said the ox man. Then his thick finger pointed toward the other side of the camp. “A person can usually find Mr. Schumpeter over to that big old pile of logs they call the office. But usually you don't go there unless he asks you to, and then you'd usually just as rather not. By the way, Mr. Ledger Clerk, be sure to wipe those boots off afore you enter. Mr. Schumpeter lives in that office of his, and he likes to keep it as neat as Astor Street. You know where that is, don't you?”

“No,” said Karl.

“And you never will neither.”

With that the ox man turned away, and Karl struck out across the muddy yard. The first log structure he reached smelled like a kitchen. He poked his head inside, barely able to make out anything except for the glow of coals in a fireplace under a hanging cauldron straight out of the Brothers Grimm.

“I'm looking for Mr. Schumpeter,” said Karl.

“I look like him to you?”

“I've never laid eyes on him,” said Karl.

He put the wind in his face again and slogged toward a cabin that looked a cut or two nicer than the rest. He knocked tentatively on the jamb of the open door.

“Hello?” he said.

From inside came the scrape of a chair, then heavy footsteps on wooden planking. When the figure appeared in the rectangle of light from the doorway, it was . . . his father!

The shock lasted only an instant. Then he noticed the age lines, the rounder jaw.

“I'm Emil's son,” Karl said.

“I was worried that he had decided not to let you come after all,” said Uncle John, reaching out his hand. “He went this way and that way for months after I suggested it.”

Uncle John wore heavy work clothes. But you could tell he was not a man of common labor. His grip would not have held a bucking horse, perhaps the effect of having so many saw clerks and ox clerks.

Karl's first lesson in business came the very next day, the basics of double-entry bookkeeping. He was not so sure at first about doing everything twice, but his uncle did not seem to be one to waste motion. For one thing, he did not repeat himself, unlike Karl's father, who assumed his sons could never harvest anything clean on a single pass.

Soon Karl began to appreciate the ways of the account books. He learned to make the figures tell the future, not like a gypsy lady, but scientifically: Let this number drift upward—by paying the men too generously or buying too many provisions—and that number (net profits) began to drop. Your fortune, or the loss of it, was not in the Tarot cards or crystal ball; it was right there on the ledger paper.