Brotherhood of Gold

by Ron Hevener

  “Ezra?” How was it possible for one word, one little word, to hold so much emotion? “What’s wrong? Were you fired?” Wondering why he wouldn’t go to work on a Friday—payday, of all days—she asked the obvious.

  “No, he didn’t fire me,” Ezra reassured her, placing his hand over hers. “But depending on what happens, what he did—or made me do—it isn’t much different.” If he could have seen the furrow between her eyebrows starting to show, he might have stopped before saying, “Remember what I told you about banking and how it works?”

  Wanting to say something else; fighting back a burst of sudden questions; she matched his calm tone of voice and said, “A bank takes money from everybody and puts it all together. Then, it gives the money to good people who deserve to buy houses and farms and such, and nobody knows who the money belonged to, because now the town is sharing it. And it’s not a gift because you always end up paying more back than what you get.”

  “You’ve been listening,” he said, though her interpretation had a slant to it that his business mind wasn’t a hundred percent sure about.

  “I always listen to what you say, Ezra,” she said, going on. “The bank makes you work and slave for a long time. Maybe even twenty years for a house or your whole life. Then, if you made all your payments on time, they finally believe you’re good enough to have the house you worked for. And they give you the deed. But they don’t really give it. They trade you the deed for all that hard work you did.” She looked around their tidy home and said, “Just like this place, here, is gonna be ours when we’re old and gray,” she tried getting him to smile, “if we do things how they want.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” he said, knowing he could never change her point of view. “Everybody puts their faith in the bank. We put our money together and we build a town.” He wasn’t smiling as they lay together in the dark and he pulled the blankets around his neck. “At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be.”

  He couldn’t see it, but at the word “supposed” both of her eyebrows went up, along with a slight sucking in of her cheeks and a twist to her mouth. “Fenstamacher?” she said.

  “He wanted things to go faster,” Ezra explained. “He knew the bank could make more money on the Exchange. So he was buying up stocks. Lots of them, Mary.”

  “In New York?” she asked, sitting up now. Although Philadelphia was the biggest city she had ever seen, she knew of a greater world of commodity trading beyond the farmers market where her friends and neighbors sold garden vegetables, fruits, baked goods, quilts and handmade furniture.

  Ezra said, “Yes, at the New York stock exchange,” although he suspected there were investments in Chicago’s livestock and grain futures as well. “I’m sure it was for everybody’s good,” he said. “And, we’re not the only ones doing it. He got a call from the bank over in Bellville yesterday. He tried hiding it from me, but I could tell it was bad news. After that, he went to the safe.”

  “What happened?” she asked. “Did he say?”

  “Not at first,” Ezra said, in a way that she knew meant there was more to the story. “But we talked before he left.”

  She took in a quick breath. “What did you find out?”

  “Only that he had to get to the station and catch the train.”

  “Did he say where he was going?” she asked.

  “New York, he told me. And, then, today…” Ezra put a hand to his head as if to help himself think, to understand. “This afternoon he called. He was scared, Mary. Real scared. He even told me to close the bank. Right away.”

  “Well, I can’t believe that!” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him correctly. The world was entering another ice age instead of saying good-bye to October. “You can’t do that…can you? Is anybody even allowed to close a bank?”

  “I don’t know,” Ezra said, truthfully, feeling again like he was standing on a cliff and his legs were shaking. “I don’t know what the rules are about this kind of thing. But he’s the president isn’t he?”

  “Well, Ezra James Hoover, no matter who he is—you didn’t listen!” she said, before adding in a small voice, “Did you?” His look was her answer.

  He knew cash was hard to come by and not just for them. Managing carefully every dime and every dollar was not only tough, it was the underlying creed and silent religion of everything Pennsylvania Dutch. Cash was the rock foundation on which everything permanent, lasting and forever was built. Money was more than that. It was the very glue that held the dirt together that made the rock.

  “Please don’t tell me you’re closing the bank on market day,” she said, looking toward the kitchen and their cookie jar. “What am I going to tell everybody? What are people going to say?!”

  Mary pinched the edge of her nightgown and ran it through fingers that seemed to have a mind of their own. “Their money!” she said, trying her best to get a grip on things. “If the bank’s closed—how can people get their money out?!”

  More silence—the kind of silence that meant he was asking himself the same thing.

  “Our money, too, Ezra!” She glanced again toward the kitchen. “I emptied the cookie jar and put all of it in the bank—just this morning!”

  “Allll of it?” he asked, with an emptiness going through his chest and down to his toes. Her look was his answer. “Well,” he said, struggling for the right tone, “we just have to wait, then, don’t we. Like everybody else. But it won’t be for long,” he said, hoping he was right. “It can’t be,” he heard himself saying, his arms around her, his body rocking hers gently side-to-side.

  Why hadn’t he said something to her, he asked himself now. He could have done that. Knowing how important their financial security was to Mary, knowing how hard she worked for the money in that cookie jar, why hadn’t he told the one person in this whole world who counted on him the most? “The market’s falling!” Fenstamacher had said from New York. “I can’t cover the losses—I’m here and I can’t find the broker! They’re jumping out of buildings, Ezra! There’s blood and guts all over the street! Close down the bank—I’m telling you! Close it! Lock the doors and board up the windows if you have to! It’s a mob!” he hollered into the phone over screams all around him. “The country’s on fire!”

  “When’s the bank gonna open again? Does anybody know?” Mary was leaving their bed now, checking the kitchen cupboards for rice, flour, potatoes, sugar, eggs. Maybe enough for a day or two, she figured. Meat and vegetables, she could get from her parents’ farm if they had to. “We’ll be OK,” she said to him. “But, Ezra. We both know I have to tell the family something!”

  It was exactly what Fenstamacher had warned him against. Mary’s family and the rest of the town would want their money, and the bank didn’t have it. “Let’s wait and see, Mary.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Please, God, he said to himself, help me find the way to say this. “As soon as it gets out, there’s going to be a lot of questions. People are going to be scared, Mary. Just like us.”

  “Not scared. Mad!” she said.

  “Then we have to be ready,” he said. “Don’t we? We have to set an example. We have to be calm for everybody until we know more. He’s going to call, Mary. He has to! He has to tell us what to do next. He’s going to explain how this happened and how to fix it. We’ve got a good bank in this town. Good people! I don’t know what’s ahead now—for you or me or any of us. I don’t know what any of this means or what can happen. But, if a bank like ours is in trouble—and if people are jumping out of buildings and killing themselves like Fenstamacher said they are—it can only mean everybody’s running out of money. Everywhere!” As soon as he said it, he wished he hadn’t.

  Not much in this world matches the fear of doing wrong or making mistakes that a bona fide Pennsylvania Dutch woman grows up with. And Mary Weaver was no exception. Raised on the farm by strict, hard-working Mennonites, it was Mary—not Ezra—who had convinced her suspicious parent
s, aunts, uncles and half the town into pulling hard-earned cash out from under their mattresses and handing it over to him at the bank. What she would tell them now was anybody’s guess—and Ezra knew it wouldn’t be good. “You should have told me, Ezra! I’m your wife! Of all the people in the world, you should have told me!”

  That night, he tried forgetting the fear, anger, accusations in her voice. He tried not to hear the calls she made to parents and relatives while thinking he was asleep. He tried not hearing Mary’s angry slam of the phone when somebody called back that night. How he managed to get any sleep at all was a mystery. The lurch in his stomach would have splattered Mary’s soup on the ceiling if he had been able to eat any.

  Strange how empty a house can be when the one you love walks out. By morning, she was gone, and he was an autumn leaf clinging to its last hope; shriveling in the wind across the fields at Phantom Creek, where birch trees and lilac bushes grew; the creek that ran through town where he and Mary dreamed of so many things; the creek by the church where wild geese were leaving their nests, gathering their wits and spreading their wings for Canada. Take me with you this time, he thought; take me as far away as you can go, no matter how much we shiver and shake. Even wrapped in soft, downy goose feathers now, Ezra Hoover couldn’t have felt more naked and alone.

  *

  Being alone isn’t always so bad. Most of us can be alone for a while, but—if we really miss someone—being alone can be a bitch. It can be like Ezra’s clinging autumn leaf finally letting go without a net or a shoulder or a passing breeze to break the fall.

  If Mary had stayed just a while longer, he might have told her. He might have taken her in his arms, kissed her again and again for staying with him. For believing in him. But she didn’t. And he didn’t. No matter how much he wanted to. Instead, he had pretended to sleep, knowing she was leaving him and knowing exactly where she was going. Mary was running out of the movie of their dreams, off the stage of their show, and she was going back to the safety of a mother who said in a thousand different ways, “If things don’t work out with him, you can always come back to us and the bakery.”

  It wasn’t like it sounded. On the surface, it sounded nice. It sounded loving. But underneath, like so many secrets in families, communities, organizations—even governments—it could be completely, and violently, ugly. In a socially acceptable way, of course.

  What it meant, was, “We’ll be here when he fails.”

  Failure is a dirty word. For those trying to better themselves, it’s more sinister and demoralizing than any profanity invented by the most ignorant and soul-destroying bullies in any workplace or school yard. It’s more disrespectful of achievement or self-worth than any insult to the human body and more incinerating to the mind than any flame.

  “When” he fails is not the same as “if” he does. And when it’s the one you love they’re talking about—the one you’ve hitched your star to—the one you chose for the rest of your life with all your thinking mind and feeling heart…it’s you they’re doubting just as much.

  If Mary understood such things, Ezra didn’t know. For now, all he could know is that the one he counted on had left him. She had cried, and become hopeless right in front of him. She hadn’t even taken a change of clothes with her, which might have told him she would be back the next day. She hadn’t packed a suitcase, which would have meant, “You’re not going to see me for a while.” She had just taken her coat, a woolen hat and a scarf. She had run off into the night, and with her, she had taken their unborn child.

  He did not want—he would not allow—their child to be raised believing a person is worthless. He would not allow anyone, no matter who they were, to erode the inner beauty and confidence of their child the way they had done to Mary and so many others in a culture that valued material productivity above all else. Didn’t they know the spirit is worth something? Didn’t they believe it? Didn’t they understand how everything ever made in this world came from a thought, an impulse, an idea? Didn’t they know—to bring those ideas to life—a person has to feel worth getting up in the morning?

  In the empty bed now, he didn’t know if he would ever open his eyes again. He didn’t know if he would try to believe it wasn’t true, and reach over to feel her gone just to be sure. Would he walk again to the bathroom or just lay there and soak the sheets? Without Mary and all she meant, what was left to care about? He thought again of his work. He thought again about their baby. He thought about coffee.

  Mostly, he thought about her and their real story. The truth was, they hadn’t just met for the first time in her parents’ tobacco field. Like everybody else in town, they had gone to school together, and she was the only one who caught his eye. Her intelligent questions when the teacher said how things had to be, and she wanted to know why…her almost-royal posture stirring memories of her from something far away and long ago. The inner happiness about her. She was pleased with herself. She was as different from the others as a bright star is, waiting behind the sunlight for the moon to set the stage and for its own beautiful moment to shine.

  He had loved all of this about her from the instant he was first aware of her. And as they grew up, he felt sure that she was watching him, too, waiting for the time when they would be ready to discover everything about each other. They were young when that happened, and by then, they were deeply in love, sharing beautiful secrets for them and no one else. Now, she was gone. Out the door, with all their future. All their hope. How powerful a family can be, he thought. How false the love songs on the radio are. How fake are the happy movies when boy meets girl and they fall in love and live happily ever after. He reached over to her side of the bed and felt only cold blankets. If this was love, then he wanted no more of it.

  He stood now beside the window and pulled back the curtain to watch their town coming to life. Along the street, he could see newspapers delivered during the night and waiting to be opened at breakfast tables, for people to see before leaving home for their offices, shops and factories. He wondered what they would do when they realized there was no one at the bank for them today. He thought about the old school teacher, who depended on her job as a bank teller, and the look on her face when he lied to her yesterday, saying she was fired. Just so she wouldn’t show up. The town liked her. Loved her, really. When they got through this, he’d hire her back.

  Mary, why couldn’t you have believed in me just one more night? One more night, My Love. Oh, Love, believe in me.

  Maybe everything wasn’t all lost, he finally told himself, looking now at the poem Mary had torn from the pages of a book, framed under glass and hung on their wall; the poem by Rudyard Kipling called “If”—in which the writer says if only you can keep your head when all around you are crying, ‘All is lost’…in which Kipling says, “if you can risk it all on one throw in the game of pitch and toss…” in which he says if you can do all these things “you are a Man, my son”! Such faith. Such hope.

  Hope. There was still the hope of what Mr. Fenstamacher had said before he left: “Don’t worry, Ezra. We aren’t the only ones caught up in this. At most, it should only be a few days. Everything’ll go back to normal then,” he promised. That’s what bank managers and presidents did. They were Daddy. Just like he would be someday. If that day ever came. If he was lucky.

  “But what if it doesn’t work?” Ezra had said; hating the child within himself for needing to ask.

  “It will,” Fenstamacher had said, before leaving for the train station. “It has to.”

  “But, what do the other banks say?” Ezra wanted to know.

  “We talked about it sometimes,” Fenstamacher admitted. “We speculated and threw around a few theories. They didn’t really believe it would happen—now they know better. The truth is, they didn’t want it to happen before they could cover their asses. Same as I did, I guess. Anybody who understands economics and finances knew it couldn’t last, Ezra. War in Europe is real. We’re not protected by an ocean—ships can cross t
he ocean now and hit us from both sides if they want to. We’re not protected by God because we’re not that special! It’s here. Right in front of us. We’ve got to get out of the market—now!”

  “But, how can you be sure of anything?” Ezra asked. If only he could see the future, or learn from the past. Maybe, then, he would know what to do. What to say to the faces crowding his mind now.

  “I can’t,” Fenstamacher had said before he left. “I’m not sure of anything. But, if I don’t get to New York and cover those losses—fast—we lose it. All of it. I know the broker good, Ezra. He’s a friend. I’ve known him a long time. He promised me. He’s buying back everything we invested—all of it. We agreed. Whatever the closing price is, I’m making up the difference between that and our last break-even point with cash. How much? I have no idea. None. None whatsoever. I just know I have to meet him and get this done. If I do, the bank’s going to be OK. If I don’t?” He didn’t have an answer for that. “I’m taking all the extra cash we have in the safe,” he said. “I don’t have a choice. It means you don’t have much to work with. So, my suggestion? Close the bank. Close it and make some kind of excuse—hospital, death in the family, your wife’s having a baby—I don’t care what it is. Try to avoid a panic. And I’ll explain to everybody when I get back. What you have to do is remember what I told you in case it all blows up!”

  “What about the other bankers?” Ezra asked. “Are they going with you?”

  Fenstamacher shook his head. “We have to worry about Steitzburg, Ezra. The others didn’t invest in the market like we did. But that don’t matter. As soon as this hits the news—if it’s anywhere as bad as I think it is—nobody has enough cash in the vault when a whole town wants its money!”

  “What if they already got their money out?” Ezra said.

  Fenstamacher held his breath. “It’s not their money, Ezra. Don’t ever call it that.” Sincere or not, it was the mark of a good bank official to say that. “And, listen. In my desk, there’s a letter of recommendation if you need it,” he added. “I was saving it for the Directors,” he said, “at the next Board meeting.”