Abbeville

by Jack Fuller

  ABBEVILLE

  ABBEVILLE

  Jack Fuller

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Unbridled Books

  Denver, Colorado

  Copyright © 2008 by Jack Fuller

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fuller, Jack.

  Abbeville / Jack Fuller.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-932961-47-8

  1. Grandfathers—Fiction. 2. Grandparent and child—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.U44A63 2008

  813′.54dc22

  2008000989

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Book design by SH • CV

  First Printing

  This is mortality: to move along a . . . line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order.

  —HANNAH ARENDT

  We’re a couple of financial wizards.

  —GEORGE BAILEY, from It’s a Wonderful Life

  FOR DEBBY

  and the memory of Will Tegge

  ABBEVILLE

  1

  EVEN WHEN I WAS A CHILD, ABBEVILLE seemed too small. It was the kind of place you might have flashed through on a streamliner going somewhere else: a blur of faded paint on plank, a crossing bell rising and falling then gone. Since the last time I’d visited the town, a fire had reduced to rubble the bank my grandfather built, leaving only its walk-in safe standing in the weeds like a crypt. The old grain elevator that had borne Grampa’s family name in faded four-foot letters was also gone, replaced by a nameless structure of corrugated steel. No boxcars stood next to it today, but to the north three silver tank cars flashed sun into my eyes. You don’t put grain in a tanker. They seemed as out of place in Abbeville as sailing ships.

  At least Grampa and Grandma’s house had survived, although it had taken on an ugly cladding of vinyl. My mother had sold the place to one of her kin after she’d moved Grandma up to Park Forest to live with us. I’d never thought I would spend another night in it, let alone want to. When I called my second cousin to ask if he had a spare bed, he said I could take my pick because he was going to be away for a month.

  “Just go right in,” he said. “The door will be open.”

  “Abbeville is still another world, isn’t it,” I said.

  “Not as much as it used to be,” he said.

  I didn’t stop at the house right away. Instead I took the south crossing over the Chicago and Eastern Illinois tracks. In the local accent, C&EI became See-Nee-Eye. For years I’d thought the name came from an Indian tribe.

  Main Street ran parallel to the tracks on the side opposite the house and the unmown prairie along the right-of-way where I used to shoot tin cans off rocks. I drove past the ruins of the bank, then the boarded-up general store. Grampa had owned that at one time, too, along with a number of farms and the implement lot that now held only one rusted old combine, whose delivery assembly poked up out of the weeds like the skull and bony neck of a Brontosaurus.

  I rolled on a little way to the north end of Main. The crossing there had a modern set of lights and gates. I wondered why the C&EI had gone to the expense. Everyone in Abbeville knew exactly when each train would pass, as sure as tides.

  Crossing the tracks again, I drove back out of town the way I had come. After a couple of miles I turned onto the dirt road that led to the shack Grampa used to own on Otter Creek. Remarkably, it was still standing on the high bank, where you could look out over the lazy current and the marsh beyond. Its plank walls had weathered black, and in a number of places the roof yawned open. The whole structure leaned in the direction of the creek, as if moving water exerted a pull on its timbers the way it always had on Grampa.

  He used to love to sit in the beat-up rocker on the porch of the shack, gazing down at the creek. There were no trout in it, and Grampa would not deign to fish with anything but a well-tied fly, so for blood sport he had to settle for smacking pesky sweat bees with a rolled-up section of the Trib. He could spend all day like this, contented, insect carcasses piling up, as if bees were money.

  When I got out of the car, I half-expected to smell the smoke from his Prince Albert pipe tobacco or to hear him whistling the nine-note, monotone cadence he repeated over and over again like a bird.

  Beyond the shack a red-tailed hawk soared over the wide, flat fields. The corn was high. I pulled open an ear to check the quality the way Grampa had taught me. It looked like Abbeville was in store for a pretty fair yield, but any farmer would tell you not to bank on a crop until it was brought in.

  I walked the edge of the field, taking in the smell of pollen and leaves and dirt, then returned to the car and drove back to town. On the way I noticed a little trailer sitting on a brick foundation. An American flag flew outside, and next to it somebody had planted a small hand-painted sign that said, “U.S. Post Office.” When Grampa delivered the mail, he used the old bank building. He opened it every day but Sunday, as he had when it had served the purpose for which he’d built it. After business hours he would sit in a big old swivel chair with a cracked leather back, tallying the coins he had taken in exchange for postage, accounting sales against revenue again and again down to the last penny.

  The garage on Main Street looked to be the only establishment still in business. I pulled in at the ancient pump. The door to the mechanic’s bay was open, so I went right in. It had been here that Grampa and the other men had set up a rickety table and played pinochle for matchsticks on Saturday nights. Now the garage smelled only of rubber and oil, but it carried the memory of cigar smoke on Bicycle cards.

  “Hello,” I called.

  A man emerged from the office, drying his hands on a paper towel. He wasn’t as weathered as a farmer, and though he was probably in his thirties, he had the face of a boy.

  “I wasn’t sure it was self-serve,” I said.

  A few old tires with new treads lay on the cracked cement floor. When the mechanic finished with the paper towel, he hung it from his hip pocket to dry. In Abbeville using anything only once had always been seen as an extravagance.

  “Nice car,” said the mechanic.

  “It likes the gas a little too much,” I said. “But from the look of those tankers on the siding you have plenty.”

  “You aren’t from around here,” he said.

  “My mother is,” I said.

  “The tankers don’t hold fuel,” he said. “They’re full of water.”

  “I was out in one of the fields,” I said. “The corn is coming in real sound. It sure didn’t seem like a drought.”

  The mechanic looked at me as if to ask what someone like me would know about judging corn.

  “It ain’t a matter of weather,” he said. “A big corporation bought up pretty much a whole township across the Indiana line, where the soil is real sandy. To make that kind of land produce, they have to run them full-acre sprinkler rigs day and night.”

  He pointed to a big plastic wastebasket full of water. A ladle hung from its lip.

  “By the time the water gets to us,” he said, “it stinks of all the chemicals they use.”

  “I used to love drinking straight from the hand pump,” I said. “You had to prime it from a coffee can that sat next to the well. The cement gutter for the runoff was so green with moss it seemed part of the stone.”

  I followed the young man into the office, fishing in my pocket for cash.

  “Should I pay for the gas in advance?” I asked.

  He went over and sat down at a desk that looked like it had supported the elbows of a lot
of mechanics.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “George Bailey,” I said.

  He smiled.

  “My father told me he had a good laugh when your mother gave you that name,” he said.

  “She had a weakness for It’s a Wonderful Life,” I said.

  “Your grandfather’s troubles and all,” he said.

  “And you are?” I said.

  “Henry Mueller,” said the young man. “My grandfather and yours were good friends. He was Henry, too. Harley Ansel was his nephew, but my grandfather didn’t have any use for him after what he done to yours. Go ahead and fill it up.”

  I pushed open the screen door. They were predicting showers, but there was no sign of them yet. The little vane in the glass bubble on the face of the old pump spun as the gasoline streamed over it, just as it had when my father had filled up his used Ford on Sunday afternoons for the drive back to Park Forest.

  “This ought to cover it,” I said, coming back through the door and pulling a twenty from my pocket.

  “How much was it?” he asked.

  “Nineteen seventy-six,” I said. “Keep it.”

  The mechanic pulled open a drawer and rooted around in it for coins.

  “There,” he said. “We’re square.”

  “I’ve been thinking about my grandfather a lot lately,” I said.

  “Some say the bubble busting like it done could bring on another Depression,” said the mechanic.

  “That’s what raised the ghost for me, all right,” I said.

  “Then you’d better stop trying to pay more than you owe,” the mechanic said. “Ask your grandfather’s ghost where generosity got him.”

  I thanked him and took the short drive to the other side of the tracks. As I stepped inside the house the ghost had raised, the air was musty. When Grampa and Grandma lived here, they always had an aromatic fire of corncobs and coal in the cast-iron cookstove. The smell of Grandma’s cooking, mixed with Grampa’s tobacco, spiced the air.

  I have never known anyone who could take such satisfaction in small pleasures as he did: rocking in his chair while cold-smoking a cigar, walking along the edge of a field with me at his side, bellowing out the old German hymns at church in a full basso that knew no sense of pitch whatsoever, or just sitting quietly under a tree at the cemetery. He would sometimes take me there on a clear dawn when the sun was still just below the horizon. He would sit me down, making me move a little this way or a little that until I was just so. “Watch,” he would say. “It’s Mrs. Hageman’s day. The sun’s going to rise straight up her cross. Watch.” The cemetery was his Stonehenge.

  But the rhythms of the world weren’t all so benign. Folks who lived close to the land knew full well that they existed at the mercy of these turnings. Nobody understood this better than Grampa. And yet he seemed able to embrace it like providence. I do believe he was the happiest man I have ever known.

  My cousin had moved things around and gotten some modern pieces, but many things in the house remained close to the way they had been. Over against one wall stood the huge breakfront that had once held heirloom china that had been brought over from Germany. Now it displayed a careless assortment of dime-store glass. Across the room was the goofy Victorian chair that used to sit just inside the front door. Its high, hard back had coat hooks at the top, which made it look like an instrument of torture.

  As I approached the stairs I stopped at the old bookcase with its horizontal glass doors hinged at the top. When I was a boy it had held treasures: Zane Grey’s stories for boys, sea tales, a copy of Dale Carnegie and The Robe, a number of Bibles, including one inscribed in German in 1851 by one of Grandma’s forebears, a leather-bound history of Cobb County, circa 1920, with more than a dozen page numbers listed in the index behind Grampa’s name. There was also a secret drawer at the bottom that had held a delegate ribbon from a Republican National Convention long ago, a member’s badge from the Chicago Board of Trade, and a silver sheriff’s star that at one time in these parts had certified Grampa as the law.

  Now the old books were gone, replaced by a collection of Reader’s Digest condensations. And when I opened the secret compartment, it was empty.

  It had never occurred to me that one day I might be wiped out by the market the way Grampa had been. It used to annoy me when my mother would warn me not to get overextended. After all, I was an accomplished man. Trained in the best schools. And by the time the technology boom came along, I had already been in business long enough to have seen my share of ups and downs. In fact, I used to argue from good, University of Chicago financial theory that we needed more diversity in our firm’s portfolio. But at some point money becomes a tsunami sweeping away everything, starting with theory. And the dot-com wave was bigger than anyone had ever seen.

  A computer terminal on the credenza in my office kept me plugged directly into the swells. They called it a Bloomberg after the man who had started the company. Thanks to his machine, I had instantaneous access to every significant market on the planet. I’d programmed my Bloomberg to display the stocks our venture capital firm had seen through their initial public offering, plus the securities I owned outside the partnership.

  I loved my Bloomberg. Sure, there were days when the screen shone a little too red, its way of denoting a falling price. But the technology boom was creating wealth at such an astonishing rate that most days the screen glowed as blue as a harvest sky.

  One of the reasons I did not take my mother’s financial admonitions seriously was that I never felt I was living anywhere close to the way I could have. We had a lovely house near the lake, but in Wilmette, not Winnetka or Lake Forest. I drove a nice car, a Lexus, and Julie had an Audi. But there were no Ferraris or Lotuses in our garage. Not even a BMW Z3 to tool around in on the weekends. Yes, we did have our son in North Shore Country Day School, which was pricey. But it was a better fit for him than the public schools. And we did extend ourselves philanthropically, which led to invitations to join several cultural and educational boards. Certainly we enjoyed some benefit, though happily none that the IRS would say required us to reduce the amount of our gift we could deduct. I’m talking about dinner parties with interesting or well-connected people and black-tie social events that, frankly, Julie got much more out of than I did.

  The day everything changed followed one such benefit. I forget what kind of human suffering it was for. Julie and I had set the alarm a little later than usual and over breakfast enjoyed a little conversation about whatever the Trib had on its front page. Then Julie motivated Rob out of bed as I suited up. We all left at the same time, Julie to drive Rob to school (he was a year shy of getting his driver’s license) and I to head down Sheridan Road to Lake Shore Drive, then eventually turn inland to the office building where I worked.

  When I got to my desk, I did my e-mail, made a few calls, and worked on my in-box. At 10 a group of young men fresh from the best business schools pitched several of my partners and me on backing their startup company. They dressed in chinos and Façonnable shirts with the top two buttons open to show tanned, hairless chests.

  By the time I arrived, the delegation had already been served four-dollar water, and its members had arrayed themselves at the big table so that the people from my firm would have to sit interspersed among them. In the trade this was known as boy-girl-boy-girl.

  “Great to see you,” said the apparent leader. “John Durkin.”

  “Hi, John. Bill Brewer.”

  “Hi, Bill.”

  “Thad Reiner.”

  “Thad. Bill Brewer.”

  “Bill.”

  The purpose of the ritual was to imprint each new name in the cranial Contacts file.

  “Sid Benz.”

  “Sid. Bill Brewer.”

  “Bill.”

  Their proposition had some appeal, and after a short conference with my partners in the hall, we invited them to come back later in the week to give us more financial detail. We did not say it tha
t way, of course, because dwelling on financials was passé. Instead, Brewer explained to them that we wanted “a little more granularity.” To which the leader of the fledgling company said, “Got it,” as if he had just solved a problem in linear programming.

  Next I was off to lunch with an old friend who had made a bundle in computer consulting. According to the argot of the day, he “sold shovels,” which alluded to the strategy a risk-averse businessman might adopt during a gold rush. Caution notwithstanding, my friend had a catholic curiosity and a penetrating mind, which always led to interesting conversation. This day he reported that he had been reading about the Cambrian Explosion, a period in the evolution of life on Earth when suddenly an enormous profusion of new species emerged in the sea. His interest was not random, since the Cambrian Explosion had come to be a metaphor for the extraordinary multiplicity of new products and services offered up by Internet entrepreneurs.

  “If we had been there,” he said, “I imagine we would have bet on the most complex, bright, and beautiful creatures. But do you know which had the greatest odds of survival? Slugs and worms. They did not fight the current. They let themselves be carried along.”

  I told him he was just trying to justify sticking to the shovels.

  “You do what you can,” he said, smiling as he picked up the check.

  The moment I returned to the office, I realized something was happening. All the secretaries were away from their desks. The place was so silent it reminded me of the way the air in Abbeville felt just before a tornado. I went to my desk. The Bloomberg was drenched in blood.

  Down. Down. Everything was down. Dot-com stocks and other tech-sector securities were taking the worst beating, but even the index funds and the blue chips were bleeding. It was a rout.

  Late in the day Jim Bishop, the firm’s founding partner, called an all-hands meeting.

  “Corrections get corrected,” he said, full of patrician confidence. “This, too, shall pass.”