Abbeville

by Jack Fuller

  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.

  13

  THE 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 seven
ty-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.

  The next morning Karl slid a canoe into the water, held it steady for Cristina and Betty, and then began to paddle. Everywhere new trees shaded the banks, mostly spruce and deciduous varieties. Here grew a stand of conifers, one of them leaning off the bank so that its bottom branches swept the current. There stood some lovely fresh birches, grown safely above the reach of the deer. Where the trees hadn’t filled back in, high grass had grown so lush that Cristina said it was hard to believe that this place had ever suffered the slash of steel.

  “Will we see varmints, Daddy?” asked Betty.

  “None we can’t handle,” said Karl.

  Up ahead, the banks closed in and the riverbed went into a steeper drop. The water became choppy.

  “Hold on,” Karl warned.

  They took the bumps easily. Betty whooped. Karl saw Cristina’s knuckles go white on the gunwales. He paddled harder, biting into the rushing water to keep them in the center of the chute. In less than a minute the water flattened out again.

  “I hope that’s the last of that,” Cristina said.

  “I hope not,” said Betty.

  The second set of rapids came a mile or so downstream. This one rumbled past a high clay bank.

  “Karl!” Cristina shouted when they were on the verge.

  “Here goes!” he shouted back.

  The canoe bounced. Karl kept paddling. Cristina was holding the gunwale with one hand and Betty’s life jacket with the other. Karl remembered doing this stretch of the river many times, once on three strapped-together logs. Of all the places he had seen so far, this one was the least changed.

  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said.

  The water quickly flattened out into a great, moving sheet of amber.

  “Look,” Karl said, pointing. A fish rose, leaving an expanding ring.

  “He was a big one,” Karl said.

  “Can we catch him?” said Betty, fairly bouncing in her place.

  “There will be plenty of others,” Karl said.

  His plan was to get as far as the riffles upriver of the rollway before stopping. The casting would be easy there, where he remembered the river flowing through a wide meadow so there would be no trees or bushes to tangle them up. It was near the place where he had lost a fish and the Indian had speared one. This time he would, by God, get his fish to the net.

  Before that, however, he had to maneuver the canoe through the most treacherous water they were going to face. Up ahead the whole riverbed tilted to the left, dumping most of the flow through a narrow, rushing chute on the outside of the bend. At the far end lay an obstacle course of fallen limbs and low, overhanging branches.

  As they approached, he pulled his paddle into the boat, letting the flat, silent current carry them. Then he reached down and freed the other paddle from under Betty’s foot.

  “Here,” he said, holding it out to Cristina handle first. “Make short, scooping strokes, all on the left side of the canoe. That will help pull us toward the inside shore and away from the snag.”

  As he demonstrated, the canoe swung into the shallow water. Gravel scraped the bottom.

  “What if I drop the paddle?” Cristina asked.

  “It will float downriver and eventually get hung up in a snag,” he said. “We’ll be able to retrieve it.”

  “What will happen to us without the paddle?” she said.

  “Just don’t try to stand up,” he said. “No matter what.”

  He could feel the current pulling them into its crease. White water was visible ahead. If the river had been slightly higher, it might have been possible to stay way over to the right, but the water there was so shallow that the gravel would have torn up the bottom of the canoe.

  “Here we go,” Karl said.

  They were pulled steadily to the left even with both adults paddling at full strength against the drift. The canoe wobbled as Betty shifted her weight up front.

  “Hold on, Sugarplum!” Karl shouted over the rush. “Paddle, Cristina! Paddle hard!”

  All they needed to do was to keep four or five feet off the bank, which would allow them to avoid the snags, sweepers, and deadfall.

  “That’s it! That’s it!” he shouted. “We’ve got it knocked!”

  Then suddenly Cristina stopped paddling and turned around.

  “We’re going to crash!” she cried.

  “Not if we paddle!” Karl shouted. But it was too late.

  Cristina turned forward again in time to duck, but Betty froze. Karl watched helplessly as a thick, crooked limb snatched her by the shirt and pulled her from the canoe.

  “Daddy!” she cried as she went over the si
de.

  Cristina looked back. She seemed to be screaming, but Karl could not hear her over the sound of the water. He leaned out and dug into the current with all his strength until finally he heard the grind of gravel against the bottom.

  Only then did he permit himself to look at Betty, tiny and helpless against the headlong force of the river. He leaped out of the beached canoe and splashed madly in her direction, his strides shortening as the water got deeper and deeper.

  Betty was holding herself just above the water, clinging to branches that jutted out just upstream from a deadly snag. The current helped by pushing her into the jutting limbs, though in the turbulence they trembled as if at any moment they might give way. She watched him moving upriver parallel to her. When he got above her field of vision, she tried to turn.

  “I’m here, Betty!” he shouted. “Don’t look for me! I’m here!”

  The current pushed at him so hard that he had to put himself sideways so as to give it only his body’s edge. He slid one foot, a baby step, then the other. The buoyant water made him light on the river bottom. The forces were in such delicate balance that so much as a doubt might have been enough to carry him away.

  At some point he realized that he was not going to be able to reach her by wading. He stopped, looked down to where Cristina sat in the canoe, her face in her hands. He jumped.

  In an instant he had Betty. The current pulled his legs downriver, curling him under her, until with a terrible crack the tree limb broke and they were both swept helplessly downriver.

  His head went underwater, but he managed to kick away from the snag and hold her up above the maelstrom. Soon he was able to lie back, Betty on his belly, squirming but secure in his grip. His head came up and he gulped air. Then it went under again and he surrendered until the force of the water began to ease and he could let his feet down and find the bottom.

  He stood, lifting her in his arms and carrying her to the middle of the river, where the gravel rose. He knew Cristina would never want to come to this place again. But he did not feel close to death. He felt that he was close to the truth of his life.