Abbeville by Jack Fuller

would haul out the
Chicago Tribune
and read it in the middle of the street, just because they could. Only at the Coliseum was opinion mixed, as young folks now had even more trouble eluding the eyes of their elders.
    Except on days when there were square dances, the dynamo only operated from 6 A.M . until 9 P.M ., when every self-respecting person was in bed. Each night at that hour Karl left his house, walked across the prairie, stepped over the tracks, and entered the engine house to disengage the clutch, close down the big valves, and bank the coal fire. The lights on the street would flicker and die. The windows of the Schumpeter house would darken. And then there would be silence— and for Karl, a feeling of things still to be done.
    After turning out the electricity Karl always made one last check of the bank, lighting a kerosene lamp with a kitchen match as he entered. The building had only one room, apart from the vault, which was in effect a separate structure at the rear. A single large table dominated the center of the room. On it men laid their hats when they came to Karl asking for a little help. The tabletop was always strewn with papers—reports from the Board of Trade, new state banking regulations, flyers from implement manufacturers.
    Fritz also used the bank as his office, so on one wall hung charts showing the cost of various building materials and pictures of the big road-building implements for which Fritz had acquired a capital-intensive taste.
    This was of no direct concern to the Schumpeter Bros. partnership, which had come into being when painters put the big black lettersacross the whitewashed wall of the elevator. There was no formal agreement between Karl and Fritz. Karl simply grew tired of Fritz’s complaints and cut him in on the elevator, general store, and implement lot, though he never let him into the business of the bank, which would have required the approval of state banking authorities. Fritz for parity kept the paving business for himself.
    When Karl divided the partnership income each month, he invested most of his share with Uncle John. Fritz spent his as soon as he got it, then started asking for advances. There was no mystery why. Fritz had finally taken a bride. Or, as Cristina said, had been taken.
    Karl rarely brooded over any of this. But sometimes, late at night, after he returned to the silent house, he would sit at the kitchen table totting up the day’s numbers and thinking about the action in the pits, the way the prices rose after they fell and fell after they rose, how the seasons came and went and Cristina’s blood flowed every four weeks, and with it the sadness. Then he would snuff out the oily flame of the lamp and go to bed to wait for the morning.

9
    W HEN I RETURNED FROM THE CEME tery to the house Grampa had built, it was still early. I had bought some food on the way down from Chicago so I wouldn’t have to go chasing all over Cobb County for my dinner. As I went inside I heard the birds in the trees and remembered the summers of my boyhood, when we would spend weeks in Abbeville. Every morning I woke up to the mourning doves. With nobody my age to play with, I was sure they were mourning me.
    I was in just such a mood one day when the flicker of spinning blades outside scared the birds silent. It was Grampa pushing the mower over the sparse lawn in front of the house. Strictly speaking, he could have let it go. In farm country nobody admired or criticized another on the basis of a crop you did not harvest. But Grampa was out there with his hand mower once a week anyway, as if for sport.
    I swung my feet over the edge of the high bed and slid down until they touched the cool wood of the floor. My heel encountered something hard and icy. It was the milk-glass chamber pot that Grandma placed there during our visits for my convenience during the night. Itwas true that it was easier to kneel down and relieve myself into it than to grope my way