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
