I drove by the church, I felt a little pang as I recalled the time I had broken a stained-glass window. Then the town fell away, and the flat, endless fields spread out on either side of me. At the rutted road to the cemetery I turned and bounced up a slight incline to what Grampa used to say was the highest point in Cobb County. He should have known, since he had been the one to fence it in when his father had donated the land.
It wasn’t hard to locate my father’s grave, even though I had not visited it often during the twenty years since we had buried him. He lay near the back fence with the extended family: the Schumpeters, the Vogels, and assorted others. This was my mother’s choice. She wanted us all to be together in the end. When she talked about this to my father, his Irish came out. He said that being planted in Abbeville was fine with him; he was pretty sure he’d have nowhere better to go.
I had always changed the subject when my mother started going into her ultimate plans for Julie and me. But now I found it reassuring that our plots were in a trust my mother had established, so there would always be at least one asset left.
My father’s gravestone was flat to the ground. In fact, it seemed a little sunken, perhaps the effect of the disturbed water table. Behind it stood a small plastic American flag in a VFW holder with his World War II rank (sergeant) and dates of service (1940–1945). I got down on one knee and soon found myself speaking aloud.
“I tried my best,” I told him. “But everything is falling apart.”
Then a memory rose from the dead. From kindergarten we had drilled for nuclear war so much that it had become a wolf cried too often. But then came the Cuban Missile Crisis, and suddenly the beast was at the door. I was sure that soon I would hear the sirens pierce the air, and all I would be able to do would be to count down the seconds until all life expired.
In the midst of it my father came into my bedroom one night as I tried to go to sleep.
“It is probably hard for you to believe,” he said, “but I have known some of what you are feeling. A lot of things happen in this life of ours. Some are very personal. Some are so big it’s no wonder folks attribute them to the devil or the wrath of God. This country has been through hell. Most of it probably seems long ago to you, but some of the worst happened not much before you were born. The Depression. Pearl Harbor. There were times that made me wonder how we’d ever get through. But we did. Or at least most of us did. Life does go on, George. It always does.”
With the Cold War over now, at least my son didn’t have to live with the nightmare of death hurtling out of the sky. For my father, of course, it hadn’t been a dream. When the kamikazes aimed their Zeros at his troop ship, he was as awake as a man can be.
I stood up at his grave. The drizzle had stopped, and the sun came heavily lidded beneath the far edge of the clouds near the horizon. Off to the right rose the monument with Grampa and Grandma’s names on it, along with their dead infant son. It was imposing in such a small place; Grampa must have bought it when he was still flush. It had ample room for his father’s and mother’s names, his brother’s as well, Grampa’s act of unconditional, unaccountable love for a man who had led him into disaster.
I stood before the monument for a time. The limestone angels had lost their faces to the wind and rain, the point of the obelisk gone as dull as a worn pencil. I tried getting down on my knees again, but this time no words came. I did not know where to begin.
2
THE DRY, GRAY EARTH CRACKED UNDER THE blade. Every inch came hard. It would have been much easier to put in these fence posts in April, when the rain-dampened soil had been as black as night and the weeds had not yet woven their roots into a shield. But nobody had needed burying in the spring.
The young man looked over the patch of ground he was supposed to enclose. A generous amount, more than three acres, it seemed absurdly large for the purpose, especially since his father had given him posts—which seemed as big around as tree trunks—on which to string wire delineating exactly what he had donated and what he had not.
Old Rolf Schlagel was going to be mighty lonely up here. Eventually, of course, he’d have company. But the young man, in a collarless, hand-me-down Sunday shirt that had been worn to patches under his father’s only suit, could not imagine it ever filling up.
When his father had given the land, memorializing it in several stiffly worded documents in his perfect Germanic hand, he had held back twenty plots for his immediate family. Twenty! There were only four of them in Abbeville: Mother and Father, himself, and his brother, Friedrich. Twenty plots would take the Schumpeters into the next millennium, which seemed to a young man as distant as the last.
Karl took out his blue bandanna and wiped his face, then the band of his straw hat. A little breeze would be all right about now. Or somebody stopping by to lend a hand. But he supposed that everybody was at the crick, swimming or fishing for the big cats that lived on the mud. Probably getting a laugh at his expense, too: fencing in ghosts, eh? That barbed wire better be mighty sharp.
His father’s plan was to have the job done before they planted old Rolf on Saturday. That meant putting in every post today, then wrestling with the wire tomorrow, giving himself a day to spare in case of weather. As his father always reminded him, “I’ve never once known anyone to win an argument against the rain.” Nor against Karl’s father either. Stubborn as this fence pole, and sometimes twice as thick.
Karl dug deep to anchor the fence against the upthrust of the winter freeze. When he got a post situated, he filled in around it and stomped on the soil until the ground was tight.
Sometimes after a day’s labor was done, he rode off on a horse and did not return until past the hour when everyone in Abbeville was in bed. Folks said it must be rutting season. But if that were it, he would simply have found a gypsy woman, who the boys said would touch you anywhere you wanted for a price. And anyway, he saved his fancy for a respectable girl, Cristina Vogel, whose father farmed a spread a mile west of the Schumpeters’. Karl was not alone in his interest. Harley Ansel, who was a year younger than Karl and a year older than Cristina, clearly had hopes for her as well. Karl did not have much experience with the way the opposite sex saw things, but he felt sure Cristina would not reciprocate Ansel’s attentions. The boy had a jagged edge that did not come from breaking earth.
A fence does not get built this way, Karl thought. It was foolish to drive oneself idle with ideas. But whenever he saw the gypsies crossing the prairie in their strange caravans—not living by the rhythm of the seasons but cutting straight through them toward something beyond—he could not help wondering what they aimed to find.
He increased the vigor of his digging until the hole reached the proper depth, then slid a post from the back of the horse cart. His father had felled it and stripped it of its bark, but he had left the bulbous knots where the limbs had been, which gave the post the look of a prehistoric bone. Karl thought of trying to hoist it to his shoulder, but the distance to the hole was short, so it was easier just to drag it.
The bottom end scraped along, seeming to get hung up on every stone, but eventually he got it to the lip of the hole and heaved it vertical so that he could get around it with both arms. It slid down his front haltingly. Knots tugged at his belt. Finally it hit bottom, sending a shudder up through him. He had to look around to make sure no one coming up from town had seen him dancing and thrusting as if he were a dog on somebody’s leg.
Karl scraped the piles of fertile earth back into the hole with his boot, then began to stomp it down. There were girls at the barn dances in the Coliseum who would let you brush up against them ever so briefly as you wheeled by in the square. You could
