Clandestine

So Piet DeVries and Willem Berglund reluctantly joined the crowd, plopped down their sixteen thousand dollars and bought cabbage acreage, two adjoining parcels of land separated by nothing but a dusty country road.

Cabbage brought them moderate prosperity, and family life—at first—brought them moderate happiness. Willem and Anna soon had twin sons, Will and George; while Piet and Mai produced Marcella and John, two years apart.

Willem played solitaire chess and went for long exhausting runs down country roads. Piet taught himself to play the violin, and listened to scratchy Beethoven on his newly purchased Victrola. The two men formed a truce, at once bitter and steeped in mutual respect. Though not of the same blood, their ties went deep. Despite the close proximity of their property, they seldom socialized; when they did, they treated each other with the exaggerated deference of the mutually fearful.

Both men were considered anomalies by their fellow townspeople. They held a separate designation, based, people said, not on their aloofness but on something in their eyes, some fascinating secret knowledge.

It was a knowledge passed on to the second generation. The people of Tunnel City discerned that, too, as soon as little Will and Marcella were old enough to walk and talk and react to the environment that they knew wasn't good enough for them.

Marcella DeVries and the twins Will and George Berglund were born three months apart, in 1912. Marcella was born first. Piet was ecstatic. He had wanted a girl and he got one—chubby and pink and redheaded like him. Willem Berglund wanted a male heir, and got what he wanted—twice over. But George was a sickly infant, born at half the weight of his healthy twin brother, and was quickly diagnosed as hopelessly backward. At the age of three, when Will was well on his way to speaking in the precisely modulated tones of an educated adult, George was unable to stand, drooled like an idiot, and flapped his arms like a chicken.

Willem hated the child. He considered him a hideous punishment, perpetrated by a hateful God for whom he no longer had any use. He hated his wife, he hated God, he hated cabbage, and he hated Tunnel City, Wisconsin. But most of all he now truly hated Piet DeVries.

Piet seemed to be flourishing. He loved his wife, he loved his violin, he loved his Victrola, and he loved his children: precocious Marcella of the red hair and translucent green eyes, whose dark freckles seemed to float in clusters all about her pretty face, who, although willful and spoiled to the point of becoming tyrannical when she didn't get her way, was nonetheless the fiercely loving daughter he had always dreamed of and little Johnny—thirteen pounds at birth—laughing, happy, bungling in his hugeness, adoring of his family. Always, always laughing. "My little dinosaur," Piet would call him, then pull a nonexistent tail on the boy's rump until father and son collapsed in tears of joyous laughter.

George Berglund, who never walked or spoke a human sound, died of scarlet fever in 1919. He was seven years old. Willem buried him in a burlap bag in a shallow grave next to the toolshed adjoining his house.

Piet crossed the road to offer condolences to the man to whom he hadn't spoken in over a year. Willem slapped him before he could say a word.

Hasse Berglund died the following year. Sodomized repeatedly by his fellow inmates at the asylum, he could stand the abuse no longer and threw himself off a high ledge into a granite quarry that the inmates were forced to work in.

The director of the asylum wrote Willem a letter demanding two hundred dollars for a "decent Christian burial" for the "boy." He never got his money. Willem simply forgot to send it; he had other things on his mind. He had to destroy Piet DeVries. He talked about it to Anna, late at night. Young Will listened at the bedroom door: Piet had been responsible for the deaths of Lars and Hasse—and even little idiot Georgie. That was the past, and it was enough. But now Piet and his little redheaded vixen daughter were trying to destroy Willem's golden Will, his only remaining true blood, with poetry and music and God knew what else. God! Willem would then exclaim hysterically to the sobbing Anna that there was no God beyond his land and his family, and that, by God, he would teach Piet that.

Marcella and Will knew each other by instinct, by mind, and by rote. With the discernment of highly attuned animals they found each other across the dusty country road that separated the two farms, across the legacy of ambition and violence that bound their fathers. The inevitability of the two was so correct that Willem Berglund and Piet DeVries just sat back and let it happen.