Clandestine

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.

It happened. When the children were four they would toddle into the cabbage field together and construct mansions out of the brown soil that ran through the irrigation furrows. Often after a day of play in the fields they would return to the DeVries farmhouse and pick out tunes on Mai's piano.

When they were seven, the year of George's death, they discovered the town, and would walk hand in hand down Main Street to the public library and read together for hours, lugging huge armfuls of books out to the pergola that stood behind the white brick building. In the wintertime they would hide in the wooden feed bin at the edge of the Berglund property, make a fire out of twigs, and tell stories until they fell asleep.

No one—not Willem, nor Piet, nor their wives, nor the neighbors—took exception to this arrangement. Somehow, it was implicitly understood that these two children were the uneasy truce between the families, and if they remained free to be together there would be no more tragedy.

But the twenties came, and Willem took to drink, and his nighttime rantings against Piet took on a renewed vehemence. Will, now ten, had long ceased to believe that his father would ever carry out his threats, but things were changing. He and Marcella were changing. Their conversations were more and more frequently being interrupted by roughhouse horseplay that inevitably led to touching and kissing and probing. Soon they were lovers in the flesh, and soon it seemed that everyone knew and loathed and feared it.

Marcella at twelve was taller than Will, already full-breasted with smooth freckled skin stretched taut over wide hipbones. Men from the town looked at her and felt immediately guilty for their thoughts. The same men looked at Will and hated him for what they knew he had.

The poetry-reading, nature-loving golden children who strolled down Main Street, lost in each other, drew much attention in the staid little farming community. Small-town talk—compounded by the strangeness of Piet and Willem—made resentment and curiosity fester, and the two lovers began to take their love clandestinely to wherever they could find a knoll or a mantle of grass or a field overgrown with foliage where they could lie together.

In 1926 Willem made his first overt move against Piet, dumping large piles of compost into his irrigation sluices. Piet knew about it and did nothing to retaliate. A week later Piet's collie dog was found bludgeoned to death. Still Piet did nothing.