Clandestine

Late at night Will would hear his father cackle drunkenly to the wife who had come to hate him. Piet was a coward, he said, gone soft from his sissy music. A man who won't avenge his land is less than a dead dog, Willem shrieked, and by God, a coward had no right to own land.

Will was watching and listening through a spy hole in the ceiling that Piet had long ago told him to construct. Will knew that it was different this time, that his father's timidity, so long held in check by his fear of Piet, was waning. Willem was awestruck at Piet's reluctance to retaliate, and young Will knew that his father would take his revenge as far as he could.

Will loved Piet, and told him what he knew. Piet shook his head and told Will two things: "Don't tell Marcella, and tell your mother to go and stay with her family in Green Bay."

Anna Berglund left for upstate Wisconsin the following day, and Marcella already knew, informed by the almost telepathic rapport between herself and Will.

And she retaliated. Marcella knew that Willem spent his Thursday mornings in town, withdrawing money from the bank to pay his farmhands and buying provisions. She waited for him there, in the lobby of the Badger Hotel, armed with hatred for her lover's father and fierce love and contempt for her own.

Townspeople sensed that something was about to happen: Marcella DeVries, straight-A student, was not in school, was instead sitting in an overstuffed chair fuming silently, her normally pale skin as florid as her bright red hair, twisting her hands into knots and staring straight through the plate glass window, watching the National Bank. A crowd formed outside the hotel.

Willem showed up at nine o'clock, when the bank opened. Marcella waited until he finished his transactions, then walked across the street to wait for him. He came out the door a few minutes later, carrying a brown paper bag full of money. When he saw Marcella there was a fearful silence, then she rushed at him and flung the paper bag to the ground, spilling its contents. Greenbacks drifted down Main Street in the April wind, and the crowd watched in horrified awe as fourteen-year-old Marceila DeVries wreaked her revenge. She punched, scratched, kicked, and bit Willem Berglund, pummeling him to the ground, pulling the whiskey bottle out of his waistband and spilling the contents over his head, cursing him in English, Dutch, and German until her throat and rage gave out.

She reserved the worst of her wrath for her father, her mother, and her lover. They were cowards too, and it was worse because she loved them.

Marcella cleaned house that Wisconsin Walpurgisnacht; informing her gentle mother that this farmhouse was no place for a weak woman, that she was to get out until such a time as her father was strong enough to shelter a woman of her kind. Piet made no move to stop his daughter. As much as he loved his wife, he was in awe of the redheaded girl who bore his features.

Mai Hendenfelder DeVries left that night for the shelter of friends in Lake Geneva. Marcella had directions for Papa, too: he was not to tinker with his violin or play his Victrola or read until he exhausted himself in the fields each day like the cheap German immigrant labor he hired. Shamed and humiliated beyond words, Piet mutely agreed. Marcella raged on: he was to renounce God and Jesus Christ and the Dutch Reformed Church. Piet balked. Marcella raged. Piet continued to balk until Marcella said simply, with brutal finality—"If you don't, you will never see Johnny or me again."

Sobbing, abject, and utterly degraded, he agreed.

Will had not helped Marcella humiliate his father. Marcella considered this the ultimate betrayal.

They were through, of course, the golden elite were now just tarnished fragments; but that wasn't enough for Marcella. She wanted further revenge—something that would solidify her contempt for the Berglund family and all of Tunnel City, Wisconsin.

Will and Marcella had exchanged love letters for years, explicit ones, full of references to lovemaking and dripping with contempt for the picayune small-town ways of Tunnel City. In those letters the genitalia of prominent townspeople were derided, Tunnel City High School teachers were excoriated as buffoons and Willem Berglund was satirized and dissected in vicious detail.

Marcella savored the letters her weakling lover had sent her. She considered her options and decided to wait before using them.

Small-town talk continued as Willem endeavored to drink himself to death; Piet worked side by side with his laborers, and Marcella and Will went to high school and never spoke to each other.

Marcella had a new cause: her brother, Johnny. Johnny, at fourteen, was six-foot-six, and blond like his mother. He was a wild but quiet boy who preferred the company of animals, often raiding the outdoor pantries of neighboring farmhouses to steal sides of beef and pork to feed to the legions of homeless dogs and cats who roamed the outskirts of town.