Mark Dunn - American Decameron

I swallowed, didn’t speak.

“Hell, I probably would’ve done the same. A soldier who doesn’t fight is a risk to every man who does . Say, is somebody gonna come get us, or do we have to get ourselves to that fucking field station under our own steam?”

I shrugged, shook my head. The sounds of war made it difficult for me to speak below a yell. My bloodied companion was having no difficulty, but I didn’t have the strength. I looked at Cantwell. The fear that had lived upon his face was now gone. It had been replaced by an expression of eerie contentment. Even peace.

Wherever the young man was now — the pavid young man who had curled up beside me — it had to be a better place than where he had been in those moments that preceded his summary execution.

In a war so nonsensically cruel, there were special cruelties meted out that made this conflict even harder to understand. And one was this: that a young soldier had been killed for the crime of not wanting to die.

It’s pretty funny when you stop to think about it. But you’d never catch me laughing.

The war was over, but where one might have expected celebration in the streets, there rose up, instead, a chorus of acrimony and dissent. The thoroughfares of America were crowded with strikers of every stripe and hue. Inflation was running rampant and wages weren’t keeping up. In Gary, Indiana, steelworkers picketed; in Boston, policemen ripped off their badges. Even actors in New York City refused to go on the boards.

1919 was the year America got dyspeptic.

It was also the year that life lost even more of its intrinsic value. This trend toward human depreciation had started in the death-trenches of France and continued even after the killing machines had been decommissioned. 1919 was a year in which contempt for one’s fellow man became especially fashionable. There were race riots in twenty-six different American cities. Anarchists protested recent laws against sedition and deportation by being violently seditious and subsequently getting themselves deported. The industrial and political power brokers found package bombs in their mailboxes. Arsonists set fire to factories.

Archie Hawke had seen what fire could do. Shortly before moving with his wife and young daughter from northeastern Minnesota to his new job in Jamestown, North Dakota, he and residents of several Minnesota counties had watched with collective horror as over one quarter of a million acres outside of Duluth burned to ash in a massive fire — the worst natural disaster in the history of the state. Thirty-eight communities had been destroyed, 453 lives lost, 52,000 Minnesotans injured or displaced by the conflagration.

Archie and his wife Cathy and their little girl Janie lived with Archie’s mother in the Duluth rooming house Mrs. Hawke ran. For several weeks the three were crowded into a small bedroom to make room for all those soot-covered refugees who had come into town from the charred countryside with nowhere else to go.

Archie was pleased when the company for which he worked, Bridgeman-Russell, transferred him to the new creamery it had opened in Jamestown the summer before.

Jamestown was a picture-postcard sort of town, comfortably situated upon the arcadian James River. The town’s many elms and elders did a fine job of shading the bucolic cinder-and-gravel drives meandering through its lovely green parks in late spring, summer, and early fall (the remainder of the year — unspeakably cold — being seldom evoked in service to Jamestown boosterism).

The new creamery was the pride of the town. All of its equipment — the large capacity churns, the capacious refrigerators, the coiling steam pipes and warming vats, the modern Pasteurizer — reminded Archie that, in spite of his good head for business and his can-do entrepreneurial spirit, there was a lot he had yet to learn about the nuts and bolts of American industry, and working for a company that had its eye on the future wasn’t such a bad way to crank-start his own professional life. Archie was thirty. He had a wife, and he had a daughter who would soon be turning four; for now, a dependable weekly paycheck was what mattered most.

Archie liked everything about his new job as director of payroll and personnel. A special aspect to his job very much appealed to him: taking groups on tours through the factory’s top-notch facilities. He especially enjoyed spending time with all the schoolchildren. Machinery fascinated the little ones — the whirring, booming, chugging sounds of a large, fully operational food plant thrilled and delighted his young visitors. Sometimes the operations manager, Waldo Spraig, came along on tours to answer the questions that Archie could not.

Archie didn’t like Waldo. He was a textbook know-it-all. Waldo sometimes made Archie feel unprepared or under-informed. Archie was well-versed in company operations; it was the new creamery and its modern hardware that tripped him up. Waldo knew this and he seemed eager to help Archie out. This came with a price.

Waldo had a daughter of his own. Her name was Angeline and she was six. Angeline, aptly named, was Daddy and Mama’s little angel. Archie had never met the girl. She wasn’t among any of the grammar school children who tramped in strepitous tandem through the factory during those first weeks after Archie’s arrival.

“Does she go to school?” he’d asked Waldo. “My little Janie is champing at the bit to start school and she isn’t even four.”

“Your daughter’s very pretty.”

“You’ve seen Janie?”

“Last week when your wife met you here after work — didn’t she have Janie with her?”

“That’s right.”

“She has beautiful curls. My little Angeline has natural curls of almost the same color.”

“What school does Angeline attend?”

“She doesn’t go to school. She doesn’t belong with other children.”

“Why is that, Waldo?” The two men were walking through the vat room to meet a group of third graders waiting with their teacher in the front office. Surrounding them were great holding vats and warming vats with tortuous coils of steam pipe and a vat in which the Pasteurized cream sat undisturbed, sufficiently heated to kill the last errant bacterium that might be lurking there.

“I don’t think that the other children would treat her very well. She’s a very special little girl. Children can be injurious to fragile, beautiful little creatures.” Waldo halted, as if the statement necessitated a physical pause. “The world has gone mad, Hawke. We must draw those we love ever closer. Do you ever fear for your little girl?”

“Of course I do. Life is precious. I lost my younger brother in the influenza epidemic last year. One day he was perfectly healthy; four days later my mother was picking out his coffin. But I think you’re taking a rather extreme position with your daughter. A parent must strike a balance between mindful caution and—”

“Utter suffocation? The kind of suffocation that may lead to asphyxiation of the spirit? And yet I’m certain that Angeline is content to be so thoroughly loved and protected.”

“There are schoolchildren waiting.”

“Yes.”

The two men resumed their walk to the office.

The tour began outside at the loading dock. “It is here,” said Archie to the two dozen young boys and girls who clustered closely around him, “that the cream is taken from the wagons of our local dairy farmers. See those milk cans over there?” Nearly all of the children nodded. “We weigh the cans and then take a sample of the milk and test it. Why do you think we must test the milk that comes here?”

One little girl raised her hand and when acknowledged replied, “To make sure that it’s clean and pure?”