Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken Read online

  Storch dug a brass-jawed, canvas-bodied clasp purse out of his trousers pocket. “For someone who opposes money so fervently, you’re eager enough to have some in your hands.”

  “You can’t shame me that way, Torsten. I’m only playing by the same terms you and the others dictated against my objections. Besides, admit it—you’ll all rejoice to see an old troublemaker like me leave. All the Storches and Lindblooms and Alquists have been resentful of me ever since I stole your daughter away from that mealy-mouthed pretty boy, Roalf Grafspiel, almost two decades ago.”

  “Not true, Horst. Your irrational bitterness is speaking. I’ve always been proud of you as a son-in-law. Often you can be as hard and fixed as a rock. But that quality stands you in good stead as frequently as it hurts you.”

  Freyda began to cry, burying her face in her hands. Rudy felt an implacable frustration welling up inside him. Why was his father so stubborn? Why couldn’t he speak up to his old man, make the elder Honigmann see what this separation was doing to his mother? If only he were older himself— But what could he do now except silently obey?

  “Forget the homilies, Torsten. From now on it’s cold hard cash we want, not sentimental advice.”

  Shaking his head ruefully, Storch grudgingly counted out $242.07, the value of three shares in the Amana community. The money was in the form of silver certificates and big clunky cartwheels, two-dollar bills and fifty-cent pieces and Indianhead nickels. When he had finished, he pondered a moment, then doled out a further sum proportional to Honigmann’s age, a span of years spent entirely in the bosom of the Amanas.

  “There! I hope you’re satisfied that you’ve nearly bankrupted us.”

  “My satisfaction has nothing to do with it. Let this be a lesson for you and the whole community in the evils of cash. Freyda! Stop blubbering and say goodbye to your father.”

  Storch stepped closer to the wagon. Still weeping, his daughter leaned down and hugged him awkwardly about the neck. Storch patted her broad muslined back. “Come, come, little girl, you can still write to us.”

  Honigmann’s features registered a blooming chagrin, as if only once irreversibly past the heated moment had he fully internalized the real magnitude of his stiff-necked decision. After a minute the patriarch said, “All right, all right, that’s enough. We’re not travelling to the moon, for God’s sake.”

  Red-eyed, tendrils of hair coming unpinned, Freyda straightened up. Honigmann climbed up beside her, and she slid to the middle of the bench.

  “Rudy boy! Let’s go!”

  Rudy snapped the reins savagely. Axel jumped as if stung, looked over one shoulder with mute and hurt bewilderment, then began to plod off.

  No one looked back.

  Once outside the town, well beyond the cultivated lands, under a sky as big as God’s quilt, the family rolled silently for half an hour. Honigmann spoke first.

  “This will work out for the best. Trust me. You’ll see.”

  Rudy finally found his tongue then, shocking himself with his brazen, irreligious, unfilial impudence. “I certainly hope so! I really do!”

  Freyda wiped away a final tear, resigned now to their fate. “Rudy, do not speak so disrespectfully to your father.”

  Against all expectations, Honigmann seemed pleased by Rudy’s forthrightness. “Let him be, Freyda. He is a man now.”

  Rudy felt the strangest mixture of emotions he had ever known: pride, anger, remorse, love.

  Heading north, the family followed nebulous rumors of land for sale cheaply, the spoils of foreclosure and failure, the ill luck of other families less fortunate than the Honigmanns. For the rest of that first day, hauling an uncustomarily heavy load, Axel stumped along the deserted back lanes at a pace barely faster than an arthritic man could hobble. Still, employing the horse saved the family from becoming footsore, and insured the slow and steady transport of their possessions. Nonetheless from time to time one or more of the family did indeed alight and walk for some distance, contributing to Axel’s relief A noontime pause for feedbag and picnic basket did everyone good.

  The first night found them in the midst of seeming wilderness, far from any settlement. For all they knew, they could have represented the first white visitors to this part of the broad continent. A timeless feeling, as if they were participating in some immemorial hegira, settled over all three people, leaving them disinclined to chatter. After a hearty supper cooked over an open fire, they extinguished their lantern and settled down in blankets beneath their vehicle. Luckily the night was unseasonably warm. Rudy, lying on his back, head and shoulders extending out from under the buckboard, fell asleep pondering celestial infinitudes.

  During the middle of the next day they crossed the Cedar River near La Porte City, a metropolis of a thousand people. They had made a respectable forty miles from South Amana.

  “Horst,” said Freyda, “perhaps we could settle here. The people appear friendly, and the land strikes me as fertile.”

  “Too crowded. We’ll go further.”

  Rudy, driving, noticed first that Axel seemed to be slowing down, rather like a wind-up toy in need of a few twists of its key.

  That night, currying the animal, Rudy could not ignore Axel’s lack of appetite nor uncommon flatulence. He mentioned this to his father, and proposed that they were pushing the beast too hard.

  “Nonsense! Axel’s as strong as the day he was born.”

  Recalling how tottery a foal Axel had been, Rudy silently thought that his father’s statement might have unintended corollaries.

  At sunset of the third day, approximately sixty-five miles from the Community of the True Inspiration, Axel slumped in his harness and refused to budge. No amount of jerking on the reins, proffering of sugar lumps, chafing his muzzle or whispering into his ears could convince the horse to take another step. Rudy and his father freed the horse from the harness. Apparently only those supports had enabled Axel to remain upright. He stumbled two short steps, fell over onto his side, kicked out his legs, released a pitiful whinny and a gutful of gas, and died.

  “We will settle here,” Honigmann realistically decided.

  Rudy looked around, taking in their surroundings for the first time. Axel’s death had occurred not far from the tree-lined banks of a small river, probably the Wapsipinicon. Open wildflower-dotted fields stretched away to distant forest. The land looked as if perhaps it had once been cultivated.

  “How do we know this parcel is even for sale?” asked Rudy.

  “God has willed an end to our pilgrimage upon this spot. The land will surely become ours.”

  Rudy experienced certain doubts. But his father’s conviction bade him keep them to himself.

  That night beneath a towering chestnut tree hard by the water, in deference to a tentative permanence, they erected a lean-to out of severed branches and a musty canvas tarpaulin. This shelter, primitive as it was, seemed to fill Freyda Honigmann with a certain serenity, satisfying her domestic urges to a small degree. Strangely, her deep emotions of distress attendant upon leaving the village had been replaced by a instinctive certitude and calmness, unwarranted by any outward signs. In contrast Rudy remained totally confused about what their future could possibly bring, and even Horst at odd moments exhibited flustered or worried behavior. At such times, Honigmann turned wordlessly to Freyda, and her river-smooth smile soothed him.

  The placid gurgling of the nearby river lulled them all to sleep that first evening, and they awoke refreshed. Soon after breakfast—skillet corn bread, fried eggs, and a flitch of ham—Honigmann made ready to set off to seek a town or farmhouse.

  “Take care of your mother, Rudy,” he admonished, before setting off down the daisy-medianed dirt road.

  After his father had vanished down the lane, Rudy wondered exactly how he might fulfill his father’s command. Freyda needed no help in making their camp more homey. Was he supposed to protect her from danger? In what form? Redskins? Hobos? Okies? Panthers? Boredom struck a restless Rudy as the bigges
t danger, and he had few weapons against that menace,

  Rudy missed his friends back in South Amana. He did not regard himself as a hick by any stretch of that word. A rousing town life was his accustomed routine: dances, Liebesmahl services, harvest suppers, chatting secretly with the three or four girls his own age behind the communal silos.… This quiet acreage in the middle of nowhere registered on his stimulation-deprived senses as disturbingly primeval and vacant.

  Around noon, Axel, exhibiting an alacrity in decomposition he had never shown in any other activity, began to stink. The loyal family horse had stiffened into a pathetic similitude of its familiar desultory posture, a picture that affected Rudy deeply.

  “Should we bury him, do you think, Mother?” asked Rudy anxiously, imagining the size of the hole he would have to dig and the commensurate blisters the labor would raise. He grabbed a wooden shovel from the nearby buckboard and attempted to thrust its dull blade into the turf.

  The shovel practically bounced off the dense matrix of grassroots. If this land had indeed ever been cultivated, it had long ago reverted to a savage condition. Future years of backbreaking labor to render it productive again loomed ominously in Rudy’s swift imagination.

  Busy stirring a boiling pot containing the young shoots of nearby cat-o’-nine-tails (remarkably like asparagus when expertly cooked), Freyda calmly said, “No need to undertake such a Herculean task yet, Rudy. Best wait till Father returns.”

  Horst Honigmann did not come back that night. A gaudy dawn found a nervous Rudy already awake, eagerly awaiting his father.

  After several hours of straining his eyes uselessly, Rudy grew tired and bored and moved off to shy stones into the river. His mother bent over a fire near the lean-to, and Rudy swore he could smell crabapple pie, tart fruit from nearby trees simmering in Freyda’s famous lard crust.

  In a moment that was to enter family legend forevermore, while both Freyda and Rudy had their attention elsewhere, Horst Honigmann announced his return not by any human speech or shout but by a loud buzzing. The angry insect drone that preceded Honigmann sounded like a Biblical plague.

  Rudy and Freyda abandoned their pursuits and ran toward the road.

  A broad smile lighting up his usually dour face, Honigmann carried two sizable cages fabricated out of laths and window-screen wire, holding them well away from his body. Inside each cage, the family later learned, hummed approximately ten thousand worker bees, a few drones, and a single queen. So furiously did the honeybees chafe at their constrained condition that the cages seemed almost to levitate.

  Honigmann made a fervent proclamation. “This land is ours! Our future is assured!”

  After that moment everything happened too fast for Rudy ever to properly reconstruct the sequence of events. Years afterwards he would still spend futile hours trying to sort out the priority and hierarchy of the actions and speeches immediately following his father’s return. What Rudy never doubted or failed immediately to discern, however, were his emotions when he saw his father walking toward them and carrying the bees. Rudy experienced exactly the same sensations then which he had always previously empathetically conjured up when hearing about the simpleton son who traded a cow for a handful of magic beans in the tale of “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

  Back in camp, setting the bee cages down, Honigmann began to relate his adventures, speaking around mouthfuls of hot crabapple pie.

  He had tramped to the nearest town—a tiny settlement named Independence—through field and forest, past farmstead and ranch, all the while carefully noting what the locals were planting or raising, with a sharp eye toward supplementing whatever market deficiencies might exist. (Although a newcomer to capitalism, Honigmann had plunged into it with the zeal of any religious convert.) Unfortunately, Honigmann soon realized that the locals had all the agrarian bases pretty well covered. In fact, later information confirmed his worst suspicions: the economy here teetered as precariously as that of any other region in the afflicted nation. As struggling newcomers, the Honigmanns would immediately be thrust in direct and deadly competition with their new neighbors, and might find survival impossible.

  In Independence itself, Honigmann managed to find the owners of the land where Axel had given up the ghost. The family lived in a house in town these days. A generation ago they had indeed farmed their property by the banks of the Wapsipinicon. But the land had been a white elephant for decades, and its owners proved eager to sell.

  Using two-thirds of his cash, Honigmann purchased fifty acres along the river outright. (Now he waved the notarized deed proudly under the noses of wife and son.) He had made a few other arrangements—for a supply of victuals and dry goods to be delivered—and then passed the night sleeping fitfully on the parlor couch in the home of the sellers. That morning he set out on foot to rejoin his family. Any elation at easily securing the desired property had rapidly faded. Honigmann felt no enthusiasm for taking up farming under the prevailing marketplace pressures. He cursed the cash economy roundly for several miles, before destiny intervened.

  A wagon rolled toward him bearing a mustachioed man who introduced himself soon enough as Mack Mackay. The man now conveyed a buzzing cargo covered in canvas. Mackay revealed himself as a honey-farmer returning from an abortive rescue mission. A fellow apiarist had detected an infestation of foulbrood in his own hives and requested Mackay to supply some replacement bees for the ones doomed to prophylactic destruction. Luckily Mackay had hives about to swarm, and he soon segregated the nuclei of two new colonies, including queens. When Mackay arrived at his friends farm, however, he found that the dispirited fellow had had a change of heart, deciding to abandon rural life altogether and journey to the large city of Cedar Rapids in search of work.

  Now Mackay was en route home with a useless cargo. He already maintained as many hives as he could handle, and would have earlier let these swarms go wild, had his friend not requested them.

  Honigmann hesitated only a moment. Feeling both as if he were falling down a well and yet floating into the sky, Honigmann bargained with Mackay for his bees. Mackay took only a pittance, and tossed in some solid advice and instruction for the beginner as well, with an offer of more at any time.

  Scraping his plate clean of the last bit of crust, Honigmann concluded his story just as the sound of an approaching internal combustion motor penetrated their fascination.

  “That will be the Parkers,” said Honigmann matter-of-factly, forgetting for the moment that no one had met these people save him. “They’re coming to build our house.”

  A chrome-nosed, beat-up International Harvester truck racketed up, loaded with lumber, cartons of nails, tools and bags of cement. Several long saws whipped up and down with every bump, as if played by invisible hillbilly giants. The slat-sided bed of the truck also held six boys and men of varying ages as well as half-a-dozen dogs. When the truck came to a stop, the human and canine passengers jumped off. Rudy immediately spotted a family likeness amongst the men, and a different shared lineage amongst the dogs. The driver’s door of the cab opened, and an older man emerged. Rudy had no trouble pegging him as the patriarch.

  The younger males began noisily unloading the truck, slinging wooden toolboxes and two-by-fours and planks with dexterity and vigor. Honigmann was shaking the hand of the truck’s driver, and chatting amiably with him. The dogs scampered and yelped and generally got enthusiastically in the way.

  As Rudy tried to make sense of the chaotic scene, he saw in amazement that the passenger-side door of the truck was swinging open apparently under its own power, as no inhabitant of that seat was visible. As Rudy gaped, a small girl emerged.

  Rudy had never seen such a beautiful child in his life. His heart did tumblesaults in his throat. She appeared all of six years old, but radiated a sober dignity and preternatural wisdom. Her wild flaming red hair, unlike Freyda’s, shone all of the same hue, almost a bronze. Pond-green eyes, snub nose and cupid lips composed a pre-Raphaelite portrait.

  Honig
mann called to his son and broke his trance. “Rudy, come meet Mister Charles Parker.”

  Rudy advanced unsteadily and shook hands. With half an ear, he took in Honigmann’s recitation of Mister Parker’s history.

  Charles Parker held the post of lone school teacher for Independence, Iowa. Twenty students of all ages received tuition under his guidance, including his own two youngest sons and his daughter, Rocinante, she of the astonishing feyness. Mister Parker good-naturedly explained the derivation of Rocinante’s name: in the confusion and sorrow of her birth, his memory had misfired, delivering up Rocinante as the name of Don Quixote’s lady love. Instead, to his chagrin, Mister Parker soon discovered he had named his daughter after the Man of La Mancha’s horse. Probably for the best, however, since he had always felt the nag had a nicer name than the dame.

  Mister Parker exhibited a weak chin but a strong voice. Rudy felt he would probably not have minded being in the mans classroom.

  And Missus Parker? She had died during Rocinante’s birth, leaving her husband a widower with only six sons and a daughter for comfort.

  Now Mister Parker hailed his oddly beguiling daughter. “Roz, come meet Mister Honigmann’s son.”

  The girl approached confidently. A few feet from Rudy, she asked boldly, “Why?”

  Mister Parker smiled. “Please don’t mind her, it’s just a stage.”

  Rudy squatted down to level his eyes with hers. Either the swift motion or a more mysterious cause rendered him briefly dizzy. Recovering, he essayed a cautious smile and said, “Hi there. How old are you Roz?”

  Her entrancing expression never altered from its solemn lines. “Why do you want to know?”

  Her question stumped Rudy. Why indeed? Suddenly the trivial mannerly inquiry appeared utterly ridiculous.

  By now the truck had been emptied, and one of the Parker boys drove it off for more supplies. While Mister Parker paid court to Freyda—Rudy’s mother scooped up Roz with no resistance, and Rudy felt a weird jealousy—the five remaining Parker brothers fell to furious labor. Hauling rocks from the riverbank, sawing, measuring, surveying a patch of ground indicated by Honigmann, digging, nailing, mixing cement, they resembled a troop of overactive gnomes. Rudy felt compelled to help, although all he wanted to do was stay within the charmed circle whose center was Roz. But an easy, chummy adoption by the Parker boys soon diverted Rudy’s full attention to his peers and their noble labors.