People in and about Bernadotte had started to become suspicious about all these meetings, but Alan, a couple of weeks earlier, had stepped up.

Many of the leading citizens of Bernadotte are holding meetings at the First State Bank of Bernadotte, with the purpose of forming a “Civic and Community Committee.” These types of committees are commonplace in many cities. Their purpose is to install a sense of pride among citizens and to promote cooperation amongst the merchants in these towns, to the benefit of all. Surely, this committee will be successful.

At that time a thought occurred to me: It was good that nobody came in to buy the newspaper as quickly as Maggie had come to buy my restaurant. The new man might have had a little more journalistic integrity.

Roosevelt won the election, as you know. It was all in Time Magazine; he won forty-six states.

. . . Now I’m going back to Washington—to do what they call balance the budget and fulfill the first promise of the campaign, and after a week or so with the budget, I’m going to get some sleep, and, because I can really sleep on a boat, I’m going on a boat to the Caribbean, and I’m going to lie in the sun and sleep, and perhaps catch a fish on the side. I’ll get back to Washington toward Christmastime. While Congress is getting ready to convene, I’ll be using the joyous Christmas season to prepare gifts for the new Congress.”

I didn’t go to the final meeting with Al and Harland and the Bernadotte investors. I had nothing to contribute. I could see people gathered around the bank. I saw the Hudson. An hour and a half later, people emerged, most laughing. They headed for Denny’s Tavern. Al came over later, took out his flask, and gave me a drink. The whiskey was of a better quality. This showed confidence, I thought, just like the Lucky Strikes. It was his confidence, not mine.

“Sorry,” he said. “I heard the sale didn’t go through. Another couple of years and this restaurant will be one of the top ones in the state. You’re on Highway Two, for heaven’s sake. When times get better, people will be driving through here by the hundreds. People like to eat. People like to drink. People will drive and travel more, because the price of fuel will start to go down.

“Bernie’s going to be president of this new corporation, but you know that. Bernie’s a bastard, I admit, but he knows dollars and cents and chemistry. That minister, Holmquist, was confirmed as our corporate chaplain. You have to have a corporate meeting every year. It’s required by law. Before the meeting starts, it’s traditional to have a blessing of some sort. You have to pay the chaplain for the blessing. Likely, he won’t need the money. He’ll probably donate it some charitable cause.

“Still, I’m the major stockholder, and the CEO.  If Bernie gets out of line, he’ll be gone. I put $30 into the pool in your name. It’s the least I could do. You’ll be fine, Johnny. You got thirty shares. They’re being printed up right now in Grand Forks. You’ll get them in three weeks. You got a safe?”

“No.”

“Well, put those shares somewhere a person can’t steal them. They’ll be worth more than gold a year from now. I’ll be back in maybe six weeks. I’ll bring some really good whiskey. Then, I’m off to France, with my family, right after the operation at the Mayo Clinic. The Mormons can’t find us in France.

And Johnny, if you see anyone come into this town dressed in all black, let everyone know. That person would be a Mormon spy.

“Now, I don’t mean Catholic priests. They have a white collar. White is the symbol of purity, though I don’t much care for Catholics.”

You hook your hopes and dreams on one of those North Dakota stars and then the rope breaks. What do you do? You make bacon and eggs and you flip hamburgers. You dream at night about what might have been. You try to put your creditors off. Toward the end of November, the weather got cooler, much cooler. I slept inside, with heavier blankets. My promising dreams turned to nightmares.

“We should put our trust in God,” Melvin Neyers said, drinking coffee. Maybe he was right. Trust in God is really a lot better than trust in bankers.

“Roosevelt really did whip the shit out of Landon.”

“I got my political opinions, Johnny, but I don’t let them get in the way of my Christian obligation, which is to love your neighbor as yourself, doesn’t matter if he’s Democrat or Republican, doesn’t matter if he’s Zachary Klukas or some other asshole.

“You have to put your trust in God.”

I wanted to cry, cry about places and people where I’d placed my trust, trust they didn’t deserve. I wanted to cry about people who deserved my trust, but didn’t get it.

“Melvin, with all you’ve gone through, how can you be such an optimist?”

“I don’t know. I try hard, Johnny.”

Melvin didn’t stay long, since nobody came in to play dice.

Do you put you trust in God? I guess you do. You got no other choice. It’s obvious that you can’t put your trust in your fellow man. There’s a Judas on every street corner.

What do we know about anything? We know wheat doesn’t grow if there’s no rain. We know that people will lie and cheat and do anything to make a few bucks. We know that cold weather can freeze you and hot weather can bake you to death. People tell you things while you’re cooking steaks or hamburgers for them.

Someone would bitch about such-and-such who just sold them something-or-other and charged them at least a dollar more than they should have been charged.

“I’m sure he never greased the bearings.”

Such-and-such would be in two days later.

“I can’t believe that son-of-a-bitch is disparaging me all around this community. That motor was in excellent condition. I could have gotten twice what he paid me for it. I just took pity on him because of his family situation and all.”

“Well, she said she hardly knew him. She expected me to believe that. Oh, she knew him, entirely too well.”

“I spend all day cooking and washing clothes and changing diapers. He gets home at midnight, says he had to work late. It doesn’t show up on his paycheck.”

“She wants to have a chain around my neck. I spend a nickel for a beer and she’ll yell at me for three days.”

You nod politely. I could have been a Dear Abby back then, with all of the things I heard. Dear Abby hadn’t been invented yet, in 1936. Abby probably hadn’t been born then. Bartenders went through the same thing, probably had it worse, since people bitch more after a few drinks.

Respectable magazines didn’t broach all of these subjects, especially women’s magazines. They’d talk about etiquette, where the napkin is placed next to the plate, in which order you lay out the silverware. What sort of wine should you serve with what sort of meal. These magazines obviously weren’t owned by the Mormons.

“You believe a third of what you hear and half of what you see.” I can still picture Doc Gilles when he said that. He had white hair and a white moustache, a low voice.

Doc was an optimist, about believing what you hear or see. The percentages should be much less.

I heard from Pastor Holmquist the next day about the meeting.

“It was something, Johnny. Al opened up a briefcase. It was full of $100 bills. He shut it and then took out another case. He opened it and took out a Tommy gun. My God, I thought, he’s going to shoot us. He handed the thing to Bernie. ‘I’m taking this thing with me,’ he said. Bernie was a little nervous when he held it. Al said he was going to Salt Lake City first. He’d pick up Ezekiel’s wife and his two kids and head north.

“Harland said, ‘It’s a hard and winding road that we have to follow.’

“Ezekiel would be waiting. They’d torch his building. They’d pour his formula all around the building and light a match.  Pretty clever, Johnny. All the records about this high-octane stuff would be gone, and it would take days for the Mormons to determine whether Ezekiel had died. From there it would be on to Vermont.

“He would pick up a friend in Iowa. That way, there’d be two of them. They would get a different vehicle, so the Mormons couldn’t track them. Al trusts Ezekiel, he says, but a lot of people trust a lot of people, and they could be wrong. Al’s friend will have a gun and cover his back. You can’t be too careful. They’ll get to Ezekiel’s house and make the exchange. ‘Here’s your money.’ ‘Here’s the formula.’ Ezekiel couldn’t trick anyone, since Al had a Tommy gun and his friend had a 44 Magnum.

“Al will bring the formula here, since Bernie is the president of our corporation. Al will bring his trailer, leave it here. Harland will come, and one of his associates. Al will take off, head east, because he fears for his life. He’ll go to France after his son’s operation, of course.”

“I know that. Al talked to me after the meeting, when Harland was still in the bank signing papers and that sort of thing.”

“If, for some reason, the formula doesn’t work, well, we know where Ezekiel lives. We wouldn’t do anything to him ourselves, you understand. Real Christians don’t do these things. Just a hint to Joshua, however, and Ezekiel will be history. We could make an anonymous phone call. Ezekiel has to know these things. He’s smart, and he won’t double-cross us. I’m certain of that. Plus he has a thousand shares. I don’t think it can fail, Johnny.

“We take the trailer first to the regional manager of Standard Oil, based out of St. Paul, Minnesota. If they’re not interested, they can go to hell. We got four other oil companies we can go to. Worse comes to worse, we can start making this stuff and selling it ourselves. We’d make more money that way, but it would be a lot of work.

“’I don’t know if I feel comfortable taking all of your money to Ezekiel,’ says Al. ‘Would some of you want to go with me? You’d just have to agree to take cyanide with you. There’s just a very small chance that we could get caught by the Mormons.

“’It could only happen if someone in this meeting is a Mormon or if they’re married to a Mormon, or if they have friends who are Mormons, and if they can’t keep a secret.’

“’Nobody in this county is a Mormon,’ Bernie said.

“’Well, you can’t be too careful. People are not always what they seem to be.

‘’’The Mormons know how to make people talk. They pull out fingernails. They chop off fingers, all in God’s name. They will castrate a man, and laugh while he’s screaming. That’s what this cyanide is for. They’ll ask for names and places. Under torture, people give up information. Cyanide is the only solution, or this entire town, and my family will be in danger.
“’I’ve got one more stop to make,’ he says. ‘There’s a druggist in Red Lodge, Wyoming. I promised him about this delivery. He’s a Mormon. If I don’t make my delivery, he’ll be on the phone to Joshua. Plus, I don’t break my promises, but I really don’t want to go to Red Lodge.’

“I didn’t want to go with Al, Johnny. Neither did Bernie. We didn’t trust Sweeney to go.

“Al says, ‘If you don’t hear from me in six weeks, it means I’m dead. Hide your stock certificates. You likely won’t have to do that. Our plan is perfect,’ he said. ‘I could get struck by lightning, I suppose, but that’s unlikely. I’ll come right here from Vermont. Of course, I’ll stop and see my wife and kids on the way. ‘

“You got to respect a man like that, Johnny, a man who puts his family first.”

“Al told the group at the bank more than that, quite a bit more. He had given his wife strict instructions. If he wasn’t back in six weeks, she was to send all the details to Bernie, as in details about where to find the trailer with secret additive in it, about where the key was hidden, about all those contacts with the oil company executives.

“There wouldn’t be nearly as much money in the venture if he was killed, but with a real sample of the additive, chemists could put two and two together. Al also left the name of our state representative and our two senators. There’d be a congressional investigation. The whole country would know, and the country would put those Mormons in their place, as they deserved to be. ‘Would you make sure my family is taken care of?’ Al asked.

“’As God is my witness,’ I said.

“Al’s a man of his word.

“If Al is killed, we can still survive. I hope they let me do a funeral homily for him, if it comes to that. I’m 99 percent sure that won’t be necessary. Al is a very able man, and he has this all planned out to the last detail.”

The pastor then described how they’d go about contacting the oil companies, what they’d say. They’d demonstrate the additive, and say, “Look at this with your own eyes.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have the formula there, but you’d have a sample of the catalyst. They’d get a sample, the oil people; it would probably take them five years to analyze it.

“’You got a week,’ we’d say, ‘or we’ll bring it to your competitors.’ They’d take notice. If none of the oil companies took us up on our offer, and simply scratched their heads, we still would have recourse.

“We’d go right to the United States government, through our local officials. You wouldn’t get a on hundred-to-one return on your investment, if we did that. Maybe thirty-to-one.”

Still that was a pretty good investment, by anyone’s standard.

“I’ll pray,” Pastor Holmquist said, “that Al comes out of this all right. It’s not only the money. He’s a gentleman, Al.

“Do you know what he asked me before he left?”

“No.”
“He said, ‘I know, whatever happens, my wife will be taken care of. You promised me, Pastor. I got your promise and I got a good attorney. I still fear about my son. If I don’t come back, and my wife sends the letter, would you take my son to the Mayo Clinic? I ask you this because you’re a man of God.’

“I promised. So help me, God, I’ll keep that promise.” Then he went into the details, the details about the meeting, which I, unfortunately, was not a part of.

Pastor Holmquist said, “I’m putting in $1150, on behalf of our church. Sweeney $30, who would have thought?  We didn’t think Sweeney could afford a pack of cigarettes. Carl Lundgren put in $4,600. Alan Herschman put in $100 total, Gabe Murphy, $420. Bernie put in $5800. Zach Klukas, $125. You add that to Al’s $9,200 investment. It’s enough for the payment and associated fees.

“Al showed us all the papers, and stock certificates. ‘Keep these secret,’ he said. ‘You know how these Mormons are.’

“That Al is quite a gentleman. He said $30 of his contribution is in your name. We signed some documents. Al said we should be prepared. This will hit the newspapers sooner or later.

“But he looked scared, Johnny, Al did. You know those Mormons. I would be scared, too.”

I was scared, and I never gambled any money—not for lack of trying, though.

We never saw Al again. Sweeney was upset after two weeks. “When’s he coming?”

“Sweeney,” I said, “Al told the investors it would be at least six weeks before he came back, maybe longer. It’s not a short jaunt to Salt Lake City and to Vermont and then back to North Dakota. And then you could have car trouble.”

“That’s true. I have car trouble every other day.” Some speculated, after three weeks, about how the Mormons might have murdered Al, dumped his body in some remote location in Utah, a location that could never be found.

Bernie called the city clerk in Red Lodge, to find out who the pharmacist was there. He didn’t get an answer. The phone rang and rang.

On December 28th a man in a suit asked for me around town. He was an FBI agent, looking into fraud. He described the whole process, pouring pails of water into the gas tank, a scoop of something from a trailer, the shaking of the car.

“Yes, yes,” I said, “there was a man who came through here doing exactly that.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“I did.”

“What story did he tell you?”

“He said he was delivering fuel to various Mormon missionaries. He said that the Mormons had figured out how to make gasoline out of water. They’d force us to convert, or they wouldn’t sell us fuel. He said the Mormons were out to take over the world. He said we had to stop them. His name was Al. He’s Lutheran.”

“Did you give him any money?”

“No.”

“Did anybody else give him money in this town?”

“Don’t know, really. I didn’t actually see anybody else give him money.”

“You might be a lucky town.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a swindle. They’re doing it all over the west. North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico.”

“Al was from Bismarck,” I said.

“Did he have a sick mother?”

“No, he had a son with a congenital hip defect, and he had a daughter just entering first grade.”

“Oh, that’s good,” said the FBI agent.

“How could Al get to all these states? He’d come by here twice a month at least.”

“There were a lot of people involved in this, maybe sixty or seventy.”

“So, you’re saying that the Mormons aren’t going to take over the gasoline supply in the United States?”

“No, they’re not.”

“Well then, who is?”

“Well, Rockefeller is pretty much in charge now, and probably will be for a long time.”

“But, you can make gasoline from water. I saw it. The Mormons have the formula.”

“This con is going on in Utah, too, maybe a different group. There, they blame it on the Jews. This type of fraud started in Kentucky a few years back. They blamed it on the Pope.”

“You can’t make gasoline from water? I saw it done.”

“You just thought you did.”

“Well, there’s a professor in Kansas you could call.”

“Beranek? He’s long gone, had an office in back of a clothing store, up two flights. He designed this swindle. That wasn’t his real name. His real name was Bernatelli.

“What was Al’s last name?”

I realized I had never bothered to ask. “You know,” I said, “You might want to talk to our banker. He pretty much knows about everything that happens in this town, knows where all the bodies are buried.”

“Bodies?”

“That’s just a figure of speech. Nobody in this town kills anybody else. We let the cold and the heat kill us.”

The agent walked to the door. He hesitated and turned around. “Let me guess,” the FBI agent added. “I’ll bet this Al liked Tabasco sauce and had a flask of whiskey that he carried with him. I’ll bet Joshua stopped in town, one time, dressed in black, all black. Did you see anyone who would fit that description?”

I didn’t answer.

“Your banker know anything about counterfeit bills?”

About four hours later, I looked up from the stove, and Bernie was standing in front of me. “Say, Johnny, I’ve been doing some re-figuring. I miscalculated George and Maggie’s net worth, by quite a bit, actually. I just rode out to their farm and told them they could have the mortgage, and I gave them a damn good interest rate.”

“That’s great. I really want to sell this place.”

“That means you can still invest if you want to. I’ll sell you some of my shares. You’re the guy who first met Al, after all. You got the ball rolling.”

“Well, I’ve been doing some re-figuring myself. I don’t think I really want to buy any shares.”

I know vengeance is the Lord’s domain, but those were some of the most satisfying words I’ve ever said. They rank right up there with “I do,” which I uttered many years later, in front of a minister, as I looked into the eyes of Helen.

An abandoned car was found in Montana a month later. It was a Hudson, had the serial number filed off, and there were no license plates. The gas tank had been modified. You could fill it from the back seat. There was a separate tank mounted underneath the car, and a spigot that allowed a person to empty that tank.
A similar vehicle, a Studebaker, was found abandoned in west Nebraska the following spring.

Pastor Holmquist resigned from the church in late January, 1937, and left town quickly. I heard he ended up somewhere in Wyoming. A month later, I sold my restaurant to Maggie for $1950. She’s shrewd. She negotiated.

I got a part-time job at the post office and later, at our feed mill, when it began to rain again, in ’37. The Liberty Trio became a quartet when they found a piano player. I rented rooms above the café that Millie owned, but I didn’t need to sleep out on the porch all that often in the summer, and I didn’t need to sleep by the oven in the winter. Duane moved east in 1938.

Then, of course, there was the war. After the war I moved, first to Bismarck. I couldn’t find a wife on my own; that was apparent. Duane found a wife in short order. His wife had an older sister. The older sister had a friend. I married Helen and swore I’d take her to Yellowstone Park someday, but babies and finances got in the way. We moved to Minneapolis. We bought a restaurant eventually, but Hollywood stars don’t come. Mostly, it’s working men and women.

I can’t help it. I still visit Bernadotte every other year. I go to the cemetery. I stop at the café. Millie gives me and my wife a free meal. I give her a $5 tip. She’s doing all right. She’s on Highway Two, for heaven’s sake.

Zach had a stroke in ’37, blamed it on the Jews. He had another one in ’38, blamed it on the Negroes.

He died after his heart attack in 1940. If he could’ve said a word from his coffin, he would have probably said, “Those goddam Italians killed me, and I know it.”

How is it we never learn about life, about what people will do to other people? We never learn these things, even though we read Time Magazine and the Bible. I sometimes think that the only ones who know anything about human nature are those who want to part us from our money.

Still, most of us were poor and desperate back then, and we’d reach for hope in any form. Bernie, the bastard, didn’t have that excuse. I don’t say anything bad to my kids about the Mormons or the Jews or the Catholics. I never say a bad word about colored people or Italians. They can’t be any worse than we were in 1936, that God-forsaken year.

They don’t have depressions anymore. We get recessions now. You never hear Cole Porter songs these days. I still dream, but I don’t dream about Mary Ellen. I haven’t in years.

People bitch about this and that in my restaurant. Coffee costs more now, but I still don’t make any money off it.

Bernie survived the loss of his money in 1936, but people throughout town knew what he had done and laughed at him behind his back, and later, after the bad times ended, to his face, worse than they had ever laughed at Sweeney.

The WPA rest stop is still there, in pretty good condition. The creek is filled and flows with promise, looks beautiful. The area isn’t called “The Royal Valley” anymore. For a while it was “Fool’s Valley,” but that never caught on with people around North Dakota. They all knew, desperate as times were back in 1936, that they would have jumped just as eagerly into those same dark waters.

THE END

It has come to our attention that A.J. Mendelson, Postmaster of Bernadotte for these past seventeen years, has been hospitalized in Dickenson with an unspecified illness. We offer our best wishes for a speedy recovery. In the interim, Gustav Martin, postal clerk, will assume Mr. Mendelson’s duties.

Alan wrote that the same day he told me that he was going to sell his newspaper.

“Alan, don’t you think you should wait until some of these dividends start coming in? What’s the rush?”

“Look at you. You put up your restaurant for sale, and, from what I understand, you practically have it sold already.”

“That’s different. If I didn’t sell the restaurant, I’d have no money to invest.”

“You don’t understand, Johnny. It will probably take me years to sell the newspaper. It’s not like selling a restaurant. Everyone who can cook wants to own a restaurant. Very few people want to own a newspaper.”

“What are you going to do after you sell it?”

“Well, don’t you tell anyone, but I got my eyes on the Devil’s Lake Journal. It’s a daily, and I heard it’s for sale.”

“It’s got to be enough work just writing all this stuff for a weekly newspaper. How are you possibly going to be able to keep up all this writing for a daily?”

“They got four reporters, Johnny. You get all this wire-service stuff for national news. You got people who sell advertising, and people who do the printing. I’d get to write whenever I felt like it. I’d just have to manage the rest of the time.”

“You do have management skills.”

A new doctor moved to town in mid-October, and thank God he did. Saturday night, ten days before the election, Sweeney came by my house at midnight and pushed Duane toward my front door.

“God, what happened?”

“I couldn’t get him to leave the tavern, Johnny. I gave you my word. I hit him and broke his nose. When I give a person my word, it means something. I’ll have to cancel some future engagements. His face is going to look like hell for a while and no respectable couple would want to see something like that.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have hit him so hard. My shoulder hurts.”

I suppressed an urge to hit Duane in the mouth and break his jaw, because he looked like he was in so much pain.

The next Monday night we had another meeting at the bank. “I have some news,” said Bernie. “I was in contact with Harland Olson today. His law firm must be pretty sophisticated. They have a switchboard. ‘I will accept the collect call,’ says the operator. ‘What extension would you like?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’d like to talk to Harland Olson.’ ‘Is this a personal or a business matter?’‘Business.’ ‘What is the name of your business?’ ‘The Canadian Import Association, Incorporated.’ ‘Let me check with Mr. Olson.’

“Well, Harland was on the phone in short order. I told him that Bernadotte was committed to this project. He said good, but we got to put this meeting off a little bit. The election is coming up, and Al says that he’s got to be around to vote. He says that anyone who doesn’t vote isn’t doing his duty for his country. And Al’s daughter has strep throat. His son’s surgery at the Mayo Clinic has been rescheduled for early January.”

Bernie took out a gavel. “Alice is taking notes. I’m calling this meeting to order. The members of the Board of Directors are Pastor Holmquist, Carl Lundgren, Zach Klukas, and Gabe Murphy. Al gave me the authority to name the members of the board. As president of this corporation, I have the right to cast a vote to break a tie. If a member is missing, I also have the right to cast a vote to create a tie. If a motion is made, seconded, voted on, and ends in a tie, it does not pass.

“We will follow the Robert’s Rules of Order. I don’t have a copy of those rules handy, but I remember most of them from my college days. We don’t have any of the minutes of the last meeting to discuss, because we didn’t have a last meeting. Likewise, we don’t have any old business.

“We got only one item for New Business. We have to approve a resolution to incorporate.”

Pastor Holmquist stood up. “So moved,” he said.

“I need someone to second the motion.”

“What does that mean?” Zach asked.

“It means that you agree with the pastor that the motion should be adopted.”

Zach stood up. “I agree with the pastor that the motion should be adopted.”

“You can’t phrase it that way, according to Robert’s Rules of Order. You have to say, ‘I second the motion.’”

“I second the motion.”

“Good. Will all of the members of the Board of Directors stand?” They did. “All of you who are in favor of adopting this regulation raise your right hand.” They all did. “This resolution is adopted. Is there anything else?”

Zach stood up once again. “I think we should have a resolution that no Jews or Negroes or Italians or known homosexuals can own any shares of The Canadian Import Association, Incorporated.”

“Look around at the shareholders. Do you see anyone who fits that description?”

“No, but a couple of years from now, when we’re on the New York Stock Exchange, they might want to buy shares.”

“Well, that’s true. You’re absolutely right, Zach. But say three years from now our shares are trading for $230 a share.”

“I thought it would be up to $300 by that time.”

“Zach, I’m speaking hypothetically. They might be, but that’s not the point. Say you decide you don’t want to get dividends every quarter but you want to get all your money right away, and move to the French Riviera or Beverly Hills. Say some Italian offers you $290 a share instead of $230. Would you turn him down?”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

God, I thought, I hope he doesn’t move to Beverly Hills. That would be too close to my new restaurant.

“I suggest we table this resolution.”

“What does that mean?” Zach asked.

“It means we’ll think about it some other time.”

“That seems reasonable.”

“One more item. The Board of Directors will hold a meeting Thursday evening at seven o’clock. This is a meeting only for the Board of Directors, not common shareholders. As you may know, we have pledges for shares far in excess of the money we need. We need a total of $20,030 in pledges. Wait, there will be incorporation costs, and miscellaneous expenses. Still, we’ve got too much money pledged, and some people, myself included, might have to reduce their investment amounts. If you have too much money invested in a venture like this, you dilute the value of your shares. We don’t want that to happen.

“We will make these adjustments in an equitable manner. After all, we have a man of the cloth on our board.

“Will someone make a motion to adjourn?”

“So moved,” said Carl Lundgren.

“I second the motion,” said Zach.

The Board of Directors voted. The meeting was adjourned. Bernie pounded his gavel. “One more thing,” he said. “I’ll let everyone know when our final meeting is, after I get the message from Harland and Al. Then we’ll get the show on the road.”

I walked out of that meeting wondering if I could vote in the general election. I’d voted twice before. I wondered if I should have registered to vote again.
“Those were good, orderly rules,” Sweeney said. “That Robert must have been a smart guy.”

I went back to the café, where Duane was working with his ugly nose. I had a piece of pie, and I thought that maybe it wasn’t so bad that Bernie hadn’t put me on the Board of Directors. I wouldn’t have to come back for all of these meetings. You go back from Los Angeles to North Dakota, it takes a lot of time and money.

Then Maggie told me, Friday afternoon, that she couldn’t get a loan. Bernie wouldn’t give it to her. That woman and her husband had 160 acres free and clear, and a house. Sure, times were tough in ’36, but any legitimate banker should know that their loan was more than covered.

Bernie was a bastard. We were right.

A night later, Duane didn’t come home, and I had to go looking for him. I borrowed Zach’s automobile. I found Duane under a tree, just north of Denny’s Tavern. He was dead drunk…underage, of course. I had to drag him to the car. I should probably have put him in the trunk.

“People in music are all the same.” I said that the next morning, when he finally got up. “You sing at taverns. What do you expect?”

Another day of school missed, another note I would have to write: “I’m sorry, but my nephew was dead drunk the night before last and couldn’t wake up properly, so I let him sleep.”

“My nephew had a terrible stomach ache yesterday, and I confined him to my house.” That’s the note I wrote.

If Zach did you a favor, he wouldn’t let you forget about it. What, I let you use my automobile, and all I get is free coffee? I could tell that’s what he was thinking. So I gave him some bacon and toast, even though I hadn’t put three miles on that automobile.

“Now, this Hitler fellow is something, but I don’t know about Mussolini. I don’t think any of those Italians are any good. You can’t trust an Italian. I think it was an Italian who killed Charles Lindberg’s kid. These Mafia people from Italy run New York State, and they kill people right and left. Al Capone is Italian. He’s in prison, but he eats better than I do—no offense, Johnny. The government just bows down to those wops and kisses their ass. Dillinger just robbed a couple of banks. They were probably banks that deserved to be robbed. Those bankers are real mobsters. That’s why people call them banksters. Bernie’s not like that.

“So, Dillinger robs a bank. What happens? He gets thirty-seven bullet holes in him.

“They practically rule this country, those Italians, and they use garlic. What, salt and pepper aren’t good enough?”

“Shit, Zach,” I wanted to say, “why don’t you stick your head up where it belongs, in some place suitable, like your rear end?” Still, Zach was a fellow investor, so I couldn’t say all that much. He had voting rights in our new corporation.

I was hoping that the investors might pick me to be a member of the board of directors. I was going to be a big investor. Harland had announced that members of the Board of Directors would receive a thousand dollars a year as a stipend. I didn’t know what a stipend was, but I knew what a thousand dollars was. A stipend was twenty thousand cups of coffee at my café.

I told Sweeney about Duane. “You got to keep him out of trouble. You guys sing. You go home. He gets drunk.”

“Well, Johnny, I didn’t know about this. I go right home after we’re done. I got a dog to feed. We are singing at Denny’s Tavern again next Wednesday. People like us, Johnny, they really do. They ask for encores. I’ll stick around after our next performance is done. He has one drink, Duane, and I’ll knock him on his ass. He’s got twenty pounds on me, but it doesn’t make any difference. I’ll knock him on his ass. You have my word, I swear to the Virgin Mary.”

The WPA was putting on the finishing touches to the school. The workers ate more in the mid-autumn than they had during the summer. A man can’t eat a big meal when the temperature is over 100 degrees, but if you put on roofing and lay brick when the temperature is moderate, you work up an appetite. I made a little money in October.

Many years later, I would tell my wife when it would be a good day at the restaurant. You could tell by the disposition of people and by the weather. You might have three days of rainy weather. Then, one day, the sun shines brightly and the weather is beautiful. People think to themselves, I’ve got to get out of the house. I’ll go over to the restaurant, get a bite to eat, and I feel so good, maybe I’ll have a little pie.

Then it stays sunny for six days. People start working around the yard, working on their vegetable gardens, painting their house. A rainy day comes, and people think, Shit, I can’t do anything today outside; I’ll drive over to the restaurant and get a good meal.

You get to know people and their habits, in the restaurant business. I can always guess when Randy will come in. Randy will never eat fish or pork or chicken. He only eats beef. I always tell Helen to have a beef special when I think Randy will come in. Little old ladies play pinochle at my restaurant on Tuesdays. They like tuna fish sandwiches and pie.

You have to vary your menu to fit the seasons. People don’t want a light salad when it’s snowing. They want warm and hearty soup. They don’t want soup on the hottest day of the year, even though we have air-conditioning. I’m not talking about the same restaurant, mind you, that I owned in 1936.

I sometimes get nostalgic for those terrible years back then. I know it’s stupid. Helen tells me that. I married her in ’47. I had a hard life, but she had it worse. I get nostalgic because of the music. I think of listening to the Liberty Trio on a Saturday night. A shimmer of hope. That’s what the music did to me. You’re in a dungeon somewhere, and then a window is opened and you can see daylight, and plot and dream about better days.

Now, all they got is this rock and roll shit and transistor radios, and people singing songs about surfing.

Towards the first of October, in 1936, everyone was talking about the upcoming election.

“They’ve say that Alf Landon can’t win,” the pastor said, “but I wouldn’t be so sure. I think God wants Governor Landon to win, and if God wants him to win, he’ll win.”

“I think God is too wise to get involved in American politics.”

There was a celebration and a grand reopening or something like that when the addition at the school was completed. It was held on a Saturday, so as not to interrupt classes. My God, they did a nice job, those WPA workers, even though it took them twice as long as it should have. There was a hardwood floor in the gymnasium, sanded and varnished. There were murals on the wall of the gym, murals of men with hammers, and women carrying baskets. If I’d owned a camera, I would have taken a picture.

I started sleeping in my bedroom again. The temperature was getting reasonable. I could listen to my radio. The election had heated up, each side accusing the other of ruining America. Hell, I sometimes thought to myself, who would care about the elections? You get one politician after another. They make promises and none of them come true.

More hoboes started showing up, and camping east of town. The trees were burnt out, but the winds from the west had subsided. The hoboes didn’t cause any more trouble. The WPA workers were getting ready to depart. Their work was almost finished. Stone upon stone, log upon log, brick upon brick. That’s what the WPA workers did. Everything took longer than it should have. Still, I thought, those workers likely don’t want to be slow and they’re probably not lazy.

They just want to stretch things out as long as possible so they can continue to get a paycheck.

Before the workers left, one of them married Marlene Spaude. I wasn’t invited to the wedding.

“You know, Johnny, this is both good and bad news. If Ezekiel wanted for us to simply give him another thousand dollars, you might begin to wonder. Maybe he’d be just another gold-digger. A thousand dollars is a lot of money these days. You talk about shares, it’s a different matter. It shows that Ezekiel’s confident enough to ask for shares and not more money up front.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“It means we’re going to have to come up with another thousand bucks.”

There was another meeting, but one I couldn’t attend because my nephew was singing in a dance hall fifteen miles east. The harmony was great. I danced with a woman but didn’t get her telephone number because she didn’t have a telephone. I got her address, however.

I knew it would probably be six or seven months until I got any money. That would put us through the dead of winter, into spring, only if I could survive the cold. I didn’t know if I could go through another winter like the last one, and, who knows, it could even be worse.

I hated winter. Maybe I should start this new restaurant in Florida, where it never gets cold.

“Johnny,” Pastor Holmquist told me, “the weather is very good in Florida in the winter. Summer is something else. It gets terribly hot. I know a pastor down there. He writes me on a regular basis. I went to the seminary with this pastor. Summers almost kill him in Florida. It doesn’t get quite as hot as it did in North Dakota this year, but there’s humidity, moisture in the air. I think you should consider someplace else. It’s not only the heat that gets you; it’s the humidity.”

“Where should I go?”

“St. Louis wouldn’t be bad. It never gets all that cold there. There’s not all that much humidity, but it does get hot in the summer. No, wait. California is where you want to go. San Diego. It’s in southern California. They don’t know what snow is in San Diego. They’ve never seen snow. The people don’t buy coats because the weather never gets cold enough where you’d need a coat. And it never gets very hot, because those ocean breezes keep the city cool.”

“You know a pastor in San Diego?”

“No. I read National Geographic.”

Al came through three days later. More water, more shaking of the car.

After Al left, Sweeney was in the café. “Johnny, I got to up my investment in this. It’s only right. I want to buy thirty shares. I got the money, thirty bucks. I discovered this guy. It’s only right.”

“You got thirty bucks?”

“Well, I got twenty-eight. Next week, after we sing again, I’ll have thirty. Will you tell Bernie?”

“You have to tell him yourself. I think we could use the money.”

You didn’t want to cross Sweeney, not because he’d hit you and break your arm or slit your throat. You didn’t want to cross him because he’d tell everybody on earth, and he had relatives to the north, and they would tell more relatives, and there would be articles written in various newspapers, and the FBI would be out here as quickly as a train could carry them. So Bernie caved in, called another meeting.

“We have only one problem, gentlemen. We got way too much money now that people want to invest.”

“We do God’s work at our church,” said Pastor Holmquist. “I don’t think we should be forced to reduce our investment. God’s work is not something that you can toy with. You reduce God’s work and there will be hell to pay. All of this is stated very clearly in the Old and New Testament.” People started arguing, and the meeting got out of control.

I said, “I’ll reduce my investment by one hundred dollars.” Shit, I could still start a new, gorgeous restaurant with that money, one that would have separate toilets for the men and the women. This was becoming fashionable, I’d been told.

“I got to have my 30 bucks,” Sweeney said. “It’s only right.”

“I’ll rework the figures,” Bernie said.

“You better do it quickly,” I said. “Al says there’s not much time. He’ll be through town in a week with the attorney, and the attorney will explain everything to us. Al says he wants everything to be on the up and up. We’ll invest, get stock certificates, and appoint a board of directors. We’ll need a secretary, someone who will take the minutes of the meetings.”

“Alice would be good for that,” Bernie said. “We have to pay her for taking these minutes. She’ll get five shares, and I will pay for those five shares.”

“Alice would be a good pick,” Pastor Holmquist said. “She’s a member of our church and she tithes. I baptized her two children.”

“She can take shorthand, too,” Bernie said.

The meeting was arranged for the thirteenth of October. I put on my best shirt.
The meeting was to take place at 7 PM, well after the bank closed. Duane would take care of my café—not that there would be many customers.

All of the investors were there, at the meeting, and Alice too. It was 7:00, then 7:05, 7:10, 7:15. Men were checking their pocket watches.

At twenty after seven, Al walked in with a man who wore a three-piece suit. He was tall and looked very respectable, like he might be a politician. Of course, he was the lawyer. Al apologized for being late, said they’d had a flat tire on the way.

The man with Al didn’t wait for any introduction. We were all seated.

“My name is Harland Olson. I’m an attorney with the law firm of Olson and Dorsey, out of Fargo. We also have a branch in Sioux Falls. I’m not the Olson who owns the practice. He would be my dad. Dorsey retired some years back. However, I am a general partner.

“I graduated Magna Cum Laude from the law school at the University of Minnesota in 1921. I would have graduated Summa Cum Laude except for one thing: I drank some whiskey the night before the final exam.”

That broke the ice. Zach laughed, and even Bernie smiled. Sweeney damn near fell off his chair, he thought it was so funny.

“Is someone taking notes?” Harland asked.

Alice shyly raised her hand. “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t put that in your notes.” Alice looked at Bernie. He shook his head. She scratched out a few things.

“I’m sure nobody knows this, but I believe my daughter was killed by the Mormons.”

There was a look of shock and horror on everyone’s face but a few, the few of us who already knew this. “I’m taking this case pro bono. That’s a Latin term. Do you have a lawyer in town?”

“No,” Bernie said. “We used to have one, but Harold Tenney died some years back.”

“If you had a lawyer, that lawyer could tell you what pro bono means. Attorneys study Latin at law school. It means free. It means I’m taking on this case without compensation, in memory of my daughter. However, on my way here, right before we had that flat tire, Al told me that he was giving three hundred of his shares to me. Al’s a generous man, or maybe a goddam idiot. He probably didn’t think I could be a real attorney if I did anything for free.”

We all started laughing. David Black wasn’t there, or he would have given some smart-ass reply, and we would have all laughed harder.

“We bantered back and forth weeks ago about what to name this corporation. We didn’t want some name that the Mormons could trace. Now, if you put the word ‘American’ or ‘Amalgamated’ in your title, most people think you’re Jewish. Mormons will think it’s a shell corporation, just a front. They’ll investigate. All articles of incorporation anywhere in this country are public record, you understand. The Mormons will look at new corporations first.

“You got to look at this from the Mormons’ point of view. Ezekiel disappears. Al doesn’t come to work. The Mormons can add. They’ll put two and two together. They’ll know that Al is a part of this. Al’s not stupid. He’s not going to go back and work for them.

“The Mormon’s will have a meeting at one of their temples. ‘Shit,’ someone will say, ‘Al couldn’t come up with enough money all by himself to bribe Ezekiel. We paid him decent wages, but not that decent. He must have had investors; all those investors will set up a legal corporation. It’s the only way they can sell the formula to the oil companies.’ The Mormons got people working at every state capital in the United States.

“Couldn’t Al just show up for work and pretend he didn’t know anything about this?” Gabe Murphy asked.

“Al’s a driver, not an actor. He couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag. Does he look like Clark Gable to you?” More laughter.

“Besides, Al wouldn’t want to drive and pull around a trailer anymore. Shit, when you make your million bucks, do you want to drive around with a trailer?”

“I guess not.”

“Al will have to move out of North Dakota, for his own safety and the safety of his family. Al will probably go to Arizona, or Florida, or maybe Europe. There are no Mormons in Europe. As far as what to call this new venture, we settled on ‘The Canadian Import Association, Incorporated,’ for a name. That would not draw suspicion. North Dakota is right next to Canada. Those Canadians don’t have a damn thing they could export to us, but who cares? Mormons study chemistry and physics, not geography.

“Alice, could you take any profane words I might have used out of the minutes of this meeting? I’m sorry I used them.”

“Certainly,” she said. She would get five shares.

“I’ll show you a sample of the stock certificates that we are printing up. I will bring the articles of incorporation with me to the next meeting. Al will be the Chief Executive Officer of this organization, as is only fitting. He wants me to be the attorney. Bernie will be president. Pastor Holmquist will be our chaplain. Alice, of course, will be our secretary.

“We’ll be through here again a week from tonight. By that time you have to elect a board of directors. State law says we have to have four members. In case of a tie, Bernie will cast the deciding vote.

“We need a treasurer, too. It’s not necessary to have one before we proceed, since we’re beyond tax time, but you should start thinking about candidates. A treasurer should be good with accounting, discreet, and a person you can trust. If you can’t find such a person, I can. I know several, but they’re not from around here. You’d have to pay them mileage to come to the meetings.

“Citizens of Bernadotte, now is the time to shit or get off the pot. Please delete that comment, Alice. Al will bring his money to the next meeting. $9,500. Well, $300 of that will be mine. You have to put your money in at that time or we’ll find another town. We’ll find that in short order. Al and I are blood brothers. We are going to take down the Mormons, one way or another, I’ll finance this thing if I have to, but I don’t want to.

“I’ll tell you why. I don’t want to profit off my daughter’s death. Janice was a sweet girl, as innocent as the day is long. She didn’t know anything about the Mormons when she got on that train. In spite of my education, I didn’t know anything about them either. Time is running out.

“Still, this is the United States of America. You are free to invest in this venture and you are free to tell us to go to hell. I would only ask, whatever you decide, that you call me, with the charges reversed. I will leave my business card here.

“I will show you the Federal and State laws regarding taxes at our next meeting, should we have one. I am an Officer of the Court. I do not encourage people to avoid the taxes that they might owe on this new source of revenue. Feel free to avoid all these taxes if you want to. That would only bring me more clients.”

We laughed and we cheered and I thought, maybe I should move this restaurant more toward Los Angeles, where the rich and famous and movie stars played.

“Does anyone have any questions?”

“When you going to buy some new tires, Al?” Carl shouted, and there was more laughter.

“Another thing,” Harland said. “You probably know about these counterfeit bills. One turned up in Atlanta. Ten of them have been reported in Chicago. Three in Denver. I don’t think the Federal Bureau of Investigation is too concerned yet, but they will be, if this trend continues.

“This source of money won’t last forever. We are going to patent this formula, and a patent is only good for seventeen years. After that, the formula will be in the public domain. Anybody will be able to make it, and the price of gasoline will probably sink to a nickel a gallon. I have patent attorneys on my staff. At a nickel a gallon, every person in the world will be able to afford to drive. They’ll all look at the people in this room as people now look at Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, people who changed the course of human history.

“In these seventeen years, collectively, everyone here will have made a fortune. You can’t keep making fortunes forever. Besides, the Feds would be able to figure out this formula in another three years, five years max, and then our formula would be worthless. A patent is the best way to go.

“And you can’t trust those oil companies forever. You might have access to their books and access to everything else, but, sooner or later, some disgruntled clerk will take the formula to every newspaper in the United States, and people will start making this stuff in their back yards. I think it’s that simple.

“One final thing, gentlemen, and Alice too: you must keep all of this confidential. If the Mormons were to find out, we’ll all be in danger. Please remember Mark Twain, who said, ‘Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’ He was not exaggerating. Don’t tell your spouses what was discussed at this meeting. Don’t tell anybody. They’ll tell somebody else, who will tell somebody else. In six days, the news will reach Salt Lake City.

“You are a tough crowd. You can probably defend yourselves. Anyone own a gun or a rifle?” Everyone’s hand went up, including Alice’s. Hell, you got to defend yourself against gophers and rabbits who eat the lettuce you planted and the tops off radishes. There’re hoboes, too.

“I guess you can protect yourselves. Can you protect your parents or your kids, who live somewhere else? Mormons have records on everyone in this country.” There was silence in the bank, complete, utter silence.

“If things get too hot for those Mormons, the ringleaders will simply pack up their wives and their belongings and move to Cuba or the French Riviera. Some foreign country will discover the formula, and our country, the United States of America, will crumble and turn to dust.”

We knew about dust. These were sobering thoughts.

“If this happens, you won’t make a penny. If this happens I won’t get justice for my daughter.” We left the meeting determined and confident. I didn’t say a word to Duane.

I slept soundly that night. The temperature was ideal, not too hot, and not too cold. I used a light blanket and dreamt about Los Angeles with moderate temperatures and palm trees. The likes of Greta Garbo and Clark Gable would probably live right up the street. I would own their restaurant of choice.

Zach Klukas broached it one morning: “So, what do you guys think about this Mormon and gasoline thing?”

“I think everybody’s crazy,” Doc said.

“Well, Pastor Holmquist talked to me about it.”

“Pastor Holmquist is a man of God,” Melvin Neyers said.

“He may be a man of God, but that doesn’t mean he’s the smartest man in North Dakota.”

“Bernie Larson talked to me about it, too. Bernie’s not a stupid man. Everyone knows that. He may not be the most likeable guy in town, but he’s not stupid.”

“It’s all a conspiracy,” Zach said. “Can’t you see it, Doc? The Mormons are in league with the Jews and the Communists, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They got half of Congress on their payroll. They got spies and agents everywhere, except here, in this café. I tell you, our nation is crumbling. We can’t trust our government officials. We got to do something about this situation. We are the backbone of this country, all of us hard-working, God-fearing citizens. It’s our patriotic duty.”

“What do you propose to do?”

“I propose to put a stop to this Mormon thing.”

“How?”

“Well, at present, I can’t say any more. This is all hush-hush. I gave my word. When I give my word, it means something.”

“God respects people who keep their word,” Melvin said.

“God also respects people who learn things about chemistry and physics,” Doc said. “There’s a sucker born every minute. I don’t know if Mark Twain said that. Maybe it was W.C. Fields, or P.T Barnum. My memory isn’t as good as it used to be.” David wasn’t there to add a bit of humor. Someone shouted outside. Doc Gilles looked at his watch, got up, and left, saying, “Shit, she wasn’t due for another three weeks. I got to go.”

This stuff disturbed me. It was all supposed to be secret. Any fool could tell it wasn’t secret.

Melvin left shortly after, hobbled his way out the door.

“How do you know things about these goings-on with the Mormons?” I asked Zach.

“Pastor Holmquist told me. You know I’m a trustee. How do you know anything about this, Johnny?”

“I met Al first. He spilled his guts to me. A man loosens up after a good meal. It’s a hundred-to-one investment. Did you hear that too?”

“Yes, and I heard it could be more, maybe two hundred-to-one investment. I’m going to put some money into it, and the church is, too. If you’re a God-fearing person, you want your church to prosper, especially in these awful times.”

The next day, Doctor Gilles had a stroke and died, right after delivering a perfectly healthy baby girl. One comes in. One goes out. That’s the way of the world.

We guessed it was stroke, probably not a heat stroke, because the temperatures had cooled somewhat. There wasn’t a medical examiner for 75 miles, and he was so busy he’d probably have a stroke too, if he had to come to our town.
The good doctor had a daughter in Minneapolis and some grandkids but no will.

Some homeless family moved into his house a couple of days after he died. Bernie didn’t have any say in this matter, since Doc had paid off his mortgage years earlier. The whole thing would go to probate, probably take five or six months. This family, with three or four kids, would live there for a couple of years, unmolested. Houses weren’t selling. A lot of things like that happened in 1936.

I was a pallbearer at Doctor Gilles’s funeral. I don’t remember when he delivered me—barely six pounds, my mother once told me. I do remember when he delivered my little brother. He arrived in a horse and buggy. I was seven years old at the time. Doc said, “It will be all right, son,” and then walked into the bedroom, where my mother was withering in pain. That was a long time ago, before electricity hit our town, and all this was done with kerosene lanterns. Then there was laughter and congratulations and whiskey passed all around. It was still legal then.

“You got a brother, Johnny.” That’s what my dad said.
“He’s almost eight pounds,” Doc Gilles said, as if that would mean something to me, eight pounds. He looked so kind, Doc Gilles.

Pastor Holmquist gave a eulogy that could make grown men gasp and young women faint. Every word was the truth. People cried.

“He nurtured us. He cured us. He gave us strength in our afflictions. He comforted us, when we thought we were beyond comforting. Doctor Gilles loved God. He loved all of us as he loved himself, maybe more so. Jesus gave us two commandments, and our doctor kept in his heart those two commandments.

“Here lies the man we all knew. This is the man we all loved. He sewed up our wounds, set our broken bones, delivered our children. He was a wise man, too. Wisdom is not taught at medical schools. You’ve got to pick it up on your own.” The pastor hesitated, looked up into the sun shining through the stained-glass windows. “May God have mercy on his soul.” I even saw a tear form on Bernie Larson’s face. It was always hard to get a tear out of Bernie Larson, always had been, unless he was around diced onions.

“He was a man of God,” Melvin Neyers said, next day at my café.

“Well, he was,” said Zach. “He was a good, honest man, but he just didn’t know anything about the Mormons. But I know about these Mormons. They all got the number 666 tattooed on their back, right above where their belt rides. It’s the mark of the devil. Ask a Mormon if he’ll lift up his shirt to show you his back, and he’ll tell you to go to hell.”

“How do you know that,” I asked.

“Well, I know people, who know other people, and they tell me these things. This is all a conspiracy in the first degree.”

Pastor Holmquist said, it’s all going according to plan. Our church is going to be involved. We don’t want the Mormons to take over our country, from coast to coast, and our church needs some money, too, just to survive.

“Where would we get the money from, to invest?” I asked.

“Well, we have next to nothing in our general fund. We could tap the cemetery fund. That’s for eternal care. A person wants to make sure that his grave is kept clean. The family of a dead one wants the lawn mowed. We don’t have any grass this year. We don’t have to mow the lawn. We have money in the perpetual care fund. We could borrow from that.

“Think, Johnny, at a hundred-to-one return, what we could to the cemetery. We could put in trees on the west side and maybe commission some sculptor to put in a nice rendition of Martin Luther at the entrance. We could put shrubs around the cemetery and maybe some sort of trellis with vines on it and a bench where visitors could sit when they come to visit the gravesites of their loved ones. They could gaze out on a circular garden of perennials in the English style.” He took a deep breath.

“Every person I know who has ever visited a cemetery would appreciate that.”
“I know I would,” I said.

I always visited the cemetery on my dad’s and mother’s birthday, and on Easter, to show my respect. But it was so damn cold and snowy on Christmas, I could never make it out to the cemetery then.

“We’d have money left over,” the pastor said. “That could go into our general fund. Our church would prosper. This could be a very good thing for me. You know, our Bishop isn’t very competent with finances. He’s getting old, and lots of people are upset with him. I could be the next Bishop, God willing. I’d have to move to Bismarck. I really don’t want to go there. I love this town. But a person has to make sacrifices if he’s a man of God.

“When the Lord calls, you have to answer that call.”

“Could you pray for Al’s boy, Pastor? He’s coming up on that operation. I’ve been praying for him, but you’re a man of God. Your prayers mean more.”

“I certainly will pray for him. But you shouldn’t belittle yourself, Johnny. God listens to the prayers of everyone, even people who own cafés.”

We were to have our next meeting in the basement at the bank. It was private there, and the bank had a fan. Carl Lundgren showed up, thank God. He wanted to go in for $4,000. “I have my sources,” he said. “This all started at my service station. He used my water first, when he came through town. I pay the city for all of this water.”

“Of course, you can invest,” Bernie said. We were getting nearer to our goal.

The pastor fell off his chair. I asked, “Are you all right, Pastor?”

“Yes. I’m just hot, even with the fan. I think I passed out.” We took a rag and soaked it in cold water and wiped it around his head and neck.

“Thank you. I feel better now.”

Bernie said to Carl, “We’ll get this whole matter wrapped up quickly; you have my word. Can you come back next Wednesday?”

“Things are tough,” Carl said, “but I can work it into my schedule, if we could meet at seven in the evening.”

“I think that could be arranged,” Bernie said.

The next night, some of us met, after banking hours, without Al. Sweeney showed up. He wanted to raise his investment to twenty-five bucks. “We’ll let you know,” said Bernie.

“Financial institutions and churches and respectable investors are one thing, but I knew something like this would happen,” Pastor Holmquist said. “You give a Catholic an inch, he’ll take a mile.”

“Pastor, Sweeny couldn’t afford a mile. Besides, we haven’t met our goal. We need every cent we can get,” I said.

“I’m willing to increase my contribution,” Bernie said.

“You can’t put in more than Al,” I said. “He said he has to be the lead investor.”

“OK. Sweeney can put in his twenty-five bucks. But no more Catholics.”

Things were not that simple. Gabe Murphy wanted to invest $500. “We got to draw a line,” said Bernie.

“We do,” said the pastor. “If you let those Catholics make all this money, soon the Pope will be taking over the world.”

Carl Lundgren said, “If you don’t let Gabe invest, I won’t put any money into this. Gabe has worked for me for seventeen years. I’d trust him with my life. He’s an honorable man. You don’t let him invest, not only will I pull out my money in this venture; I’ll take my money out of your bank, Bernie, and find another one.

“Maybe, we should rethink this, gentlemen,” Bernie said. That was the second time he had called me a gentleman.

Meetings. More meetings. Seems everyone wanted in. The ones who were in wanted to up their investment.

“Investment” you called it if you wanted to seem respectable. “Gambling” would have been a more accurate term. In 1936, we didn’t much care about these linguistic subtleties. We didn’t much care about anything except how we were going to stay cool or warm and find food.

“There’s a complication,” said Al, the next time he came through town. “Ezekiel is kind of hesitant, says he wants a thousand shares in our corporation. He thinks we’ll make one thousand-to-one on our investment. He says, ‘All these guys are going to be multi-millionaires; I should be a millionaire, too.’”

“That complicates things,” I said.

It always bothers me, nowadays, when people say those days back then were simpler times. They were not simple at all. Unions were striking, cops were busting heads, socialists were confronting capitalists, men were robbing banks, and people were spending hours and hours in breadlines. Europe was getting ready to explode.
And we had those locusts.

One night, the middle of September, I watched a hawk try to carry off a small squirrel. The hawk had the squirrel in its claws, but the weight of the squirrel was too much. He was dropped on the ground and promptly found a tree to scoot up on. Vigilance, I believe it’s called. A squirrel should be vigilant. A man should be too.

“Uncle Johnny, why do you want to get involved in all this shit?” Duane asked. “I don’t trust that banker. You walk by him in the morning and he won’t even say Hello. He looks straight ahead, like you’re not worth his time to even say Good morning. Besides, you like the restaurant business. You’ve told me that.”

“That’s not the point.”

The point was, with some money I could go to a bigger city, maybe Fargo or Grand Forks, maybe Minneapolis. With a hundred-to-one or two hundred or three hundred-to-one return on your investment, you’d be able to establish the best restaurant in the Midwest. Of course, I wouldn’t cook—that’s what you hire cooks for. I had management skills, and I could sample some of the dishes and say, This needs a little more pepper. With a restaurant like that, any woman would be attracted to me. I’d marry her, and she’d come to the restaurant, on occasion. Everyone would treat her with respect, and she’d get the most fabulous meal money could buy. Romantic meals. She’d get romantic meals, not bacon and eggs, and beef stew, the meals most popular at Mannie’s Café.

“I do like the restaurant business, but I’d like it better if you could make some money off it. I got to make enough so you and I can get out of this town. There’s no future here.”

“I like it here. The Liberty Trio can go places. We got an engagement lined up in Williston between Christmas and New Year. We’re learning all these new Cole Porter songs. And “Cheek to Cheek” and “I’m in the Mood for Love.” Our harmony is top-notch.

“Duane, you can’t make any money off that. People stay home now on Saturday nights and listen to their radios, with NBC playing respectable music from New York, or they listen to those hillbilly stations.”

“Well, I’d rather not move.”

Hell, I can send him money, I thought.

The next time I saw Al, he was distraught. “Shit, Ezekiel pulled a fast one.”

“What do you mean, a fast one?”

“Well, he’s been thinking. Nineteen thousand dollars is a good amount of money, and he’s not asking for more, mind you, but he doesn’t want to pay for these shares, thinks we should give these shares to him. I’m scared to tell Bernie this, Johnny. Besides, I’m late on my route. I can’t even eat here today, though I’m damn hungry. Could you tell Bernie?”

I did.

“He wants us to simply give him a thousand shares?”

“Sorry, Bernie, but that’s what Al told me.”

“I wonder why he would do that. He could simply take a thousand dollars out of those $19,000 we’re giving him and buy stock in this corporation like everyone else.”

“I think it’s called greed.”

“Greed is one of the seven deadly sins.”

“I know it is, Pastor, along with lust, gluttony, sloth, pride, envy and wrath. Thank the Lord, I practice none of these vices.”

I will say this about Bernie: He had a very good memory. Besides greed, I could think only of lust and Mary Ellen.

We were blessed, this past week, to have the diminutive actor and actress, Jonathon Littleton, and his wife, Lorraine, perform in the persona of Tom Thumb and Thumbelina, at our town hall. They did a rendition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Almost two hundred people turned out for the event, most likely a record for any performance in our community. They have performed in Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York City.

Not a person departed who was not thoroughly pleased with the performance, even though the temperature was extraordinarily high for this time of the year. Many autographs were signed. We’ll not likely see an event of this nature for quite some time.

Of course, Zach Klukas had something to say about Jesse Owens making such a splash at the Olympics. Owens won both the 100- and 200-meter dashes, and the running broad jump. He was a member of the 400-meter relay team, which took a gold medal too.

“It was only because this Owens guy was taking heroin. Those Negroes can’t do anything fast. They pick cotton slow. They read slow, if they can read at all. I don’t blame Hitler for walking out of the Olympics. The only thing a Negro can do quickly is to get out of work. This whole Olympic thing is a sham. The only Negro athlete who forgot to take heroin this year was Joe Louis, and look what Max Schmeling did to him. Maybe Joe Louis took some heroin, but he didn’t take enough.”

“Maybe Jesse Owens prayed to God,” Melvin Neyers said. “With God, all things are possible.”

“Those Negroes don’t know how to pray.”

“How do you know that?”

“Well, everyone knows that.”

“Maybe those Germans at the Olympics should have taken some heroin too,” David Black said.

“How many Negroes have you met?” Doc Gilles asked that in a subdued, matter-of-fact manner.

“Well I haven’t met any. But I read things.” Zach nodded his head, as if he had some secret knowledge, too secret to divulge.

“Did you ever read Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? I think those dwarfs took something, too.” David was in top form. There was laughter, but Zach’s face just got red.

“What do you guys think about Alf Landon?” I asked, just to change the subject. There was more arguing about this and that, but Zach didn’t blow up. We were coming near an election. The Civilian Conservation Corps was going to plant trees west of town.

Why would they want to do that? people asked. A tree would look nice right in front of my house. But the west side of town?

It was called a wind break. These kids dug holes and put in trees. They’d come to the water tower and fill up five-gallon pails and pour water on the trees. A week later they were back and got more water, and prayed that some day, some time, it might rain again, and they wouldn’t have to come back to our God-forsaken town. Nobody was really sure that it would ever rain again.

“What the hell is a wind break?” Zach asked.

“If we plant enough trees, maybe all of our topsoil won’t blow east, into Minnesota, where they have at least three feet of it,” Doc Gilles said.

“That’s reasonable,” Zach said. That was the first intelligent thing he’d said since I met him. Maybe the second. I think one day in July he walked in and said, “It’s going to be a hot one today.” Didn’t take any Marconi to figure that out. It was something even Sweeney would know.

“Where’s the dice-box?” Melvin asked. He was up almost a nickel before the game split up, and Zach cursed under his breath. Alan Herschman took notes.

On the fifteenth of October, late one night, one of the hoboes tried stealing some chickens from Mrs. Hanson, and she stuck her shotgun out the window and fired. She killed a man and a chicken. Mrs. Hanson sold me the chicken the next morning at a discount right before one of the Sheriff’s deputy’s came to take her in for questioning, a dead man lying out back of her house. I had to take the buckshot out of the chicken before I served it.

When the deputy and Mrs. Hanson came back to the police car, a large man was standing in front of that car. He pounded his fist on the hood. “I’m Ivan, king of the hoboes. I want this woman prosecuted. She killed one of us. We want justice.”

“She said he was stealing chickens.”

“So? You got chickens and you got human beings. Who’s more important? She should get 99 years.”

Mrs. Hanson got into the passenger side of the car, and the sheriff’s deputy got into the driver’s side. He started the engine. “Get out of the way, you idiot, or I’ll run you over.”

The county attorney concluded that there was no basis to charge Mrs. Hanson with a crime.

The next night, Mrs. Hanson’s house was torched. She made it out, and the fire didn’t spread, but nobody had any doubts about who the perpetrators were. The next night, a fire started in the grove of trees west of the Hooverville. The wind was strong, and the fire spread. All those vagrants ran east as their tents went up in flames. Sparks would jump 20 feet. It was that windy and that dry. The vagrants ran through the WPA camp, and fistfights broke out. Two men were killed. One was a WPA worker. He was promptly identified. The other was a hobo, no name, no address.

It was just dumb luck that the fire didn’t cause more damage. There had been a wheat field, maybe 500 feet across, between the Hooverville and the WPA camp. There was really no wheat that year. What little had grown that year had been wiped out by an earlier grass fire. Any scraps were later taken by the locusts. A raging fire just stops dead when it’s met by 500 feet of plain, cold dirt.

Doc Gilles treated everyone. Most had cuts and bruises, some broken fingers and torn earlobes and bloody mouths, that sort of thing. The hoboes left for greener pastures next day, likely west, only if there were greener pastures in 1936. They left before any charges could be filed against anyone. Ivan, king of the hoboes, was tossed off a freight car near Cheyenne, we heard later. Ivan died. Nobody knew if another king of the hoboes would be appointed. The WPA workers got some respect from the people of Bernadotte after that night, but not all that much respect.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all, Johnny.” Al started to light up a Lucky Strike. My God, he’s no longer rolling his own, I thought. That shows confidence. “Those vagrant camps are a breeding ground,” Al said. “The Mormons know it. They send in their missionaries. They’re sly. How many people were in that camp, Johnny?”

“Maybe a hundred.”

“Well, you can’t drink whisky if you’re going to be a Mormon. I’d bet eighty percent of them drink whisky.”

“I would think so.”

“So, twenty percent don’t. The Mormons would go after them. Maybe half could be persuaded. That would be ten people.”

“What can ten people do?”

“Don’t you understand, Johnny? There are five thousand Hoovervilles in these United States. That would make fifty thousand new Mormons, maybe not devout. But, if you give them thirty counterfeit $10 bills apiece, they’ll become devout. They could buy something for fifty cents. They’d give the clerk a $10 bill and get change. They’d probably have to send $7 out of every $10 counterfeit bill back to the Mormons. The Mormons would get legitimate money. The hoboes would feel rich. You send the $7 back; the Mormons send you more counterfeit $10 bills.

“God, those Mormons are smart. You know, they couldn’t simply buy a service station with counterfeit bills. Some bank would notice if you did that, and then the Feds would come. Hoboes spread that fake money out, all over the country, from New York to California, Canada to Mexico. And the hoboes will send back the $7 they’re supposed to send…except the real drunks, that is.

“It’s a pyramid scheme in the first degree. The Mormons will play it out. The hoboes won’t have to steal chickens any longer. Pyramid schemes always collapse in the end, but the end can take a while. Before it collapses, the Mormons might have taken over the world. When they do, they’ll get rid of the hoboes. They don’t like freeloaders, and they certainly don’t like witnesses.

“There’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Most of these hoboes will convince themselves that they’re doing God’s bidding, by pawning off these worthless bills, of course, only if they’re sober. Think about it.”

I did think about it. Most men, and most women, too, want to think they’re doing the right thing in life. If you are making a little money in the process, it just makes that right thing a little easier to swallow, like whiskey. Swallow ill-gotten gains the first time, and your throat burns, and you think, Why would anyone drink this shit, it’s like drinking sin itself. After a hundred times, you just lean back and savor the taste, thank God for the grain that he invented that could be made into whiskey. You don’t feel any guilt.

I didn’t know if Al was right or if he was simply blowing smoke with all this hobo stuff. To me, those hoboes were mostly idiots, not just people down on their luck. Still, it all sounded so logical, when Al spit it out. This whole plan we were fermenting was driving me crazy.

I don’t think I slept for a week, and it wasn’t because of the weather any longer. I started imagining what I’d do with the money. I’d buy a car first, then some new clothes. Women go for a man who has new clothes and a new car. I’d buy a nice, new, black car, not a Hudson, probably a Cadillac. I’d get a fancy black suit with white stripes to go with my black car and patent leather shoes. A black fedora and a red tie would be the finishing touches.

I could kind of circle around the Post Office until I saw Mary Ellen go in to pick up her mail. Then I’d drive up to the Post Office and casually saunter in. “Well, hello, Mary Ellen. How are you?” She’d likely faint and fall down. I’d kneel down to assist her. I’d hold up her head and say something comforting. “I hope you’re all right. Would you like me to take you to the hospital in Dickenson in my new Cadillac?”

No, that wouldn’t sound right.

“I’ll take you to Doc Gilles. You might have a concussion.” I’d help her up, guide her to the door. She might spit on my shoes again, but who would notice? Moisture of any sort rolls off patent leather shoes.

Likely she would just look up, say, “Thank you, Johnny, I’m fine. I can walk home.” I’d pull her up and guide her to the door.

“Should you need any assistance,” I’d say, “just give me a call. I’ll pick you up in my Cadillac and give you a ride to the hospital.” No, that wouldn’t be right. “I’ll pick you up in my automobile.”

She’d likely go home and say, “What did I do? He let me keep all of my tips, when I worked for him.”

A person has to try not to show off too much in a black fedora or a Cadillac, or people resent it.

With the money that I’d made, I’d drive to Yellowstone Park, hopefully with Mary Ellen, should she be willing. I’d always wanted to see Old Faithful. I’d give money to my nephew, a smart kid, put him through college, not the college at Topeka, but some respectable college like Princeton or the University of Minnesota.

If Mary Ellen were to spit on my shoes again, while we were looking at Old Faithful, I’d send her back home on a train. I’d send her first class, which would gall her immensely. I know Mary Ellen, had known her since I was in high school, and I knew what would really upset her.

I could probably find a woman at Yellowstone Park, one just as good-looking.

“I’ll get a new stole, after this is all done,” said Pastor Holmquist. “The one I have is probably thirty years old. I’m ashamed to baptize anyone in that stole. The colors are faded, and the ends are all frayed. I never know if the automobile I have will start. It won’t start when it’s cold. I’ve got parishioners to take care of, many in outlying areas. We got broken panes on our stained-glass windows. We could get them repaired and fix our front steps, if we had funds. The roof leaks near the back door, has for the last five years.

“We could send money to our Lutheran missionaries in Africa if we had some money.  Maybe, I could buy my wife a new dress or a new pair of shoes, and I could get a respectable suit, not a black suit with stripes, like all those atheists wear, but a navy blue suit. Blue is God’s color. St. Andrew was a fisherman, and he fished in God’s blue sea.

“I’ll wear a gold chain around my neck with a plain gold cross. That signifies a man of God. Gold goes well with navy blue.  I need a new pair of shoes, too, and a better radio. We need a new stove. I thought I’d have a housekeeper by this time in my career, and a gardener. Writing a good sermon takes hours, Johnny. You can’t write sermons when you’re pulling weeds. Well, you can write sermons in your head when you’re pulling weeds, but they won’t be inspiring sermons.

“I should have a driver, too, for my automobile. The Bishop has one.”

“I’d buy some banks,” Bernie said. “You know I get the Banking Today magazine. They say, in the future there will be chains of banks, that’s what they call them. It would be good for the banks and for the customers of the banks.

“Say there’s a millionaire out here. He’s a customer. One day he comes in and says, ‘I need 30 thousand dollars, in cash. I’m going to take my entire family for a cruise around the world for a year.’ Shit, we’d have only 20 thousand on hand. He’d say, ‘I’ll take my business elsewhere.’ If you got a chain of banks, you’d call, and one of them would wire-transfer the money you needed. You’d keep your customer. It’s the wave of the future, Johnny. Of course, there’d be a lot of traveling involved. You got to meet with the managers of your banks on a regular basis, keep them on the up-and-up.”

Those Fascists in Europe were taking over everything back then, but nobody gave a damn. Those Europeans should take care of their own problems, we thought. If they want to kill each other, let them do it. We solved their problems once, during the Great War, and then they started into all their squabbling again, just like they’ve always done. Squabble, kill each other. That’s all they did in Europe.

Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler were all idiots, didn’t matter what Zach said. Still, if you fight all the idiots in the world, you’d be out numbered by a hundred to one. There were idiots in Bernadotte, too, in 1936. Doc Gilles had their names and their birthdates on his calendar.

We got canned beer into town in September. People who couldn’t afford to pay their mortgages or taxes or any of their other bills could afford canned beer. The new game, Monopoly, was a big hit. Two or three people in town bought a game. Everyone who owned that game would invite their neighbors over on a Saturday night and play it until midnight and they’d drink canned beer. I played Monopoly once.

But the biggest thing was the new game, bingo. Even old ladies would show up, a penny a card. This whole thing all started at Denny’s Tavern. Then some of the churches got wind of it. Denny’s bingo business dried up. At a church, the old ladies could say to themselves, We’re not really gambling. We’re fundraising, donating money to the Lord.

“I don’t understand this stuff,” Zach said. “They piss away their money on bingo, then they can’t afford groceries the next day, and they don’t come to my store. That don’t make any sense.”

“People got a right to some amusement,” Doc Gilles said. “There isn’t much amusement in the world these days.”

“Well, they should find some other form of amusement, something that wouldn’t cost them their grocery money. I got Campbell’s soup on sale. Nobody buys the soup. They say they can’t afford it. They can’t afford soup and they can’t afford bread, and they can’t afford milk. They all got radios, though. They can afford them radios.”

You’d work hard during the day and try to sleep at night. It didn’t always work that way, labor during the day, relax for an hour, and sleep soundly at night, the way life was supposed to work. Duane wouldn’t come home sometimes at the time he was supposed to come home, and I’d worry and get mad, but he was a good kid, I thought.

Still, I’d lie awake at night and listen to the grasshoppers chirp. At times the temperature would be pleasant. Every night, I’d see all of those same stars in the night sky. I’m convinced that God put all those stars in the night sky so we would have something to look at after the sun went down. When there’s a full moon in North Dakota on a calm night, you can’t help but think that maybe life could be beautiful.

I’d fall asleep and dream again, dream about the old days, when I had money, had a car, had customers, when the temperature was perfect. I’d dream about Mormons and plots to do this and that. I’d dream about moving to Park Place that was on the Monopoly board and wearing a top hat. I’d dream about finding a girl, maybe one like Mary Ellen, but one who wouldn’t curse and spit. I’d dream about cooler weather.

There were nightmares, too, mostly about customers. A man might order a steak. I’d put it on the skillet. We’d talk a little. How’s the steak coming? Well, it wasn’t, and I would turn the heat up, but I couldn’t get it cooked. The man would get up and leave. Well, at least I can eat that steak, I thought, but the steak wouldn’t cook. I lay down on my cot and thought, I’ll take a short nap, and the steak will be done.

Then, Joshua would sometimes appear, with Al. “This man can’t cook a steak. You know what the Bible has to say about that?”

“I do,” Al would say.

“Well, do you have your knife handy? You have to deal with this cook, who is an abomination to the Lord.”

I knew that soon I’d move my bed back inside. I kept my cot folded up under my bed. I might need it again for the coming winter. Eggs, bacon, soup, stew, desserts, delusions, and dreams. That’s all I had back then, and a nephew to take care of. I’d dream that all of my money was in a bank in Bismarck. I was trying to get there but I kept getting lost, and I needed to get to that bank. I’d dream about those drunks that came through in 1928. I was running around with my nephew, trying to catch chickens, but I couldn’t catch them. Then, fortunately, I’d wake up, go downstairs, and turn the ovens on.

Francis Grejtak was a Sunday dinner guest at the Wm. Jensen home. August and Roman Fisher cut and hauled wood from August Sieber’s land last week. The weather, as we know, was brutally hot. Still, the cut amounted to almost six cords.

Doc Gilles kept our town alive. You had whooping cough and measles and strep throat, and women giving birth, and middle-aged men dying from heart attacks and heatstroke. There were chickenpox and pneumonia, and rumors that two people had died from smallpox barely forty miles north. You had men and women wondering about their children. Doc couldn’t cure everyone. He cured many, though. I’m sure of that. He had sulfa drugs for infections. He had a saw and some cauterizing tools in case a leg had to be amputated. He had delivered maybe four hundred babies…one of whom, once upon a time, had been me.

A lot of times, these illnesses weren’t that bad. Doc would tell a mother, “Your daughter will be fine. Just give her a few days.” The mother would be able to sleep that night.

Other times he might say, “The kid has a ruptured appendix. I can’t fix it. You got to get him on the train to Dickenson, tomorrow morning. They might be able to help him in the hospital there.”

A doctor sees life and death and everything in between.

“Well, buddy, you got syphilis. You need some treatment at a hospital.”

“What am I going to tell my wife?”

“Make up something. Tell her that you got an infection of the lower intestinal tract. You can travel safely by train, but she needn’t go along. It would cost more. Train rides cost a cent and a half a mile, these days, and two cents if you want first-class with sleeper berth. Make up any story you want to. I can’t make it up for you.
But if you infected her, I think you’re screwed.”

You can cure a lot of ills of humanity when you’re a doctor, some fairly simply, like by telling the farmers they should wash their hands after shoveling pigshit and milking the cows before bandaging up themselves or their kid’s head after he was accidentally hit with a pitchfork.

Yes, a good doctor can cure a lot of people’s ills, but he can’t cure a town or a state, or a country that’s sick.

Alan Herschman told me I should read this new book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. How would I get this book, I asked. “I’ll loan you my copy.” It was a fascinating book and very informative. Still, it couldn’t do me any good. I could win all the friends I wanted to and influence them in the process, but they still couldn’t afford a hamburger at my café.

I did listen to the New York Yankees beat the New York Giants in the World Series that year, four games to two. We all did. It was a delayed broadcast. We didn’t know that at the time, though. We thought the crack of the bat was the crack of the bat, not some guy in the studio hitting a stick against a desk. The final game of the World Series ended fifteen minutes before we heard it end. Baseball was not just a game. It was a way to forget about our own lives, if only for three hours.

Tuesday at one o’clock, Al showed up. “I got all of the legal things done, Johnny. I made arrangements to get the stock certificates printed up. I got incorporation papers. Maybe I jumped the gun. Is Bernadotte really on board?”

“Without a doubt. We got God on our side. We’re trying to work out the details, but we’ll get those details worked out.”

“What details?”

“Who invests what, and for how much money.”

“Don’t forget the newspaper guy. We got to cover his shares, too.”

“Bernie wants to start regular meetings, you know, to make sure all our ducks are in a row.”

“That makes sense.”

“He’d like to meet at night. I don’t know if you can do that, Al. Any night but Thursday.”

“Well, next week I got to be in Rochester, Minnesota, with my son, but I can meet after that. Let me go to my car and get my notebook.”

Al walked out. Al came back. “I got more freedom, now, Johnny. This time of year, people don’t drive as much as they do in July and August, and harvest hasn’t started. How about Tuesday, one week from tonight? Seven o’clock?”

“Sounds good.

I didn’t see Al the remainder of the week, but what I did see, that very same night, was two men stealing some of Millie’s chickens. I yelled, but it didn’t do any good.

I prayed that they’d be able to do something for Al’s son at the Mayo Clinic.

Brenda Wendiger walked around town with a congenital hip defect, same thing likely, that Al’s son had. She was painful to watch, as she went up the steps to the Post Office, but Brenda didn’t ask for any pity, probably doesn’t to this day, if she’s still alive. I tried to help her up those steps one day when I was probably twenty years old. I took her arm. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“I was just trying to lend you a hand.”

“Go, screw yourself. I don’t need a hand.”

I never helped her from that day on.

Before he sat down, Al pulled out a snuff box and opened it. There was some sort of powder in it.

“What do you think this is, Johnny?”

“I don’t know. It looks like talcum powder.”

“It’s not. This stuff is cyanide. If I put a little of this in my mouth, I’ll be dead in eight seconds. I got connections, Johnny. You know I go to South Dakota. They use cyanide for processing gold.  That’s how I got this stuff. I tried it out on my dog. He just flipped over on his back, took one breath, and died. The kids were all upset when I told them that the dog had died. Of course, I didn’t tell them that I was at fault. This is genuine cyanide.

“I won’t be caught and tortured and yell out names and places. I sold my house and the farmland I owned. I took money from my savings. My wife and kids are living in my mother-in law’s house. The Mormons will never find them there. Besides, I told Joshua I was now up to five wives. I gave him fake names and addresses. They wouldn’t know where to look.

“I got almost $9500 to invest. I want to be the top investor. It’s only right. I discovered this opportunity. When can I meet this banker you’ve told me about?”

“How about now?” I took Al over to see Bernie.

Of course, Alice held us at bay. “I’ll tell Mr. Larson you’re here.”

“Tell him to be quick,” I said. “Al’s on a schedule.”

I left them alone and went back to make a pot roast. Doc walked in a few minutes later. “You’re not involved with all of this water-to-gasoline stuff, are you, Johnny?”

“Not really. Well, I heard some things, and I’ve seen some things.”

“Johnny, there’s one universal law of life. You only believe a third of what you hear and half of what you see. My old man told me that. I was maybe thirteen, fourteen years old at the time. My dad was a smart man.”

“You’re a smart man too, Doc.”

“I’m not as smart as my old man was.”

Then someone came running in and said, “Harland Johnson just cut his toe off.” Doc ran out the door.

How the hell do you cut your toe off? Well, we found out later, you cut it off when you’re chopping wood for the upcoming winter. You put your foot up, to steady the log, and then you miss your target by a good eight inches.

In forty-five minutes, Al was back from the bank. “Bernie’s not really a bad guy, although I wouldn’t want him as my next door neighbor. He’s a little bit of a pompous know-it-all type, but he can be sensible on some things. I meet a lot of pompous, know-it-all types, wherever I go. They seem to grow like weeds. Bernie knows financing and chemistry, I will say that. The deal is all lined up, except for the fine details. What time is it?”

“Almost two.”

“Shit, I got to speed or I’ll be late.”

This was later August, and the heat wouldn’t go away. I still slept on the porch, but with a blind, trying to be more modest. The moon and the stars sparkled. You look out at the universe, and the stars seemed like diamonds spread out on black velvet. The sky was beautiful. It made you feel small, all of these stars, millions and millions of miles away. It made you feel large, too. If people like me didn’t look at those stars, would they really be beautiful? I remember all of those nights, those North Dakota nights and those North Dakota dreams. A view of the universe can set your mind on fire, even though you really needed rest.

I’d dream about my mother making all those damn quilts. She was always sewing, when I was young, and my old man was always cooking.

About one in the morning, the temperature would cool, and my nephew would quit snoring, and you would actually pull a thin blanket over your body. There were more dreams. I’d dream about Mary Ellen before she spit on my shoes, and Marlene, if she could have found a way to think of me in as nice a manner as her dad did. I’d go over and shake Duane if he started snoring again, and I’d tell him to turn over.

Yes, I’d dream.

In the corner of the porch was an immigrant’s chest. It was my grandfather’s chest. My grandfather was a real craftsman, my father told me. He died a year before I was born.

On the top of the chest were carved, very neatly, the words Bernadotte, Amerika.

Ignorant people with dreams, those were my ancestors. They probably thought they could just show up at Ellis Island and say, excuse me, sir, which train do I get on to go to Bernadotte?

Still, the ancestors of almost everyone I’ve ever met were ignorant about what to expect in these United States. We were the Promised Land, they thought, a gold-plated world. You can homestead, get some acreage, and make a fortune. Nobody thought about droughts or army worms.

Three days later, about noon, a truck pulled up from the west and stopped at my restaurant. That’ll make eight customers for the day, I thought. The guy had blond hair and overalls and looked and smelled like a farmer, the kind of smell you don’t want in your restaurant if there’re a lot of customers, but there weren’t. This guy ordered some food and said, “God, I thought it was dry in Montana, but it’s not as dry as it is here.”

Tell me something I don’t know, I thought.

“The world has gone in the shitter,” he said.

“It’s been there for quite a while. Listen, I’ve been stiffed a lot of times. You got money?”

He showed me some bills.

“You’re right about the world. Still, I saw something two days ago that I couldn’t, in my life, ever imagine. Well, I work for this farmer who’s selling this truck to his brother near Devil’s Lake. He’s almost giving it away. But his brother is not doing well and you got to be your brother’s keeper, says so in the Bible.

“Besides, they’re going to have somewhat of a crop in Montana, enough to keep the wolf from the door, if you know what I mean.  The guy I work for is just south of Glendive. He paid me a decent amount to drive there, to Devil’s Lake, though I got to hitchhike back.

“I needed gas when I got to Miles City. When I went inside, this clerk asks me if I’m a Mormon. No, I said. ‘Too bad,’ he says, ‘or you’d only pay ten cents a gallon.’ ‘What do I have to pay?’ I asked. ‘Twelve cents a gallon.’ I had to pay twelve cents a gallon, because I wasn’t a Mormon. Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

“No.”

“Well, neither have I. Man, this country is doomed. You got some pie that I could eat, for dessert?”

I did. He got up to pay his bill, paid it with a one dollar bill.

“You know anything about money?” he asked.

“Well, I can make change.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.” He showed me a ten-dollar bill. “Do you think this is counterfeit?”

“I don’t know. It looks like a ten-dollar bill to me.”

“Well, I don’t know. It doesn’t look right to me. I got it at that station in Miles City. They gave me some one-dollar bills, too. I know those are genuine. They say bankers can tell. Have you got a bank in town?”

“Sure, just a block west.”

“Thank you. I’ll go there and check it out. I’ll stop by on my way back from Devil’s Lake, unless this bill is useless or the guy who picks me up when I’m thumbing a ride doesn’t want to stop here. You’ve got good pie.”

The man in the overalls walked west. Ten minutes later, Bernie was in my door. Imagine that! Bernie never came over to see anyone. Everybody had to go over to see him. “I’ve got an appointment with Bernie,” you’d tell Alice, when you went over to see him.

“Have a seat. I’ll tell him you’re here.” That’s what she’d say.

You’d wait. Bernie hadn’t read How to Win Friends and Influence People. Well, if he read it, it didn’t show. Bernie could influence some people, like county officials and the sheriff at sheriff’s sales when he was foreclosing someone’s farm, but he couldn’t win a friend if his life depended on it. Even his wife despised him, most people thought. Here he was, coming to my door.

“Johnny, that guy you sent over had a counterfeit ten-dollar bill. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“It means the Mormons will flood this country with counterfeit bills. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“It means the Treasury Department will notice. Our currency will go to crap, and 100,000 Federal agents will be out looking for the source of the counterfeit bills. They’ll find those Mormons. They’ll lock all of them up in jail and throw away the key. Do you know what that means?”
“
It means they’ll put those Mormons behind bars, where they deserve to be.”

“Johnny, it means more than that. It means that Ezekiel will probably be killed and his formula will linger in a safe somewhere until the Mormons all get out of prison. Do you know what that means?”

“No.”

“It means we won’t make a goddam penny. All of this thing with counterfeit bills won’t take more than six months. You can mess with a lot of things with the Federal Government and they won’t even notice, but they won’t tolerate counterfeit bills. All of the Mormon hierarchy will end up in prison with balls and chains and striped clothing, and we won’t have a chance to get that formula.

“When’s Al coming through town again?”

“I don’t know. Soon, I think, but I’m not certain.”

“We got to move fast. Next time you see him, send him over to me, pronto.”

“I’ll do that.”

Well, “pronto” turned out to measure thirteen days. Al rolled in. Sweeny put water into his tank, checked the oil. Al pulled up the tarp on his trailer, put his scoops in, and shook the car. Al sauntered into my place, as if he had all the time in the world. I tried to send him to Bernie.

“I got to eat first. I’m starved.”

“Bernie said it was urgent.”

“It can’t be more urgent than my hunger pangs.”

“How’s your son?”

“We got an operation scheduled for December 15th.”

“How much is that going to cost?”

“I’m not going to tell you, Johnny. If I did, you wouldn’t believe me. Still, they say it will help. He’ll never be able to walk completely normal, but a lot better than he can now.”

Al ate, paid, and walked west. I stirred the soup, thinking I wouldn’t have to stir soup much longer. I wouldn’t have to wash dishes much longer, or mop floors. I wouldn’t have to scrub my toilet, or sleep near my oven or out my upstairs back porch.

Fifteen minutes later, Al was back. “Shit. This is all happening so fast. I had no idea. This thing about the ten dollar bills is something I didn’t know about. Ezekiel never said anything about that.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know.”

“You’re right. He probably knows nothing about it. Jeremiah doesn’t tell him anything. Ezekiel says things are getting tense. He told the Mormon hierarchy that he had developed the formula for high-octane gasoline, but it smelled too much when it came out of the exhaust. People wouldn’t like it, people who had a nose, that is, a vehicle smelling up their garage when they warmed up their car, especially people in the north, like us, where it gets cold. It’s nothing to worry about, Jeremiah says. It will be fine. I’ll send Joshua to get the formula.

“Ezekiel added some horseradish to the fuel when it was tested. The car ran just fine on the high octane mixture, but Joshua started coughing and rubbing his eyes. That must have been a sight. ‘I can fix this,’ Ezekiel says. ‘Just give me a month or two.’ That was last Thursday, when he told me that. We don’t have much time, with these counterfeit ten-dollar bills floating around the country.”

My morning crew got into more arguments. Damn near all of them thought they had the answer for our misery.

“You know,” Zach Klukas said, “I think we should take a closer look at this man, Adolph Hitler. I think he’s on to something. Those Germans don’t go hungry. They eat three square meals a day. They all have those little automobiles. Everyone has an automobile in Germany, even women. German tool and die makers are the top ones in the world. They know precision. They don’t let their kids lollygag around after school to play basketball. They got discipline in Germany, something this country could use a good dose of. Those Germans got the Hindenburg. What do we have in this country? We got people piling up stones and making rest stops.”

“We got the Boulder Dam,” answered Doc Gilles. “It’s an engineering marvel.”

“Well, it’s the only marvel we’ve got. Now, this Hitler don’t take crap from anyone. He’s got the Jews pegged. The Jews don’t run Germany like they run the United States of America. Now, I’m not saying we should go out and kill those Jews or the Negroes, either. I’m just saying we should try to control their population, for the good of the country.”

“And how would we do that?”

“Well, I don’t think you should castrate the men. That would be inhumane. I just think, you know, Doc, a little snip, snip in the right place and they wouldn’t have any more kids. You know the kids likely take after their old man, and these people breed like flies. Soon, all of us decent, hard-working people will be outnumbered.”

“So, you believe in this eugenics nonsense?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Doc. But I believe we have to protect the purity of our race. If we don’t, our country will be just like the Titanic. All of us good people in this country will be at the bottom of the ocean. The freeloaders will just look down at us and laugh. What do you think about that, Johnny?”

“I don’t know—times are tough.”

“They sure are. That’s why we got no time to waste. Another twenty or thirty years and all we’ll have are Jews and Negroes in this country. We think we’re safe, because we live in a small town in North Dakota, but we’re not. They’ll come here, too.”

“Well, we don’t want crazy people to take over this town either. Maybe the good doctor could do a little snip, snip on you, so you won’t have any more kids,” David Black said.

Melvin laughed.

“I’m not snipping anybody,” the doc said. “If I snipped all of the crazy people in town, our population would decline by sixty percent in ten years.”

Then Alice, Bernie’s secretary came in. “I forgot to tell you, Johnny. I was supposed to tell you yesterday. Bernie would like to see you at ten o’clock this morning. Pastor Holmquist will be there.”

Everyone’s jaw dropped. I could tell what they were thinking; Bernie’s going to foreclose on the café. The pastor will be there to comfort him in his afflictions.

“Don’t worry, guys. I owe lots of money to lots of people, but not to Bernie. I paid off the mortgage two years ago.” Everyone left except for the good doctor. He walked up to me.
“There’s an idiot born every day,” he said. “I keep track of these things. Zach’s birthday is on the 27th of December, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s another day I can check off my calendar.” That only left two-and-a-half hours to wonder about the talk with Bernie. The doctor walked to the door, turned around, and said,” Most days, there’s more than one idiot born.”

“We certainly don’t want the Mormons to take over our country. The Mormons are an abomination. They’ll form an alliance with the Jews, then the Communists, and pretty soon they’ll close down all the churches. They’ll let the Japanese take over most of the world,” Pastor Holmquist said. “They’re not Christians. I don’t think they’re Christians.”

Bernie leaned back in his chair. He looked up, as if he were contemplating the Second Coming of Christ. “I’m willing to finance this venture, if it’s that important to the future of the United Stares.” Bernie said that. Oh, he was such a patriotic soul when there was money to be made.

“Well,” Pastor Holmquist said, “I think our church would like to be involved, to the tune of $1100. Our parishioners are all patriotic. But you’d have to agree, Bernie. You’re a trustee of the parish. Zach Klukas is too. We’d have to get him to agree with this.”

“I’m religious, but you know that, Pastor. I think the church should make some money off this. Don’t you worry about Zach Klukas. I’ll talk to him. He’ll come around.”

“I’d like to be involved also,” I said. “$1500.  I’m going to sell my restaurant.”

“Well. I don’t know, Johnny. A financial institution and a church is one thing. I don’t know if private investors, such as yourself, should be allowed to invest.”

“I discovered this opportunity.”

Pastor Holmquist pounded his fist on Bernie’s desk. “This is the United States of America. We got freedom here. Anyone decent man who wants to invest should be allowed to invest. If you won’t let Johnny invest, well, people will say you’re a socialist.”

“You’re right, Pastor. Johnny can invest. Anyone can invest. I don’t believe in docialism.”

When my old man died, the restaurant was worth $4400, a popular restaurant on Highway Two, the main road crossing North Dakota. I was the baby of the family. My oldest brother, Merlyn, got married when I was six years old. He and his wife had a baby, as often happens. When the baby was three years old, Merlyn’s wife ran off with Jake Klukas, a clerk at the hardware store and a second cousin of Zach’s. Neither has been heard from since.

James, my little brother, left the state for California when he turned fifteen, decided he wanted to become an electrician—the wave of the future, he said. I’ve never heard from him since then, either.

I wanted my old man’s restaurant after he died. Merlyn did not, never much cared for cooking bacon and eggs, or washing dishes. I paid my brother Merlyn, over the years, $2200. I owned the café, free and clear. Then Merlyn fell off his tractor, while cultivating, and those blades ran over his head. Duane, his son, came to live with me.

I really couldn’t afford him, but Duane was kin. He didn’t like any of this ten-minutes-to-six stuff. I let him sleep until twenty minutes before school started. He would wash dishes at night. After a while, he learned to cook.

I figured, times being what they were in 1936, that I could probably sell the restaurant for $2500. I put it up for sale, and Maggie McCabe was there the next day to buy it, with her husband George.

“I could make this go,” she said, “But I can only pay you $2100. I got to fix that window and paint the walls. This place needs tablecloths.” She knew she had me. Maggie had never owned a restaurant but had done all the wedding cakes and funeral meals in town for years, a shrewd Irishwoman if there ever was one.

Maybe it could work, I thought. You’ve got to have a funeral meal when you die. People were kicking off right and left, some from pneumonia, some from consumption, many from the heat, some from pure despair. She could bake and make doughnuts and sweet rolls. Our bakery in town closed in ’33. We settled on $2150.

“I don’t know why anyone would want to cook for a living,” George said, and shrugged his shoulders. “Maggie knows what she’s doing, though.”

“We have to get a mortgage on this,” Maggie said. “I’ll be back in a week or so.”

Sweeney wanted in on the water for gasoline deal, said it was he who had first discovered this opportunity, wanted to invest twenty dollars. Opportunity? I didn’t know Sweeney could utter a word with that many syllables. But that’s what it was, an opportunity.

“This whole thing is an opportunity. St. Paul talked about opportunities, in one of his letters. I forget which one it was. An opportunity to do God’s will should not be neglected. That would be a sin, a sin of omission.” Pastor Holmquist looked energized, didn’t look any longer like he might have a heart attack.

I was with Sweeney in the eighth grade. He had flunked sixth grade twice, but by eighth grade he was the most popular guy in the class. He was the only one old enough to have a driver’s license. His old man would let him take out his Model T every once in a while, an ancient wreck that you had to start with a hand crank. It had no headlights. We’d cruise the town before dusk and whistle at girls our age, even those a little older, and they would blush and pretend that they were offended.

In 1948, well after the war, Sweeney moved, went to work for a service station in Mandan. A woman came in for a new muffler one day in her Nash. She also had a burned-out headlight. Sweeney noticed that her name was Gertrude. She was ten years younger than he was, with auburn hair and a beguiling smile, and a no-nonsense attitude. Sweeney’s heart came alive, and he was persistent, and sometimes that’s a better skill than being able to change spark plugs. This Gertrude put him off but, some weeks later, heard him sing at a VFW hall, and she was entranced.

“I knew, from the first minute I met you, that we were destined to be together,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. He pulled up his shirt.

They married and eventually had eight or nine kids. I lost track. You know those Irish. Still, in ’36, he put twenty dollars down to buy shares that would revolutionize life as we knew it, and nobody thought he could scrape together a nickel.

“Well,” Bernie said, “I don’t think Catholics should be allowed to invest. If they are allowed to invest, the Pope will take over the world. Catholics are almost as bad as the Mormons.”

“We got a long ways to go to get to $19,000. Twenty bucks wouldn’t hurt.” I said that.

Pastor Holmquist said, ‘Well, I don’t like Catholics any better than you do, but Sweeney did discover this opportunity. Fair is fair.”

Bernie just leaned back in his chair, as he always did. “We got to have regular meetings on this, just to keep up on these financial proceedings. Tell Al that. Thursday night is out for me. I got a Rotary Club meeting every Thursday night.”

I never did find out what the Rotary Club actually did.

“They just actually keep turning around and around. Everyone I know who is in the Rotary Club is a dizzy bastard,” David Black said.

Al kept coming through Bernadotte, the “Royal Valley” of North Dakota. The town was named after the royal family of Sweden. I kept entertaining him, and we kept plotting.

“Did you know I’m a Mormon, Johnny?”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I had to sign some documents. I had to take an oath. I had to go through some baptismal ceremony or they’d fire me. I only did it because of my son, but I’m not a Mormon in my heart. I tell Joshua that I’ve got three wives, and eight kids. He doesn’t think eight is enough. He doesn’t think three wives are enough. He says Protestants only have three or four kids, by and large. Catholics have five or six. He says the Jews, in spite of what most people think, only have two, so they should be no problem.

“He says all conscientious Mormons must have at least twelve kids. That’s the way they’ll take over the world. They would have taken it over eventually, but with this new formula, it will speed up the process by two hundred years.”

It hit 114 degrees August 16th, 1936, an all-time record. Old man Swenson died that day. On his death bed, breathing heavily, he said to Doc Gilles, “I know I’m going to hell, but it won’t be any hotter in hell than it is in North Dakota.” In Henderson, where the fires had been, seven miles west, three people died that day. Wimps, people said, under their breath. Those Bohemians are all wimps. Their artists paint abstract pictures. The women have sexual relations with any man who walks by, and sometimes with other women, too. They don’t like to work, and they wear funny clothing, and they all have cigarette holders.

I lost ten pounds in 1936. We broke the August 16th record three days later, when it got to 121 degrees. We lived in the Death Valley of the north. Old people were dying mostly, and young children. Maggie was busy with her funeral meals…only if the family had life insurance, or they wouldn’t have been able to afford a funeral meal.

I had a fan. At night I’d take a dish rag, wipe my body, and sit in front of the fan. I’d take the fan to my porch, lie out there, try to pretend that the world was a hospitable place. I would look up into that North Dakota sky, see those North Dakota stars, and wait for some breeze. I didn’t care where the breeze came from, but it never came. I would have taken a Bohemian breeze, even a Mormon one. I was so lonely most of the time during those days that my soul fell through my shoes.

Duane snored at night.

The world was not a hospitable place.

August 20th they had a downpour 20 miles to the north and 30 miles to the south, too late to do the crops any good. The rain missed us completely. Still, we thought, God’s preparing us. Twelve million gallons of gas a day times one cent or more. That was a lot of money. Of course, there would be legal fees and all sorts of fees. There’d be taxes, and I’d have to split this money with all of the other investors in town, but it was still a ton of money. Al might end up the richest person in the United States.

My $1500 investment would just make me filthy rich. I’d probably move to New York City or Chicago or Newport, Rhode Island, where women didn’t spit on your shoes. I’d come back to my hometown by train, first class, every once in a while. I’d eat at Maggie’s Café, which I had once owned, have eggs and bacon, and leave her a $5 tip. I know the restaurant business, only too well. Likely, Maggie would need the tip.

We had a prospering new business in town, and that was unusual. Gary established it; I don’t remember his last name. It was a long German name. The business was a pawnshop. This Gary was from out of town, and if you open a pawnshop, you want to be from out of town. A person doesn’t want his next-door neighbor to know that he’s pawning all of the china that he inherited from his grandmother, who came over from the old country.

Gary was an avid supporter of the Chamber of Commerce. I stayed a member out of a sense of civic duty, even though it cost two dollars a year. Gary smoked big cigars, and people hated him even more than they hated Bernie.

“What will you give me for this lawn mower? It cost me two dollars and twenty-five cents. I’ve only used it twice.”

“I can give you twenty cents. You can get it back in thirty days for twenty five cents. After that, the ownership reverts to the store.”

So, you can mow your lawn or you can eat. Lots of people chose the latter. Besides, we had no rain, and no grass.

Al told me later that Joshua considered the rest of the country to be Jericho, like the Biblical Jericho. The United States was simply a land that was based on stone upon stone, all cemented together with mortar that was made mostly of sin, the sin of the past, the present, and the future. That mortar was made weaker by alcohol consumption, dancing, caffeine, cigarettes, and you-name-it. That mortar was rotted and mostly gone. One loud, ferocious blast from his horn, and those walls would all come tumbling down, Joshua said, just like in that story from the Bible, but you had to know when to blast that horn.

Timing, Joshua said. It’s all timing and a little finesse. Sometimes you blast that horn softly, and nobody notices, but a few stones crumble. You blast it again softly and a few more stones come down. The foundation weakens. The idolaters don’t even notice. They’re too busy sinning.

Then, bang, one note, the proper note, and everything collapses. Montana would fall into place quickly, then North Dakota. The Mormons would go for Minnesota and South Dakota next. Nebraska and Kansas would fall easily. Wisconsin would be tough, but they had plans. Other groups were working on Oregon and Washington.

California would be the hardest state, probably the last state in the union to fall. You had all these idolater’s cities—San Diego, Santa Ana, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Santa this and Santa that, San Francisco, Los Angeles. These were all cities named after early, false saints, not Latter Day Saints.

As for Wisconsin, you wouldn’t go after Milwaukee first. There were too many Catholics in Milwaukee and too much beer. Milwaukee was built on beer. You’d start upstate, around Doer County, where people were decent and God-fearing, and where they needed a lot of gasoline to find a neighbor and get to work.

“You never see a Mormon man with his shirt off,” Al told me. “You know why?”

“No.”

“They got tattoos.”

“Tattoos?” Ten years later, Gertrude, Gertrude, Gertrude, would have come to mind, but this was 1936.

“Every Mormon man has a tattoo, just below his neck on his back. There’s a fist with a sword in its hand. It represents the Archangel Michael slaying his enemies, the enemies of God. On their lower back, they have another tattoo: 666.”

“666? That’s the mark of the devil.”

“I know that. The Mormons say that it shows that the good angels, the Latter Day Saints, will prevail against the devil, against Satan himself.

“I think differently. I think they’re trying to cover themselves on both ends, the good and the bad. I mean, they preach tithing, giving ten percent of your income to the poor, and then they kill innocent people and leave their bodies to rot in the sun.”

In early September, a tornado hit just south of town. We probably wouldn’t have minded it so much if it had been accompanied by some rain, enough to settle the dust, and to remind us what rain actually was. The tornado went through the Hooverville, and five men died. We buried them, and Pastor Holmquist said some words. They were buried in our town cemetery, in unmarked graves.

There was no money for headstones, and what would the headstone say? Here lies Jerry, died September, 1936. Nobody even knew who these guys really were—even their friends. The hoboes knew these guys by only their first names, and they might know whether a fellow came from Cleveland or Chicago. They didn’t know much else, except that he preferred brandy to whiskey. Maybe we should have contacted the Catholic priest. Maybe some of the dead were Catholics, maybe Jews. One or two could have been a Mormon. We never checked their backs for tattoos.

In 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind sold a million copies. We couldn’t much afford books in North Dakota in 1936. Somebody would buy a book and lend it to her neighbor. It would be passed around to ten or twenty people to read. There was a library almost forty miles away, but nobody could afford the gas to get there. I read the book in 1937. I read it again in 1940, after the movie came out.

I believe in timing too, just like Joshua did. Mostly, my timing is bad. I think that if I’d timed things out a little better, I could have gotten Mary Ellen. “I’d like you to marry me, Mary Ellen. We could have a beautiful life together. I love you more than words can ever express. Sure, times are tough now, but they will get better. I’ll buy that ring that you deserve when times improve. It will be a diamond ring. Meanwhile, we can make love, have lots of kids, waltz when we can, and serve chicken and dumplings downstairs at the café. You can wipe off tables while I watch, and you can hum any tune that you want to. Your tips will make us rich.”

She might have fallen for that.

There is a day of reckoning. The Bible tells us so. I sang at our church, a mediocre tenor, nowhere near Duane or Sweeney, and I was standing next to mediocre sopranos, while Pastor Holmquist looked on. We had an excellent bass, however: Orville Johnson, whose voice was always on key. The rest of us were always off key by maybe a half note. I was always surprised that Orville, a perfectionist, didn’t give up in disgust. Your ears hurt when you left our church, and not from the pastor’s sermons, which were always top-notch. People don’t sing any better today. I know that. Still, you go to church now, you just look for a few uplifting words and then you go home to bacon and eggs and the Sunday newspaper.

Back then you looked for hope—any sort of hope, anything that might make you think that tomorrow could be better than today. You couldn’t afford bacon and eggs back then.
But the hour of reckoning was approaching, Al told me. It will come sooner rather than later, he said.  People I knew, people with pride, people whom I had known since I was a youngster, humbled themselves to ask for some sort of nourishment at my restaurant. I couldn’t refuse. People would go through my garbage cans at night, looking for left-over food, and it wasn’t only the hoboes.

I voted for Roosevelt in 1936. Well, I had in ’32. Everyone else did, too, I think. He couldn’t do anything about the weather, though. We knew that.

It has come to our attention that some households in our community have been receiving unusual correspondence, inviting them to become a member of the Prosperity Club. This letter will say, “In God We Trust,” and trumpet the virtues of Faith, Hope, and Prosperity. This letter will have six names and addresses attached. You will be asked to send a dime to the person at the top of the list, as a charitable donation, and to add your name to the bottom of the list. You will then be asked to make five copies of this letter and send them to various people you know.

People have been assured that they will receive $1,056.50 in a matter of weeks.
The United States Postal Service has informed us that this whole scheme is illegal, as gambling is not permitted in the United States mail system. We were told that this particular scheme started in Denver, spread to St. Louis, and rapidly to every city in the United States, and even countries overseas. The original perpetrators are now in custody. Most people have lost a dime and the price of five stamps.

I could never understand why Alan always said “we.” He was the only person working at the newspaper. At least seventeen people in our town had lost a dime and the price of five stamps, before the article appeared. Three got a dime back. One woman made 30¢.

Jesus, there were a lot of scams back then.

Please send in five cents to the above address to help us in our noble work. Send this letter on to a valued friend. If you send the five cents for this wonderful cause, make a wish, say a prayer to Our Lord, say it three times, and your wish will come true.

A prayer, such as this, has never been known to fail.

Wally, from the WPA, never came into my cafe again, thank God, even though I never said a prayer, even though I needed the business more than ever.

In town we had electricity, and I owned two fans. People used to come into the cafe and order a glass of lemonade and just sit and sip it in front of one of the fans. People used to come in and asked for a glass of ice water, and I really wouldn’t charge them for that, at first. They’d all take a napkin, dip it in the water, wipe their face down, and let that breeze from the fan cool their body by a degree or two.

We didn’t have any of these new refrigerators in town, only ice-boxes. Ice cost money. Stephen Grauptmen had a large ice-house, the biggest I’ve ever seen. I’d get my ice from him. People these days don’t understand what an ice-house is. They don’t understand how hard it was to keep things cold. As a kid, we’d build these igloos out of snow. We’d throw straw on top. More snow a week later. More straw. More snow. More straw. If it was a bad winter, the igloo would get 10 or 15 feet tall. We’d close off the entrance, and meat and perishables would keep till the first of August. We got freezers now. You open the top of a freezer, and the frozen food is all laid out, no work involved.

When I changed my menu to say ice water costs two cents, people quit coming in for ice water. We didn’t have REA yet in those days in our area, and the farms, by and large, had no electricity. Well, all the Schwecke brothers had batteries and windmills, but most farms still used candles and kerosene lanterns. The farm wives would wash clothes with the Maytag one-cylinder gasoline washing machines, but they didn’t wash the clothes very often. Gasoline cost money. Still, the farmer’s noses were dead after all those years around manure, and they didn’t notice how bad their clothes smelled.

One kick. That’s all it took to start those Maytag gasoline-powered washers. The exhaust would stink, but the machine would get your clothes clean. Of course, there were no clothes dryers. They hadn’t been invented yet. That’s what rope was for, and clotheslines, in the summer of ’36. They would dry a shirt in five minutes, and no one gave a damn if it was starched and ironed.

Most people couldn’t afford decent food then, in and around Bernadotte. They ate rutabagas and squirrel stew, stuff you wouldn’t feed a dog nowadays. There wasn’t a piece of any slaughtered animal that went to waste. I ate better, since I owned a restaurant, but I was going broke, and I knew it. I lived upstairs, with Duane, and in the winter that helped, since the heat from the stoves rose. In the summer, that heat almost killed you. We used to sleep, half naked, on a porch out back. Everyone slept on their porches, half naked. It’s not like it shocked anybody.

Our upstairs porch was on the east side of the building. That was both good and bad. It was good because the dust, coming from the west, wouldn’t accumulate on our mattresses. It accumulated everywhere else. I grew up shoveling snow in the winter. I had no experience shoveling dust. You used a handkerchief, ten times a day, to blow that dust out of your nose.

On the east side of a building, though, you’d get no breeze. That would pose a question: Do I want to die from the dust or from the heat?

Summers were carefree back when I was a kid. Oh, you had your chores to do and complain about, but my buddies and I could swim in the creek, play baseball, and plot about ways to fool our parents. My mother was gullible. My dad was not.
Reality sets in, sooner or later, usually after you get out of school.

I grew tomatoes for the café, green beans, and onions myself, and got eggs from crazy Millie, who lived next door to my café. We bartered. She’d eat a meal and I’d get so many eggs. She wasn’t as crazy as most people thought. Millie had a twinkle in her eyes that said, I’m not really crazy, but I don’t want anyone to know that I’m not really crazy. I’d buy chickens from her.

One night I got a drunken crowd in, and everyone wanted chicken. I didn’t have enough. I walked out back, saw some of Millie’s chickens. Duane, I said, here’s a butcher knife—go get two of those chickens. I’ll make it right with Millie in the morning. He caught two chickens, chopped off their heads, and plucked them. Chickens might run around when they get their heads chopped off, but they didn’t run around after spending time in my oven. The meals took longer to prepare than they should have, but nobody noticed. They were all drunk, and they were having a good time tossing BS back and forth. You toss BS back and forth after you drink a lot.

I got a shitload of compliments that night. “This chicken sure tastes fresh.” Of course it did. I made almost nine dollars that night—a fortune.

Al told me that I was wasting my time in a café. “You’re destined for bigger things, Johnny,” he said. “Listen, anyone can cook, no offense. Well, I can’t cook myself, but a lot of people can. My wife can cook. Why do you think I got this stomach? But Johnny, you can manage. You know dollars and cents. That’s what companies pay money for, real management skills. We get this thing done with the Mormons, you’re going to be one of my top guys. You don’t have a newspaper in town, do you?”

“We got the Bernadotte Sentinel.”

“Damn, I didn’t know about that.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Well, this newspaper guy might get wind of this and say something in his newspaper. Has he said anything yet?”

“No.”

“Maybe we can stop him then.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Don’t you understand, Johnny? If he says something about this in his newspaper, things will get out, not only in Bernadotte. They’d know about it in Bismarck in a week. Hell, the Minneapolis Star would know about it in two weeks, and the Federal government would know it a week later.”

“The Federal Government could stop those Mormons.”

“Of course they could. But you and I couldn’t make a cent off this deal. Don’t you realize that, Johnny?”

Well, I hadn’t, but he made sense.

“Johnny, you go to the newspaper man, explain the whole thing to him, offer him twenty…no, twenty-five…shares in this if he doesn’t say anything in the newspaper.”

I did. Alan says, “So what’s twenty-five shares worth?”

“Well, it’s a hundred to one, maybe a thousand to one investment, or more. I’m selling my restaurant and putting all of the proceeds into this. I saw it, with my own two eyes. I saw him changing water to gasoline.”

“I saw it too.”

“So, what do you think?”

“I’ve got my journalistic integrity to consider. How about thirty shares?”

“I think that could be arranged.”

“I won’t say anything about this whole process in the newspaper. Can a person buy more shares? My old man left me some money, but it’s running out fast.”

Management. Somehow, I had never thought of myself as having management skills. I could cook and wash dishes. I could sweep and mop floors. But management was a different type of wax. Still, I was responsible for making sure there was food available in my café, and I had bills to pay, and I paid them. I had to order some of my provisions from the drummers that came around, and those provisions would be delivered, cash-on-delivery. I had to make sure there were napkins on my tables and toothpicks.

I used to pay employees…when I had them, that is. I had to pay attention to inventory, and shovel the steps and the sidewalk after it snowed, and after all the dust.

Years back, I envied the hardware store down the street, before it went belly-up. You buy some pliers, wholesale, and screwdrivers. Well, those pliers and screwdrivers and nails and levels and hammers might not sell right away, but they’d still be good in three years.

Bacon would keep a few weeks. Then it would turn green. Lettuce would turn brown.

I’d listened to Roosevelt during his fireside chats. I couldn’t afford a new radio in 1936, but the one I had was purchased in 1928, when people ate out at restaurants on a regular basis, still worked. I didn’t agree with most of what Roosevelt said. Still, I liked his opening phrase. “Good evening, my friends…”

On September 6th, 1936, he talked about the drought.

“I shall never forget the fields of wheat so blasted by heat that they cannot be harvested. I shall never forget field after field of corn stunted, earless and stripped of leaves, for what the sun left, the grasshoppers took. I saw brown pastures which would not keep a cow on fifty acres.”

Those locusts had been pure torture, but they only lasted for about two days. They couldn’t really find anything to eat and went east. Still, those locusts felt like salt in a wound, and I know what that feels like. One of the hoboes threw a rock through my window one night.

I think it was a hobo. I didn’t see him.

The next morning, pulling all the shards of glass out of the window, I sliced my ring finger. I didn’t, as I mentioned, have a ring on this finger. It was a serious slice, and I bandaged it up. Still, salt from the soup-stock soaked in, and I had to rip the bandage off, and soak my finger in water. This was very painful.

I put cardboard on the window, because it felt like the right thing to do. There were no mosquitoes that year, since there was no water on the ground, anywhere, nowhere they could breed, but you didn’t know if there might be another locust storm.

Yes, Mr. Roosevelt, we are all friends and fellow Americans, but the government quit repairing roads, and Highway Two went to hell. The hoboes loved us, though, since we had a railroad going through town. They’d beg at the front door of my café every other day. I’d give them coffee sometimes, if it was three hours old, but that was all I would give them.

Then Al and Joshua walked in the door, maybe a quarter to noon. Joshua was a big man, dressed entirely in black, so black that I couldn’t see any sweat stains. He wore a black shirt, black tie, black topcoat, and a black hat. He had long black hair and a black beard. Joshua looked like the devil.

Al was right—the devil with a suit on.

“Good morning, gentlemen. Can I get you something to eat? My name’s Johnny.”

“My name is Joshua.”

“I’m Al.”

I offered my hand, but Joshua wouldn’t take it. Al wouldn’t either, taking his cue from Joshua.

Al looked like he was Joshua’s personal servant. Al’s face was red, not the kind of red you get from drinking too much whiskey, but like the kind of red face you have when you’re all shook up.

“Do you have a toilet?” Joshua asked.

“Yessir, it’s in back.”

“Sorry about that, Johnny,” Al whispered, after Joshua had walked back. “Mormons don’t believe in shaking hands with a gentile.”

They finished eating, didn’t say a word to each other or to me during the meal, and then stood up.

“Pay the gentleman,” Joshua said. “Don’t leave a tip. You know, we don’t believe in tips.”

I had decided, some weeks back, to sell the restaurant and put my money into this new secret formula. I could make money and help out my nephew. You got to take a stand against evil, I thought. The Bible tells us these things. Abraham took a stand against evil. Moses did. David, the Satchel Paige of the Jews, brought down Goliath with a slingshot. John the Baptist told Herod to go to hell. A man has to step up to the plate.

Besides, I could make a fortune. Al, three weeks later, told me about the chemist he had talked to.

“I don’t understand this science stuff, Johnny. I was good at math and history and spelling when I was at school. When they started talking about chemistry and biology and physics I was just lost. Periodic tables. What the hell is a periodic table?”

“I think it’s a listing of all of the elements in the universe.”

“Sure. PB equals lead. AU equals gold. Why don’t they just say lead and gold?”

“I don’t know. I think those scientists speak Latin or Greek.”

“Well, it’s all Greek to me.

“I know Ezekiel well, but I’ve mentioned that. I know that his wife’s favorite color is blue and that she likes chocolate, but that’s something you can’t admit in Salt Lake City. Chocolate is against the law. Did you know that chocolate has caffeine and sugar in it?

“Cigarettes are against the law, too, so I don’t smoke there. I have to wash my hands and my face and take a breath mint before I go into a meeting. People can smell if you’ve been smoking. I can’t even chew there. Spit, and somebody will see you. You can’t drink liquor, but everyone knows that. Still, you can hide a bottle in the trunk, under the wheel well.

“Ezekiel’s wife trembles at night, afraid that the Mormons might decide that her and her husband have outlived their usefulness. She’s afraid that Ezekiel might cave in to Jeremiah’s demands and take another four or five wives. She’s afraid for their kids. Ezekiel works out of that laboratory 90 miles north of Salt Lake City, all by himself, not a soul to talk to. He wanted to paint the walls blue, but Jeremiah said, ‘No, all of our walls are white, the color of pure, Biblical intentions.’

“Well, I read the Bible. I didn’t see anything about the color white and painting walls. The sky is blue, for heaven’s sake, and God created the sky. All of this makes no sense to me.

“Ezekiel gets to visit his wife and kids just the first day of every month. I should say, they get to visit him. The building is just one big garage with a singe bed and a desk there, so Ezekiel and his wife don’t get to have any time together, if you catch my meaning.

“I think Jeremiah’s hoping that Ezekiel will get so lonely that he’ll find a second wife out in the middle of nowhere. If you get used to having two wives, why, it kills your conscience, and it’s not nearly as hard to take a third one.”

Like Tabasco Sauce, I thought. It almost kills you the first time you take it. A couple of years later you can’t get enough.

“The Mormons send Ezekiel food every Monday, so I never come by on Mondays or the first of the month. When I do come, I always bring something with me. I always bring a bottle. I bring him coffee and Gene Autry LPs, and chocolate. Ezekiel doesn’t much care for chocolate, but it endears him to his wife.

“One night, Ezekiel mentioned a name to me, like, ‘Well, he may be a professor, this Professor Beranek, but he’s not going to figure out my formula. He’s trying, but I went to Stanford,’ he says. ‘Nobody from Topeka is going to figure this out. Well, people from Harvard can’t figure this out. Neither can people from Yale.’ You know they hate each other, Yale and Harvard. That’s what Ezekiel says.

“I found that professor, Professor Beranek, University of Kansas, Topeka, on one of my trips, even though I had to go a hundred twenty miles out of my way. I had to fake all of my travel records, but the Mormons never noticed.

“It was spring break, but I found him in his office, a dedicated man if I ever saw one. He took me to an empty classroom. Beranek tried to explain this whole thing to me, but I got lost. He started writing all these symbols on his blackboard, walking back and forth. I just nodded. I didn’t understand anything.

“You could hear some loud footsteps in the hallway. Professor Beranek quick erased the blackboard and whispered, ‘It’s the head of the department’. The footsteps faded. ‘He’s a Mormon,’ Beranek said. I know what I can understand. I know what I can’t understand. I didn’t have a clue on any of this.

“I got through high school, but I couldn’t afford college. My father died when I was eight years old. You know anyone who has an education?”

Well, of course I did: Bernie Larson, our banker.

“You talk to him, Johnny. Make him swear that he won’t tell anybody.”

Oh, Bernie had heard all the talk from customers at the bank. We mostly hated Bernie in our town, and with good reason, too. His bank almost went under, during the panic after the crash in ’29, like a couple of thousands did across the country, but it survived, and then Bernie started repossessing every property in the county. He likely couldn’t sell the properties, but he rented them out. A week late on your rent, and he’d kick you out.

Bernie had bought the assets of the state bank that went under, and he bought those assets for next to nothing, and he got all their properties, too. There were Sheriff’s sales every week. Bernie got all this property ten cents on the dollar. Still, Bernie had studied chemistry in college, and he made the phone call, long distance, person-to-person.

Pastor Holmquist and I sat across the desk from him. There was lot of hemming and hawing.

“Yes, yes, I understand.”

There was a pause.

“Well, that makes sense.”

Another pause.

“Did you say ‘oxide’ or ‘dioxide’?”

The pastor and I walked outside to get some air. I rolled a cigarette.

“What are you thinking, Johnny?”

“I just wish my old man was alive. He’d know what to do. He was a good man, but he was a smart man too. Some time it’s not enough to be good. I wish we knew what we were doing, before we jump in with both feet.”

“He was a man of common sense, your father,” the reverend said. “He was a man of God, too. I think he would have wanted us to stand up to the Mormons. He knew that you have to take a stand, sometimes. Remember when that bootlegger wanted to set up headquarters in the old seed building?”

Sure, I did. My old man said, “It’s a stupid law, this prohibition, but it’s the law, and he’s not coming into this town—I don’t care what the mayor says. The mayor wanted the property sold, so the city could tax it, but the mayor backed down, and the bootlegger went to Dickinson, where he was arrested a year later.

“In 1927, at the café, my father had a heart attack and collapsed onto the stove. People screamed. I pulled him from the stove and ripped the burning clothes off of him. Somebody ran to get Doc Gilles, but it was too late. I tried to tell my old man how much I loved him, but he couldn’t hear me. He was already dead.

We had a funeral in a closed coffin. For weeks, I was scared to turn on the stove, figured maybe I’d smell my dad, but a man has to make a living somehow. I was only twenty years old at the time.

There was an awkward moment of silence outside the bank. What else was there left to say?

“Maybe Bernie’s done with that call,” said the pastor.

“Bernie’s long-winded,” I said.

“He is, but probably not when he’s paying for the phone call.”

“You’re right. Bernie’s so tight, when he takes a shit it probably squeaks.”

The pastor actually laughed.

Bernie had completed the call, had his feet up on the desk, was contemplating the future of life as we knew it, the future of Christianity, the future of the price of fuel. He was thinking about his own future.

“I had a very detailed conversation with him, a nice guy, very polite. Jesus, he knows chemistry. Sorry, Pastor, I didn’t mean to say that. Chemistry has advanced, as a science, quite a bit since I took the courses in college. This guy is an associate professor, not a full professor. I wonder what that call will cost?

“Thomas Beranek is his name. It’s a German name, I’m sure of it. Those Germans know chemistry. He said it was a simple matter. Gasoline is a hydrocarbon. Well, everyone knows that. Water is mostly hydrogen. Wheat is mostly carbon. If you can combine the two properly, you will get a hydrocarbon, but you’ll need a catalyst. You don’t have the right catalyst; you’ll simply be pouring wheat glue into your engine.”

“Still,” said the pastor, “I really don’t quite know what a catalyst is.”

“Well you got two chemicals. You put them next to each other, and nothing happens. You put in a little of this third chemical, the catalyst, and that allows the two chemicals to combine, and produce a third chemical. This third chemical might be useful, especially if it was gasoline.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Well, think of oxygen. Think of gasoline. You spill some gasoline on a concrete slab. It doesn’t explode. It doesn’t explode even though it’s in contact with the air, which is mostly oxygen. Why doesn’t it explode?”

“I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t explode because there’s no catalyst. The catalyst is a spark plug, which is in every engine in every automobile in the United States, and across the world, for that matter.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Without a spark plug, Pastor, the gasoline would not ignite and power our world. It’s like you take life and then you take Lazarus. Well, Lazarus was dead, all wrapped up. Outside his tomb, there was life all around. Jesus was the catalyst. He was able to give life back to Lazarus.

“You got gasoline next to air. You got life next to Lazarus. They just sit there. You bring in the right catalyst, bang. These things combine, and the whole universe is a different place.”

“I think I understand.”

“We’re talking chemical catalysts here. That’s a whole different story. Professor Beranek says that the U.S. War Department has determined that the catalyst has sodium and potassium and magnesium in it. Still, that leaves something over 12,000 compounds to test. It would take years and years to discover the right catalyst. This is a matter of national security. The government would pay big money to get that formula. We don’t want the Japanese to get it first and take over the world.”

“No, we don’t,” Pastor Holmquist said.

“Oh, there’s one more thing. This catalyst has an anti-rust additive in it. Think about that. You not only have to make fuel out of water, you have to make sure that the water doesn’t rust out your engine. An engine body is made out of iron. All of the components in an automobile engine are made out of carbon steel. Half of the world is made out of steel. The anti-rust component of this formula is worth a fortune, all by itself.

“And think about this: They’ve learned how to deal with crappy alkaline water, hard water, they call it, and that’s all we have here and in many places across the country. This Ezekiel must be a genius of the first degree.”

Bernie stared out the window, looking at dollar signs scattered across the cloudless sky, a blue sky, a color that the Mormons wouldn’t let you paint.

“We’ll have to think carefully about this matter, gentlemen.” He stood up. “We can’t tell a soul.”

The pastor and I left; Pastor Holmquist was even more of a nervous wreck than he had been before.

I couldn’t believe it. Bernie had referred to me as a gentleman.