every aspect of the life of Marcella DeVries Harris. No one called or knocked on my door. I felt like the marshal summoned to clean up the rowdy town who finds that the townsfolk are unaccountably afraid of him.
I checked my watch: five-thirty. The heat and smothering humidity were starting to abate, so I decided to go for a walk. I dressed in slacks and sport shirt and strolled through the clean lobby of the Badger Hotel, getting a suspicious look from the clean desk clerk before entering the clean streets of Tunnel City, Wisconsin.
Tunnel City had one business thoroughfare, named, appropriately, Main Street. Every bit of Tunnel City commerce existed on that one street. The town's residential streets spread out from this commercial hub, pointing outward to the bordering farmland.
I walked south, toward the cabbage fields, feeling out of place. Every house I passed was white, with a perfectly tended front lawn bearing well-pruned trees and shrubs. Every automobile parked in every driveway was clean and glistening. The people who sat on the porches looked resolute and strong.
I walked all the way to where Tunnel City proper ended and Tunnel City's nourishing farmland began. Walking back to my hotel I knew why Marcella DeVries had had to get out—and why she had had to return.
I was strolling down Main Street looking for a place to eat when a man crossed the street toward me, coming from the direction of the hotel. He was a tall man in his forties, dressed in blue jeans and a checked sport shirt. There was something different about him, and when his gaze zeroed in on me I knew he wanted to talk.
When he hit the sidewalk he planted himself firmly in my path and stuck out a large bony hand for me to shake. I took it.
'I'm Will Berglund, Officer,' the man said.
'Fred Underhill, Mr. Berglund, and I'm not a policeman, I'm an insurance investigator.'
'I don't care. I knew Marcy DeVries better than anyone. I—' The man was obviously very moved.
'Where can we go to talk, Mr. Berglund?'
'I run the movie theater here in town.' He pointed down Main Street. 'The last show is over at nine-forty- five. Meet me there then. We can talk in my office.'
When I walked into the lobby of the Badger Theater Will Berglund shooed the few remaining moviegoers out the door, locked it, and wordlessly led me to an upstairs office crowded with beatup theater seats and inoperative movie projectors. 'I like to tinker,' he said by way of explanation.
I took a seat without being asked, and he took one across from me. My mind was jumping with questions that I never got the chance to ask—I didn't need to. Berglund opened all the windows in the room for air and began to talk.
He talked without interruption for seven hours, his manner by turns plaintive, morose, but above all else tragically accepting. It was an intimate story, a panorama of small-town life, small-town talk, small-town hope, and small-town retribution. It was the story of Marcella DeVries.
They had been lovers from the very beginning, first in spirit, then in flesh.
The Berglund family had emigrated from Norway the same year as the DeVries family had left Holland. A network of Old Country friends and cousins secured work for the two families in the stockyards of Chicago.
It was 1906, and work was plentiful. The hardy Berglund men became foremen, the quicker-witted DeVries men became master bookkeepers. The three Berglund brothers and Piet and Karl DeVries shared a dream common to immigrants—the dream of Old Country power, the dream of land.
All five men, then in their thirties, were impatient. They knew that the feudal power they so desperately desired could not be achieved by the attrition of begging, borrowing, scrimping, and slaughtering cattle with ten- pound sledgehammers. Time was not on their side, and history was not on their side. But brains and ruthlessness were, compounded by their Calvinist religious fervor, and the five men embarked on a career of crime, with only one goal in mind: the acquisition of twenty-five thousand dollars.
It took three years, and cost two lives, one from each family. The Berglunds and DeVrieses became burglars and armed robbers. Piet DeVries was the acknowledged leader and treasurer, Willem Berglund his adjutant. They were the planners, the shrewd overseers of impetuous Karl DeVries and the outright violent Hasse and Lars Berglund.
Piet was a romantic intellectual, and an ardent lover of Beethoven. He loved jewelry, and converted the cash gleaned from the gang's burglaries into diamonds and rubies that he sold in turn for a small profit on the commodities exchange, always keeping a few small gems for himself. He longed to be a jewel thief—for the romance of it as well as for the profit—and he planned the strongarm theft of an elderly, jewel-bedecked Chicago matron known to attend the opera unescorted. His brother Karl and Lars Berglund were to do the job. It was 1909, and the money from the robbery would put them well over their twenty-five-thousand mark.
The woman traveled to and from her home on the near north side in a horse-drawn carriage. The men waited under the steps of her brownstone, armed with revolvers. When she pulled to the curb and her driver helped her up the stairs, Karl and Lars sprang from their hiding place, expecting to easily overpower their prey. The driver shot them both in the face at point-blank range with a custom-made six-shot Derringer.
The three surviving members of the Berglund-DeVries combine fled to St. Paul, Minnesota, with eighteen thousand dollars in cash and jewelry. Hasse Berglund wanted to kill Piet DeVries. One night, drunk, he tried. Willem Berglund interceded, beating Hasse senseless with a lead-filled cane. Hasse was irreparably brain damaged, and Willem was distraught with guilt. To assuage Willem's guilt, Piet placed the now childlike Hasse in an asylum, paying the director of the institution two thousand dollars to keep him there in perpetuity.
Where were two immigrants, one Norwegian, one Dutch, with sixteen thousand dollars, without wives or children, and above all else, without land, to go? Their dream was dairy farming, but now that was impossible. Sixteen thousand dollars would not purchase two dairy farms, and co-ownership was out of the question—the two men were bound by spilled blood, but hatred lay in abeyance beneath that bondage. So they traveled, living frugally, drifting through Minnesota and Wisconsin until they ended up, in 1910, thirty miles east of Lake Geneva in a little town in the middle of a giant cabbage field.
They married the first girls from their home countries who were nice to them: Willem Berglund wed Anna Nyborg, seventeen, Oslo-born, tall and blond, with a frail body and a face of cameolike loveliness. Piet DeVries wed Mai Hendenfelder, the daughter of a ruined Rotterdam shipping magnate, because she loved Brahms and Beethoven, had a beautiful thick body, and could cook.
Tunnel City in 1910 had cabbage, but it also had aspirations to the ultimate Wisconsin trade: cheese. Piet DeVries, thirty-seven-year-old Dutch dairy farmhand, and Willem Berglund, thirty-nine-year-old Norwegian bank teller and part-time milkman, wanted to settle for nothing less than a dairy dukedom, but with their depleted funds they found themselves reluctantly looking for other options.
The land had the last laugh—huge lots of it were bought by wealthy cheese farmers, acreage stretching all the way to Lake Geneva, acreage whose soil temperature and consistency soon proved to be almost totally unsuitable for grazing large numbers of milk cows. But it was
So Piet DeVries and Willem Berglund reluctantly joined the crowd, plopped down their sixteen thousand dollars and bought cabbage acreage, two adjoining parcels of land separated by nothing but a dusty country road.
Cabbage brought them moderate prosperity, and family life—at first—brought them moderate happiness. Willem and Anna soon had twin sons, Will and George; while Piet and Mai produced Marcella and John, two years apart.
Willem played solitaire chess and went for long exhausting runs down country roads. Piet taught himself to play the violin, and listened to scratchy Beethoven on his newly purchased Victrola. The two men formed a truce, at once bitter and steeped in mutual respect. Though not of the same blood, their ties went deep. Despite the close proximity of their property, they seldom socialized; when they did, they treated each other with the exaggerated deference of the mutually fearful.
Both men were considered anomalies by their fellow townspeople. They held a separate designation, based, people said, not on their aloofness but on something in their eyes, some fascinating secret knowledge.
It was a knowledge passed on to the second generation. The people of Tunnel City discerned that, too, as soon as little Will and Marcella were old enough to walk and talk and react to the environment that they knew wasn't good enough for them.
