agreed. Marcella raged on: he was to renounce God and Jesus Christ and the Dutch Reformed Church. Piet balked. Marcella raged. Piet continued to balk until Marcella said simply, with brutal finality—'If you don't, you will never see Johnny or me again.'
Sobbing, abject, and utterly degraded, he agreed.
Will had not helped Marcella humiliate his father. Marcella considered this the ultimate betrayal.
They were through, of course, the golden elite were now just tarnished fragments; but that wasn't enough for Marcella. She wanted further revenge—something that would solidify her contempt for the Berglund family and all of Tunnel City, Wisconsin.
Will and Marcella had exchanged love letters for years, explicit ones, full of references to lovemaking and dripping with contempt for the picayune small-town ways of Tunnel City. In those letters the genitalia of prominent townspeople were derided, Tunnel City High School teachers were excoriated as buffoons and Willem Berglund was satirized and dissected in vicious detail.
Marcella savored the letters her weakling lover had sent her. She considered her options and decided to wait before using them.
Small-town talk continued as Willem endeavored to drink himself to death; Piet worked side by side with his laborers, and Marcella and Will went to high school and never spoke to each other.
Marcella had a new cause: her brother, Johnny. Johnny, at fourteen, was six-foot-six, and blond like his mother. He was a wild but quiet boy who preferred the company of animals, often raiding the outdoor pantries of neighboring farmhouses to steal sides of beef and pork to feed to the legions of homeless dogs and cats who roamed the outskirts of town.
Marcella, now bereft of a lover, became the aimless giant's benefactor, counselor, tutor, and anodyne. She held her brother fiercely close in the wake of her loss, and taught the bright but lazy boy subjects as diverse as geometry and poetry, medieval history and calculus. She awakened in him more than he knew he possessed, and by doing so reached deep for her best.
The new DeVries combine had a dream; a dream that expressed both Marcella's elitist contempt and Johnny's love for animals: medicine. Marcella the microbe hunter, the doctor who would go into 'pure research,' and Johnny, the veterinarian who would surround himself with the love of strays and foundlings seeking to be healed. It was a powerful dream, one that would take them far from the hated confines of Tunnel City, Wisconsin. But first Marcella had to have her revenge on the town.
In June of 1928, at sixteen, she graduated from Tunnel City High School, the youngest member of her class. Piet was very proud. Mai, still estranged from her family, returned from Lake Geneva at Piet's urgings to see the daughter she hated smile contemptuously in gown and mortarboard on the stage of the school auditorium as she was lauded in small-town hyperbole for her academic accomplishments. After the ceremony, Mai returned to Lake Geneva, never to see her family again.
Diploma in hand, Marcella went about her business. There were eighty-three letters from Will. On the Monday morning after her graduation, Marcella spent hours deciding where each letter should go to achieve the maximum insult and harm. This accomplished, she went on her mission. Main Street was first, where Marcella dropped little packets of vitriol with the mayor, town alderman, librarian, sheriff, barber, and every businessman on the four commercial blocks of Tunnel City.
'Read this,' she said to each recipient. 'See if you recognize any of your friends.'
The churches were next: Dutch Reformed, Catholic, Presbyterian, and Baptist all received messages of hate tailored to offend at the level of both faith and viscera.
Marcella then traversed the residential streets of Tunnel City in a concise, well-mapped-out pattern until her brown paper bag was empty. Then she walked home and told her brother to pack his bag, that they would be leaving soon to pursue their dream.
Their departure was delayed. Marcella figured she would wait two days, to collect her thoughts and savor the first ripples of shocked reaction from the town before stealing her father's cache of gems and heading for New York City with Johnny.
She holed up in her bedroom reading Baudelaire and thumbing through East-Coast college catalogues. On Tuesday night she heard her father weeping in his bedroom. That meant that he knew.
Marcella decided to go for a last walk in the cabbage fields. She skipped down the dusty road that separated the DeVries and Berglund farms. Willem Berglund was waiting. He was stone cold sober and carrying a straight razor. He grabbed Marcella and threw her to the ground and raped her, the razor at her throat. After he finished he lay on top of her as she stared off into the sky, teeth clenched, refusing to make a sound. When he regained his breath, Willem stood up and urinated on Marcella's prostrate form. Then he walked back into the darkness of his cabbage fields.
Marcella lay there for an hour, then hobbled home. She forced herself to cry. Her father was still awake, tinkering with his violin. Marcella told him what had happened, then turned and went to bed. Piet didn't. He stayed up all night, playing the Beethoven symphonies in chronological order on his Victrola and executing the most difficult passages of the Kreutzer Sonata on his violin.
In the morning, while Marcella and Johnny were still asleep, Piet walked to the home of one of his farmhands and asked to borrow a 10-gauge double-barreled shotgun. Varmints, Piet said. The man gave his employer the gun and shells with his good wishes. Piet then walked to the Berglund farmhouse, the loaded shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm. He knocked on his neighbor's door. Willem answered immediately, as if expecting someone.
Piet stuck the shotgun into Willem's chest and fired, ripping him apart at the level of the lower torso. The top half of Willem's body flew back into his living room, while the lower half crumpled at Piet's feet. Piet reloaded and stepped into the living room, gathering the two pieces of what had once been his friend into a pile next to the fireplace. He dipped his hand into Willem's blood and smeared 'God's mercy on us' on the wall, then stuck the shotgun into his mouth and squeezed both triggers.
If it was more than she had bargained for she never told anyone, not even Will years later when they were reconciled and corresponded voluminously.
Marcella gathered up her brother and her father's jewelry shortly after dark on the night he died and headed south, on foot, toward Chicago. As they passed the far border of what were once the Berglund and DeVries cabbage farms, Marcella took an ax and smashed the connecting points of the irrigation sluices that fed water to the farmland. She didn't know if this would flood the cabbage fields or render them dry as a bone, and she didn't care; she only wanted the land on both sides of the dusty country road to suffer as she had.
They traveled southeast, by train and by bus. Marcella decided on a circuitous route, to give Johnny time to accept his father's death. Although they were only sixteen and fourteen, no one bothered them; Marcella had the competent look of a woman in her twenties and Johnny was too big to be considered anything but an adult.
They arrived in New York City two weeks later. Marcella had half-expected a sheriff's posse of Tunnel Cityites to follow them, but no one pursued. New York City sweltered in a summer heat wave, and Marcella sold the jewels and set about trying to register in premed at Columbia and New York universities. She was not accepted at either school, or at Brooklyn College, New York City College, or at the half-dozen other schools she applied to.
There was a simple reason for this: Tunnel City High School would not forward her transcript, and she could not return to pick it up, lest she be held and placed in a home for wayward girls. Marcella thought about this. She had seven thousand three hundred dollars in a bank account, she had Johnny, and she had her will to succeed. She had a two-room flat near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and she had her brains.
Marcella decided that fate was on her side. She was right. On Independence Day, 1928, she went walking and passed the Fletcher School of Nursing on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. Next door to it was the Fletcher School of Pharmacology. Both schools were 'fully accredited'—it said so right there above the door. Marcella had a feeling that this was her destiny, at least for the time being. She was right again.
Willard Fletcher took one look at the hard-eyed young redhead seated across the desk from him and knew that she could give him things his wife never could. He told Marcella this on their first night in bed together.
The admissions office was quiet that day as Marcella explained that her small-town high school had recently burned down and their records were destroyed in the fire. She was a straight-A student, as was her brother John, and she wanted to take the Fletcher School of Nursing's three-year course before transferring to a prestigious
