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 Bergiund wed Anna Nyborg, seventeen, Osloborn, 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-sevenyear-old Dutch dairy farmhand, and Willem Berglund, thirty-nineyear-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 _wonderful_ soil for growing cabbage.
So Piet DeVries and Willem Bergiund 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.
Marcella DeVries and the twins Will and George Berglund were born three months apart, in 1912. Marcella was born first. Piet was ecstatic. He had wanted a girl and he got one–chubby and pink and redheaded like him. Willem Berglund wanted a male heir, and got what he wanted–twice over. But George was a sickly infant, born at half the weight of his healthy twin brother, and was quickly diagnosed as hopelessly backward. At the age of three, when Will was well on his way to speaking in the precisely modulated tones of an educated adult, George was unable to stand, drooled like an idiot, and flapped his arms like a chicken.
Willem hated the child. He considered him a hideous punishment, perpetrated by a hateful God for whom he no longer had any use. He hated his wife, he hated God, he hated cabbage, and he hated Tunnel City, Wisconsin. But most of all he now truly hated Piet DeVnes.