Thunder City (28 page)

“Did you bring stakes?” Ford hailed him when he drew near.

“Steaks?”

“To mark the spots. Never mind. I’ll remember.” He twisted his heel into the moist earth. “We’ll build the steel mill here.”

“Steel mill?” Harlan was turning into a parrot.

“We’re going to have to dredge the river. The docks will go in there. We’ll have our own ships.”

Ford seemed to be in a state of deep shock. Harlan decided to go along with it until he could talk him into going home, where Clara could call a doctor. “Who’s going to build the engines, Horace Dodge?”

“They’ll
come
with engines. I’m not going into the shipbuilding business. They’ll bring down ore and limestone from the Lakes and drop their cargoes right in our backyard. We’ll shunt everything around on our own railroads. We’ll have a separate power plant, our own telephone switchboard, our own glass plant, our own police force.”

“It sounds like you’re planning a city.”

“A country. If the Jews take over the world the day after we cut the ribbon, we’ll be able to operate independently.”

“What do the Jews have to do with anything?”

“Jew judges, Jew lawyers, that Jew William C. Whitney. They can’t stand to see a gentile raise himself up above them. Only they won’t be able to do a damn thing about it once Rouge is built. I’ll have the entire Ford business behind one fence where I can keep an eye on it and them out.”

“There is no Ford business. They’re shutting you down.”

“I thought so too. I almost sold out to Durant. I threw back his offer when I found out he was going to sign up Buick with the A.L.A.M. Those people all stick together. I’m filing for an appeal and I’m posting bonds to protect our customers from lawsuits.”

“Can the company afford it?”

“I want to show you something.” Ford patted all his pockets, said, “Wup!”, took off his hat, and drew something from inside the sweatband, which he held out to Harlan. Harlan studied his partner’s face closely before taking the object. There was no sign of instability in his stark features, the steady burning of the eyes set deep beneath the bony shelf of his brow, but then there never was. He had heard Ford go on about the Jews before, but that was a common theme in the business world and he had not thought much about it. What he had just said was dangerously close to a speech.

The object was a brown leather postcard of the kind sold in railroad stations. Some people mailed them, but most kept them as mementoes of trips far from home. This one had a pen-and-ink cartoon of a farmer in overalls addressing a pair of motormen clad in dusters beside their generic touring car, sunk up to its axles in mud. The caption read:

Farmer—“Huh! Feller come along here ’bout an hour ago all right—with a
FORD
!”

Harlan handed it back with a dutiful chuckle. “It’s cute.”

“Cute, hell. I picked it up in New York. They’re all over the country. And that ain’t all. I bought a paper on the train and there was a piece in it about this man that was on his deathbed. When the priest asked him if he had a last request he asked that they bury his Ford with him, because he said he never was in a hole it couldn’t get him out of.”

That one made Harlan laugh out loud. “Is it true?”

“No. Newspapers are bunk. It doesn’t matter, though. They’re telling these stories in joke books and such all over the country. Did you hear about the man in Duluth who drove his T touring car up three flights of steps and won a hundred-dollar bet?”

“Bunk?”

“No, that was real. I saw a photograph. People everywhere love the T. You can’t stop that in court.” He returned the leather postcard to his hat, ran his finger carefully around the sweatband, and put the hat back on, squaring it off two inches above his eyes.

“That’s not much evidence to build a factory on. Do you own this property?”

“I’ve made an offer. I’m going to build my new house on part of it. Too many people know the place on Edison Street. Everybody seems to spot me these days. I even tried false whiskers for a while, but they didn’t work. I guess they recognize the car.” His own town car was parked nearby at a lopsided angle with one wheel propped up on an old muskrat hut. It was one of the japan black paint jobs he’d gone to exclusively when tests confirmed that the color dried more quickly than all the others, allowing for a greater number of vehicles to be manufactured in less time. Overnight the red, blue, and green options disappeared. He’d even had the impudence to advertise the lack of choice: “Available in any color you like, as long as it’s black.” Sales continued to soar, and Ford advertisements encouraged the public to “watch the Fords go by.” The episode of the paint demonstrated that Henry Ford was not a man to sit around waiting for anything; not even to stake out prospective buildings on real estate belonging to someone else.

“How many people are you planning to employ at this plant?” Harlan asked.

“A hundred thousand.”

He nodded, as if the figure held no shock for him. He felt detached, a disinterested observer eavesdropping on a conversation between two strangers in a swamp. “What does Couzens say?”

“He’s against it. He’s against sharing stock with the employees as well. That’s how I know it’s a good idea. The old bear is against anything that hasn’t been done before. If he’d been with me in ’99 he’d have tried to talk me out of going into the automobile business.”

“You want to make your employees stockholders in Ford?”

“It’s an idea I’m playing around with. In a couple of years, automobiles will be going two abreast, in two directions on Woodward, and at the same time. The men who build those cars are going to be rewarded for their work, whether we decide to reward them or not. A shorter workday’s coming, and so is a daily wage. It will be five dollars, maybe as much as ten.”

“If you start paying five dollars a day, every laborer in this country will hop a freight to Detroit.”

“Jews too, no doubt. But you can’t open a window and not get flies.”

Evidently having considered this statement a sufficient farewell, Ford squished over to his town car, cranked it into life, got in, and backed down off the muskrat hut, twisting the wheel expertly toward Jefferson as he did so. He was the best driver in the world, having had more practice than anyone else living. Harlan Crownover stood watching the boxy car’s retreat with his hands in his pockets, brackish water soaking his feet to the ankles. Standing in this unlikely wonderland he could not make up his mind whether he were in partnership with the March Hare or the Mad Hatter.

And he wondered if it was worth what it had cost.

Edith Hampton Crownover filled out a form authorizing a wire transfer of five hundred dollars to Gus and Katherine Gorlich in Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory, and handed it to the clerk at Western Union, who drew a line through
Territory
without bothering to explain that Oklahoma was now a state; the error was a common one. He accepted a draft in the amount of the transfer and wrote her out a receipt. She then gave him money to send her telegram informing her daughter Katherine of the transaction, thanked the young man, and took the streetcar home.

She enjoyed the rebellion of using public transportation nearly as much as she did her new wealth independent of her husband’s. Abner II, obsessed with maintaining distance between his family’s present status and the indignity and poverty of his youth, had always insisted that a Crownover vehicle be employed for any excursion beyond a few blocks. The arrangements were tedious, and she had formed the habit of turning down promising invitations and sending the hired girl on errands she would have preferred to take care of herself. Abner’s horror that the past might repeat itself amounted to a superstition, preventing her from confiding to anyone that she sometimes envied the working class its freedom to take advantage of those conveniences that were designed for everyone, and by implication denied those who were not just everyone. She found it liberating to board the first car that came along, pay her fare, and step off at any stop without having to instruct the driver when to pick her up. If she decided to stay longer, or finished her errand more quickly than anticipated and decided to go back early, she had merely to board the car whose schedule coincided with her own. For the first time in her life she felt a connection with the Common Man who was always appearing in the editorial cartoons in the newspapers. And standing was easier on her back.

The coin she gave the conductor was hers, as were the ones she had paid the telegrapher and the five hundred dollars she had wired. None of it came from Abner. When her husband’s doctors had sent him home to an uncertain recovery at best, he had asked for his lawyer, and the two had shut themselves up in Abner’s bedroom for two hours. The lawyer emerged with a new will and power of attorney over the personal finances of Abner Crownover II. As the two men were of one mind in most things, and in view of the fact that her husband had not spoken to her since he suffered his attack on the loading dock at Crownover Coaches, Edith had elected to make no contact with the lawyer for any purpose other than to forward Abner’s medical bills to his office. She drew all her expenses from the dividends Crownover Coaches paid her for the use of her stock. The value of those shares had decreased alarmingly for a brief period after the announcement was made that Crownover had agreed to furnish the Ford Motor Company with bodies for its automobiles—most of the stockholders outside the family, a conservative lot, had sold out their interests quickly—but began to swing back up at the end of the first week of trading. Following the introduction of the Model T, the stock’s climb was steady, and when the first-quarter profits were announced, Edith was told her 38 percent of Crownover Coaches was worth 4.2 million dollars. She had begun wiring money to her daughter and son-in-law that day.

Abner III, her eldest son, had by dint of a mother’s gentle encouragement sufficiently overcome his dread of making decisions to sign a proxy form allowing Harlan to vote his six percent as well, which with Harlan’s own three gave him control of the company’s fortunes. His share made Abner III independently wealthy, but Harlan had had the good sense to arrange for a custodianship so that his older brother might never be burdened with the choice of what to do with it. She found bitter amusement in the knowledge that Edward, whose five percent was now worth ten times what it had been when Abner II was in charge, refused to exchange more than perfunctory greetings with her when he came to visit his father, but cashed his dividends without comment. She was not devastated. She loved all her sons equally, but she liked Edward least.

And so the world had changed, in the main for the better; but as she stepped down from the car, accepting the gracious and unnecessary assistance of the conductor, all her concerns were for Harlan. She had seen what the company had done to Abner II, wearing at him day by day almost imperceptibly, like nature’s elements conspiring to destroy a building in the most reprehensible way, one molecule at a time, for suggesting that a man may improve upon a mountain. She hoped she would not live to see her middle son worn round at the edges and discolored so that none who had not known him in his youth were aware how different he had been from all the others. The kingdom of heaven belonged to the man who survived success; as yet it was unclaimed.

She removed her hat and gloves in the Queen Anne’s foyer, from which she had banished the ponderous oak-and-brass Black Forest halltree and dour portrait of William McKinley—a gift from the president in gratitude for the phaeton Crownover had designed for the 1901 inauguration—and replaced them with a Tiffany floor lamp and prints of English gardens, thus relieving the room of that somber bass note that made visitors feel as if they had come to pay their respects to an important corpse. Elsewhere in the house she had ordered rugs taken up, woodwork painted, heavy bronze replaced with airy crystal; had, in effect, breezed from room to room like Queen Mab, turning dark to light and lead to gold with the sparkling wand of her stock portfolio. She had felt like a bride—if the bride were married to anyone but Abner Crownover.

After confirming the dinner menu with the cook, she went upstairs to Abner’s bedroom, where she knocked from old habit and entered unbidden from new. The male nurse, burly and balding in his twenties, was rising from the rocking chair beside the bed when she came in. She waved him back into it. A glance at her husband, breathing loudly on his back with his eyes open, answered any question she might have put to the nurse, and as the young man interested himself once again in his paperbound book she went to the west window and opened the curtains to let in the afternoon light, smiled at her husband, whose face was thoroughly simian now in the absence of all expression, touched the hand that rested atop the counterpane—touched it with true affection—and went out to solve the problem of the paneling in the dining room.

After she left, Abner II lay absolutely without thinking, a luxury he had not known until the destruction of his stomach lining. At such times the constant clawing pain, its edges dulled by a solution of morphine in water prescribed by his doctors, seemed to be drawing all the electrical impulses from his brain. He was aware of his surroundings—the regimental-striped paper on the walls, the milk-glass fixture in the ceiling, the nurse, who smelled aggressively of Dr. Sloan’s liniment and Lifebuoy soap—he had a fair idea of the time of day and even the day of the week, and he remembered, but he could not be said to think, or if he did the thoughts had no more significance than the movement of the gears in a clock whose face no one consulted. This too he attributed to the morphine, and wondered if anyone else was aware of this benefit. Without it, nothing would prevent the thoughts from shredding the rest of his insides.

He was not deluded. He knew the depth of his betrayal and the necessity of refusing communication with those who had played him false. Neither Edith nor Abner III nor Harlan—not Harlan, never Harlan, until hell burned out and was rekindled and burned out again—had heard a word from his lips or managed to capture his gaze since that day on the dock. This was their punishment, the only one he had still in his power to deal out: the denial by word or look that they existed in the world he now inhabited. It was small, but considering that eye contact and speech were his only links to the world he had once trod as one of the seven or eight Americans whose opinion counted, it was absolute. That it was not enough did not concern him, because he did not think.