This was their chance, she thought, to enfold Breitsprecher into Duke Logging. After their longest and most passionate meeting Duke’s Board had suggested making Breitsprecher a buyout offer. The Breitsprecher logging concern was worth ten of the little independent cutters who cleared fifty acres and retired. But Lavinia sensed it might be more diplomatic to offer a partnership. Despite their peculiar ideas on clear-cutting and replanting stumpland, Breitsprechers had the reputation of a highly reputable business that dealt fairly with loggers and dealers. And while Armenius was alive they had been successful. They also had the reputation of being honest, and while too much honesty could hold a company back, there were many people who still believed it a virtue. A partnership would add luster to Duke Logging, considered ruthless and devious by other timbermen. Lavinia was still grateful to Dieter for his help in teaching her how to read and apply the Scribner and Doyle scale rules to raw logs; and she was curious to know the details of Armenius’s rumor-tainted death two years past. But would Dieter agree? He had always seemed rather aloof. So his request to attend the inventors’ gathering seemed fortunate.
• • •
Two Civil War veterans, Parker Brace and Hudson Van Dipp, both from Cherokee County, Georgia, both house carpenters who had been friends before secession, fought for the south until they were captured at Shiloh and stuffed into Chicago’s notorious Camp Douglas. They survived in the squalid pen where there was no medical treatment, no hygienic tubs or basins, where scurvied prisoners sat in apathy. Brace and Van Dipp did their best to survive by constructing a complicated trap from a piece of wire and a crushed tin cup and lived on rats. To stay sane they made a carpenter’s game for themselves: through talk and scratched diagrams in the dirt they built an imaginary house from the foundation to the weather vane.
The dirty Yanks offered choices: be returned to the south as a prisoner of war; take an oath of allegiance and enlist in the U.S. Army or Navy; take the oath and be sent north to labor on public works; or take the oath and return home if that home lay within the Union Army lines. Brace and Van Dipp scorned these alternatives. But the day came when both showed symptoms of scurvy and Van Dipp said, “I am goin to take their goddamn oath and join their goddamn army and get out a the goddamn rain, get the goddamn hell out a here. Can’t git much worse than this and maybe find somethin I kin eat. Sick a goddamn raw rat.” Both took the oath and the two new Galvanized Yankees were sent off to fight the Indians in Texas. Van Dipp had never imagined such a dry hard place existed in the world. The sun rushed up in a tide of gilt that became the flat white of noon, then the torpid decay of visibility in an evening dusk still throbbing with accumulated heat. Brace was felled by arrows and lay for nine hours in the dust hearing the scream of a redtail cut the incandescent sky, but Van Dipp was never wounded. Mustered out, they went back to Georgia briefly, recoiled from Reconstruction, found their families recoiled from them and called them traitors.
Together they returned to Chicago, where the city was literally exploding with demands for carpenters. Hundreds of people wanted houses built yesterday. During a rare week of idleness Van Dipp said, “Parker, let’s don’t wait until we got the next job. We-all kin make up a stack of windows and doors beforehand. No telling what we’ll build, but I guarantee she’ll have windows and a door.” They added cupboards and sets of stairs and even wall sections that could be hauled to a site. It made putting up a house noticeably faster. It was this habit of prefabrication that led to a partner and a grander idea.
One morning, as hot and humid as only a Chicago summer day could be, a sharp-angled man in a wrinkled linen suit came into the workshop and stood looking at the stacks of made-up windows and staircases stored there.
“Good day. Do I have the pleasure of greeting Van Dipp and Brace?”
“Don’t guarantee how much pleasure is in it, but that’s us,” said Van Dipp. “Who-all mought you be?”
“Charles Munster Weed, sir, an architect. I have a contract to build a street of ten houses and I want good carpenters who will work quickly. You have that reputation. Are you currently involved in a construction project?” He looked pointedly at the extra windows and stairs.
“Not much this minute. Them’s frames and stairs we make up ahead to save us time. Doors and frames, pantry cupboards and such.”
When Weed learned that several of his houses stood right in front of him only waiting for assembly, he hired the two carpenters on the spot. The work went as merrily as kittens playing with feathers.
They met again a week after Weed’s houses were finished and the architect’s almost rabid enthusiasm fertilized the Idea; he understood where their preconstruction process could go. “Why, you could build a town that way. You could have a dozen different designs of houses so people could pick the one they liked, you could pack one or more up and ship them to wherever on the railroad.” His voice rose to an unmasculine pitch.
“We know where they-all need it, too,” said Brace. “Out on them ol prairies. No trees, no wood, but they got a have houses. Some a them are a-buildin dirt houses, full a bugs and snakes. They want barns. They want churches. I guess they would buy a house all packaged, ready to go. But the problem is it takes money to git them packages built.”
“And we ain’t got it,” said Van Dipp.
“Schoolhouses,” raved the architect, rowing his arms back and forth. “Shops and courthouses. They need towns and this is a way to get one to them.”
“We can bundle the parts up and ship by rail. Make the crates the right size fit in a farm wagon.”
“Yes! Yes! I could design different models, let the customers choose what they want. You listen to me! I got some investment money. I’d like to work with you boys — if you are willing.” They were willing and on the spot formed Van Dipp, Brace and Weed, and named their venture Prairie Homes.
• • •
More than a year had passed since Lavinia had sent the two genealogists out to search. Another autumn was closing in. Now she had a letter from R. R. Tetrazinni, who wrote that he had “discovered something you may find interesting” and wished an appointment. Lavinia named a day in late summer just before Duke’s Inventor’s Exhibition. To be fair she wrote to Sextus Bollard and asked what he had found. She was surprised when a letter came back from Bollard’s nephew, Tom Bollard, saying Mr. Bollard had returned from foreign parts in a grave condition and had died shortly thereafter; he, Tom, had taken over the bookshop and would send on the papers his uncle had amassed for Lavinia. These arrived before Tetrazinni’s visit, and Lavinia read that every one of Bollard’s leads had played out in a dead end. Charles Duquet had left no trace in Parisian records and it was thought that any papers naming his people had likely burned in the French Revolution. Of the Dutch connection Lennart Vogel had been the last remaining relative.
• • •
R. R. Tetrazinni arrived punctually. His red beard was trimmed close and his spectacles transmuted to a gold-rimmed pince-nez. He carried two leather cases. Annag brought him a cup of coffee and put it near his elbow. He took out his papers and began a long recitation of his travels and discoveries. Annag Duncan sat near, taking a few notes. Lavinia listened with increasing impatience. Why could he not get to the point?
“Mr. Tetrazinni, let me ask you bluntly, have you found any Duke descendants?”