Chapter 11: Wheatland

Welcome to Wheatland!

     Eh-ehm coughs Mr. LaFollette from the stone porch to get the attention of everyone gathered in the slanting November sun on the front lawn of the historic family manor in Clarke County, Virginia. "Finally - the south and the north come together in love."

"I have the distinct honor," he continues with a nod to the Hankens as the laughter dies back, "to welcome the son of our beloved orchardist and his ale-making wife into our esteemed family."

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     This rather humble toast from the heir to an antebellum fortune was the result of his recent loss in the New Jersey senate race to Republican Walter Edge, a blow that helped to flip both chambers away from President Woodrow Wilson's policy of world engagement. Meanwhile, back in the old country, the allied October offensive had forced a German retreat culminating in a ceasefire to the bloody conflict and general armistice on November 11. Despite Wilson's pleas to the contrary, the U.S. would fail to sign the subsequent treaty of Versailles or to participate in the newly formed League of Nations, helping to set the stage for a German resurgence and the second world war.
   This return to populism was a reaction in part to a devastating flu epidemic that year. Nearly 700,000 Americans had died from respiratory failure before it was through, including the LaFollette's elderly African American nanny. Molly had barely survived her grippe and her grief on a liquid diet of cider and a daily dose of apple cider vinegar.

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     "I'm not m-much of a t-talker," Henry stutters, reaching down with his left hand to pull Molly up onto a round stone dais, the former auction block for the Preston family business.

"F-first I just want to," he proceeds, pausing while pulling off his herringbone scally, "to remember my f-friend Donato Biondi. Tom set me on this path, and then he died chasing the Krauts out of F-France."

"I want to thank Mr. LaFollette," he forges on, glancing down at Molly and warming up to his spellbound audience, "for the manager job at Calco. We make the best dyes from oil, and our chemists are also brewing fertilizers and medicines."

"Finally," he concludes with a wink toward his willful 17-year-old bride while holding up his left hand with a gold band on the stump of a ring finger, "I'd like to dedicate this new life to Mrs. Mary Preston Kern Thweatt LaFollette Hanken. That's a m-mouthful, she's a handful, and I'm thankful."

Auction block at Wheatland

Chapter 10: Lover's Leap

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/chimney-rock-nj-nr-bound-brook-1868881047

     "He'll never let me marry you," Molly cries as she hitches her horse to the post in front of the Haelig quarry in the Chimney Rock gap.

"Never you mind, Miss Molly," Henry soothes, taking her right arm in his left hand and leading her up the path in the orange glow of an October evening. "The threat of those old bones scuttling the Evergreens development ought to go a long way toward saving the orchard and settling your parents minds."

"They're from the old South," she groans, grabbing his hand in hers and pulling him up the rocky trail through the red and yellow leaves of the oak and poplar forest covering the south slope of First Watchung. "You just couldn't wed below station."

"We'll see about that," he laughs as they emerge from the woods to an expansive view of the Raritan Valley and he pulls himself up to the jutting rock. "Notice anything different about my arms?"

"Hank, hold on tight," she screams, a shiver running through her as she scrambles after him and straddles the basalt outcropping. "The librarian said this is where Winona and her lover leapt to their deaths."

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    The Lenape tale of a chief's daughter falling in love with a Dutch miner had moved west to the Delaware Water Gap along with her people when they were displaced by the settlement of New Holland. The beautiful and spurned Winona had leapt to her death, soon to be followed by the older Netherlander who had reconsidered too late. The oldest versions of this seventeenth century legend are instead placed at the Chimney Rock above the Middlebrook.
     Meanwhile, across the ocean and the centuries, the allied armies had broken through the Hindenburg Line at the second battle of Cambrai. The end of the Great War was in sight, though it would take another month of British and U.S. ground forces rooting out entrenched German troops to finish it. The largest number of American casualties for the entire war occurred in this one last push.

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     "Look at me!" Henry commands, holding Molly's arms around the rock, his arresting chestnut eyes catching her blue-turned-violet ones in the setting sun. "Tell your dad the Calco dye pool cured my stump infection."

"You can hold me without pain!" she marvels, breaking into a wide smile for the first time that day even as she's shaken by a trembling ache all over her body. "How will that change his mind?"

"He'll see dollars when he hears a daily soaking in dye for a week cured a rotten finger better than the doctor's bandages, Frenchie's prunella, mom's cider vinegar, or your old nanny's voodoo."

Chapter 9: Tropical Storm

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     "It's going to be a big one, Hank," exclaims his father as the wind picks up, whisking early October's browning leaves from the branches of the pear trees they're pruning. "See those big white birds?"

"Oh dad," Henry groans, dismissing the admonition even as he sees dark clouds gathering in the east, "it's black birds that bring trouble, remember?"

"Nothing superstitious about gulls coming up the Raritan when a storm's brewing in the bay," Henry's father patiently explains, laying down the ladder and gathering up his saws. "Let's pack it up and call it a day."

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     Mr. Hanken was right. A hurricane that devastated Bermuda a week before had deflected up the mid-Atlantic before tracking back toward the east coast. Although these tropical storms didn't receive official names from the U.S. Weather Bureau until 1953, people in central New Jersey knew that one would whip up the Raritan Bay every ten years or so. Henry had been a three-year-old and had no memory of the last one that had stripped the orchard on September 16, 1903, destroying the harvest and flooding downtown Bound Brook with torrential rains. 
    Since then the population of the heretofore sleepy village had more than doubled as bottomland and marshes were filled in by mostly Italian and Polish families with the ways and means to settle there. Their ways were work at the woolen mill and temporary housing at an Immigration House built by the LaFollettes. Their means was a new trolley line from New Brunswick to the Somerset County seat at Somerville. By 1918, nearly six thousand men, women, and children were packed into the square mile of tenable land, and nearly all of their houses were adjacent to one brook or another.

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     "Lord have mercy, what's that roaring sound?" Molly shouts over the howling wind early the next morning, leaning into Henry as they trudge down the trolley tracks toward the Talmadge Avenue bridge.

"It's just the Middlebrook running down the mountain," he soothes, switching sides to place his good hand around the shoulder of her long Macintosh, his worn wool aquascutum barely repelling the rain beating at their backs. "We'll make it to the point and back before it gets up to the bridge."

"Hurry!" she urges, shaking loose and running across the bridge while trying not to look at the muddy torrent. "We've got to get there before they're washed away."

     "Holy Joe, it's about to overflow," he exclaims as they reach the Calco dye pool. "You go on, I'll shore it up."

She splashes down the path beside the rushing Raritan as he starts plopping mud onto the leaking dam, leaning over to rinse his hands in the cyan water after each scoop.

     "That should do it," he smiles as the rain slows, hands on hips surveying the patched dam as Molly hurries back to join him. "Did you get my lucky things?"

"Dagonnit!" she curses, her normally ruddy complexion gone white. "The river's done washed away your cure."

Their trudge home is accompanied by a single caw repeated every half minute as a solitary big black bird glistening in the breakthrough rays of the eye of the storm flaps from sycamore to sycamore all the way back to Bound Brook.