A Good American by Alex George Page B

glass was sprinkled around his head. Frederick looked down in shock at the barman’s crumpled, empty face.
    “He does this every night,” said Kliever. “He’ll be fine by tomorrow. Help me with him, will you?”
    They carried the old man through the back door of the tavern and left him on a mattress behind the building. “He’ll wake up in a few hours and make his way home,” said Kliever as they went back inside. “Won’t remember a thing about it.”
    “What happens now?” asked Frederick.
    “Someone usually volunteers,” said Kliever. He looked at Frederick and scratched his nose.
    Frederick spent the rest of the evening behind the bar. It was a night he would never forget. Men greeted him warmly in German, and soon he was drowning happily in one long conversation. His worries about reaching Rocheport gradually dissipated in the warmth of the Nick-Nack’s friendly welcome.
    Hours later, Kliever and Frederick staggered back to Kliever’s house. Frederick sang arias as they weaved through the empty streets. He gazed up at the sky, so different from home. In Europe the stars hunkered down low across the night, dull and pendulous. Here, though, the heavens were filled with a million dazzling celestial bodies, each one casually brushing up to infinity.
    “I could get to like this place,” he said.
    “It’s home,” said Kliever.
    “Beatrice is a strange name for a town, though.”
    Kliever clapped him on the shoulder. “Come with me,” he said. After a short walk they arrived in the town’s main square, which was dominated by a large redbrick building, hulking and sinister in the shadows cast by the moonlight. It dwarfed the tidy, single-story shop fronts that surrounded it.
    “Church?” guessed Frederick.
    Kliever shook his head. “That’s the Caitlin County Courthouse,” he said. “Beatrice is the county seat. Here. Come and see this.” On the sidewalk in front of the courthouse there was a bronze statue of a middle-aged woman. She had a long nose and a grim expression on her face. The two men gazed up at her. Frederick leaned forward and read the plaque at the foot of the statue. It read beatrice eitzen .
    “Beatrice,” he said softly.
    “Her husband, Nathaniel Eitzen, founded this place,” said Kliever. “They were from South Carolina originally, but Eitzen had an itch he needed to scratch. He came west to seek his fortune. And he brought his wife with him.”
    “Doesn’t look as if she was too happy about it.”
    “Oh, she wasn’t. She missed the sunshine. In fact when they reached southern Indiana, she refused to go another step. She’d had enough. Told her husband to go on without her.”
    “And?”
    “And so he did. He hopped on his horse and drove out of town. Left her in the middle of nowhere. She had no choice but to wait for him to come back.” Kliever yawned. “Anyway, after a week or so, Eitzen started to feel guilty about what he’d done. So he wrote her a letter, asking her to come and join him.” He pointed up at the statue. “But she was as stubborn as he was, and refused. This went on for a couple of months—he’d beg her to come, she’d say no. Every day, of course, he was moving farther west, until he arrived here, when he decided that he’d gone far enough. So he established a township, and pretty soon there was a fair-sized group who joined him here.”
    “But not his wife,” guessed Frederick.
    “Not his wife,” agreed Kliever. “That’s when Eitzen had the bright idea to name the town after her, to see if that might tempt her to come.”
    “Did it work?”
    Kliever nodded. “Not even she could resist having a town named
after her. Eitzen put on a big parade to welcome her, and had this statue made in her honor. So the carriage pulled into the town, and stopped right about here. Everyone had turned out to welcome her. There was a hush from the crowd as she climbed down from the carriage and looked around. She slowly took it all in. Then she