“Green Prairie,” the southern town, and “River City” on the north bank, were loyal to different states though connected even then by bridges a few hundred feet long. The loyalty, and rivalry, grew after Sumter: River City’s state was free, Green Prairie’s, slave.
After the Civil War, lead and zinc were discovered beneath the prairie sod. In distant hills, at the century’s turn, a dam heaped up the river’s energy. Hydroelectric plants followed.
Oil was found in Bugle County and good coking coal in Tead. Smoke covered the prairies from then on. And the immigrants arrived.
They unpacked their carpetbags. They sold skills learned in the mills and mines of Europe. They created lichenlike slums, went to school, entered politics, became the gangsters of the twenties and some, the heroes of the Second World War.
By then the combined population of River City and Green Prairie approached a million.
Where the sullen, sweating mules had brought the barges to rest, where Sioux arrows had fired cottonwood logs in the fort, skyscrapers stood.
By then, there were families who could look back to four or five generations of unbroken residence in the region. Some of these “natives” were rich and powerful; some were poor; but most were ordinary people—prospering modestly, loving freedom, hating interference, intelligent by the lights of their society, fair citizens and superb neighbors. The Conner family in Green Prairie was such.
Their white frame house had been built in 1910, set back in a big lawn on Walnut Street in the “residential south section,” then a long trolley ride from the busy downtown district. The houses around were like the Conner house in atmosphere even though some were frame, some brick and some stucco. The people, too, were like the Conners: indistinguishable from millions in the nation, at first glance—yet, like the millions, on any second look more individualist than most other people of the earth. At the end of the Second War, during the great expansion, the Conners had thrived. But like all their fellow citizens, and more keenly than many, they shared the doubts and anxieties of the new age.
Its very voice influenced their lives, even their domestic lives, as the years chased each other swiftly, rewardingly, after the century’s mid-point. Green Prairie and River City were halves of a happy, urban world, separated by a river and a political boundary but united by bridges both actual and spiritual. Typically American, content, constructive, the Conners, too, were happy. And yet….
The sound came through the open windows of the dining room. Each of the five members of the Conner family was differently affected. Henry, the father, stopped all movement to listen.