“O, why did he have to come today?” Ashley Kracl groaned, hanging her head over a beef paste sandwich and a glass of milk, an early lunch. A lock of dark-brown hair fell from behind her ear and brushed the forehead of the infant in her lap. The baby started, flinching her arms and tangling her fingers in her mother’s loose hair. She let out a coo, which was dampened by the patter of light rain and the continual rustle of the trees outside.

Over the course of several minutes, an overcrowded wagon had been driving down the quarter-mile stretch of gravel leading from Nebraska Highway 2 to the Kracl farmhouse. Its passengers, although uniformly dressed in practical workwear, were otherwise sundry: young, middle aged, old, of various associations or of none at all, such as one finds on a public bus. While the wagon was yet some way off, those in the kitchen had heard coins rattling in a tin can nailed to the side of the driver’s bench, the till. The drive arced near enough to the rear of the farmhouse before it curved around to the front circular drive that Ashley had recognized two poncho-draped figures through the kitchen bay window: a certain father and son.

“Maybe you could go to your room and finish packing up,” Ashley heard her mother suggest, preempting what doubtless would have proven to be awkward questions by her aunt and grandmother, who were drinking sun tea out of coffee mugs and solving crosswords at the other end of the kitchen table.

Ashley had been packed for days, so eagerly was she anticipating summer vacation. Her father and grandfather were out in the livery stable just then, loading trunks and suitcases onto an elegant, jet-black stagecoach that her sister Christine Kruger had sent to bring her and her aunt Caroline to the lake house. But from her vantage point at the kitchen island, her mother too had caught sight of this certain father and son among the passengers of the wagon, and had graciously offered Ashley an excuse to extricate herself. She walked over to the table and reached out to accept her baby granddaughter.

“I got her!” snapped Ashley, pressing her daughter tight against her chest and turning her shoulders away. The baby was enveloped in her loose hair and the sleeves of her crew neck sweatshirt as she stormed off–only she did not go to her room. She thumped in her socks on the smooth wooden floor, out of the kitchen and through the entryway, which lay in plain view of the circle drive through wide-open double front doors. Ashley could see the driver nodding his appreciation under an umbrella as the disembarking passengers dropped coins into the till. Further off, Luke and John Kracl could be seen coming in from the livery stable. She could hear muted sloshes and crunches through the glass as her father and grandfather led the visitors to the front door, and she scrambled so as to make only as brief an appearance as possible through the storm doors. She flounced down a short, narrow hallway papered with navy blue damask, a shield motif, over grainy wainscoting, along which ran a pair of two-by-sixes set on wood blocks, a makeshift bench that Jack had set up for the convenience of applicants to the salt works, of which the Kracl house lately received dozens per day.

“Don’t you dare hire him!” Ashley erupted as she barged into the office.

Jack was by himself. For a moment, he sat nonplussed behind a pile of papers at the tanker desk which occupied the center of the room, wide-set eyes blinking, letting his hand travel under the collar of his short-sleeve shirt and back behind his neck.

“That’s some nerve he’s got,” he then scoffed, shaking his head. The frenzy of Ashley’s entrance had momentarily disarmed her brother, but her opening words otherwise plainly announced the unwanted applicant. He gathered up the loose papers and leveled them into a neat little stack next to a plastic souvenir cup. “I guess he’s hard up against it as the rest.”

“You cannot just ignore this!” Ashley angled her shoulder towards her brother and jutted over the desk, her hip knocking a tin can filled with cheap plastic pens. “His lie is all anyone else seems to talk about. I heard it all when we last drove into town! I could practically make out the exact words of a couple of sophomores one aisle over–what would they know?” She let out bitterly, her scoff turning into a sob as she lowered herself into the steel chair across the desk from her brother. “–but they couldn’t even be bothered to whisper. And now you’re going to–what?–just sign him up and let him ruin my life around here now, too?”

“They’ll be miles away. The plans I drew up put the salt works over in the east fields, south of Lakeside.” Jack pointed vaguely out the full-height window from his desk, his gesture blunted by the fact that the window faced the wrong direction. “It’s not like they’ll be coming to the house for lunch or anything. “Besides,” Jack clenched his shoulders together at expressing this inference, “if he’s here, he must be ready to–”

“That ship has sailed, Jack!”

“Oh, Ash!” Jack threw his arms out wide.

“Don’t you ‘Oh, Ash!’ me, Jack! I’ve put up with this lie of his for what–a whole year now? The way they look at me, the ones who took his side.” Jack stood up behind the desk, scratching his fleshy neck.

Out in the entryway, the storm door opened, and an irregular cadence of work boots thudded on the wooden floor, pneumatic door closer hissing as the glass panels banged over and over against the shoulders and backs of the men following John and Luke Kracl inside.

“So you want me to–what exactly?”

“Just fucking send him away! Oh, God.” Ashley sunk into the metal chair across the desk and buried her eyes in the palm of her free hand, the one not holding her baby. Her brother walked over and sealed the heavy wooden door of the office. From outside came muffled creaks and stomps as the men took their seats along the bench.

“For better or worse, he’s part of our–”

“No, no. He’s not. He made that very clear when I told him the news last year.”

By then she was starting to hear her father talking to the applicants out in the hallway, their talk muffled by the thickness and rubber sweep of the office door.

“If I don’t hire him, who else will?”

“That’s not your problem! Remember, he was going to make it big with that football scholarship, right?” Ashley scoffed bitterly. “Anyways, the way he is, Marian and I wouldn’t see a cent of child support.”

“Turn him away? Oh, Ash, he’d have to leave town, join up with some migrant caravan! I mean, he’s a scoundrel, but that–” Jack shook his head and leaned back against a tall, metal filing cabinet. “–that’s just too low.” Ashley hung her head again over the baby rooting deeper into the folds of her sweatshirt. A frog in her throat turned her voice low and full.

“Not too low, Jack.” Ashley bent further inward upon herself, down upon the baby in her arms. “Not for him.” Jack paced over to the window and looked out through the aluminum blinds. Black clouds lent the landscape a bluish hue.

“We’d never hear from him again.”

“Oh, and you think I’m crying about that?”

Jack paused. “Marian will need her father.”

“A father–now that’s a thought! Wouldn’t that be nice?”

The rubber sweep of the door squeaked, and Ashley fell silent, wheeling around on the vinyl seat pad of her heavy steel chair. Luke Kracl quietly admitted himself into the room, and Ashley could see a row of applicants seated on two-by-sixes through the open door. Down at the end of the hallway, past all the men in dripping wet jeans and plaid pearl snap shirts, stood a sullen eighteen-year-old in a black long-sleeve waffle shirt, wet around the collar from the rain. The boy looked down at his bundled-up poncho, eyes disappearing under the frayed bill of his ballcap. The rubber door sweep squeaked again as her father sealed the door behind himself, surveying the scene before him.

Ashley did nothing to simulate composure. Her chest still heaved from the remnants of her sobbing even as the features of her face had sharpened during her tirade. The fraught image she presented just then to her father, she knew, left no doubt she had observed the arrival of the Leudkes, and she gathered from Luke’s pointed quietness that in fact she must have been a little too loud just before.

Her brother stood up straight, his heft banging out a metallic thunk against the side of a tall filing cabinet he had been leaning up against and sending a pendant chain swinging into the arm of a desk lamp which sat unused on top of it, cord wrapped around its base. The brass dinged once or twice, then died down. Luke raised his hand to excuse his son.

“I can get these men signed up out in the dining room.” Luke offered, then swept the surface of the tanker desk with his eyes and picked up the neat stack of employment agreements Jack had prepared. “Grandpa and I got the bags all loaded up, Ash. Have them come get me before you set out.” Then he cracked the door and bade the applicants all come with him so he could enroll them as employees of the salt works.

Ashley lurked just behind the door, peering out between brass hinges through the gap between door and frame, waiting for Brandon and his father to be safely out of sight so she could leave. Just as the last of the applicants was about to turn the corner at the end of the hallway, her brother stepped up next to her.

“Hold up!” Jack called their father back and went behind the tanker desk. “I drew up too many forms for teamsters.” The applicants watched from the end of the hallway as Jack flipped through a folder he had pulled out from a drawer. “I need one more digging evaporation pools,” he said, wetting his finger and sliding a different form out of the file. “Let’s just say,” he began, striding back to the doorway and sizing up the applicant pool before deciding how to put it most innocently,”–whoever is the youngest." Jack handed the additional employment agreement to Luke, who lingered for a moment with raised brow before Jack and Ashley, but accepted it without another word. “Once they are dug, we can see about a transfer.” Ashley watched Brandon whither as her father strode back down the hall with papers in hand. He fell in line with the others and slunk along behind.

Ashley sat in the corner of the Kruger stagecoach on a blue velvet cushion which, tethered with loose cloth loops, slid back and forth a few inches at a time along the smooth wooden bench seat as they made the drive from Antioch to Lakeside along Nebraska Highway 2. Her baby girl wrestled with the folds of her sweatshirt, its small cries of discomfort drowned out by the rumble of wheels and the creaking of axles. Ashley righted herself constantly with minute exertions, thrusts of the foot against the lacquered floor or arching of the back into a velvet curtain that hung from a brass rod tied back next to her head, and switched her baby from arm to arm. The rocking of the coach eventually lulled the baby to sleep, and the young mother leaned her head uncomfortably against the curtain. Warm, humid air slowly seeped into the cab through the cracked window over her head.

Across from Ashley sat Aunt Caroline, her veiny hand covering a lukewarm mug of sun tea resting on her linen pant leg. The two had set out from the Kracl ranch an hour earlier, had been trailed for a short time by the stage wagon bringing the job applicants back to Antioch, but had by that point separated from it and been driving all alone on the highway for a good hour, an interval which the two had spent in awkward silence, each having on her mind a conversation they had overheard back at the farmhouse.

The driver had been hitching up the team for their eight-mile, mid-morning drive to Lakeside. Outside the coach, just on the other side of the glass, the young man who riding shotgun with them that morning had been stringing a cartridge belt around his waist, gazing out over the property line and paying no heed to the supplicant father and son addressing Ashley’s parents nearby on the stoop.

“Luke, Mary,” Mr. Leudke had begun, “Brandon and I talked the other day.” A brief pause had followed, which in anyone else would have signaled tact and consideration, but which from Mr. Leudke betokened only embarrassment and guilt. “He came clean,” he had continued. Ashley and her aunt had listened in silence. The angle of the stagecoach had precluded any view of the conversation, but the cracked window had made it impossible for Ashley and her aunt not to overhear. “Isn’t that right, Brandon?”

The shotgun rider had been ducking periodically to load shells into his hunting belt a handful at a time out of an ammo box he had balanced on the iron rung of the mounting block under the carriage door.

“Marian will need a father,” Brandon had said somberly. Ashley had sat frozen in the cab, shoulders clenched in rage at this boy who, at her own front door, was having his father apologize on his behalf, the boy who for months had denied his paternity.

“We want to be part of her life,” Mr. Leudke had appealed. “–if there is any way.”

At this, Luke had broken his reserved silence to assure the Leudkes that he and his wife would speak to their daughter about it in good time, that the girl would be at the lake all summer, but that maybe in the fall they could revisit the question. Ashley brooded on this as the carriage raced away.

“Well, dear, how should we occupy ourselves this summer?” Aunt Caroline broke the silence with this question put to Ashley, whose eyes had been following the few water droplets still dripping in occasional spurts down the windowpane, ending her reverie. Over the highway, the clouds were opening up, the birds beginning to chirp and flutter to and fro, and the sun shone through the window. “Or rather, how should we best relax? Christine hired a nanny and a nurse for Marian in Lakeside, you lucky girl,” she chuckled. “I can hardly speak of any ‘occupation’ for you amid such luxury.” Ashley sat upright, her mind just now loosening its grip on the problem that had vexed her on the Kracl ranch right up to her very departure and coming to hover now over the long, indefinite summer before her in Lakeside. “It’s just the thing for you right now: time to think about what comes next.”

Ashley had spend the months of spring adapting herself to motherhood. In years past, a summer at the lake house would have foretold swimming with her girlfriends, fishing with brothers and cousins, and passing whole afternoons wound up in tire swings or stretched out on quilts in the long, sparse grass of the backyard. The anxious expression on her face just now, however, gave her aunt to understand that she had not yet considered what the impending summer meant for her in her present condition, untethered as it certainly would be from past routines and childhood pastimes, and relieved as she stood to be from the tedium of nursing and diaper changes. What the even more nebulous fall beyond it forebode, for that matter, she had not the faintest inkling.

“I don’t know what I’ll do, Aunt Caroline.”

“Oh, we don’t need to make any plans, really. I was just thinking,” she waved her hand dismissively, sloshing a bit of tea. “Even just swimming or reading here and there in old magazines are plans enough for a mother enjoying some hard-earned rest, I would think. I won’t get up to much more than that myself!”

Although Lakeside must have still lain many miles up ahead, the coach rolled to a stop. The driver opened a little sliding window above Aunt Caroline’s head, which communicated with the cab. Aunt Caroline looked up behind herself. Through the slit, the women could see only the fringe of a denim pant leg and the mud-caked boot of the driver–or perhaps of the shotgun rider, who sat next to him there on the driver’s bench.

“Ladies, there’s a caravan coming down the highway up ahead. Looks like Mexicans.” The farmland on either side of the highway, as Ashley knew–for it was a Kracl possession–mostly lacked county road access. “There’s no good exit.” The sandhills stretched on for miles around, covered in sparse green grass and patches of wildflowers. A copse of rough, scraggly trees was growing up along the roadside, obstructing their view of a sandy-banked alkaline lake to the south and a Quonset hut that was going up on the far side of it. “We’ll just have to go on through. Now, I wouldn’t worry, Miss Kracl and Mrs. Scherer, but can I just have you lock the doors, please?” The driver closed the slit.

The women shot each other anxious glances as they considered the sight they presented just then in the jaunty stagecoach of Mr. Kruger, agribusiness titan and quite possibly the migrants’ former employer, if these were the laid-off workers from the plant in Alliance. Aunt Caroline drew the curtains.

The team set back off at the crack of a whip. The women peered out from behind the curtains at the migrants who began filing past on both sides, yielding to the majestic stagecoach that drove swiftly down the dashed midline of the highway. They were Hispanic men in sun-bleached jeans, dirty ball caps, and straw hats. A plastic water jug hung from a strap slung over some old man’s shoulder, its bottom scraping against the concrete pavement as its bearer limped along. Another, younger one wearily carried a sleeping toddler on his shoulders.

A yell issued from the crowd outside. It was something in Spanish. The stagecoach stopped abruptly, and Ashley heard the stomp of boots on the driver’s platform.

“Make way, you hear?” A shotgun cocked.

Thunk!–Something slammed against the front corner of the carriage, then came a crash of breaking glass. Ashley found herself crouching on the floor over her baby, clutching her aunt’s linen pant leg. The blast of a shotgun rang out, and then, either at that or at the simultaneous command of the driver, the carriage jolted forward. A chunk of concrete tumbled past Ashley’s face over the glass-covered floor as the team of horses started off at a gallop. The stagecoach jumped up and down a few times and rocked from side to side, sending Aunt Caroline to the floor beside Ashley and the baby. The woman rolled on the floor, holding the thin skin of her veiny wrist and shrieking to see blood streaming down her forearm and dripping at the elbow. A cry rose up outside in the caravan, and a torrent of thuds sounded against the rear of the stagecoach.

“Hold tight in there!” the driver shouted as the thuds subsided, kicking the sliding window open with the heel of his boot so the ladies would hear. He pressed on. How long exactly the team maintained the gallop Ashley could not say. She and her aunt lay flat on the ground, trying hard not to move for the shards of broken glass. The baby was crying, and her mother did nothing to comfort her. Ashley heard a retching through the slit and the splash of vomit on the pavement. The driver brought the coach to a stop. Boots hit the ground, the key rattled in the door lock, and the latch swung open.

The driver stood in the bright sunlight of the doorway, observing for a moment the disorder of the two women holding the infant on the glass-strewn carriage floor, then sweeping the broken glass out of the cab with his forearm and helping Ashley and Caroline to sit upright. He scanned the horizon behind the stagecoach as he went to fetch a first-aid kit from under the driver’s bench and climbed inside to dress and bandage Caroline’s cut, whose thin lips opened and closed tightly, though all the other features of her pale visage were frozen stiff, gaze fixed on the rear window. She was talking to herself in a low tone. Ashley saw the driver raise his eyebrows once or twice at something she said, though he kept his eyes on his work. The shotgun rider was holding his head on the roadside and moaning.

“They hit him with a rock,” the driver said, holding the catatonic woman’s one hand tight around the bandaged one. “Could he rest inside the coach with you guys?” he asked Aunt Caroline, who kept on muttering to herself. “We aren’t that far off at this point.” Receiving no response, he turned then to Ashley, who nodded, and the two untied the loose cloth loops of the blue velvet seat cushions to make a bed on the carriage floor. Hoisted up at the waist by his partner, the shotgun rider managed to clamber up onto the mounting block beneath the carriage door, kneel down inside, and fall face down on the cushions, which slid apart beneath the solid young man.

As the drive went on without end, Ashley fought to keep the concussed shotgun rider awake, sending from time to time a glance behind her through the rear window. A spent plastic cartridge fell in through the high slit window and rolled around the velvet cushions in wide arcs until it came to rest beside Marian’s hand. Ashley watched her daughter’s little fingers toy with the plastic tube as she stroked the shotgun rider’s forehead to keep him awake. Over the low rumble of the wheels and her baby’s cooing, Ashley could just barely make out the two words her aunt kept muttering to herself.

“The canaille,” Aunt Caroline kept repeating. “The canaille.”

Ashley woke up gradually in a small bedroom, her own from summers past. The crisp morning air blew in through a square window, rustling the wide-open curtains and circulating fluidly in the room, even pleasantly cooling the small pockets between her flannel pajamas and the thin polyester sheets, which were warm on top from what had already been several hours of direct sunlight. She drew the comforter up over herself and flipped onto her belly, staring past the side of the headboard and out the room’s one square window into the front yard.

An older man limped to and fro amid springy chicken wire and the shoots and leaves of plants heavy with green tomatoes. He hunched here and there over squashes and gourds lolling fat in the shadow of the Kruger stagecoach, which was parked just off the main gravel road that wound loosely around the reedy shores of the lake. Though dented and gashed in a few places, the jet black still gleamed in the mid-morning sunshine. Jagged clumps of dry dirt crunched under foot as the crippled man puttered unsteadily about his vegetable garden.

On the far edge of the lake, whose ripples the steady, light wind had worked into long, sharp gashes, Ashley could see her baby carriage being slowly pushed by two short, feminine figures walking along the gravel road. A man in black clothing strolled behind them at some distance, shotgun slung over his shoulder. Ashley followed them with her eyes as they neared the Kruger lake house, under renovation since Christine had taken up her summer residence there a few weeks ago. The wind carried a faint pounding of hammers and a rasping of handsaws over the lake.

The girl let her hand drop languidly off the side of the bed. She travelled with her fingertips over the short, matted piles of the decades-old area rug. At its edge, her fingernails flicked off the border and clicked against the wide, blond wooden floorboards. At length, she got up and made for the kitchen. Halfway down the hall, the door of a dim room stood partly open. An older woman sat perched on a cedar chest at the foot of a bed, her hand resting on an embroidered comforter covering the young man who rode shotgun the day before, her son. Across the hall, the other bedroom was still sealed. Aunt Caroline remained in seclusion.

Ceramic pots, a bread box, and glass jars sat on a narrow wooden countertop between a gas stove and the alcove which used to house a refrigerator, but in which now stood an ironing board, a wash basin, and a plastic cooler. A French press presented itself enticingly on the stovetop, still hot to the touch. Ashley sensed a robust, earthy aroma as she drew near. With a bold smirk, the girl decided to help herself to some coffee, a newly scarce commodity which she had anyways never before tested. She raised a mug to her mouth with both hands like her sister always did to savor the first sip. Thin wisps of steam wafted up through her field of vision, which was occupied mostly by the scraggly bushes of the back yard that could be seen out the kitchen window. A hammock was strung across the middle between an ash and a birch. The hot liquid grazed her upper lip, and a sudden bitterness swiped the smirk off her face. She promptly set about blowing and mixing in milk and sugar.

Sheets rustled in the other room, apparently in response to the thud of the cooler lid dropping shut, the grating of a wooden drawer without runners, and the clinking of Ashley’s spoon against the sugar bowl and inside her mug. The older woman stepped in and bid her guest good morning. Ashley had pulled a slice of bread from the breadbox and was buttering it at the table.

Ashley apologizes, but the mother is trying to act just as though she had arrived under normal circumstances for a vacation at the lake.

doctor arrives and the mother goes out to the screened-in porch to talk with him, overhears her explaining the boy’s condition. The mother is worried about the condition, but the indications of the doctor suggest things are probably alright.

boy comes out of the room, drinks coffee with Ashley.

mother and doctor come in, mother scolds him for being out of bed and drinking caffeine. doctor corrects her and says it is good for him to rest for the first day or two, but he doesn’t need to be on bedrest.

ashley says she wants to go for a little walk around the lake to see her baby. as she leaves, the father comes in and tells her son to go with over the objections of the mother.

Green brings investors from Florida, who transport potash to factories in the south to produce synthetic fertilizer. They also transform Antioch into an enclave of luxury, building a golf course, a small casino, and hotels. Large houses go up in downtown Antioch and Lakeside.

Colette becomes a fixture in the Kruger household. While she makes overtures to Jack, he chooses Cassie. She is successful eventually in seducing young Peter Kracl, who is brought into the Kruger fold and takes up a position with the Kruger uncles.

Green’s business plan is faltering. He takes out large loans from his Florida investors and the State of Nebraska on the Kracl name to keep his business afloat. Eventually the debt comes due and he has to beg Luke Kracl to cover his large debts. Ashley’s divorce from Green (Question for Luke: Is it worth bailing this guy out? No, although it means we will have to play second fiddle to Krugers, the business plan fundamentally won’t work. Another question: Is it right for me to let my daughter stay with this liar, after I encouraged her to marry him for what we thought would be our family’s financial gain?).

The loyalties are set: Krugers - Mr. Kruger, Kruger uncles, Christine Kruger, Peter and Colette Kracl, residual Florida investors (Abraham Toro) Kracls - Luke and Mary Kracl, Jack and Cassie Kracl, Ashley Kracl, Sam Kruger

Green is financially ruined, and his Florida debtors are going after him and his remaining assets violently. Green has taken details of the Kracl mineral rights with him in the wake of the divorce, and has traded information to the State of Nebraska to pay off his debts. He had removed records from the County Clerk’s office, and without them, Jack cannot prove the mineral rights are not in State control. The State is coming to Antioch to press their false claim on the mineral rights.

The Kracls move to organize a private army to defend the claims against the Nebraska National Guard, as the profitability of their enterprise depends on it. They have had a financial investment in Jack’s potash operation since the deal at Jack’s graduation party.

Sam Kruger dies.

The situation devolves into trench warfare, a de facto blockade of the Kruger-Kracl potash operation which prevents export. This puts a great financial strain on Antioch, which is defending a hypothetical future profit, although no money is flowing as the war drags on.

Luke Kracl dies.

Kruger uncles want to use chemical weapons to break the stalemate. Jack initially draws up the plans, but the Kracls eventually prohibit this. Colette sells information to the Kruger uncles in exchange for the promise that Abraham Toro can secure transportation for her from Florida back to France. She leaves Peter for Florida. The Kruger uncles attempt to make use of the information, but inadvertently kill their own soldiers in the attack.

Although the attack breaks the stalemate, public opinion turns against the Kruger-Kracl ruling class. The Kruger uncles pin the blame for using chemical weapons on Jack, who is exiled. The Krugers gain control of the potash operation. Cassie stays in Antioch with their children. While she retains ownership, the effective control lies in the hands of the Krugers, who rise in public opinion, which prohibits Cassie from asserting operational control over the business she technically owns.

At this point, Christine has fully sided with the Kracls. Ashley, Cassie are marginalized. Peter is left with no other option than to stick with the Kracls. He is powerless.

The major arc: Antioch thrives under joint Kruger-Kracl ownership. Kracls become dominant under partnership with Green. Kracls suffer as the result of Green’s failed business plan. Krugers become dominant. Kruger’s business threatened while defending Kracl mineral rights. Sacrifice Jack to definitively secure the mineral rights. Kracls completely sidelined or absorbed. Krugers become warlords as the result of the “Potash War”. The benefit of potash is marginal on the community, but they retain quasi-feudal control over the panhandle. A new. quasi-feudal world order is established, though the promise of economic prosperity never materializes.

Part II

Jack’s son is a man, technically the owner of the potash business, but in practice left without operational control. The Kruger nephews are making the calls about potash, for whatever that is still worth, and at any rate, their role as regional warlords is what matters anyways, and that is undisputedly a Kracl designation.

The Kruger nephews are grown, and having been tutored by Colette, speak among themselves bastardized version of French as a sort of language of court, which other aristocrats/oligarchs in the region emulate.

Jack secretly returns to Antioch. He guides his son in secretly setting up a laboratory to perform experiments that would be the basis for a viable synthetic fertilizer operation based on lab notes he salvaged from the university. In order to obtain the requisite equipment and chemical precursor, Jack and his son need to convince some of the remaining Florida investors, who still come to Antioch seasonally for the golf course and casinos, although their business focus has shifted elsewhere in the wake of Green’s failure. There is no way to hide from these investors that Jack has returned to Antioch. Although he needs to be there for the chemistry to work, at the same time he cannot be there due to his banishment and the Kruger uncles. Jack’s pitch is this: Front us the money to prove this works. If it does, you will make a ton of money. If it doesn’t, turn me in and get the reward for my capture. That will cover your loss.