The Parable of Rust

By Amos Williamson

The Parable of Rust tells the story of the boom, bust, and recovery of the fictitious factory town of Rust and three generations of the family which builds, owns, sells, and re-acquires the factory, or at least what remains of it after corporate raiders lay off half off the workforce and then flip it to a conglomerate which mismanages it into fa

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ferrox Fiction
• Release date: Aug 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736887707

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Copyright © 2021 Amos Williamson

The Parable of Rust is a work of archetypical fiction. While some real places and persons are referenced, the names, characters, and incidents depicted either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of these to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and wholly the reader’s subjective association.

ISBN: 978-1-7368877-0-7

Published by Ferrox Fiction

www.ferroxfiction.com

For her, who taught me

all possess a book within,

with hers so called home

Contents

Prologue

The Parable of Rust

Gold

Silver

Bronze

Heroes

Iron

Epilogue

The Parable of Rust

Prologue

The city of Rust is a Midwestern (post-)industrial town. Its boom and bust follows the lifecycle of the widget factory at its economic heart. A town of respectable size due to its Great Lakes access, Rust hit its prime when the interstate highway system placed it at the nexus of road, rail, and lake transportation networks and ideally suited for widget manufacturing. It collapsed when the forty-year thread of useful economic life the fates of industrial economics dispense to major capital investments ran out. It is presently undergoing a modest recovery.

Behind that description is of course a human story.

Neu Röst was originally settled in the 1840s by Saxon emigres under the leadership of Ludwig von Röst. Ludwig discovered his Anglo-Saxon neighbors unable to properly pronounce the German long-O sound and capitulated to Anglicization as Lewis Rust. In an act of mild petulance he decreed that if the town’s name was to be anglicized as well it was no longer new anything.

Nearly all the Midwest was surveyed by capable professionals; Rust existed outside the area so circumscribed. In fact, it literally existed outside the areas circumscribed by state borders as the Midwest was admitted to the union. The 1850s did not feature effective dispute resolution. The Southerners were not about to give the Yankees two senators in exchange for nothing, and the Free-Soilers were not about to countenance further westward expansion of the peculiar institution just to remedy minor incompetence. Rust itself was not going to settle for conglomeration into another state having had its hopes raised so high.

During the war, Rust threatened to declare independence and join the empire on the other side of the lakes. The purpose of the senators was moot, as that question was now being settled by force of arms. For that same reason, the Union could not afford a breach with the Commonwealth. No one really wanted to carve out another semi-invented new state, especially one lacking the size and strategic value of West Virginia. The whole secession business was out of the bag, but the entire problem derived from Rust never acceding as a state in the first place. Therefore no terrible precedent was set by granting Rust its independence, with a lopsided treaty requiring it to mirror most of the US’s laws and strictly circumscribing (no mistakes this time) its foreign policy.

Rust was to be… a little bit different.

As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another

Proverbs 27:17

The Parable of Rust

The roar of the twenties was the sound of blast furnaces. Norman Selbsteiger was not the quiet type. Rather than split the farm with his elder brother he launched a Great Lakes shipping company. He began with the family’s produce but found his real niche feeding the furnaces of the great freshwater industrial colossi. What boosted Norman from bootstrap to baron was the war.

Rust existed in a gray zone at the edge of Washington’s formal neutrality. American neutrality was limited by the cash & carry system, but Rust was too inconsequential to provoke a fight. The soon-to-be Allies could launder aid to the House of Windsor through Rust, provided Rustan-flagged vessels shipped the munitions to Windsor, ON, and a Potemkin factory permitted the pretense they were of Rustan manufacture. Selbsteiger Shipping could supply the former immediately and the latter in short order.

The factory needed only exist until Rust could manufacture a pretext to PNG the German Ambassador, who produced the requisite raw material like an open-pit mine. The Third Reich maintained previous German governments’ tradition of posting an ambassador. Ostensibly honoring distant kinship, its real purpose was to exile politely people of parentage too prominent to punish. Rust tolerated the indignity because the spending habits of such people made the system de facto state aid, augmented in the 30s by the expense accounts of the G-men dispatched to keep tabs on Herr Ambassador.

Their dispatches produced zero intelligence, but their boss was not one to forego lurid gossip: the Nazi respected social boundaries in the manner his compatriots respected national ones. The reports recorded which ladies in the social register resisted (nearly all) and appeased (a scandalous few) his intoxicated advances. An especially offensive such advance in the spring of 1940 towards the 17-year old Miss Louisa Rust (decisively repulsed) scandalized Rust and justified booting him. No replacement returned; intervening events focused attention elsewhere. Norman had intended to make the nominal factory real, but the absence of anyone to fool mooted the issue, and the site operated for the remainder of the war as an open depot.

The young Norman Selbsteiger, Jr. served in the war, where he