Jewelweed Page 12

  “I wish you’d reconsider,” said Mrs. Roebuck.

  Dart was quiet for a moment, and then she told Mrs. Roebuck that she had something to say. “To everyone.”

  “All right,” said Mrs. Roebuck. “You and Ivan go down to the kitchen and we’ll all meet you there in a couple minutes.”

  Ivan and his mother went down to the kitchen and waited. It wasn’t long before Mrs. Roebuck came in with Florence and Wally, followed by Kevin and Quiet Shoes. The five of them sat at the table. Several minutes later Buck came in. He walked over to the refrigerator, opened the door, and took out a can of grape soda. It looked like a Dixie cup in his hand. “We didn’t find the turtle,” he said.

  Just like Kevin said, thought Ivan.

  “You want one of these, Ivan?” he asked.

  Ivan’s mother frowned and he shook his head.

  “Anyone else?” asked Buck.

  There were no takers so he closed the refrigerator, then drained the can in one swig.

  “So, what’s the deal?” he asked, sitting carefully on one of the stools by the counter and looking over at Dart.

  “I’ve got something to say,” she said.

  “Okay, let’s hear it,” said Buck.

  “I’ll work here and I’ll work hard, but no one is ever going to hurt my son. Ivan’s going to amount to something and nothing is ever going to happen that would make him feel cheap or unclean. No one is going to touch him, ever. And that goes for you too, big guy. If any of you ever harm him in any way, I promise you’ll be sorry. I’ll make you wish you were never born.”

  She stood there with her eyes blazing, hands pressed to her sides, shoulders hunched forward, and elbows cocked out. Ivan sighed. It was hopeless. Once again his mother had ruined everything.

  Buck looked over at his wife. Mrs. Roebuck looked at him, and Florence smiled at Ivan. Buck stepped away from the stool. “Sounds fair to me,” he said. “Is that okay with the rest of you?”

  Five heads nodded around the table.

  “Good, then we have a deal. When can you start?”

  “Today,” said Ivan.

  “We can be here within a week,” said his mother, and relaxed her arms.

  “Is that okay with you, Amy?” asked Buck.

  “The sooner the better,” said Mrs. Roebuck.

  “Are we done here?” asked Buck. “The permit came through and they want us back at the job site in Red Plain.”

  “I’m going upstairs to think about my dream some more,” said Wally, filling a cup of coffee.

  Mrs. Roebuck stood up from the table. “Buck, wait. Dart’s car won’t start.”

  “The battery’s shot,” added Ivan.

  Buck walked over to the phone on the wall, picked up the receiver, dialed a number, and talked into it. “Carl, there’s a Bronco out front. Put a battery in it. If it doesn’t start, fix it.”

  Intimate Imperatives

  Outside the Words Repair Shop, Winnie nosed her little car between a piece of unidentifiable farm machinery and a heap of twisted metal. Her husband’s work generated an astonishing amount of refuse, and she often thought of the little shop as a cement-block creature feeding on oil and electricity and eliminating ferrous waste through its windows and doors. She climbed out of the car and smoothed her clothes over her body, flattening a few wrinkles.

  Inside, the shop was furnished with a haphazard arrangement of chain saws, lawnmowers, garden tractors, pumps, generators, tillers, three- and four-wheelers, and farm implements needing repair. Surrounded by his well-worn shop manuals, machines, tools, testing equipment, grease guns, and other things that Winnie could not readily identify, Jacob stood on the other side of the building, hunched over the howling bench grinder. He hadn’t heard her come in. A bright stream of yellow sparks erupted from the piece of metal he was pressing against the abrasion wheel. Directly above the workbench, grayish-white clumps of smoke clung to the ceiling. The shop smelled like a shorted-out toaster. Choosing her path carefully, Winnie slowly made her way over to him.

  Jacob turned off the grinder and removed his goggles. “Winifred! What a surprise.” His face, neck, forearms, and hands were black except where the goggles had been, and his smile seemed unusually white. Fragments of burned metal were embedded in his forehead. He put down the bar of steel he’d been grinding.

  “Hello, Jacob,” she said.

  Eye contact made them real to each other again. Animal warmth hurried out of him, attached to her, and woke up their shared history of unrehearsed movements, unplanned utterances, natural smells, and comforting connubial habits. She smiled and Jacob came closer. More layers of their public selves peeled away, replaced by the latent excitement that normally characterized their nearness to each other.

  Winnie cherished Jacob’s need for passion from her, and sometimes imagined that his consciousness consisted primarily of an awareness of his own sexual instinct—his only gateway to rapture. Thankfully God had created this vital opportunity for bliss, yet Winnie remained convinced there were many more avenues that could be followed to divine pleasure. People could become hyperconscious in countless ways. It was possible. The sight of a hummingbird—along with the sound of its thrumming wings—once revealed to her how she had long ago lived with tiny black feet and a nectar-searching tongue. Her shoulders remembered the thrilled rhythms. On another occasion, the taste of a strawberry related its entire history of self-propelled spirit into matter. All human sensations could, she believed, provide paths to the same state of ecstatic worship.

  The principalities of civilization had hidden most of these gateways to heightened awareness, however, and for most people now, the only way back to the blessed original state involved a spectacular sexual event. And while Winnie rejoiced as much as anyone else in extraordinary sexual events, she sometimes feared that keeping the species alive had nearly replaced being alive, as if the entire galaxy of spontaneous felt-unity threatened to become perversely focused on one narrow impulse.

  But as soon as she entertained this thought, Jacob picked up an orange oil rag and began wiping his thick hands in a vigorous and methodical manner. The simple gesture was artfully performed, and it implied a level of satisfaction with his work. Perhaps he knew of many other avenues to heightened awareness as well. The thought greatly amused her.

  “Jacob, we need to talk,” said Winnie.

  “Good,” he said. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “What do we need to talk about?” He sat beside her on the ripped seat of a four-wheeler, his teeth still gleaming from the surrounding darkness of his sooty face. She looked for somewhere clean to sit, and stayed standing.

  “You have far more work here than you can do yourself. It keeps you from sleeping well and it steals from the time you spend with August and me. And there’s absolutely no reason for it.”

  “I thought you said I had more work than I could do,” he said playfully.

  His smile suggested he might not be taking her seriously.

  “You could have someone else working with you. Another person could do all the things you can’t do yourself in a reasonable workday. You could hire someone.”

  “We can’t afford that,” said Jacob.

  “Yes we can,” said Winnie. “In fact, it’s necessary.”

  “No we can’t. Besides, you already make more money than I do, and if I have to pay someone else I’ll be even further behind.”

  “That’s ridiculous, Jacob. You don’t make more money, because many of your customers don’t pay, or don’t pay enough, and you let them get away with it.”

  “The economy’s gone south and people pay what they think they can.”

  A truck pulled into the lot just then, and after several clanking, scraping, and banging sounds, an older man came in with a weed eater.

  “Good afternoon, Pastor Winifred,” he said.

  “Hello, Mr. Roebuck.”

  Jacob nodded imperceptibly in greeting. Wally nodd
ed back.

  Leaving them alone, Winnie went into the craft room and spoke briefly with the woman behind the counter. She was knitting a red sweater from a muskmelon-sized ball of yarn that was lying on the floor. Winnie looked through some of the items on display. One black-and-green pot holder had been made to look like a face, and it continued to haunt her even after she stopped looking at it. Something about the sewn mouth made her think about pure evil, which was surprising because the concept no longer held a respected place in her collection of thinking utensils. Its sudden appearance in her mind seemed a little like coming upon a long-forgotten article of clothing in the attic, and she made a mental note to later contemplate how discarded pieces of herself could still be so handily attached, ready for service.

  When she rejoined Jacob in the shop, he was alone again. Sunlight fell through the open double doors, making it seem as if there were two separate areas, one light and one dark. Dust motes filled the bright area.

  “So, who do you want me to hire?” asked Jacob.

  “I’m sure there are many highly skilled and reliable workers who would be pleased to share your responsibilities,” said Winnie.

  “For some reason I think you have someone in mind,” he replied, picking a piece of metal out of his forehead.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Just a guess,” and he smiled again in a way that suggested he might be thinking about sex in addition to not taking her seriously.

  Her voice assumed a slightly angry tone. “I think you should hire the Bookchester boy.”

  “Isn’t he in prison?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s not a boy and I don’t want to hire him.”

  “He’s almost fifteen years younger than you. Why not?”

  “He’s been in prison over a decade, Winifred.”

  “That’s all the more reason. Without a sponsor he might not be released this summer, if ever. You have no idea what an unholy place that prison is. I try to get you to visit, but you won’t. That building is a monument to the ignorant cruelty that characterizes much of our civilization. The damage it does is unspeakable. Our nation has more people in prison than any other country on earth. It’s an abomination and it mocks the civic ideals we profess to believe in. It’s essential that we get him out of there as soon as possible.”

  “He’s in the supermax because he’s uncooperative and violent,” said Jacob, rearranging the position of a socket set on the workbench.

  “It should be beneath you, Jacob, to repeat the same stories the government uses to frighten people. Men are sent to maximum-security prisons for such small infractions as not looking straight ahead when the guards bolt shackles onto them. Blake Bookchester is not overly violent, and even if he was a little impulsive a long time ago, he’s changed. He reads books and thinks deeply about them. I’ve been visiting him and I know.”

  “You know the part he wants you to see.”

  “That’s unfair, Jacob. Everyone shows their best side.”

  “True, but Blake has more he’s not showing than most of us. He was arrested for carrying over two pounds of black tar heroin and convicted for drug trafficking.”

  “He wasn’t the only one. There were other arrests around the same time. There was a man working at the foundry outside Red Plain with connections to a Mexican drug cartel. He had a number of young people delivering drugs for him. Four or five others were caught as well.”

  “Yes, but unlike the others, Blake put the officer who arrested him in the hospital. Eight years later he was sent to Lockbridge because he hit a guard at the Waupun prison. His father told me.”

  “I know all about that,” said Winnie. “Blake understands that those were mistakes.”

  “Mistakes?”

  “All of us fall short of the people we’d like to be, but we keep trying and so does Blake. He knows about machinery and how to fix things. He’s worked as a mechanic before.”

  “He’s not working here.”

  Winnie took a deep breath, slowly blew it out, and threw her head back. A cat crept cautiously in the open garage door, hurried into a darkened corner, and disappeared underneath a shelf of oilcans and a coil of chain.

  “Jacob, we have a predatory criminal justice system in this country, operated by people who in one way or another make money from its operation. They try to keep inmates from getting out, because profits accrue from keeping them in. Whenever there’s a possibility for meaningful penal reform the prison lobby advertises the few really horrible crimes, and everyone gets frightened and keeps as quiet as rabbits. Meanwhile, people who never should have been locked up in the first place die on the floors of their cells because they can’t get the medication they need, and others simply go crazy. Imagine, Jacob, what it would be like to live in a cement room all year long, eating food shoved through an iron grate, never seeing people you love except during rare visiting hours, and then through wire and glass, monitored the whole time. That hell-house in Lockbridge is nothing more than a human garbage pit.”

  “Stop making speeches, Winifred.”

  “Everything I say is true.”

  “I want no part of prisons or people who have been inside them,” said Jacob. “Living without you and August would reduce me to a reptile in a couple weeks. I don’t know how those guys survive. I couldn’t. I try to imagine it and watch myself melting from the inside.”

  “Good, then you’ll hire him.”

  “No I won’t.”

  “You said I was right, Jacob.”

  “Someone as damaged as Blake Bookchester probably can’t be set free among people who aren’t trained to deal with him. Brutalized people brutalize others.”

  “The injustice must be addressed. It’s a moral imperative.”

  “There’s no telling what he might do. I’m sorry for what’s happened to him, I am. But he’s not coming here. Sometimes the harm done can’t be fixed. Maybe Blake never should have been sent to prison in the first place, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s the only life for him now.”

  “You’re afraid of him, Jacob.”

  “I am not. All right, I am. He’s unpredictable. His own father is afraid of him.”

  “Those who see the injustices in our society are obliged to do something about them. How can you live with yourself, Jacob?”

  “The way most people do, with difficulty.”

  “I knew you’d be like this,” said Winnie.

  “And I knew this was coming.”

  “What was coming?”

  “This discussion.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “You talk in your sleep, Winifred. You’ve been worrying about this for months.”

  “Jacob, you can’t bring up something intimate between us and expect to win the day. You won’t. I’m right about this and you know it. And I don’t talk in my sleep.”

  “You do.”

  “Then you shouldn’t be listening.”

  “You say the same things over and over.”

  “Besides, I’ve already told them you’d sponsor Blake.”

  “Told who?”

  “The prison authorities asked for the name of two sponsors and I wrote down yours and mine. It’s done now and nothing can change it. He’s going to live with his father and work here.”

  “Winifred, that better not be true.”

  “It is,” she said.

  “I’ll undo it.”

  “Jacob, please. I thought you’d understand. When I started visiting him he seemed to be like all the others. But he isn’t. I care about him. Deep inside me, in that quiet place, he’s now among that small group of people. I tried and tried to keep him out, but he got in somehow. What could I do? I don’t control who gets in, and now I’ll never forgive myself if we don’t try to help him.”

  “At least now you’re talking about something real,” said Jacob.

  “I’m sorry,” said Winnie. “I should have started here in the first place, but I didn’t know how to begin
. It seemed too much to ask, I mean, on my account.”

  “Why can’t he work for someone else?”

  “No one else will have him.”

  “Okay, he can work here. To be completely honest, I decided two days ago it probably wouldn’t hurt to have him here.”

  Winnie stepped back. “No, you didn’t,” she said, throwing her head back.

  “I did—two nights ago, when you woke me up again. I just wanted to see if it was possible to talk you out of it. I mean, I think it’s a bad idea, Winifred, but I know you well enough to know that if I win the argument you’ll only get stronger from losing, and then several days later you’ll be back more determined.”

  “So you’ll let him work here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re not angry with me?” Winnie shifted her stance and leaned against a short wooden stepladder that looked fairly clean.

  “No.”

  Winnie frowned. “You were just pretending to listen, weren’t you? You weren’t taking anything I said seriously.”

  “Deep inside me,” said Jacob, “there are only two other people, you and August. I’ve tried to let more in, but like you say, we’re not in control. There’s just you two, and whatever you say or do will never change that.”

  “Only two? That’s kind of sad, Jacob.”

  “I know. Well, there’s one other, but he doesn’t count.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “You mean July?”

  “Yes.”

  “The dead can be in there too,” said Winnie. “No one can keep them out.”

  “And I was trying to take you seriously, Winifred, I really was. I just couldn’t stop thinking about how soft your skin feels behind your ears.”

  “I hate you,” said Winnie, leaning forward to kiss him. When she drew away, her lips, cheeks, and the tip of her nose were black.

  Jewelweed

  The night sky dumped warm rain on southwestern Wisconsin—a dark violet vertical downpour—as Nate Bookchester turned onto the blacktop road in front of his house. His headlights lit up thirty feet of boiling, dancing liquid runoff tumbling over the gravel shoulders. As the Kenworth slowed down, oceans of fatigue moved through him.