Jewelweed Read online

  By the time they got home it had started to rain and water from the downspout around the corner ran across the sidewalk in front of the meat locker. They splashed through. Inside their apartment the roof leaked in the corner of the kitchen, where it had before. His mother got the pail to catch the drips and put in a piece of wood so the splashing wasn’t so loud.

  They ate carrots and macaroni and cheese. Then his mother fixed him a cup of hot chocolate while she drank her coffee. He had the last half of an ice cream sandwich before brushing his teeth and going to bed.

  After Ivan lay down he listened to the dripping in the other room and cars pulling in and out of the parking lot behind Smokey’s. That lonely crying feeling got inside him again and he stayed still and just hated school for a while. Then he could hear his mother cleaning up, and each time she walked past the doorway her shadow streaked all the way to the wall. She went toward her bed and all the lights went out except the bathroom glimmer. Then the glimmer went out and orange from the lamp beside her bed came into the kitchen. She was under the covers, probably reading her catalogs, he thought.

  His mother had catalogs—stacks of them—with pictures of houses and rooms with furniture, clothes, kitchen utensils, automobiles, shoes, curtains, bedspreads, jewelry, watches, televisions, cameras, computers, camping equipment, snowmobiles, books, magazines, fans, coats, garages, lawn ornaments, flower seeds, mirrors, and framed pictures to hang on walls. As soon as they paid off the money borrowed to buy the Bronco, she always said, they’d start getting some of the things other people had.

  “When we get our own place we’re going to have folks over and entertain,” she said.

  Ivan tried to imagine who those folks might be, because no one ever came to their apartment except his grandmother, and she almost never came. She and his mother couldn’t talk about anything without shouting at each other. Grandma would cry, say she did the best she could, and leave. Then later she would call back and they would shout at each other over the phone.

  In the morning they ate cold cereal. His mother poured all the remaining milk in Ivan’s bowl. She said she didn’t want any anyway.

  Because it was Saturday they had to go into Ace Cleaning to hand in reports. It was not far away, so they walked. The sidewalk and roads were still wet with soaked trash along the curb. Everything had a watery smell.

  Inside the building Ivan sat on one of the chairs Ace kept for visitors, next to the hoses. His mother told him to keep his hands to himself and then she went and talked with her supervisor, Mrs. Borkel, behind the counter. The two of them didn’t seem to belong together, his mother as hard and brown as a Slim Jim and Mrs. Borkel all blotched and bulging like an uncooked bratwurst. She was upset his mother had not called the office before driving Mrs. Goodenow to the hospital. It was not proper procedure, she said.

  “Dart, you can be an efficient and competent worker, but you must pay attention to the rules. You were written up for something like this a month ago, and it’s a black mark in your file.”

  His mother tugged at her cap. Ivan was afraid she was going to say something, but she kept quiet.

  People who had known his mother a long time, including Grandma, often called her Dart instead of Danielle. She was apparently such a different person before he was born that she’d even had a different name.

  Mrs. Borkel slid some papers across the counter and his mother read them without looking up.

  “Something like this doesn’t come along often,” Mrs. Borkel said. “It’s a chance for you. You’ve had a rocky beginning, but if you work hard even you can make something of yourself. Do you know the Roebucks?”

  “I know who they are,” said his mother.

  “Good, then you know what it would mean to work for them. They’re looking for a live-in to cook and clean and help the nurses take care of their son. As you’ll see in the evaluation forms, managing Kevin falls within some of the training you received last year. The position doesn’t start until summer, but I want you to consider it. This could be good for you and Ivan. Roebuck Construction employs many people, and succeeding at this job would mean a great deal to your future with Ace.”

  His mother stared into the papers on the counter. “Would I be working for Ace or for Buck and Amy?” she asked.

  “You’d be working for Ace, but you’d be living at the Roebucks’ twenty-four-seven. Like I said, you don’t need to decide right now, Dart, but how does this opportunity sound to you?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You’ll need to make a formal application and go over for an interview. I’d suggest doing it this week. I mean, I’m looking out for you here, Dart. I’m trying, but there are also others to consider.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Borkel.”

  His mother adjusted her baseball cap, and Ivan stood up and stepped toward the door.

  “Dart,” said Mrs. Borkel, “did you hear that Blake Bookchester is up for parole?”

  “Who says?” asked his mother without turning around.

  “Blake’s father said if he can find a sponsor they’ll release him from prison.”

  “That has nothing to do with me,” said his mother, and they walked out.

  Evolution

  Buck Roebuck lived four miles from town with his wife, Amy, their fourteen-year-old son, Kevin, Buck’s father, and Amy’s grandmother. Behind their three-story home, a pond lay wide and deep. A dock made of wood planking extended over the water to a painted gazebo. Nearby, a tethered boat floated, its oars slanting out of the oarlocks like the back legs of a cricket. Though the surface of the water seemed as smooth as glass in the dim morning light, an unseen current beat one of the oar-shafts against the side of the boat in a slow, hollow drumming.

  Buck paid little attention to the hypnotic noise or the extraordinary tranquility of the morning. There was a creature living in the pond that he needed to get rid of, and for this reason he was pacing back and forth along the dock, waiting for the conservation agent from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Wispy strands of fog clung to the water’s surface, and the sound of his boots pounded through it. He didn’t like it when people were late, and being an unusually large man, with thighs as big around as his wife’s waist, his impatience could be understood from a long way away.

  Buck had dug the pond four years ago, and a great variety of living things immediately appropriated it for their own use. Innumerable tunnels, paths, and flyways led to the water’s edge, and what at one time had belonged only to his wife’s vision of the future now belonged to more creatures than anyone could fully fathom. At least eight kinds of fish now thrived somewhere beneath the surface. Buck had caught a three-pound bass himself, and no one would ever call him a fisherman; with a construction company to run, he simply didn’t have the time. His seventy-eight-year-old father, Wallace, had once caught an enormous orange carp, and no one would call Wally a fisherman either.

  Since no one had stocked the pond, Buck sometimes wondered how the fish arrived there. Did the feeder-spring connect to a larger body of water? And could full-grown watery creatures actually move through the underground passage like refugees from another world? Frankly, Buck didn’t really care, but thinking about the astonishing fecundity of the pond sometimes gave him a fleeting pleasure. Nature had apparently focused its green eye upon it.

  It had been his wife’s idea to turn the swampy ground behind their house into a pond. Amy said their son, Kevin, would find reason to leave the confinement of his room. It would encourage him to rise above the disabilities that usually prevented his participation in outdoor activities. So Buck agreed to complete it.

  Problems had mounted quickly. Before issuing a permit, the DNR required a costly study of the watershed’s drainage grid and an assessment of the environmental footprint of impounding three hundred thousand gallons of water with an anticipated flow rate of ten thousand gallons per day. Buck hired a consultant to work with the department, draw up a land-use plan, and complete the legal
forms.

  When the permit finally came through, Buck began pumping water out of the swamp and pushing dirt with his dozer, filling trucks and hauling the dirt, clay, and rocks to a construction site on the other side of Grange, where it could be used in later projects.

  By the time he dug down six feet, the spring dried up. The DNR sent people out to look and Buck’s consultant agreed with them: the weight and vibration of the machinery had temporarily sealed the channels in the rock and clay. But everyone was sure that the spring was still down there and further digging would open it up.

  Buck brought in his excavator and went down another ten feet, enlarging the diameter of the hole as he went.

  “This is bigger than we planned,” said Amy, standing with her husband on the deck off the back of the house, her hands clasped behind her back. She was a tall woman with wide shoulders, and her upright posture argued against the worried expression on her face, creating an image of optimistic anxiety. Beneath them, the excavator loaded rock and dirt into trucks parked on a second tier of ground. The dozer carved out another ramp into the pit. Smoke belched from the engines.

  At twenty feet there was still no water.

  Buck signaled his operator to go deeper.

  At thirty feet the spring opened up.

  “Oh good,” said Amy, watching water rise around the tracks of the excavator. Farther away, the dozer tried to climb up the muddy incline and slid backward.

  Buck scrambled down from the deck and ran forward, shouting at his men standing along the sides of the pit.

  By the time the equipment was pulled out, water had seeped into compartments, shorted circuit boards, fouled switches, filled intakes with gritty water, and damaged the pumps. Repairs cost over eight thousand dollars, even with his own men doing most of the work.

  But no one had been hurt and the DNR didn’t complain too long or too loudly when the size of the pond turned out to be three times the one originally proposed. It now extended from the edge of the deck on the back of the house all the way to the windbreak along the gravel road.

  The following summer, the grass on the earth dam sprouted thick and green. The dock and gazebo were completed on schedule, at a thousand dollars below the estimated cost. With warmer weather, Amy coaxed Kevin out of his room, away from his video games, computers, and magazines. The boy inched across the redwood deck in his slippers and placed his thin hands on the railing. He looked over the pond. A squadron of mallards flew overhead. Four of them broke formation and dropped out of the sky. At about twenty feet above the pond, wing and tail feathers fanned open, necks arched, green heads rose; the ducks appeared to be standing up in the air, sinking slowly. Then their wide orange feet skidded across the glazed surface, spraying water. Seconds later, they folded into compact oval shapes, bobbing up and down contentedly in the undulating wake of their own landing.

  A smile spread across the boy’s face. With the help of his mother and nurse, Kevin climbed onto the lowest terrace of the deck. From there they ventured onto the dock, Amy steadying his progress and the gray-haired nurse pulling the oxygen tank and keeping the tubing from tangling in the wheels of the cart.

  Beneath the dock, lazy liquid slapped against oak posts, and water bugs skittered madly in and out of rolling shadows. The hoarse croaking of a bullfrog sounded like an ancient door pried open, thick ribbons of iridescent green slime grew underwater, and the smell of moist heat, earth, and damp wood rose into the air. These sensations dove to the bottom of Kevin’s mind, where they were set to work in the mines of his young imagination.

  Amy later recalled this moment to her husband as they ate dinner at the kitchen table. “I wish you could have seen his smile, Buck. It was like he finally—” She stopped, set her cup of coffee down, and listened.

  “Finally what?” asked Buck.

  Before she could answer, Kevin began coughing and Amy hurried down the hallway toward his bedroom, leaving Buck to eat the last of the salad from the wooden serving bowl. At the other end of the table, Buck’s father rose, centered his weight on both legs, adjusted the suspenders holding up his pants, and walked out of the kitchen, closing the door.

  Unfinished sentences had become a way of life, thought Buck. He was still hungry, but resolved to eat nothing more. He listened to his father climbing the stairs to his bedroom on the second floor. Buck had offered to move his furniture into available rooms downstairs, but Wally preferred to stay upstairs. In the morning he could look out and see farther, he said.

  Though he did not like to acknowledge it, Buck often felt abandoned, first by his wife and later by his father. The feeling shamed him, made him seem weak, childish, and ungrateful for the many privileges that he enjoyed.

  For thirty-five years he and Wally had worked side by side, building Roebuck Construction from a father-and-son team with a pickup, cement mixer, ladder, and two wheelbarrows, to the largest construction company in the area. They’d constructed so many retaining walls, parking lots, sheds, garages, shops, additions, houses, and commercial buildings that Buck had recently walked into a store, finished what he’d come in for, and left without remembering that he and his father had built it.

  Together, they had borrowed money, bought more equipment, bid on jobs, and hired workers. The company grew until they could no longer handle the paperwork. Two new employees helped with that—a younger woman with a lively telephone personality and secretarial skills, and an older bookkeeper. A new office building in Grange provided them with a place to answer the phone, make payroll, deal with vendors, send out bills, pay insurance, apply for permits, and file contracts.

  During this time Buck married Amy Fisher, which seemed especially appropriate to everyone who thought about it. Because of Amy’s six-foot-three-inch height they made an almost-normal-looking couple, and people often said how fortunate they were to have found each other. Someone as big as Buck married to an average-sized person would look like a giant married to a child, and seeing such a mismatch would be uncomfortable for everyone. They also seemed to have temperaments that fit nicely together: Buck was reserved yet amiable, and Amy was amiable yet reserved.

  Amy’s mother ran the Cut & Curl in Grange, and her father had traveled through a large area of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa, selling farm machinery. She had one younger brother, named Lucky, and although the two siblings were often together they never formed a close relationship. From an early age they nurtured separate agendas. Lucky wanted to be admired and Amy wanted to belong, and the paths leading to these respective fulfillments headed in different directions.

  Amy and Buck both liked hiking and camping, and whenever they got a chance, they walked into wilderness areas with packs on their backs and compasses in their pockets. They canoed the Boundary Waters and in winter went cross-country skiing. One year they hiked much of the Glacial Trail.

  Amy liked to make love inside tents, Buck discovered. Something unraveled inside her when the wind blew the canvas sides in and out, and even when it didn’t there was something exciting about the thin walls and pointed, membrane-like ceiling.

  Buck also discovered that Amy loved her grandparents’ house outside Grange more than anywhere else in the world. Much of this had to do with her grandparents, of course, to whom Amy felt a deep and relaxed affinity—a fond attraction stronger even than her feelings for her parents, in whose presence she always felt disapproval hiding behind measured acceptance, a silent nagging insistence for her to become someone more accomplished and petite.

  Amy experienced unmetered acceptance from her grandparents and spent as much time as she possibly could with them. They were like her, laughed at her jokes, understood her quiet ways, and appreciated her without her needing to do something flamboyant or cute. Her grandfather taught philosophy at the university in La Crosse until he retired, and their big old country home possessed all the seclusion and grand enchantment that her parents’ home in town lacked. There were three full floors, ten-foot ceilings, leaded windows, walnut bas
eboards, and a library on the third floor for all her grandfather’s books. On the outside were wooden sides painted in gray, ceramic roofs, gutters, and downspouts. Her grandmother, Florence, kept a flower garden and orchard that extended the quaint features of the house a short ways into nature. Everything about the property seemed to exist in an earlier era, a different time to which Amy felt perfectly in tune.

  As they aged, her grandparents became increasingly unable to conduct war against the omnipresent forces that seek to erode the unique charm of any particular place and time, to hide its attractions and obscure its beauty, and the place fell into disrepair. When her grandfather died, Florence put the house up for sale. Amy couldn’t bear to have anyone else own it, so she talked to Florence and implored her to allow Buck and her to move in. Flo agreed, and Amy at once began the deliberate process of turning back the clock and restoring the house and gardens to their former condition. She attempted to enlist her grandmother as an adviser in the restoration, but found her oddly uninterested in the furnishings and condition of her surroundings. Having already lived through the period of history that Amy longed to re-create, Florence had no desire to see it resurrected, and preferred to pass the years and hours left to her making rosaries, or in silent contemplation.

  Then Amy got pregnant inside a tent on a windy night, and after he was born the baby seemed fine for a week or two. He looked normal, but over the next month he failed to thrive, which was how the hospital staff referred to it. Something was wrong, and after kissing the infant’s forehead one morning, Amy noticed that her lips were salty. Tests were run and discoveries made: Kevin’s DNA made errors in translating its coded material into proteins. His heart and lungs were weak. Amy and Buck were told that these impairments would certainly increase with age, and might later prevent his proper growth. He would most likely need some type of care for the rest of his life.