Jewelweed Page 4

  “Nature’s way of experimenting,” said the counselor who had been recommended by the hospital.

  “No,” said Amy, “it’s not. It’s the opposite.”

  The counselor folded his hands over his stomach. “Evolution,” he said, “progresses through little mistakes. Some are beneficial and over time become refined into species-wide adaptive traits. Unfortunately, others are not beneficial at all. These cases of cystic fibrosis are well documented, and with modern drugs much of the discomfort can be alleviated. A palliative treatment routine can be readily administered within a proper facility.”

  “Will he live? What kind of help is available in the home? What could we have done to prevent this?”

  “Look, Mrs. Roebuck, let’s not make ourselves out to be victims here. In my experience there’s nothing more difficult than people who see themselves as victims. You need to stop thinking of this as some kind of cosmic injustice. Your first obligation is to your own mental wellness. If you don’t feel adequately prepared to care for this child, there are alternatives that may prove—”

  Buck leaned forward in his chair, picked up the compact carved maple desk between them, and held it several feet off the floor. Then he put it down and everything, including the phone, pens, and papers, remained in place. Afterward, the counselor adopted a different, more sympathetic approach.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do things like that, Buck,” said Amy afterward.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Over the years, caring for Kevin brought Buck and Amy closer together in many ways, though this seemed somewhat paradoxical because they had little time to themselves. They were silently united in rejecting all social norms that prescribed failure for their son. Kevin would have a good life and they would see to it. They encouraged each other, supported each other, and even pressured each other to never give up. When problems arose, they could be fixed. And when they couldn’t be fixed, they could be lived through. People could be happy in a different kind of way, and they were.

  In the meantime, however, Buck lost the larger portion of his wife. There was little of Amy leftover and he accepted that. She was too busy with Kevin and Florence. But it didn’t matter. He and his father had a construction company to run and he threw himself into his work with missionary zeal, always aware of the rising cost of his son’s medical needs.

  Buck liked construction and even suspected that his father had started the business to provide him with the incessant physical activity he had required as a young person—pushing wheelbarrows of wet concrete, shoveling gravel, and climbing ladders with pallets of shingles and brick. They had a mutual love of the work, and even many years later, when all the other workers had gone home, Buck and Wally remained at the job site, tying up loose ends and planning out the following day.

  Then Buck’s mother died and Wally’s interest in the company died with her. He continued another couple years and just gave up.

  “You take it, Buck. I’m through,” he said one morning, looking out the window in the office in Grange.

  “Never thought you’d say that, Dad. What will you do? You ought to think about it a little longer.”

  “Buck, I can’t do it any longer.”

  And so Wally left the construction business and entered into what seemed to Buck and Amy like an uninterrupted two-year-long drinking binge. After wrecking his pickup twice, setting fire to his kitchen, falling asleep on his front lawn in winter, buying and selling a tavern in the same week, tearing up the road in front of his house with the construction company’s biggest dozer, urinating in front of the police station, and otherwise proving to everyone concerned that he could not live alone, he sold his house and moved in with Buck and Amy. He preferred one of the rooms on the second floor, he said.

  Amy agreed to it. She wanted him there. Wally would stop drinking, she said, as soon as he was living with family. And he did.

  As Amy had also foreseen, the pond ignited Kevin’s enthusiasm for the out of doors. He spent many of his summer afternoons inside the gazebo, where he could lie down and plug any needed equipment into the outlets. Stacks of magazines spread across the table, accompanied by computer cords, video game controls, and sketching tablets, onto which he drew images of the pond and the creatures that came there. Once, when his resistance to infection, mildew, and dampness in general seemed especially strong, he even slept overnight in the gazebo, overruling the disapproval of his nurse. He felt connected to nature there, in touch with a wider experience.

  Then one night in early autumn, Wally couldn’t sleep. He carried a tackle box and a fishing pole out to the end of the dock, baited a hook, and caught a fish. It weighed over five pounds and was followed by six others, ranging between two and four pounds. He put them all on a stringer, tied the stringer to the end of the dock, and went back to bed. While falling asleep he thought about batter-frying the smaller ones and taking the biggest to a man who smoked fish inside a metal drum behind his garage. But after he went to sleep Wally dreamed of an elegant woman with a sensuous smile and a bulbous eye on each side of her head.

  Since his wife’s death, Wally had become increasingly sensitive to any signals from the next world—a sensitivity he consciously nurtured. He wanted to be ready to calmly greet whatever waited for him after his death, and he tried to live accordingly. Because of his dream, Wally decided to free the fish on the dock. But first he wondered if his grandson Kevin might want to see them.

  “I caught some nice fish last night,” he announced Sunday morning while he, Buck, Florence, and Amy ate scrambled eggs and buttered toast. “I’m going to turn them loose, but I wondered if the boy would like to see them first.”

  “I’m sure he would, Wally,” said Amy, setting down her fork. “I’ll ask him.”

  When Kevin was dressed they all went outdoors together. Buck carried his son, the nurse followed with the oxygen tank, and Amy and Wally helped Florence, who brought a camera.

  “Put me down, Dad,” said the fourteen-year-old, and Buck set him on the bench beside the gazebo. The boy’s eyes followed the stringer over the dock and into the water. Wally stepped forward and drew it up. Six ragged heads dangled in midair, their bodies missing. The nurse muffled a shriek with a gasp. Kevin drew back in horror. Unable to interrupt her intended movements quickly enough, Florence took a picture.

  Wally dropped the stringer.

  Kevin’s face darkened.

  “Turtles do that,” said Wally, trying to sound comforting in an informative way. “A turtle leaves heads.”

  “He ate them while they were alive?” asked Kevin.

  “Well, yes, in a manner of speaking.”

  “I want to go back inside now,” said Kevin.

  “Sorry, Amy,” said Wally as they walked up to the house.

  “It will be all right,” said Amy. “I know it will.”

  At first it seemed as if Amy’s resolute optimism might prevail. After several weeks, Kevin again was drawn to the water, and once again ventured out to the gazebo.

  Migrating geese stopped that autumn, sometimes a hundred at a time. They dove beneath the surface looking for food, slept on the water, and talked to each other in wild squawking tones.

  As Kevin watched them, he tried to imagine being a goose, having feathers, and floating half in and half out of the water, webbed feet dangling. He wondered what it would feel like to be surrounded by an enormous extended family of geese, to fall asleep with your head lying on your back, the naked sun overhead and the cool water beneath—a seamless connection to the rest of the world.

  That’s what I want, thought Kevin, a seamless connection—every stir stirring through me.

  Several days later, Kevin sat in his chair in the gazebo and an unusually large flock of geese circled the pond and landed. The noise was deafening in a good way. Kevin stood up and gripped the railing.

  “We should throw out pieces of bread,” he said to the nurse. “Go get some.”

  “I’ll be right back,” she said, putti
ng her book aside and slipping her shoes on.

  After checking the tubing and settling Kevin back into his chair, she walked down the dock, up onto the deck, and into the house.

  Kevin watched the geese. They covered nearly all of the surface. Then they rose at once in a cacophony of beating wings and loud fearful cries. Kevin sat forward. Within seconds, they were flapping over the top of the windbreak—all but one, who appeared to be having some trouble taking off from the surface of the pond. The lone goose slapped its wings against the water, lurched upward, and continued to bleat as it sank deeper into the pond. Finally, only its neck and head remained, and then these also disappeared and quiet ripples radiated from the place it had gone under.

  The pond became absolutely silent.

  When the nurse returned Kevin said he wanted to go back inside the house.

  “Where’d all the birds go?” asked the nurse.

  “I told you I want to be back inside.”

  “We have to wait for your mother to come back from town.”

  “I don’t want to wait.”

  “I’ll go in and get your grandfather. He can help.”

  “Hurry, I don’t want to be out here any longer.”

  The nurse went back inside. Kevin listened to the deafening silence of the pond and felt alone. He stood up and walked out onto the dock. Staring into the blue-green water, he thought he saw something. The color of the water seemed to coalesce beneath the surface, drawing together, taking on form.

  It seemed as if the old nurse was taking forever to come back, and Kevin grew increasingly anxious. As his anxiety grew, his breathing became more labored. His chest hurt and he stared into the water again.

  The greenish-blue form had turned more yellow since he last looked, and it had a definite shape now. It looked like a boulder three or four feet in diameter, lying at the bottom.

  Then it slowly rose and a dark bony shell broke through the surface, wet and slick. Finally the turtle’s knurled head and neck emerged. Its bright reptilian eyes contemplated him, and Kevin could not at first understand—beyond the sickly horror he was experiencing—what manner of stare it was. The neck swelled out from beneath the shell, serpent-like. The head drew closer and the mouth opened, revealing the full width of its bite. Kevin felt the animal’s dark intelligence, as if all its ten million ancestors were scoffing at Kevin, laughing at evolution’s latest doomed experiment. Long after Kevin had taken his last labored breath, the turtle would still be here, living beneath the surface.

  Satisfied with its communication, the giant turtle then closed its mouth, drew its neck in, and slowly sank until it disappeared completely.

  From then on, Kevin refused to have anything to do with the pond.

  “It’s the turtle, Buck,” said Amy. “You’ve got to get that thing out of there.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Wally said he saw it once. He poked it with a stick and it bit off a piece of the wood.”

  “Seeing it and getting rid of it are two different things.”

  When the DNR agent finally arrived later that morning, they stood together on the dock and Buck explained what he intended to do.

  “Oh no, you can’t drain the pond, Mr. Roebuck.”

  “I have all the pumps I need.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Roebuck. We can’t let you drain the pond.”

  “I want that turtle out of there.”

  “We talked about this turtle, Mr. Roebuck. I discussed it with our fish and game people and none of them think there’s a snapper like the one you described anywhere in Wisconsin. They’re certain, in fact, that there isn’t.”

  “I don’t care a whole lot what your people think,” said Buck. “My father saw it. My son saw it. I’m going to drain the pond.”

  “We can’t let you do that. It’s disruptive to the ecosystem. You already ceded this. It was part of the agreement you signed before impounding the water.”

  Buck knotted his hands together.

  “We can bring in a seining crew,” said the field agent. “It would be expensive, but we could drag the pond and pull up whatever you have down there.”

  “With nets?”

  “Nylon nets. Nothing escapes the nets, especially something as large as you think you have here. We’ll bring it up and remove it.”

  “What if it comes back?”

  “It won’t. You want me to put in a requisition for a crew? Remember, Buck, it’s expensive.”

  “Do it, as soon as possible.”

  Loyalty in Lockbridge

  Reverend Winifred Helm had been thinking about visiting Blake Bookchester for a long time. Ever since her husband, Jacob, told her that Blake had been transferred from Waupun to the prison in Lockbridge, it seemed like something she should do. Lockbridge wasn’t all that far away, and Blake’s father, Nate, was a frequent customer at Jacob’s repair shop in Words. But visiting an inmate was a good distance beyond Winnie’s comfort zone.

  As a younger woman she would not have hesitated. At the beginning of her ministry, Winnie efficiently converted the first twinge of moral impulse into an imperative for action. If the urge she experienced seemed sufficiently demanding, self-denying, and righteous, she at once assumed the source of the prompting to be divine—a Voice commanding her obedience. As she grew older she learned to more patiently examine the complex routes by which moral urges arrived in her conscious mind. All too often, she discovered, impulses of a self-serving and reward-seeking nature cleverly disguised their ignoble ends, professed virtues they did not have, and mimicked the Voice. With astonishing ingenuity, her desire for attention, praise, and achievement found ways of pretending to be something else, something bigger, something noble, and the ruse could be sifted out only by repeatedly testing her urges over a period of time. Consequently, though she often thought about visiting Blake Bookchester in the Lockbridge prison, she didn’t go.

  Then one night Winnie had an especially frightening dream of demonic creatures with purple throats, rooms with long sloping hallways, no exits, and red floors.

  “Are you all right?” asked Jacob, stirred awake by the sudden turbulence in bed.

  “I had a nightmare,” said Winnie, sitting up.

  “You shouted something.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Can I get you some tea?”

  “No. Go back to sleep. You’ll wake up August.”

  Their eleven-year-old son was in the room down the hall. His overly active mind had an enormous appetite for raw experience, and leaped to life at the slightest provocation. Jacob lowered his voice.

  “Tell me about your dream.”

  “I have to think about it first. Go back to sleep.”

  Jacob worked long hours in his repair shop, so going back to sleep came easily to him after he understood there was nothing better to do. He was a good man in that and many other ways, and deep rhythmic breathing soon emanated from the other side of the bed. As the sounds grew more sonorous and underwater-like, she turned toward the nearby window and was greeted by a cool, lazy breeze.

  Only a few stars were visible beyond the thickly growing pines in the backyard, blinking on and off with the movement of feathered limbs in the wind. The sporadic flickering made the distant lights seem less like objects in space and more like airborne fireflies igniting unpredictably as they flew. She smiled. The living world contained so many merry minor moments that sometimes it seemed as if fresh entertainment waited behind every turn of her head.

  Yet the dream troubled her. It indicated a serious rift at the base of her psyche. There were clearly vital parts of herself she did not recognize and had not confronted. They wanted in and had assumed the terrifying shapes needed to draw her attention.

  Following a successful effort to forgive her father for leaving her mother and other cruelties committed during her childhood, Winnie had been free of nightmares for several years. This was mostly thanks to her paternal uncle, Russell Smith, whose harsh and reactionary ma
nner had slowly informed her—from the safe distance of living in another house—how someone in her own family could hurt those around him without consciously intending to. Uncle Russell responded to everything that made him uncomfortable with a habitual blind urgency. For reasons known only at an intuitive level, he simply lacked the capacity to understand himself or his surroundings any better. Those who loved him, including his wife, Maxine, had learned to accept this in exchange for his more-agreeable qualities, like reliability and the absence of guile.

  Winnie had been lulled into thinking her deep challenges were over. She assumed that taking care of her son, husband, and church family would continue to round out her life in the same hectic yet mostly satisfactory manner. The future would bring only more of the same. The trials of childhood, insecurities of adolescence, and other extra-hormonal adventures had thankfully concluded and she was now safely grounded in the staid-fastness of middle age.

  But the dream indicated otherwise, and now Winnie watched stars appear and disappear through the giant pine tree, thinking about how she might know herself better. Soon, the prisoner returned to her thoughts. As she continued staring out the window, she realized that some of the blinking stars really were fireflies, and this greatly amused her. When proven to be a fool, dance, she thought, and quickly stifled a giggle.

  Before committing to visit someone in prison, however, Winnie explored the idea further by preaching a sermon on the subject the following Sunday. It was a fairly good homily, she thought, seasoned throughout with biblical references. Jesus asked his disciples if they ever visited him in prison, and when the disciples dodged the question and asked, “When were you ever in prison?,” Jesus said anyone hungry, needing clothes, or in prison should be seen in the same light as himself. The Prince of Peace had made it clear: the faithful should visit prisoners.

  Her congregation that day—some twenty-five people out of a total membership of somewhere between forty and two hundred, depending on how membership was defined—listened attentively, sang two hymns, prayed, and went into the basement to eat a potluck meal with hamburger casserole, cheese, green beans, spaghetti squash, Jell-O salad, peanut butter bars, and triple-chocolate cake. The conversation was quite lively, but no one mentioned visiting prisoners.