Jewelweed (17 page)

“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 nodded 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.

T
he 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.

He inched beyond the driveway and backed the tractor-trailer down the drive, between the house and his pickup. The motion detectors on the side of the porch failed to turn on the lights. They'd quit working last winter.

Nate turned the ignition key back toward him and the diesel's rattling vibration died; the wipers collapsed at the bottom of the windshield. With competition from the engine gone, the rain beat more boldly, washing away memories of intersections, flashing lights, merging lanes of traffic, exit signs, blasting horns, public restrooms, and loading docks. The liquid drumming coaxed his muscles toward a yearned-for resignation. The trunks of the trees in the yard trembled in the storm; their limbs flailed.

On the front of his house a waterfall rolled off the sagging, leaf-clogged gutters, and he thought about marching into the deluge, unlocking the door, clambering inside, and dripping all over the floor—greeted by walls, doorways, and pictures that always seemed to resent late-night intrusions, and to hold grudges every time he was gone this long.