Nick Reding (15 page)

For an entire two-year mayoral term, Murphy and the city council labored to come up with the money. As Murphy said to the
council one night, either they push full steam ahead or else they slide inextricably backward. Those were the two choices
faced by Oelwein in a global economy. Murphy essentially leveraged the next election on how much he could raise, selling people
on the theoretical hope that business would eventually come to Oelwein, if only the improvements were made. He applied for
Vision Iowa grants, which netted Oelwein $3.4 million. He and the council members, including former mayor Gene Vine, whom
Murphy had unseated, lobbied for real estate tax assessments for the sixty-five commercial business owners in Oelwein. Murphy
spent three weeks talking to each owner individually, going again and again to their homes and to their stores, asking them
to agree to the passage of an ordinance that would essentially increase taxes with no guarantee of increased profits. He begged
the townspeople to pass a referendum calling for a higher sales tax, which passed in late 2005, and a school bond referendum
worth $2.5 million. Murphy and the five council members secured another $3.4 million in private donations from some of Oelwein’s
wealthy old families.

What’s remarkable is that Murphy and the city council got the money they needed for the planned improvements and more—enough
to build a new library with Internet access. Raising the money was in some ways the easy part. The hard part would come next,
when Oelwein would either be buoyed by an economic resurgence or sink further. Once ground was broken for the street revival
project in May 2006, it was anyone’s guess what would happen. Maybe in twelve months the shops would fill up, the call center
deal would go through, and the long-empty Donaldson plant, with 160,000 square feet of prime industrial space behind the roundhouse,
would find a new tenant. Maybe Logan would continue to keep the meth users under control and would prevent a new crop of batchers
from moving in. Maybe In dependence wouldn’t use Oelwein as its ghetto. Echoing the Kantian philosophical tradition that pervades
that part of the Midwest, and through which Murphy, like Clay Hallberg and Nathan Lein, understands the world, Murphy said
that his only wish was to provide the genesis that Oelwein so sorely needed. Oelwein in the spring of 2006 was in the midst,
as Kant describes it, of acting to the limits of its knowledge and its environment. From there, only a leap of faith would
carry the town forward, no matter what actual advances it made. If Oelwein failed, then a subsequent generation would have
to address the same issues. At the very least, said Murphy, Oelwein, just for trying, would regain the very thing that had
been missing these many years: its dignity.

CHAPTER 8

WATERLOO

E
ver since Nathan had moved back to Iowa in 2001, he’d wrestled with what he referred to as the Girl Problem. The Girl Problem
was formed when he’d fallen in love with Jenny, the woman from Indianapolis whom he’d met in law school and who moved with
him to Waterloo, Iowa, where he worked as a judge’s clerk, she as a public defender. There, they lived together while Nathan’s
parents smoldered with indignation, for to them, cohabitation before marriage is a sin. Because Nathan’s parents would not
be damned by God, they would be damned if they spoke to their son. In a roundabout way, it was the Girl Problem that brought
Nathan back to Oelwein, putting him in a position to help his hometown rebuild itself. In another way, the Girl Problem represented
a once-intractable dilemma, like meth in Oelwein, that seemed suddenly to be solvable.

Nathan might have been mad as hell about his parents’ treatment of Jenny, but his anger didn’t change the fact that he had
been raised to respect their judgment. Add to that the idea that any hope of ever being involved in the central feature of
their collected lives—the farm—would vanish if his relationship with his parents disintegrated, and Nathan was caught between
two very powerful gravitational forces: anger and honor. He assaulted the problem with all the intellectual tools of his training
in philosophy, to no avail; it was like a fortress whose walls would not be breached. He appealed to instinct, and this proved
murkier still, for he did not see himself as the marrying type. And yet the idea that he and Jenny might never legalize their
love did not minimize the obligation he felt toward the woman who had moved to Iowa to be with him. As the problem churned
in his gut, he grew more and more withdrawn, more inward. For a year, it went on like this, with no answer. The war between
his instinct and his desire settled into the trenches, where it threatened to destroy his life, not via entropy, but by attrition.

Then, in 2002, Larry Murphy had called and offered Nathan the job of assistant Fayette County prosecutor. He moved to Oelwein,
and Jenny stayed behind in Waterloo. He still loved Jenny, he said, and she him. But the one-hour drive between the two towns
felt longer all the time. Slowly, wordlessly, Nathan began spending more time at the farm. His parents never talked to him
about the fight they’d had, and the familiarity of the silent understanding they’d reached reinforced the pull of his family.
The very fact that nothing needed to be said made him feel the weight of his place back in the fold. With Jenny, he said,
everything had been about discussion, about argument. When he and Jenny talked, it was like two lawyers debating. Though he
understood the emotional liabilities of silence, Nathan found he preferred not talking to arguing. Nathan saw other women,
including a DHS caseworker, though he couldn’t commit to anyone. He bought a tiny, two-bedroom house on in Oelwein’s Ninth
Ward. And then, in June of 2005, Nathan’s half brother, David, died of heart failure in San Francisco at the age of thirty-eight.

David was Nathan’s closest confidant; being raised together in that house on the prairie gave them a shared understanding.
It was thanks to David, who’d had the courage to get out of Iowa for good, that Nathan could see that leaving wasn’t an ideal
solution. And it was thanks to Nathan for having the courage to return home that David still had an advocate for him with
his difficult mother and his stepfather, not to mention a connection to the place where he’d grown up. When David died, Nathan
was crushed.

Nathan’s parents had no money to go to California for a funeral. So it was he who went to get David’s cremated remains and
bring them back to Iowa. Burying his brother was the hardest thing Nathan Lein ever did. He said a few days afterward that
it would be a long time before he was “right again.” Three years later, he still, he said, wasn’t right.

But David’s death had also offered Nathan a solution to the Girl Problem. He didn’t ask Jenny to accompany him to the funeral—he
asked the DHS caseworker, whose name is Jamie Porter. Why he did so was unclear. Perhaps, he said, David’s death put his own
life in perspective. After the funeral, Nathan unburdened himself to Jamie of all the secrets he’d kept pent up for twenty-eight
years. And so, as the town of Oelwein began rebuilding itself from the ashes of the meth epidemic, so began a new era in Nathan’s
life, born out of the ashes of his brother’s death.

Jamie Porter is a year younger than Nathan. Standing next to him, she looks small, even at five feet seven. She has blond,
shoulder-length hair and blue eyes bordered by long, delicate lashes. With her red cheeks and porcelain skin, she has the
flushed, healthy look of someone just coming in from the cold. She attended Wartburg College in her nearby hometown of Waverly,
Iowa, where she was an All-American softball player as a second baseman. She is still built in a way that suggests a home-run
threat: strong, powerful legs and wide shoulders. She knows her way around a pheasant stew and is perfectly at home in a tent
pitched somewhere on the Volga River. In the evenings during December’s late bow-and-arrow deer-hunting season, Jamie is known
to climb into the tiny hayloft above Nathan’s woodstove-heated garage and sit next to the swing-door. There she can look down
on a small field bordered on one side by an unincorporated spit of timber and on the other by the neighboring houses; Nathan’s
street defines the point at which Oelwein ends and the country begins. Dressed in heavily insulated camo coveralls, with a
book in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, Jamie waits in the ambient heat of the woodstove for the whitetails to pass
through the field. Next to her is the bow Nathan bought her for their first Christmas together. To date, she has killed three
deer from the garage window—two bucks and a doe.

Jamie has an undergraduate degree in psychology. She has worked since mid-2006 as a contractor for the Iowa Department of
Human Services. DHS contractors are assigned cases by the courts; much of their work is in-home visits. On a typical day,
Jamie might have three appointments: one with a child who has complained of physical abuse; one with a child whose mother
or father is in jail for manufacturing meth; and a third with a recent parolee in the halfway house in West Union. Aside from
the Northeast Iowa Behavioral Health Clinic, which has only six employees, there isn’t much in the way of other job opportunities
for social workers in Oelwein.

Working with DHS, where she’s essentially a freelancer, gives Jamie the feeling that she is doing all she can in order to
help people who would otherwise not be given any help. The job’s frustrations, she says, stem in part from the fact that Jamie
sees a lot of the same people over and over again. Trouble often seems to wrap itself around certain families—the Jarvis clan
is one—whose members show up constantly in jail, in halfway houses, and on Jamie’s list of appointments. The rest of her frustrations
Jamie characterizes in stark economic terms. Rural Iowa grows older and smaller each year, while the number of cases Jamie
is assigned seems to stay stable. The region’s poverty means there are more problem behaviors, and also less money to minister
to those behaviors—especially under the kind of long-term treatment that Jamie says would be needed in order to turn a family
like the Jarvises around.

What Larry Murphy says is that there is always greater pressure amid a fiscal crisis to cut spending altogether on non-revenue-generating
programs like human services. Fayette County and the town of Oelwein are businesses like any other, and presently both of
them are losing money. Sociologist Douglas Constance’s observation that ours is a psychological rather than a socio logical
culture is once again apt. Much of what Jamie has to deal with are the ravages of meth; when one is forced to choose between
blaming the addict and blaming the system that created the addict, it can be difficult to blame the former. During the late
summer of 2005, three of the five members of the Jarvis family—Roland, his mother, and his brother—were in jail on drug-related
charges. The brother was in federal prison and would not be paroled for another half decade. Instances like this make Jamie
wonder if some people can ever be helped.

The instinct to assume that the Jarvises will not change no matter how much the state intervenes might begin to explain how
Jamie was out of work for over a year, between mid-2005 and mid-2006. The theory of one of Jamie’s co-workers was that, with
money tight all over Iowa and public sympathy at ebb tide regarding drug addicts, it had become more convenient than ever
for state government to look at a man like Roland Jarvis and throw in the towel. In that same year, says the co-worker, nine
out of ten social workers in northeastern Iowa lost their jobs. As a result, Jamie had taken the only job she could find,
as a bartender in a little town called Strawberry Point, twenty miles northeast of Oelwein. During this difficult time, Jamie
moved in with Nathan. She could get only a few shifts a week, mostly during the daytime; the woman who worked nights had no
intention of handing Jamie the only lucrative shifts in a small-town bar. Money was short, given Nathan’s modest state salary,
and Jamie spent a lot of time around the tiny house, trying to keep busy. The arguments she had with Nathan were a case study
in relationships being tested by hard financial times. For his part, Nathan couldn’t understand why Jamie didn’t get up and
go do more—though exactly what more she should be doing wasn’t clear. From her perspective, she’d gone and gotten the work
that was available, even if it embarrassed her: she was too well educated to work in a bar, never mind a bar that was forty
miles away, round-trip, in a time of rising gas prices. What did he want her to do beyond swallow her pride and work as best
she could? She said to Nathan over and over that she was the only one who hated all the time she had on her hands more than
he did.

Meantime, Nathan kept up his usual schedule of working at the office during the day and going to the farm at night. His parents
loved Jamie; they’d met her at David’s funeral and taken an immediate liking to her. Unaware that they were living together,
Nathan’s father asked him all the time if he’d heard from Jamie or seen her. He wanted to know why Nathan didn’t bring her
to the farm at night to help, or why Nathan didn’t bring her by for Thanksgiving supper or on Christmas eve. It’s an interesting
question, and one that Jamie herself was anxious to know the answer to. After all, she and Nathan were living together in
a small, tight-knit, gossipy community just twelve miles away from Nathan’s parents. It couldn’t long remain a secret that
they were in love and were living in sin. Nathan’s parents might be Luddites, but they weren’t living on Mars. And if Nathan
was so adamant that Jamie do more than work in a bar while she waited for another social worker position, then why didn’t
he bring her to help at the farm? That was the good, honest kind of work that Nathan could respect, and it would help his
family, to boot. What was with all the secretiveness?

Nathan’s response was that, no matter how interested and nice his parents seemed now, they would eventually turn on Jamie.
That’s what they’d done his whole life, he said: lured women in, only to then become so critical that it ended up ruining
Nathan’s relationship. Because he cared about his relationship with Jamie more than any other, he wouldn’t let that happen
this time. He’d finally learned his lesson, he said, and had no interest in subjecting Jamie to his parents’ scrutiny. And
so until something happened—what that something would be Nathan couldn’t say—he and Jamie would have to keep their living
arrangements a secret from his parents, and Jamie would not accompany him to the farm.

As far as Nathan was concerned, this represented a genuine coup in his love life. He
was
in love, even if he couldn’t say it to Jamie. He was living with her and happy with her and his parents were not angrily shunning
him. Eventually, the situation began to feel pretty natural to Jamie. Her training in psychology made her more sympathetic
than most people might have been to Nathan’s plight, and she was genuinely able to help him. That in turn made Jamie feel
needed in a time when she had to work in a bar in Strawberry Point. Her family loved Nathan, and they weren’t any the wiser
when, on holidays, Nathan went alone to his parents’, then came home in the afternoon or the evening to have a second Thanksgiving
or Christmas meal with Jamie and her parents. For Nathan, it was as good as it was likely to get, for things with the girl
were splendid. Problem solved.

Around the time that Nathan’s brother died, Clay Hallberg entered a rocky period in his life. One night, Clay played a gig
at a bar called the Eagle’s Roost, in Hazleton, Iowa, just five miles south of Oelwein. As usual, much of Clay’s compensation
had come in the form of beer. After a couple of rowdy encores, Clay had sat around with the bar’s owner, an old friend from
the better times of the 1970s, and drank until closing time, before loading his equipment into his Toyota Highlander and heading
home. Knowing he was drunk, Clay skirted town, instead taking South Frederick north, past the Country Cottage Café and Lake
Oelwein, before hanging a left on Tenth Street SW. When he got to his street, Q Avenue, he knew he was safe, for Q Avenue
is nothing more than a farm road that was graded back when the prairie was divvied up into quarter sections. But after driving
a few hundred yards, Clay fell asleep. He missed the right-hand turn into his long gravel driveway, jumped the irrigation
ditch, and T-boned the fence. His truck, with significant damage, came to a clattering stop in his cornfield.

The real wake-up call for Clay, though, came at the end of 2005, just a week before the two-year anniversary of his mother’s
death. Again, he’d been down in Hazleton, playing a gig. And again he had stayed too late and driven home drunk. Only this
time, an Oelwein cop pulled him over just north of the Fayette County line. Clay had been smoldering for two years about what
he saw as the complicity of the Oelwein police in the death of his elderly mother. She’d been complaining to the Cop Shop
for months about an Amishman whose Clydesdale was always wandering onto Highway 150 in the evenings, thanks to a hole in the
Amishman’s fence. But the police had ignored her pleas. That was the very horse that, startled by her headlights as she drove
home late one cold winter night, bolted onto the road. The collision killed her, totaling her car and throwing it into the
ditch out of which the horse darted.