That morning I had been going to fix the water tank in the upper yard, cut the rest of the lousy first crop of hay, and topdress the west field. I needed to worm the sheep, pay some bills, cultivate the soybeans. The hay was worrisome. There wasn’t going to be enough to last the year. And already there wasn’t good pasture for the cows because of the drought. Alice often complained that there wasn’t time to do anything well. I suppose she was right. She had once said something in anger that cut me to the quick. She had said that farming was only really about staying in the exact same place, that there was no moving beyond milk, beyond manure, beyond soybeans, that it was the same year after year. Nothing is farther from the truth. There are seasonal variations, medical challenges, new technologies to consider and balance against the proven ways. Each year there is new life. That morning last summer I had the sensation of standing still in a way I had never experienced before. It is not pleasant to feel still, forcibly still, stuck. I didn’t think that stillness was the variety that had worried Alice.
Later that afternoon I got between Emma and Claire on the sofa. I tried to read
Hansel and Gretel
to them. The air as well as the uncertainty had a suffocating effect. They couldn’t listen. When Hansel was making his trail the second time with bread crumbs Claire asked, “Can’t we take a bath?” They both sprang up to get towels and run the water. If Alice had seen me dusting, pulling out towels and cleaning supplies in the bathroom to wipe the shelves, she would immediately have realized the degree of my anxiety. There was already a distinction which would be with us for the rest of the summer. There was out there, beyond our front door. It was a shapeless and hot landmass with Alice on it, somewhere, picking her way home. The only other point of reference was inside our house. The rooms of our house were the things we owned and knew.
That afternoon I kept reaching for the receiver to put a call through to the American Embassy in Bucharest. After a minute I’d hang up. I wasn’t sure what message to leave for my mother. She used to ask after the crops and the animals, out of politeness. She didn’t know specifically what to ask because she didn’t have a working vocabulary for the farm. I
always explained what I was doing, and why I thought it was interesting or necessary. If I called her over in Rumania she would have to ask detailed questions in order to get as much as a vague answer. When the phone rang at three o’clock I pounced on it.
“Howard—” Alice began.
“Are you out?”
There was a television on in the background there and I could hardly hear her. “The public defender just took the bar a month ago,” she said. “He was more nervous than I was.”
“Where are you?”
“Upstairs,” she said. I had to think if she could mean above me, in our bedroom. “Fourth floor, pay phone. I can call all I want now that I’m booked. Listen, they say there are other children coming forward with charges. The judge talked about how a public health worker is a person of trust and how angry communities are when that trust has been violated. That’s why the bail is unusually high. The lawyer thought I should have been given a chance at release on property or signature bonds, but I wasn’t. The judge set a cash bond.”
“How much?”
“Too much.”
“How much?”
“It’s wild, Howard—it’s, it’s one hundred thousand.”
One hundred thousand what? Horse chestnuts? Hickory nuts? We had five hundred dollars in a savings account which we had started when Emma was born, for college. We had weeks before not only refinanced the farm but borrowed ten thousand dollars from the bank for a hay bine, a baler, and a rack. The hay bine was a dream, conditioning the hay, cutting the drying time in half. With the pop-up baler I could make six hundred bales all by myself in an afternoon. If Alice and Dan helped I could do twice that. It was possible that I might be able to get several thousand dollars from my mother, but one hundred thousand—it might as well have been two million. “I’m going to write you a letter,” she said quietly. “I’m all right.” She said something then which almost made me laugh. “Don’t worry, Howard.”
“Don’t worry,” I echoed.
“They have nothing to go on.”
“Alice—” I said, waiting for her to interrupt.
“The women in here are young enough to be my daughters,” she said after she’d waited for my response. “I’m worried about you three,” she whispered. “I’ll be all right. This is only an indication of things to come, for the next life. I’ll be in hell, and you’ll be in heaven with the girls. We’ll have to consider ourselves lucky if there’s even such a thing as Sunday visitation.”
When I didn’t respond she said weakly, “I’m kidding, Howard. It was a joke.”
After the call we got in the car. It was the first of many such excursions. We’d edge toward Racine and then veer north or south. I’d think in a hallucinatory moment that I could go straight to the jail and wrangle her out. That first trip we opened the windows and cranked up the radio. The girls put their heads in the breeze and closed their eyes. I followed the arrows for the winding roads, assuring myself that she would be home by morning. It wasn’t possible for her to be held any longer than one brief night.
Over the next few days several problems arose. I shouldn’t have been surprised on Wednesday when I pulled the
Blackwell Dispatch
from our mailbox, the dark headline proclaiming, “Prairie Center Nurse Charged with Sex Abuse.” Below, in smaller print, it said, “Principal sets meeting for concerned parents.” I stood on the driveway, hoping to look away and then back again at a different lead story. I hadn’t taken off my clothes the night before. I hadn’t slept much, or at all, sitting in the living-room chair. The sunlight stung my eyes. Claire crawled up my leg, screeching at me to feed her while I stood and read.
Alice Goodwin, age 32, was arrested early Tuesday morning at her home, 22394 Walnut Lane, for seven felony charges, including two counts of reckless endangerment, child abuse, and three counts of second-degree sexual abuse. Mrs. Goodwin, a LPN, is employed by the Blackwell School District and holds the part-time job of school nurse. She had been under investigation for several weeks prior to the arrest. If Goodwin is convicted of these charges the combined maximum penalties would be over $100,000 and fifty years in prison. Racine County Circuit Court Judge Rhone also ruled that additional counts of felony charges to be filed in an amended criminal complaint will include reckless endangerment and sexual abuse.
In addition, Goodwin is under investigation in the drowning of Elizabeth Collins, two years old, of Prairie Center. The suspect was baby-sitting when the child allegedly ran from the house and drowned in the pond on the Goodwin farm. The principal of Blackwell Elementary, Mr. David Henskin, said today that he was shocked by the arrest and that he will assist the investigation in any way he can. A meeting for concerned parents has been set for Friday, June 16, at 7 P.M.
I suppose it was then, stuck on the driveway with Claire, that I began to understand the nature of the problem. We weren’t going to be able so easily to remedy what to us was a mysterious error. Even with Rafferty’s help Alice wasn’t going to be able to slip from jail without notice. By the end of the morning, after the phone calls started coming in, I knew full well that her trouble was like mercury, spilling and slipping, running into unexpected corners. I was dazed by the equation that overnight made Alice’s private trouble equal to everyone’s trouble. I had waited in the chair until dawn. I was waiting, and also standing guard against something outside I couldn’t name. I hadn’t known that it was already spreading, that it was at large.
I carried Claire inside and put the whole box of Cheerios into her outstretched arms. Emma started in about not having her very own box of cereal when the phone rang. “Shut up,” I said to her. I had never used those words to my children before, or in front of them. “Shut up,” I said again, handing her the box of cornflakes.
“Mr. Goodwin?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Sylvia Romero, from the
Racine Journal Times
. I’m sorry to bother you this morning—”
“I
hate
cornflakes,” Emma squalled.
“—I know this must be a very difficult time for you. I’m sure your wife’s arrest—”
“Must have come as a sh-shock,” I finished for her. I covered the receiver with my hand and stamped my boot at Emma.
“I’m sure it was! These unfortunate types of situations seem to gather force on their own. I’m sure you know that since this story broke yesterday there is already a lot of talk in your part of the county about your wife. We are very concerned that you too have an opportunity to tell us what you know about the charge. It is only fair that you—”
I hung up. I hung up and poured milk into the girls’ cups, and sat down, rubbed my eyes, took off my T-shirt. When the phone rang again I considered, for three or four rings, not answering.
“Hello?” I said finally.
“I want to tell you what she did.” It was a gravelly woman’s voice, not someone I recognized. “My daughter says your wife used to come up to the locker room when they were taking showers after gym class. She says she ran her hand down her friend’s back, up and down her back. She says she stood and stared at the girls while they were naked in the shower. She kept running her hands up and down the girl’s back until the girl got away. Your wife also told a neighbor, twelve years old, that she could ‘get it on,’ I believe those are the words she used, with a tampon.”
I wiped my left underarm with my wadded up T-shirt, and then I said, “Who are you trying to reach? This is K&L Rental Cars.”
“Let’s drive,” I said to the girls. “Let’s go driving.”
“We’re not done eating,” Emma cried, “and you don’t even have a shirt on.”
I snatched the keys from the pegboard and started out the door. Ken Hegeman, the editor of the
Blackwell Dispatch
, was just pulling into our yard. He had done an article on the farm two years before, when “Sustainable Agriculture,” an old concept, was the brand-new buzz word. I’d done a lot of experimenting with compost preparations, which I used in place of pesticides. I’d been getting reasonable yields all along. Because of stray voltage near the barn and the amount of pasture land we had I also was a strong advocate for rotational grazing. The somatic cell count in our cows was about as low as it goes. I would have liked to have used horses instead of tractors, but it wasn’t practical for the acreage. I latched the screen door and started for the back stairs, whispering, “Come on, come
on, come on.” I pulled Claire along with me as I ran. The girls sat straight on the bed in our room. They were breathing heavily and straining to hear more than their own breath. We waited while Ken rang the bell and knocked at the window at regular intervals. Later, after he’d given up and driven off, a crew from the Channel Four news team parked their van across the road. They filmed the house. I locked the doors and we went upstairs again. That time we waited in the windowless hall. There’s an old mahogany dresser by the bathroom filled with junk. Again, for something to do, we began clearing out the drawers. We threw out sheaves of paper, old shoes, dried-up rolls of masking tape, various odd baby toy pieces, and incomplete decks of cards. It was a game for the girls, like a hunt for treasure. All of the stuff was useless.
After the van was gone we sat in front of the fan in the bedroom. Claire fell asleep while I taught Emma to play War. What if the Channel Four news team found more secrets in our house than I would care to believe? I shuddered to think how an unpainted, clapboard farmhouse would speak to them when they reviewed their footage. For the first time I saw the place as an outsider. It would look to their experienced eyes as if it should be condemned.
When I had clear thoughts, they were of one thing: how I could lay my hands on one hundred thousand dollars. If we sold the car, the old combine, and the new baler we might get seventeen thousand. If I sold the farm equipment or the cows I would be without income, without the means to pay Rafferty. If my mother had eighty-five and I could come up with fourteen or fifteen we could get Alice out. When I was not thinking clearly, I wasn’t sure what I was trying to get her out
of
. I’d start through the process, trying to link Robbie Mackessy to a faceless investigator, and to Alice, and to a stark cell in the jail in downtown Racine. Again and again, after I’d made the impossible connections, I knew that I would have had less disbelief if she had just gone and died.
Occasionally a sudden bolt of reason would come to me and I’d understand certain facts. Everything that I could think of to sell would in some way cripple us, or cripple the cause. There were very few places we could go any longer. It was going to prove difficult, if not impossible, to find someone to watch the girls while I was away trying to get Alice out. We had always been satisfied with our circumscribed life. We had been
proud, I think, to know that we could get by with so little. As for child care, the few people I might have ordinarily called upon for help were in distant parts. Dan and Theresa were out of the question, besides still being in Montana, and the girls’ regular school-year sitter was at her summer cabin in Boulder Junction. My mother was doing her good deed in Rumania.
I had finally called the embassy and left the message for Nellie that no one was hurt, but that she should phone her son as soon as possible. “Is something the matter?” she asked when she got through. There was a lag and an echo, so that I heard my hello coming back to me as she asked, “Are you all right?”
“Ah—”
“What is it? What is it, Howie?”
I was loathe to tell my mother that Alice had been arrested for hurting a small boy or that she’d been running her hands up and down the backs of junior-high girls in the locker room.
“What is it? Do you need me, sweetheart?”
“I’m going to have to have some money to get Alice out of jail,” I shouted, hoping that sheer volume would make her understand the particulars.