“Usually in a case like this, when the accused is an upstanding community-minded person, the bond is between three and ten thousand. Somewhere in that range. I’ll argue with the judge, make a motion to reduce the bail or change it to a property bond. The farm is your greatest asset in terms of bargaining for the bail. A chunk of property like that indicates that you are here to stay. But I can tell you right now: It’s going
to be a fight. How many students are enrolled at Blackwell Elementary—did she say seven hundred? You have fourteen hundred parents in a feeding frenzy, my bets are the judge isn’t going to make out like a softie.”
Rafferty closed his book and rose, hiking his pants up at his waist and then tucking his shirt in all the way around. He worked at this with the fervor of a small animal digging a hole. “We’ll see what they come up with at the hearing in a few weeks,” he said.
It was clear that for him the meeting was over. I wasn’t anywhere near ready to leave. He hadn’t enlightened me. I still wanted to know why he thought Alice had been singled out. I guess I had the hope that Rafferty could declare the whole thing a gross injustice and that would be the end of it. He thrust his hand at my chest as I rose. I looked at it, wondering what to do. I had to think, left from right, hand from foot, to find the correct limb to meet his shake.
“Try to get some rest,” he said then, bumping my arm with his knobby fist in what I suppose was a gesture of camaraderie. “We’ll get through this, you’ll see. It isn’t the first time this has happened, and I’m afraid it won’t be the last. We’ll stand firm and plow over ‘em.” He went to the door and opened it wide. “I’ll be calling as I frame specific questions.” The girls were on the sofa, their mouths full of candy that stunk of artificial banana, strawberry, blueberry. I knelt down to pack up their things. “I’ll see her today,” he was saying, “I’ll tell her that we talked, that they”—he nodded at the girls—“look fine.”
At the front door Claire said, “Look, Daddy, we’re like Hansel!” Behind us was a trail of Starburst wrappers all the way down the stairs. They were hot colors, bright bits of paper. She laughed. “We’ll be able to find our way back from the forest!”
Chapter Ten
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O
N
S
ATURDAY NIGHT
I called Miss Bowman, our egg lady. We used to get our own eggs, before the neighbor dogs killed all of our chickens. I had thought the hen house was dog-proof but the black Labradors managed to squeeze in through the swinging door. I had shot at them and missed. They each had the audacity, Alice said, of a fox. The only dealings we’d had with Miss Bowman was the weekly exchange of a dollar fifty for two cartons of eggs. She was a scrawny, gray-haired woman who raised chickens and terriers. She was strange for many reasons. Without saying a word, she used to hand me Jehovah’s Witness tracts. There was also something wrong with her right eye. She didn’t seem to be in pain. It was the bystander who suffered, looking at the half-closed lid and the displaced half-iris.
“Miss Bowman,” I said.
“Who is it?” Her voice creaked from what I assume was disuse.
“Miss Bowman, this is Howard Goodwin, your egg customer from down the road.”
“Uh.”
If it had been Salem in witch-hunting times she would have been the first to go. She would have been suspect because she talked to her animals,
because she was a single-woman property owner, and because she was disfigured. She was about as out of touch with the world as someone like me could hope to find.
I said, “My girls were wondering if they could come down and help you with your chores. You don’t know them very well, but they’ve always liked visiting you when we make an egg run.” It was true that Emma and Claire argued over who would pet the Scottish terrier that was chained to a post in the yard.
Miss Bowman was quiet on the other end of the line.
“Their mother and I happen to have kind of an important meeting tomorrow afternoon, in fact, and I was wondering if the girls could come over for an hour or so. I’d be glad to pay you. I’d pay you.”
She may have been struck dumb that anyone would talk to her about something other than the price of eggs. I waited a while for her to respond. She was breathing heavily, the “ah, ah, ah,” of each breath coming right into my ear. She finally spoke. “They mouth off?”
“They’re good girls,” I said. “They are very good girls. Would around one thirty be all right?”
“Who was that?” Emma called from the landing.
“Miss Bowman,” I said. “Tomorrow you—”
“I’m NOT going to her house.” She came into full view. “I’m not! She only has half an eye!”
There were moments, and that was one of them, when my knees almost folded up, when despair passed over me like a waft. It had been enough to call Miss Bowman and ask her to do something she wasn’t suited for. Claire was sitting right in front of the television, just about in the screen. I squatted down and whispered in Emma’s ear. “Tomorrow,” I said, “if you do not go to Miss Bowman’s for one short hour, I will not be able to visit Mother.” I had never called Alice “Mother.” “I won’t be able to find out how we can help her. I won’t be able to find out when she is coming home. If you sit here and make an awful stink, I will stay and watch you. Mom will sit and wait and wonder.”
“I want to come too,” she protested, her voice weakening as she spoke.
“Ch-children aren’t allowed.”
“Why can’t I come? Miss Bowman looks like a bird, like one of those naked birds that fell out of the nest.” In fact that was exactly what she did look like. I forced myself to whisper, to speak mildly. My new and gross instinct was to shout. I had never laid a hand on the girls. I could now imagine shaking them hard. Rafferty had called that morning to tell me about the parents’ meeting at Blackwell Elementary. They had brought in a speaker, a social worker who directs the Sexual Assault Unit at a Milwaukee hospital. She had urged the parents to watch their children carefully for nightmares, biting, bed wetting, masturbation, spitting, or any unusual behavioral changes. She suggested making an appointment with a physician who would be able to determine if physical injury had taken place. She wrote down alarming statistics on the blackboard about the prevalence of abuse. “We can all stay here and we won’t know anything about Mom,” I said to Emma. “And she won’t know anything about us.”
Emma covered her face and wept without much sound. I sent her into the living room to sit with Claire. Because they fought over the seating arrangement, I packed them off to bed without a story. I could hear Emma crying in her room for a short time before she fell asleep. Rafferty had tried to make the parents’ meeting sound benign, even casual, not much to worry about. I’m sure the social worker didn’t tell the parents that many of the behaviors she described were normal for young children. I knew, and Rafferty also knew, that those parents might as well have poured gasoline in a circle around our house and thrown a few matches in the grass.
In the end, on Sunday afternoon, I left the girls in Miss Bowman’s living room. I left them standing in front of her whatnot. They were holding their own hands, trying to keep themselves from reaching out to touch the china pitchers and the glass-blown figurines. They stood, mute and wide-eyed, in spite of themselves, at the rare view of Miss Bowman’s life. She had plastic slipcovers on her sofa and the chairs. They had a stiff new look to them. I wondered if she’d put them on to protect her upholstery from the girls. There was an upright piano in the corner, boxes of canning jars and lids on the coffee table, a bowl of orange velvet apples on a metal tea cart. There were egg cartons stacked halfway up the wall. The
house smelled of cats and the gas stove, of mildew and overripe fruit. Miss Bowman stood paralyzed in the middle of her kitchen. Her territory had never been besieged by midgets before. She was clutching a potholder with two hands at chest level. “Don’t touch,” she squawked.
“I’ll be back soon,” I said.
Emma shot me an anguished look, calculated, I suppose, to make me feel worse than I already did. I had talked myself into believing that Miss Bowman’s house was a safe and wholesome place for children. “Demented” appropriately described our neighbor. It would upset Alice, when she’d found that I’d given the girls over to the egg lady. I got in the car and left them. I drove past the covered bridge to Vermont Acres. By now everyone up in the subdivision would have discussed the trouble. I went past the single new home in the middle of what used to be Clarence Holland’s horse pasture. It’s a formidable Southern-type plantation house with pillars and shutters, a verandah, and no shade trees. I guess the homestead is supposed to be imposing out there by itself, all dressed up and no place to go. Alice imagined that the owners, the doctor and his wife, spoke in Southern accents, that the wife wore a corset and a hoop skirt, that their servants cooked grits over an open fire. Dr. Miller might have already examined some of the schoolchildren, to see if they’d been hurt. I turned on Highway P, the road to the city center. Past the old Sinclair Station that had been the library since the Super America Station opened out by the racetrack three years before. The librarian, Mr. Benchler, was a retired history teacher with a hook for a hand. Alice said she couldn’t help thinking he was wicked, like Captain Hook, not only because of his infirmity, but because he was cranky and unhelpful. I’d found out some interesting things from him about burial mounds in the area and never even noticed his hand.
On that windy Sunday afternoon, the dust from the wide street was blowing up at the library and next door, at Del’s. The diner was the backbone of the community. I used to think that when I reached middle age I’d go down to Del’s for my breakfast, or for coffee. In twenty years or so I’d become an honorary old guy. They served you coffee in large white pots that you got to keep at your table. It was pretty weak and usually not very hot. Alice liked the idea of sitting long enough to drink a whole pot. Del himself, a large man, literally took up three stools at the counter while
he read his paper all morning. Every now and then we used to stop in for cherry pie. The girls had cocoa for their beverage. I waited for the day Lavelle would ask me if we were having the usual.
I went on past the fire station, the town hall, the Dog ’N Suds, the mini-storage units, and the branch bank that had recently been held up. Alice had been so relieved to find that every branch bank was vulnerable to raids, that a scheming thief had not pored over county maps to discover the single assailable town in southeastern Wisconsin. She used to say that when archeologists dug up our civilization they would find nothing but branch banks and master bathrooms and mini-storage units. I heard Alice at every turn through the cluttered countryside. She wasn’t going to survive in jail. She had been fragile, the last few weeks. I knew enough about what happened in prisons, knew enough not to dare to consider the possibilities. She might be lying on the floor as I drove, beaten or sick. Everything about that summer, even as it happened, was like a dream that is hardly remembered, a fragment a person is afraid to recall: the drought, Lizzy, Alice’s sickness, the policemen, Suzannah Brooks and her Scripture, Miss Bowman.
I passed under the interstate, into the new land of car dealerships, the outlet rug stores, the adobe Mexican restaurant, the Wisconsin Cheese Palace. I’d always had affection for Racine, a manufacturing town that got shoved out of the limelight in the 1800s by Chicago and Milwaukee. By the turn of the century it had come into its own because of a few solid entrepreneurs. One of my boyhood heroes was J. I. Case, the man who made threshing machines and farm implements. When I was in eighth grade in Minneapolis, I did a report on Racine with the nonsensical title, “J. I. Case: the Man and the City.” I had written to the Case company for information and they had sent me a cap with their logo sewn like a Boy Scout’s badge on the front. It was a picture of the globe with an eagle perched on the North Pole, its strong talons keeping it always on top of the world. When I became a farmer I wore nothing but J. I. Case caps through the summer, until it was too cold to forgo a stocking hat.
So I knew that the port city had always been a factory town, a durable goods place, inhabited primarily by hardworking Scandinavians, Germans, and Eastern Europeans. It’s a modest town, a little run down, a city where people don’t seem to feel any need to put on airs. There’s a high
school named after William Horlick, the guy who invented powdered milk. They have a good library, a zoo, a couple of fine hospitals, a Frank Lloyd Wright creation called the Golden Rondell that looks like an unidentified flying object. They have Johnson Wax, fresh Kringle, and Lake Michigan. I think it’s supposed to be a secret, as if it’s a mint, that the Western Publishing Company makes baseball cards. If I know it’s so, everybody else probably does too. Along a stretch of Spring Street in Racine, before the time of Christ, the Woodland Indians had garden plots for their corn. Alice and I had taken a walk there, a few years before. It was a pilgrimage for me, I guess. She could tell the seedy houses and the litter were getting me down. “I’m sorry, Howard,” she had said. “There might be a molecule of air, or something, left from that long ago.” She kept breathing in, picking up glass and pieces of dirt, in an effort to make me feel better.
When you round the bend on Highway 20 you see before you a five-block stretch of municipal and county buildings, the phone company, several churches, and law offices, one after the next. Five square blocks devoted to God and the law, all connected by Ma Bell. The few Victorian houses wedged between the churches have been given new paint, brass fixtures, hanging plants, understated signs: Akgulian, Akgulian & Larson. Keep driving east and you’ll come to the courthouse. It’s there before you expect it, a monolithic gray slab with inscriptions on the front about justice. Alice said later in the year that it was inevitable, the building, surprising and inevitable, with no charm or grace, just like a Porta Potti in the middle of the forest preserve. That is the sense you have when you come upon it.
The Law Enforcement Center went up across the street from the courthouse about ten years ago. Nobody realized that 146 beds would soon prove inadequate. Now there are close to 500 inmates in the jail at any time. It’s a simple brick square, built for utility, with narrow gold windows that shine in the daylight. That first time I visited I got out of the car and stood staring at the place. An older woman stopped in front of me. She spoke as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation. “You know,” she said, “Racine has the highest crime rate in all of Wisconsin.”