I sat for a while. I was unsure how I was going to make my way through the ranks outside. Rafferty slid in beside me after everyone else had gone behind the screen and out the back hall.
“It went well,” he said. “Better than I thought it would, actually. Mrs. Dirks doesn’t usually lose her cool.” He chuckled at that.
“Why’d she do it this time?”
“It’s important to go after the boy in the prelim, to be vicious, if you will, so that he’ll turn against me at trial time. He’ll remember what a creep I was, and hold it against me. In front of the jury, you see. Jurors, especially older jurors, don’t warm to disrespectful children.”
He stank of aftershave.
“I think we accomplished that,” he continued. “I don’t have any doubts that Robbie will be belligerent, smug, and foul. I will be all sweetness at that point, trying hard to empathize, to understand.”
He waited for me to say something.
“Mrs. Dirks knows the ploy, of course,” he went on. “She tried at first to keep her objections to a minimum. She didn’t want to give Robbie the idea that I’m as bad as she thinks I am. But when she started caterwauling, in spite of herself, she only reinforced the idea that I am the ogre.”
“I see,” I said.
“I’ve got a hunch about the boyfriends. I went sniffing around all weekend, as I said. I wouldn’t be surprised if they dropped charges. They might try to settle out of court, which I will not allow. Dirks knows me. She knows their only real choice is to drop charges.” His aftershave was a slow-moving, noxious odor which only now had reached my nostrils in full. “Don’t look so shaken up,” he said. “They know now that the boy can’t make it in court, and if they have any brains at all they’ll realize that the mother has less of a chance than he does.”
“What about the admission?” I asked.
“Well, naturally they’ll walk that one around the block and make it piss on every tree. We’ll get it excluded. We knew it was coming, so it wasn’t a surprise.”
“We knew it was coming?” I asked.
“Alice told me that she’d been—what were her words?—’babbling incoherently’ to the investigating officers.”
I thanked him and got out, down the six flights of stairs, away from him. I went as quickly as I could. The band of women in the hall had gone off, presumably to feed their anger elsewhere. I stood on Wisconsin Avenue on the hot pavement across the street from the jail. I stood looking at the narrow mirrored windows on the fourth floor, where Alice’s pod was. She had always spoken about Robbie in such disparaging tones. There wasn’t much substance to him. I had thought he’d be a tough kid, brawny, someone you’d want to wrestle. How could she have hurt a boy without the principal and the secretary and the guidance counselor knowing about it? She had once squirted me all over with whipped cream and come running behind sticking out her long tongue. The topsoil of the entire county could have blown into Lake Michigan right then. I wouldn’t
have noticed or much cared. “I didn’t see anything,” I said under my breath. The metal plates over the jail windows were blinding in the noonday sun. “I didn’t see Robbie looking at that doll.”
When I’d finished telling Theresa about the hearing she put her head down in her lap. Just as both Alice and I had done at some point during that long and surreal morning. Theresa was frozen, glued to her chair. I wasn’t sure if she was praying or somehow crying in that pose. I had told her some of it, as best I could. I’d thought at the start that I’d see something in the telling. I’d thought there might be answers among my sentences, something obvious and inevitable.
“So what,” Theresa said, without looking up, without moving, “did Robbie say Alice did to him? I’m not clear on that.”
I had come up to the scene so many times. I couldn’t get to it. I knew Alice had always admired me for the fact that I was “solid”—that’s the word she often used to describe me. In fact, I was like a mouse skittering back to its hole in the face of a shadow. I had not watched Robbie abuse his doll but I’d gathered what private acts he thought Alice had done to him.
I started to get up from the chair, hoping that Theresa would leave, now that she’d heard most of the story. “I need to check Emma—” I started to say.
“What does Rafferty think?” She was trying to hold me. There was a thin stream of light coming through the door from the upstairs hall light and the flicker of the television. The rest of the house was dark. “He thinks the way into the case is through the mother, a boyfriend or two.”
“Is he any good, Howard?”
Now there was a question which took me by surprise, I must admit. Dan had been friends with Rafferty for years. Rafferty was one of the few Dairy Shrine Angels, having contributed over a thousand dollars to the museum. Dan had told me that Rafferty could have worked in any major city, in any firm he liked, but that he chose to stay in Racine.
“How do you dispute the injury to a doll?” I said. The words came out the side of my mouth. I thought that if my fists came uncurled my hands might knock something over.
“I’m sorry, Howard,” she said, stretching her arms toward me. “I’m
sure Rafferty is the best, I really am. It’s just that I’m so concerned about Alice. These things are capricious. I love Paul, I do. He’s such a character—but sometimes he gets caught up in the drama of the trial. I’ve been on the receiving end, hearing amazing stories over the dinner table. He’s a nut, you know? Every now and then he does lose a case. I’ve been to the jail and—”
“She says she’ll be all right,” I said. “Three months, four months.”
“But it will be so much more than that. They always make motions. Trials are always delayed. That place is crowded. They’ve got four hundred fifty people in there, on average, at a time. Half of them are going cold turkey from crack, or even cigarettes—there’s no smoking anymore. It’s noisy all night long, it smells, it’s never dark to go to sleep.” She covered her eyes with her hands. “God, Howard, I really can’t bear to think of her in a cell.” She put her head down again and started to cry. I thought that if she made one more irritating comment it might be difficult to resist striking the back of her neck.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she sniveled. “Do you know what? I’ll take the girls tomorrow. I’ll take them until this thing is over. I’ve got all summer off. You need to work and Audrey will love to have company now that—”
Now that what? In the hour that I’d been talking to Theresa I’d forgotten that Lizzy was gone.
“Would you let me do that, Howard? Take care of the girls?”
The kettle was clattering on the stove top. I hadn’t heard it until now. Most of the water had probably boiled away. My children were sleeping on the dirty floor in the glare of the one station we could get. It probably came out in a fairly gruff way when I said, “That’d be fine.”
Chapter Thirteen
——
T
HE NIGHT AFTER
T
HERESA
first came down we started a routine that went smoothly for a few weeks. I got out early and did the chores, before the girls were up. They were to ring the old dinner bell if they needed me. That had always been the rule, when Alice and I used to milk together. It had never been put to the test and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hear the call over the whir of the compressor. Usually they were just beginning to blink and stretch when I came back to the house for breakfast. Theresa showed up around eight to take them away to Vermont Acres. They were only too happy to go. They waited at the screen door, watching for her to come along the cornfield. She always went into the house to pick out the things she knew they needed. She found suitable clothes for whatever activity she had planned.
A few days following the preliminary hearing a social worker from the Child Welfare Office called to set up an interview for Emma and Claire. It was a factual conversation, about times and dates. She didn’t say why a government agency thought it necessary to talk to my children in the downtown office. My first impulse was to slam down the phone. I cordially told the woman that I’d like the opportunity to speak with my
attorney first. “Your attorney has nothing to do with this procedure,” she said.
“I understand,” I replied, in ignorance. But I knew enough about the so-called procedure to envision my children swept out from under my feet in the name of protection.
Rafferty spoke faster than usual when I called him to ask for his expert opinion. “They’ll never let me be present,” he said, “but I’m going to demand that they videotape the sessions. I’ve seen cases where they conduct the interview, mislay the notes, and then remove the children from the home. Don’t worry, don’t worry, we won’t let that happen. This problem is another thorn, nothing larger than a thorn. Another hassle we’ll have to deal with. We can’t say no to them because they’ll take the kids off in a second. Standing in their way implies guilt, and implicates you.”
I remember weakening, seeing the kitchen go fluid and red. The place spread, the trembling walls streaming beyond their own boundaries. I was at first hot, and then suddenly cold, hard. How Alice could have done this to us, I didn’t know.
“We need to be calm, as best we can,” Rafferty said, “and cooperative. It’s an unusual situation, because the children themselves have not come forward. Typically, the kids report and then the whole process kicks in. There’s only a suspicion here. The social workers can’t ask leading questions; they can’t order foster care unless the girls say something very explicit. Your children are going to have to be specific, come up with details, I mean details, in order for this thing to get to court. You know they don’t have that kind of vocabulary.”
Theresa was far more comforting, and also far more enraged. When I told her I had had to make the appointment for the girls she came at me with her talons spread and stopped just short of my chest. After she’d turned away and gone at the wall she said, “Theresa, get a hold of yourself.” She shut her eyes and put her praying hands to her mouth. She began to apologize without changing her stance and without punctuating her sentences. “I’m sorry, Howard, forgive me, this whole thing makes me very angry, extremely angry.” She appeared to be asleep. “But I think,” she said, slowing down, “I think you will be all right. Most of the people I know over there in the department err against children, actually.
Myra is one of the more extreme case workers. A child has to be pretty mangled to be removed from their home. There has to be bruises—real wounds, and you have to say in plain English what’s been done to your privates. Claire and Emma will have nothing to tell them. Nothing.” She looked up at me and said, “I marvel at how coolheaded you are. I feel murderous, I honestly do. It’s so good for the girls, that you can be level. They’ll be fine because of your tranquility.”
Just like an old rock, Alice might have said. Solid, hard, dark all the way through. Had the latest thorn been my only worry it would have been aggrieving in an all-consuming way. It was a sorer kind of aggravation than the others: The girls were innocent and should have had nothing to do with the trials of their parents. Removal would permanently damage them. Because the thought of them being taken from me was incomprehensible and untenable, I by and large refused to acknowledge the process. I went out and worked. I worked as if my life depended upon it. I worked as hard as I could, without conserving my motions, so that sleep would come at night.
I moved, always moving, forcing my hands and feet to their accustomed tasks. There is an old saying most people probably know: Live as if you’re going to die tomorrow and farm as if you’re going to live forever. I guess through the good and the bad times I tried to follow that saying. Take deep breaths, savor the moment, appreciate what you have. Build up the soil, mend your fences, put your money into good breeding stock. I spent my time during those weeks mulching potatoes and the garden, pulling thistles, and clearing a field of its stones. In one flowering thistle there are twenty thousand seeds. With my leather gloves on my hands and a heavy shirt on my back I walked the farm, pulling up the thorny plants by their roots, tossing them into piles, and putting the flowers in my bag. At night I burned the blossoms. All across the farm there were the piles I’d made of uprooted thistle plants. They turned white in the sun. The weeds were enemies and even in death they did not look completely vanquished. I must have pulled thousands of thistles in those weeks. I must have picked up thousands of stones. I had already lost the spring wheat, and the stunted corn was nearly dead. It was reasonable to clear the lowest field on the farm. There might be some moisture left in the subsoil, and if it did rain the field might hold the water. It might be a
good place to try for some winter wheat. I could think of enough reasons to spend the day clearing the field. The truth is I didn’t know what else to do except pull thistles or walk along the furrows I’d made, picking up stones.
There is never an end to stones in a field. You can clear the five acres one summer and come spring there will be a new crop. With each freeze and thaw stones are pushed up through to the light of day, as if they have the sense of a seed. And if a field is plowed, there the stones are, sitting like old potatoes, brought to the surface by one’s own hand. So I walked and stooped and carried stones, some the size of my fist, others the size of a melon, to piles I’d made, or I’d heap them on the hay wagon. I wore nothing but my drawers underneath a pair of filthy denim coveralls. I’m sure I smelled. There was plenty to worry about and I sometimes had to stop to organize the fears. There didn’t seem much point in trying to understand why such a thing had happened to Alice. I tried not to think about the reason. I attempted, as I moved, not to worry about the girls. I couldn’t consider their looming appointment without feeling as if my chest was going to cave in. In retrospect I’m not sure I had one clear thought as I worked. It was hot and I kept going. I also wondered how I was going to feed the cows for the winter. The girls were safe up with Theresa, that was the thing to remember. I carried stones trying to keep my focus. Think, I told myself, about how to set Alice free. Think how to hold the family together, to keep it from scattering like the thistle seeds I was keeping in my sack, tight in the blossom. There were afternoons when setting the jail on fire seemed an adequate solution. Think how to keep the girls protected from the system that would pull them in, hold them, change them. Once I set myself the assignment, I pictured a faceless child welfare worker and Susan Dirks and Rafferty, all of them floating down the river toward a steep drop off. They looked around in discomfiture when they found themselves going over the falls, toward the sharp rocks.
Susan, Paul, are you comfy?
Alice came unbidden behind them, flailing and screeching as she fell.