Jewelweed (23 page)

Darkness—soothing, feathery, drowning softness. He inhaled the black radiance. It had been so long since he experienced darkness. A peal of laughter coiled up inside him, an ungovernable howl of relief. It rose up so fast to his vocal chords that when he actually laughed it sounded almost like a scream.

He laughed and laughed, sitting in the dark kitchen. It felt good, even with his face hurting. When it passed, his father was standing in the doorway to the living room.

“You all right, Blake?”

“I'm fine. Sorry I woke you.”

“I wasn't asleep. You sure you're all right?”

“It's just good to be home.”

Nate turned and walked back down the hall.

He probably thinks I'm crazy, thought Blake. He wondered what someone who was completely sane would do in his situation. How different could it be?

The darkened living room entertained him for half an hour, presenting one time tunnel after another. Then he went back to his bedroom, opened the door, turned on the light, and shuddered. Nothing had changed—the same bed, walls, bureau, and closet. It was as if he had never left home. His father had even kept his wrestling and motorcycle-racing trophies on the shelf next to the window.

I'm different now, he thought. There are new layers this room knows nothing of.

He turned off the overhead light and lay down on the bed. Again, darkness enveloped him and he immersed himself in it until a deeper need bloomed in another part of the room, stronger than the touch of darkness. He turned his head. Dim greenish light entered from outside and glimmered in a patch on the floor—a fluorescent lure dangled from the sky, coaxing him out of bed, nurturing his movement across the room to the window. Beyond, the backyard waited.

The sash moved in the casing without a sound. He unfastened the screen effortlessly and lifted it away from the aluminum frame.

Blake climbed into the night air. The ground felt unnaturally soft. He took his shoes and socks off to feel the wet grass. His father had left an upright wheelbarrow next to the garden—half-filled now with rainwater. When he looked into it, a miniature heaven of stars looked back at him. Then the beautiful sadness forced him to look away. Putting his shoes back on, he moved silently through the yard, past the beehives, until he stood at the back fence along the neighbor's pasture.

This probably isn't a good idea, he thought, but the argument had no appeal compared to the welcoming outline of trees in the distance. The smell of living vegetation joined the sound of frogs, insects, and whippoorwills in nocturnal intoxication. After a brief glance at the dark house behind him, Blake squeezed between two barbed wires and moved toward the rock outcropping. He found the remembered path up the incline, each handhold engaging a memory retained more by muscle and bone than mind.

At the higher elevation a new horizon opened. A moonlit path led deeper into the woods. He remembered that by following the trees southwest he'd enter a larger forest, without roads, homes, or people. With each step his soul expanded. He heard an owl. Prison and the civilization that had built it slipped farther away.

As his eyes adjusted to the light, he moved more quickly, following animal trails with a pleasure known only to him. Damp leaves cushioned his steps and the underbrush allowed him to pass without hindrance. In the open spaces, the great reeling constellations pursued him. He crossed a deserted highway, plunging deeper into rocky, uninhabited forest. The smell of humus climbed into his mind. I'm alone, he thought, and this realization was even better than darkness, better than anything else he could imagine. No one could hear, see, smell, or touch him. Nothing he did or thought could affect another person, and nothing anyone else did or thought could affect him.

He sat on the ground, leaned back on his arms, looked up at unspooling generations of stars, and wondered what would happen to him next.

I
n one afternoon Ivan and his mother moved all their belongings from the apartment above the meat locker in Grange into their much bigger accomodations at the Roebucks'. All their old things fit nicely among the new furnishings, and Amy Roebuck gave them a television from an upstairs storage room. Dart advertised the old one on craigslist, and when it didn't sell, she threw it into the dumpster behind the machine shed.

Mrs. Roebuck also gave Ivan some clothes that used to belong to Kevin. Most of them were almost brand new, which Ivan assumed was probably on account of Kevin not moving around more than a wooden hanger in a closet. His legs sometimes got tired just walking to the kitchen. One of the shirts smelled like the medicine fog they sprayed in Kevin's room in order to help him breathe. But Dart said it would wash out no problem.

Ivan liked his new home, and when people asked his mother what she thought of working for Buck and Amy Roebuck, she often joked, “The commute's not hard.”

His mother hardly ever kidded around, and it always made Ivan laugh when she said it. Dart was mostly serious. She liked to be busy, and she often told Ivan that the world was full of lazy people, shirkers, slackers, sluggards, sloths, laggards, loafers, lollygaggers, lounge lizards, idlers, day-dreamers, do-littles, do-nothings, and folks who liked to sleep in. “Don't ever let someone catch you napping” was one of her dire warnings.

When the rest of the Roebucks' big house was still sleeping, Dart's light would snap on and the pages in her catalogs began to rustle. Then she showered and dressed, and by the time the birds started yakking outside she was banging around in the big kitchen. Every morning, the
first thing she did was make breakfast- and lunch-boxes, along with two thermoses of coffee, and set them on the corner of the counter.

Buck was usually the second one up, and after sleepwalking into some clothes he would stumble down the stairs like a drunken horse, shaking the whole house. He was usually too tired to say anything to Ivan's mother on his way through the kitchen, so he would just grab the food boxes and coffee and continue down the hall. After getting his shoes on and closing the front door, he would clomp down the porch steps and onto his truck. Ivan often looked out of the window in his bedroom and saw Buck's taillights descend to the bottom of the drive, then turn up the highway toward Thinker's Ridge.

When Buck's engine started it almost always woke up Florence on the third floor, and by the time she had bathed, dressed, and settled into her chair, her thick glasses perched on the end of her nose, Dart was there with breakfast and chamomile tea. When Dart and Ivan first arrived, Florence had eaten only sardines and raisin toast, but Dart told her that simply wouldn't do. “Not on my watch,” she said.

Dart ate breakfast with Florence. She sat beside her, with just a small folding table between them. No one else was to come into Florence's room while they were having breakfast.

In fact, nobody cared. Everyone else was either sleeping or trying to sleep. And their breakfast lasted only about fifteen minutes, anyway. After that, Dart came back down to the kitchen and set out fruit, yogurt, granola, oatmeal, toast, low-fat butter, coffee, and more tea. Only on Sunday morning were there eggs, pancakes, ham, and fried potatoes, or something else.

Amy Roebuck usually got up next. She ate breakfast in the kitchen while talking to Dart about work that day. If Kevin was too tired to get out of bed, she ate with Kevin and the nurse. But Kevin usually came to the kitchen to frown and watch Ivan's mother out of the corner of his eyes.

Wally and Ivan were usually up last. They sat at the kitchen counter. Wally drank black coffee and told Ivan what he'd dreamed about, if he could remember. Ivan ate cereal with jam, honey, or sugar. Meanwhile, Kevin slumped at the table next to the window, where he could pick at his fruit and yogurt and get a good view of the sink.

At that point Dart would begin doing the dishes, but she was still
usually available for conversation. And breakfast time was often good for conversation. Lately, Quiet Shoes wanted to talk about the prisoner who worked for August's dad. She remembered him from before. He was crazy reckless, she said, and hard to get along with. She imagined being in prison had probably made him worse. “It's best to stay away from him,” she said.

“People catch diseases in prison,” Kevin added. “It's second only to hospitals in spreading infections.”

Amy said everyone deserved a second chance, but Dart disagreed. Prisoners should never be released, she said. Once they proved they couldn't be trusted, they should be left in the clink.

Quiet Shoes said the prisoner was out on account of August's mom. Everyone knew it was her doing, she added, and the people in her church weren't happy about it.

Wally said churchgoers were never happy about anything. That's why they were in church. He knew August's mom and liked her. “Pastor Winnie just thinks people could be better than they are. There's nothing wrong with that.”

“Look, I'm not against trying to do good,” said Dart. “But people who do good should stay out of other people's business.”

Quiet Shoes asked Dart if she had known Blake before he went to prison. Dart said she didn't remember meeting him. But later, when Quiet Shoes said he had reddish hair, Dart corrected her. “No, he didn't,” she said. “It was black.” And then she quickly added, “Or at least that's what I heard.”

Wally remembered that Nathaniel Bookchester, the prisoner's father, had driven trucks for Roebuck Construction a long time ago. Then he took a different job after his wife ran off and he needed to be home more. Quiet Shoes said he wasn't home enough, even so, but Wally replied that it was hard when you had to make a living and take care of a child on your own. He remembered that Blake had later worked in the foundry and raced motorcycles. “The kid had grit,” he said.

“Blake's bike was quicker than spit, and nobody ever outran him except Skeeter Skelton,” said Dart. “And nobody ever beat Skeeter Skelton. I mean, that's what I heard.”

Everyone agreed. Skeeter Skelton must have been born on a motorcycle. For many years he did tricks in the foundry parking lot at lunch,
and the workers—even the office workers—came out and watched. He could ride standing on the tank, do wheelies all the way across the lot, tilt the bike up on the front tire and pivot around, cut figure eights in the asphalt, and get off the bike while it was still moving, then catch up to it ten or twenty yards later and get back on. After he was done, they would put dollar bills in his helmet. He once rode ten miles of railroad—a single rail between Grange and Luster. Nobody ever beat Skeeter. He had so many trophies he began giving them back to the clubs so they could use them again. Around Grange, Red Plain, and Luster, Skeeter was a legend, said Dart.

Ivan liked breakfast time, especially when they had waffles with strawberries, syrup, and whipped cream. There was even maple syrup at the Roebucks'—the real stuff. Wally had made it several winters ago and put up jars and jars of it in the pantry. He showed Ivan the trees he bored. That's what he called it—boring, with a big drill. Ivan could stick his fingers right into the old holes. It didn't hurt the trees one bit, Wally said. They sealed up good as new.

After he bored the trees, Wally put in spiels and the sap dripped out into buckets. It ran faster, he said, when there was a hard freeze the night before, followed by clear skies. That's when the buds on the branches sucked hardest, filling the trunk and limbs with sap. He told Ivan he could sometimes collect a whole bucket from one tree in a single day. It ran out clear. Then he poured the buckets of sap into a long, flat pan sitting on concrete blocks with a fire underneath. The clear sap boiled down until it was brown and thick.

You had to be real careful, he said, not to boil the liquid down so far that the bottom of the pan showed through. Then it would burn and you had to throw the whole batch away. So you kept adding more sap to the boiling pan. It took a long time to do it right, and a lot of firewood. He said Ivan could help him make syrup next winter.

Wally told Ivan about a night years ago. He and his wife stayed up all night boiling out sap in the sugar bush. As morning came on, the thickening syrup was getting just about right. They added another log to the fire and more sap to the pan, then watched real close to make sure the sugar didn't burn. That's when a black bear walked up a path out of the woods and came right over and looked at them. Wally told Ivan that meeting a
bear taught him everything he ever needed to know about humility. He bowed and backed away slowly. “Easy now, easy,” he said. But his wife wouldn't leave. She stayed with the boiling sap. “No old bear is getting this,” she said. When the bear rose up on his back legs, she waved the long spoon she'd been stirring with in his face. Then the bear got down on all fours, growled, and went away.

“Is that story true?” Ivan asked.

“Yes,” he said, and went on to explain that something had happened between the bear, the spoon, and his wife—something that might never be repeated. He said life was full of things like that, but most people chose not to think that way. They liked everything standard.

After the breakfast dishes were done, Dart usually started making some kind of soup for lunch. Unlike other foods, she said, soup filled up all the little empty cracks. Then she would get a load of laundry going and begin cleaning. And if it was a shopping day, she would set out early, so she could be back in time to finish making lunch. Ivan would go with her if he wasn't doing something else.