Jewelweed (37 page)

“Where?”

“Mostly Fort McCoy. I don't know where the office building is supposed to go.”

“Who's submitting the bids?”

“He's working with Raymond.”

“So they're having a party, these big shots?”

“Look, Dad, I'm afraid I have to get back to work here.”

“Sure, Buck.”

“Where you going now?”

“I'm thinking about driving over to that repair shop in Words. The guy who owns it has a garden behind his house with a pool and some exotic fish. Anyway, I was hoping I could see them.”

“Who told you about them?”

“Ivan.”

“How does he know?”

“He's friends with the boy who lives there.”

B
lake's first night in the brick farmhouse passed almost as slowly as a night in prison. Everything felt foreign to him. The previous occupant had never bothered to remodel, or even to repaint. And because all the original features of the house had been retained, the sparsely furnished rooms evoked a dimly lit earlier era. A musty pungency lurked throughout as well, proudly defying all association with the present.

Blake felt uneasy about living this far away from everyone else. He'd never lived in open country before. There had always been other houses, slamming doors, lit windows, and occasional voices relatively nearby. In prison, of course, there were way too many other people nearby, but this farmhouse felt like the other extreme. Looking outdoors, the lonely vacancy of the farmyard and surrounding landscape seemed to be waiting to capture him inside an old photograph.

The building itself seemed hostile to Blake's presence as well. The staircase resented his inability to understand its narrow, steep design. The fieldstone basement mocked his failure to find anything quaint or charming about it. And after dark, every noise in the house seemed to be amplified to levels of urgency.

And there were a lot of noises. Mice caravanned through the walls and under the floors. Carrying a small flashlight, Blake investigated clomping sounds in the attic, only to discover a full-grown raccoon. Before lumbering down the stairs and out the front door, the masked creature looked up at him as if to ask, “What are
you
doing here, anyway?”

Later that first night, when Blake unsuspectingly turned on the kitchen light, a garden snake slithered across the cracked linoleum and into a hole in a cabinet baseboard.

Twice he got out of bed to let swooping bats out of the house, and as he returned, spiders monitored his movements from inside gossamer fortresses. Half the animal kingdom, it seemed, had been making use of the residence he hoped now to claim.

The morning, however, had an altogether different story to tell. After washing in cold water, dressing, making coffee, and carrying a steaming cup of it outside to drink, his surroundings unfolded before him in a way Blake had never experienced before. The preying vacancy of the night before had been replaced by the silent marvel of dew and plant life shaking off sleep, regrowing the world. A new sun rose in the east, and the beads of moisture hanging from the spokes of his motorcycle burned like blue diamonds. A chorus of wild fledglings sang about the significance of eating weed seeds, having feathers, and flying wherever they wanted. The air felt alive, and he participated in its vitality with every breath.

Blake sat down and stared. This morning was like none other he could remember—something he imagined his father might experience, but never himself. If he weren't living out here on his own, away from the architecture of his childhood, he might have mistaken the morning for one that didn't belong to him, something loaned by others, handed down. But here he was. Only he could testify to its burgeoning wonder, and unlike the few other times in his life when he'd encountered something extraordinary, he did not ask, Is anyone else seeing this? His mind did not leap toward a need for verification, or a desire to share. The morning and he simply communicated. Blake felt authenticated, as if he was catching up.

As far back as Blake could remember, he'd felt behind, born too late, an unneeded afterthought in a long march of human events that had already prescribed the nature of everything around him. Monuments to earlier events were everywhere. His father had a father who'd had a father, and there were stories of all of them doing things Blake could never hope to equal. Likewise, his mother had a mother, and so on. They acted out of habits passed down from generations before. The laws governing what couldn't be done, the kinds of work people engaged in, the ruling order of traffic lights, convenience stores, row farming, drive-through windows—everything had been determined earlier. The streets were named for families who no longer lived along them. His father's house was called the Old Sanders Place, after a family he'd never met. The
schools he'd attended had dates chiseled into the cornerstones. Even the prisons he'd been locked inside had come ready-made, part and parcel of a time-honored penal practice that dated back hundreds of years and depended upon developed traditions, enacted laws, and evolved conventions of social and economic power that remained as far removed from questioning as they were from understanding.

But now, as he sat on the sagging front step of his new residence, Blake participated in something the rabbit traps of civilization could never snare. The morning enlisted him in a secret but nonetheless universal rebellion. The past would not prevail. Everything important was not simply being mirrored forward through time. Though the past might always appear to be winning because of the despotic power of knowledge and familiarity, the old was being overthrown and Blake was a part of the insurrection. The inexhaustible emptiness of morning would eventually win. Nothing could stand against it.

As he stared into the misty dawn and thought about the commanding reality of renewal, Blake realized he had absolutely no idea what time it was. He was free, or rather had been free in the previous moment before he realized it. The coffee in his cup was cold. He set it on the step and went down to his motorcycle. Brushing beads of moisture from the seat, he climbed on, fired up the engine, and rode down the drive to the road.

His efforts in rebuilding the motor had been well spent, it seemed, and a shadow of his former confidence moved through him. On County Highway Q he followed the winding valley to the four-way stop on 41, turned east, spooled up into fourth gear, sped around a tractor and a honey-wagon, a pickup and an Amish buggy, then climbed onto the next ridge and followed it until the road plunged into another valley and continued for miles and miles downhill into Red Plain.

The temperature inside the combustion chambers had risen to optimum levels for igniting petroleum vapor and the motor ran smooth and strong. Blake found second gear and glided quietly through town as shopkeepers opened, people in terrycloth robes snatched newspapers from yards and front porches, and folks on their way to work pumped gas into pickups and vans while eating sweet rolls and balancing insulated coffee mugs on the tops of their vehicles. A couple of men who preferred to be
drunk for as much of the day as possible headed for the taverns, followed by several others who simply wanted company.

He avoided the street he used to live on, unprepared for the sight of the old rooming house where he and Danielle Workhouse had once lived together.

In the cement plant's lot, he set the stand and walked into the office.

“Hey, Blake,” said Bee from behind the counter. She was wearing a bright orange blouse with a huge white collar.

“Hey,” he replied, looking around. The room had changed little in the years since he'd come here looking for Danielle.

Blake put a red wallet on the counter. It bulged inelegantly with pictures, credit cards, coupons, expired lottery tickets, keys, movie stubs, car wash tokens, stamps, safety pins, and change. “You left this the other night,” he said. “Dad's on the road again today. He asked me to run it over before you missed it.”

“What a ninny,” said Bee, hanging her head in an exaggerated theatrical way. “Thank you. Have you had any coffee yet? I've got some in back.”

“No thanks.”

“It's the stuff your father gets from the guy who roasts his own.”

“I know—had some already.”

An expectant silence opened up between them, and was broken by Bee.

“So, did you go over and talk to Danielle yet?”

“Why, did you see her? Did she say something?”

“No, I just wondered if you'd gone over to talk to her.”

“I didn't.”

“Why not?”

“No reason, I guess. I don't really think about her much.”

Blake could see Bee's eyes laughing behind her reading glasses.

He quickly left the office, climbed on the bike, and rode out of town. To clear his head, he accelerated enough to bring the front tire off the road between gears, and leaned into a tight corner.

On the summit overlooking the descent of the rustic road into the valley, Blake came to a full stop and closed his eyes. This was the time. He summoned memories of the ride that lay ahead of him from the countless nights he'd imagined it in prison. Then he pulled the clutch, notched into first gear, opened his eyes, and started down.

For the most part, traffic was nonexistent. Few people lived along the steep-sided valley, and even fewer took this twenty-mile-long road between Red Plain and Luster, because of the neglected surface, the abrupt curves, and the poorly banked corners.

The ride was mostly as Blake had remembered it. A couple of new vinyl-sided homes had been put up, and several of the old houses had fallen into disrepair or been abandoned. Others had been taken over by the Amish, who built on additions and painted them white, added hitching posts and outhouses, and left their buggies and horses in plain sight. The hilly terrain did not allow for much agriculture, but there were a few foraging goats, small plots of corn and soybeans, calf hutches, wooden beehives, and chickens hunting for insects.

As Blake rode, his whole body remembered what traveling along this road had felt like at the age of eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one. Moisture welled up in his eyes as he realized for the first time that prison hadn't stolen all his youth. Though he had been damaged, he still had access to the unwounded delight that lived beneath all the damage. He pulled over on the narrow shoulder and climbed off the bike. A crowd of wobbly, small white and yellow butterflies flew up around him and scattered. His tears fell onto the faded blacktop and he did not attempt to stop them. The memories of lying sleepless on his cell bunk receded. They were out of step with his surroundings.

With his motorcycle beneath him again, he finished the ride to Luster. He briefly explored the little town, then checked the clock in front of the bank. When an old woman with a walker scowled at him, apparently finding his sudden presence beside the crosswalk an unwanted intrusion into her day, Blake returned to the same road and headed back to Red Plain.

Though he wasn't late for work, he wanted to cover the same territory in less time. Leaning into the corners and accelerating briskly along straight stretches released an old and welcome exhilaration. As he became more acquainted with the limits imposed by the surface of the road, and the responsiveness and maneuverability of the bike, he began testing them.

About halfway to Red Plain, a deer jumped into the middle of the road ahead of him and held its position with a straight-on startled stare. At the speed Blake was moving, stopping was not an option. He could
only guess which way the buck would go. Blake's intuition told him left and so he focused on the opposite space in the road, a width of less than four feet. He leaned into this committed course with little conviction that he would make it through, but the deer bolted in the direction Blake hoped he might, and the motorcycle passed through the narrow space without obstruction. With an ever-widening distance between them, a shiver of relief passed through both sentient beings. Blake felt endorsed by fate. His good fortune seemed to suggest that perhaps Spinoza's god didn't want to kill him, after all. He twisted the throttle and thundered on faster.

Each morning and night he returned to the twenty-mile stretch between Red Plain and Luster, learning the curves, grades, and straightaways more intimately, going faster and faster. The present moment, it seemed, was slowly embracing him anew.

At the end of the week, Jacob invited Blake home for supper with his family. Blake washed, shaved, and changed clothes in the shop's bathroom. They pulled down the front doors and drove out of Words.

At the log home, Blake parked his bike off to the side and they went in together. Cooking smells filled the house, and Blake tried to identify them as his eyes wandered through the well-lit rooms. “Sit down anywhere,” said Jacob. “I'll try to find Winifred and get us something to drink.”

Blake had often tried to imagine what Winnie and Jacob's home looked like, and finding himself inside it gave him a satisfying sense of closure. Welcome details emerged from everywhere he looked, grounding his sense of Jacob and Winnie in a domestic opulence that his imagination never could have conjured up. There were pictures, pieces of furniture, colors, lamps, telephones, magazines, growing plants, utensils, marred wooden floors, and curtains unremarkable in every way except that they remarkably belonged to Winnie and Jacob.