Jewelweed (43 page)

Then Ivan and Blake heard a car coming up the drive, and hurried out
of the library. Ivan locked the door and replaced the key. They went downstairs.

Outside, Ivan's mother was standing in the lot holding a big sack of groceries, staring at the motorcycle with a hard look on her face. Blake just stood there motionless on the porch, looking at her. Then he and Ivan walked over.

Dart looked up from the motorcycle, and when she and Blake looked at each other their eyes got watery big. Blake's hands were shaking.

“What are you doing here?” Dart demanded.

“I came to talk to you,” he said.

“We've got nothing to talk about, Blake. Nothing.”

“Yes we do,” he said.

“No we don't,” she said.

The look on her face was like nothing Ivan had ever seen before. It was as if she were crying and madder than blazes at the same time. Her whole body was shaking, and when Ivan looked over at Blake again, he was shaking too. And their faces looked like they were both freezing.

“It's good to see you again, Danielle,” he said, his voice breaking up.

“Get out of here!” she shouted. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

“Ivan and I have been talking,” Blake said.

That's the first time she noticed Ivan. “Go inside,” she snapped. “Now.”

Ivan went toward the house, but only as far as the front porch.

“I wanted to come as soon as I got out,” said Blake. “I thought about you every day, and then I asked Bee about—”

Dart threw the sack of groceries at him. “Get out of here!” she yelled. “Get out of here. Leave me alone.”

The door behind Ivan opened. Wally came out and sat down beside him. “Is that Blake Bookchester?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Ivan.

“I thought so. Do you think I should go over there?”

“I wouldn't if I were you. You might get hit by a can of soup. Now be quiet, I'm trying to hear what they're saying.”

But even with Wally not making a sound, it was hard to tell what they were saying. Blake was talking in a normal voice, which was hard to hear from that far away, and Dart's words came out too fast to separate them.

“Get out of here!”

“You never wrote after I . . . later then when . . . I didn't understand.”

“You left me alone you bastard!”

“I tried to . . . then after that . . .”

At that point Dart went over to the motorcycle, shoved it over onto its side, and started kicking and jumping up and down on the tank.

“Danielle, stop that.”

“Get out of here leave me alone you're going to ruin everything you only came here to hurt me get out of here!”

A
fter the heavy rains, Winnie weeded her garden. The soil's friability allowed for a strategic victory over enemy plants. Even the most stubbornly rooted species complied, and Winnie found delicious satisfaction in pulling on damp weedy stalks and feeling them yield all the way down. She smiled as she remembered previous times, when even the tiniest invasive plant necessitated the intervention of trowels, diggers, and shovels. And then when they finally did come out, their roots either busted off, seeding the next weed war, or came up clinging to sizable chunks of earth. Now, the weeds slid out cleanly, ready for stacking.

Rather than feeling badly about extinguishing the life of a happily growing organism, Winnie reasoned that when growing conditions were optimal—the soil moist, fecund, and alive with the mineral magic of life—the earth simply let go of its weeds. Even better, on this particular morning some had already been pushed up an inch or so, as if the ground itself had ejected the weeds to make room for plants with giant colored heads, elegant stems, and extravagantly veined leaves, plants painstakingly selected from seed catalogs in the depths of winter. Rich soil reveled in exotic plants that needed assistance in reaching their full potential, while the more hale and hearty varieties grew everywhere. Winnie understood that a well-kept garden was an expression of the invisible splendor of the dirt beneath it.

And yet as she crawled from place to place, leaving behind mounds of extracted weeds as big as muskrat houses, she struggled with a far more menacing internal adversary. By noon, she had won the ground war but been battered to defeat by this more personal struggle, and gave up the pleasure of gardening altogether. The sight of her soiled hands, wrists,
arms, elbows, knees, and clothes mirrored the condition of her soul, and she walked over and lay down on the painted bench next to the fountain. Curled up on her side, she wondered what she was going to do with herself.

The last several months had been an ongoing psychic disaster, culminating in the recent debacle with her son. How could she have been so negligent? She knew August did not understand the potential consequences of carrying his beloved bat around in public. She also knew he had been taking Milton out with him more and more often. She knew the time and place of his talk on White Nose Syndrome, and she knew the subject meant a great deal to him. She knew young hooligans often attended the county fair where August was scheduled to speak, and that she should be present. She knew her meeting with the church's board of trustees could be postponed, and she knew that when August was with Ivan the chances of him getting into trouble increased exponentially. And finally, she knew that if something very bad happened it could drive a wedge between her and August, choking off all the joy in both their lives.

And yet she had let it happen. In fact, she was guilty of an even more serious infraction. Curled up on the bench with her eyes closed, she tried appealing to a higher court, but the judge in that potentially more forgiving venue had apparently gone on vacation.

Winnie knew that her loyalties were no longer in their proper order. It was not just that she had been negligent about August taking his bat to the fair, but also what she did after everything went bad. Called away from the board of trustees to meet with the sheriff, the two youths who had assaulted her son, and their parents, Winnie was thrown into a state of supreme agitation. Accusations flew, making her feel like a harried bull in an arena.

She admitted that her son had a pet bat. No, he did not have a permit to keep a wild bat, nor did she or her husband. Yes, she agreed that people should obey the law, and yes, that included state laws regulating wildlife. The bat had been seen regularly by a veterinarian, and checked for communicable diseases, but no, that did not mean owning a bat was a particularly good idea. She agreed there was no excuse for a bat biting someone, and she was very sorry the boys had been bitten. And no, being sorry did not make everything right, and of course no one would want to be bitten by a bat even if someone else felt sorry about it. Yes, she
understood very well that her son had given a talk about bats at the fair and advocated for costly measures to protect bats, and yes, she was aware that these were difficult economic times. There were many people out of work and many more without health insurance, and yes, the price of gasoline was rising. No, she did not think bats should come before people. Yes, she understood that many people had strong feelings about bats, but she did not agree that because many people had strong feelings about bats, their feelings should be respected above those whose feelings were less strong, though she agreed in general about respecting other people's feelings when they were in a state of high dudgeon, even when they weren't especially respecting yours. No, she wasn't trying to talk fancy. Yes, she agreed that if a rabid bat bit someone and that person went untreated they could possibly die. Yes, she agreed that her son had done something wrong, but no, she did not think carrying a bat in his pocket was the same as packing a concealed weapon. She did not agree that her son had attempted to cause any trouble, nor that he had goaded the bigger boys into knocking him down and kicking him repeatedly. Yes, it certainly did appear as if the two boys who attacked her son had gotten the worst of it in the end. No, she did not condone violence, not for any reason. Yes, there obviously had been some violence here, but no, she did not agree that the initial assault was perpetrated by a couple of good-natured boys just being boys, only to be followed by the real violence. Yes, she knew that her son's friend had occasionally been in trouble at school, and that he would be repeating fifth grade. Yes, Ivan's mother was unmarried, and Danielle's father and stepfather had both been in prison, but Winnie didn't see how this was relevant. No, as far as she knew, Ivan and his mother were not Muslims, and never had been. No, she didn't have proof of that. Yes, she was a Christian pastor. And no, she was not the kind of pastor who didn't believe in the Bible. She was not aware that the two boys who assaulted her son were both model students who had never been in any kind of trouble before, nor that they had both won prizes in the junior rodeo competition in Marengo. No, she did not know that their fathers were members of the Lions, and that one of them had served on the chamber of commerce. Yes, her husband, Jacob, owned the Words Repair Shop, and he did employ a convicted felon. And yes, she had even encouraged him in this. She did know Jack Station, and that he
worked in corrections for the State of Wisconsin, but no, she was not aware that Jack Station had recently told someone in Red Plain that she and her husband did not have proper respect for the law. And finally, no, she was not calling Jack Station a liar.

In the end Winnie agreed to bring the offending bat in for testing. She had no choice. That was the law.

And suddenly it occurred to her that this was the seminal problem. She had allowed her life to become one predetermined choice after another. Her consciousness had so attuned itself to the shifting politics of her congregation and the sensibilities of her community that she had become a social robot.

How had these imperatives usurped so much authority over her inner life? How had they come to crowd out almost everything else? By what devious means had public shame climbed to the top of her most feared emotions? And now, lying on a bench in her own garden, where were the bitter accusations even coming from? Who supplied her accusers with the sordid material needed to prosecute her?

Winnie could remember a time when she could tell the difference—or at least she thought she could—between what God wanted her to do and what she felt others expected of her. But now she wasn't so sure. She'd made so many decisions to accommodate the beliefs, feelings, and prejudices of those in her church and community that she felt groundless at her core. The absolute had become an abstraction, not something she related to directly.

Winnie needed major change in her life. She had become someone she never intended to be. She had to realign her instincts along a firmer source of inspiration. If she failed to do this, even worse things than the bat debacle were bound to happen. Her most precious and divine gift—the inexplicable ability to reason, wonder, and feast on the harvest of her senses—was being squandered in exchange for a numbing addiction to civilization's harness, when in her heart of hearts Winnie knew that her concern for her standing in the community was little more than pride in her own enslavement.

This was not just a matter of getting older and having less passion for the same experiences that had once thrilled her. Those old concepts and interpretations she had once so eagerly excelled in learning and proclaiming
were no longer yielding meaningful benefits. Established ways of thinking had led her astray, and the spiritual life she had always wanted to live was slipping away.

Obviously, the time had come to leave the church.

At first appearance, this idea seemed so foreign, heretical, and insane that Winnie's whole body lurched. Sitting up on the bench, she prayed for forgiveness. I didn't mean it; the thought wasn't mine.

From an early age she'd found refuge inside Christianity. Its psychological truths had sustained her, given her hope, courage, and helped her form a valid identity. Then she had fastened onto the mystical branch of her faith like a vine twining toward sunlight. Leaving the church would be like leaving her true home, abandoning everything she believed in, giving up her part of the shared responsibility for mankind.

I'll just get a cart and haul these weeds away, she thought. And I'll completely forget I ever entertained such an absurd idea.

But even as she carted the extracted weeds out of her garden and placed them into the composting cage Jacob had made from the shell of an old baler, she already knew the idea of leaving the church was not going away. Despite her objections, it now resided in a secure region of her mind, watching her.

Oh no you don't. Stay there as long as you like, but I won't ever think about you again.

Finding a new reservoir of resolve, she finished hauling all the weeds away from her garden. As the sun set over the western ridge, she sighed with satisfaction over how happily her flowers were growing and how nice they looked. Inside, she showered, dressed in light, comfortable clothes, chopped up vegetables for a stew for dinner, and cooked it in a cast-iron pot.

When Jacob came home he devoured three-quarters of it, while August picked around the edges of his plate and went back to his room without saying more than three words. The splinter in her heart worked in deeper.

“It takes time,” said Jacob.