Jewelweed (5 page)

Amy later recalled this moment to her husband as they ate dinner at the kitchen table. “I wish you could have seen his smile, Buck. It was like he finally—” She stopped, set her cup of coffee down, and listened.

“Finally what?” asked Buck.

Before she could answer, Kevin began coughing and Amy hurried down the hallway toward his bedroom, leaving Buck to eat the last of the salad from the wooden serving bowl. At the other end of the table, Buck's father rose, centered his weight on both legs, adjusted the suspenders holding up his pants, and walked out of the kitchen, closing the door.

Unfinished sentences had become a way of life, thought Buck. He was still hungry, but resolved to eat nothing more. He listened to his father climbing the stairs to his bedroom on the second floor. Buck had offered to move his furniture into available rooms downstairs, but Wally preferred to stay upstairs. In the morning he could look out and see farther, he said.

Though he did not like to acknowledge it, Buck often felt abandoned, first by his wife and later by his father. The feeling shamed him, made him seem weak, childish, and ungrateful for the many privileges that he enjoyed.

For thirty-five years he and Wally had worked side by side, building Roebuck Construction from a father-and-son team with a pickup, cement mixer, ladder, and two wheelbarrows, to the largest construction company in the area. They'd constructed so many retaining walls, parking lots, sheds, garages, shops, additions, houses, and commercial buildings that Buck had recently walked into a store, finished what he'd come in for, and left without remembering that he and his father had built it.

Together, they had borrowed money, bought more equipment, bid on jobs, and hired workers. The company grew until they could no longer handle the paperwork. Two new employees helped with that—a younger
woman with a lively telephone personality and secretarial skills, and an older bookkeeper. A new office building in Grange provided them with a place to answer the phone, make payroll, deal with vendors, send out bills, pay insurance, apply for permits, and file contracts.

During this time Buck married Amy Fisher, which seemed especially appropriate to everyone who thought about it. Because of Amy's six-foot-three-inch height they made an almost-normal-looking couple, and people often said how fortunate they were to have found each other. Someone as big as Buck married to an average-sized person would look like a giant married to a child, and seeing such a mismatch would be uncomfortable for everyone. They also seemed to have temperaments that fit nicely together: Buck was reserved yet amiable, and Amy was amiable yet reserved.

Amy's mother ran the Cut & Curl in Grange, and her father had traveled through a large area of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa, selling farm machinery. She had one younger brother, named Lucky, and although the two siblings were often together they never formed a close relationship. From an early age they nurtured separate agendas. Lucky wanted to be admired and Amy wanted to belong, and the paths leading to these respective fulfillments headed in different directions.

Amy and Buck both liked hiking and camping, and whenever they got a chance, they walked into wilderness areas with packs on their backs and compasses in their pockets. They canoed the Boundary Waters and in winter went cross-country skiing. One year they hiked much of the Glacial Trail.

Amy liked to make love inside tents, Buck discovered. Something unraveled inside her when the wind blew the canvas sides in and out, and even when it didn't there was something exciting about the thin walls and pointed, membrane-like ceiling.

Buck also discovered that Amy loved her grandparents' house outside Grange more than anywhere else in the world. Much of this had to do with her grandparents, of course, to whom Amy felt a deep and relaxed affinity—a fond attraction stronger even than her feelings for her parents, in whose presence she always felt disapproval hiding behind measured acceptance, a silent nagging insistence for her to become someone more accomplished and petite.

Amy experienced unmetered acceptance from her grandparents and spent as much time as she possibly could with them. They were like her, laughed at her jokes, understood her quiet ways, and appreciated her without her needing to do something flamboyant or cute. Her grandfather taught philosophy at the university in La Crosse until he retired, and their big old country home possessed all the seclusion and grand enchantment that her parents' home in town lacked. There were three full floors, ten-foot ceilings, leaded windows, walnut baseboards, and a library on the third floor for all her grandfather's books. On the outside were wooden sides painted in gray, ceramic roofs, gutters, and downspouts. Her grandmother, Florence, kept a flower garden and orchard that extended the quaint features of the house a short ways into nature. Everything about the property seemed to exist in an earlier era, a different time to which Amy felt perfectly in tune.

As they aged, her grandparents became increasingly unable to conduct war against the omnipresent forces that seek to erode the unique charm of any particular place and time, to hide its attractions and obscure its beauty, and the place fell into disrepair. When her grandfather died, Florence put the house up for sale. Amy couldn't bear to have anyone else own it, so she talked to Florence and implored her to allow Buck and her to move in. Flo agreed, and Amy at once began the deliberate process of turning back the clock and restoring the house and gardens to their former condition. She attempted to enlist her grandmother as an adviser in the restoration, but found her oddly uninterested in the furnishings and condition of her surroundings. Having already lived through the period of history that Amy longed to re-create, Florence had no desire to see it resurrected, and preferred to pass the years and hours left to her making rosaries, or in silent contemplation.

Then Amy got pregnant inside a tent on a windy night, and after he was born the baby seemed fine for a week or two. He looked normal, but over the next month he failed to thrive, which was how the hospital staff referred to it. Something was wrong, and after kissing the infant's forehead one morning, Amy noticed that her lips were salty. Tests were run and discoveries made: Kevin's DNA made errors in translating its coded material into proteins. His heart and lungs were weak. Amy and Buck were told that these impairments would certainly increase with age, and might later
prevent his proper growth. He would most likely need some type of care for the rest of his life.

“Nature's way of experimenting,” said the counselor who had been recommended by the hospital.

“No,” said Amy, “it's not. It's the opposite.”

The counselor folded his hands over his stomach. “Evolution,” he said, “progresses through little mistakes. Some are beneficial and over time become refined into species-wide adaptive traits. Unfortunately, others are not beneficial at all. These cases of cystic fibrosis are well documented, and with modern drugs much of the discomfort can be alleviated. A palliative treatment routine can be readily administered within a proper facility.”

“Will he live? What kind of help is available in the home? What could we have done to prevent this?”

“Look, Mrs. Roebuck, let's not make ourselves out to be victims here. In my experience there's nothing more difficult than people who see themselves as victims. You need to stop thinking of this as some kind of cosmic injustice. Your first obligation is to your own mental wellness. If you don't feel adequately prepared to care for this child, there are alternatives that may prove—”

Buck leaned forward in his chair, picked up the compact carved maple desk between them, and held it several feet off the floor. Then he put it down and everything, including the phone, pens, and papers, remained in place. Afterward, the counselor adopted a different, more sympathetic approach.

“I wish you wouldn't do things like that, Buck,” said Amy afterward.

“I'm sorry.”

Over the years, caring for Kevin brought Buck and Amy closer together in many ways, though this seemed somewhat paradoxical because they had little time to themselves. They were silently united in rejecting all social norms that prescribed failure for their son. Kevin would have a good life and they would see to it. They encouraged each other, supported each other, and even pressured each other to never give up. When problems arose, they could be fixed. And when they couldn't be fixed, they could be lived through. People could be happy in a different kind of way, and they were.

In the meantime, however, Buck lost the larger portion of his wife.
There was little of Amy leftover and he accepted that. She was too busy with Kevin and Florence. But it didn't matter. He and his father had a construction company to run and he threw himself into his work with missionary zeal, always aware of the rising cost of his son's medical needs.

Buck liked construction and even suspected that his father had started the business to provide him with the incessant physical activity he had required as a young person—pushing wheelbarrows of wet concrete, shoveling gravel, and climbing ladders with pallets of shingles and brick. They had a mutual love of the work, and even many years later, when all the other workers had gone home, Buck and Wally remained at the job site, tying up loose ends and planning out the following day.

Then Buck's mother died and Wally's interest in the company died with her. He continued another couple years and just gave up.

“You take it, Buck. I'm through,” he said one morning, looking out the window in the office in Grange.

“Never thought you'd say that, Dad. What will you do? You ought to think about it a little longer.”

“Buck, I can't do it any longer.”

And so Wally left the construction business and entered into what seemed to Buck and Amy like an uninterrupted two-year-long drinking binge. After wrecking his pickup twice, setting fire to his kitchen, falling asleep on his front lawn in winter, buying and selling a tavern in the same week, tearing up the road in front of his house with the construction company's biggest dozer, urinating in front of the police station, and otherwise proving to everyone concerned that he could not live alone, he sold his house and moved in with Buck and Amy. He preferred one of the rooms on the second floor, he said.

Amy agreed to it. She wanted him there. Wally would stop drinking, she said, as soon as he was living with family. And he did.

As Amy had also foreseen, the pond ignited Kevin's enthusiasm for the out of doors. He spent many of his summer afternoons inside the gazebo, where he could lie down and plug any needed equipment into the outlets. Stacks of magazines spread across the table, accompanied by computer cords, video game controls, and sketching tablets, onto which he drew images of the pond and the creatures that came there. Once, when his resistance to infection, mildew, and dampness in general seemed especially strong, he even slept overnight in the gazebo, overruling the
disapproval of his nurse. He felt connected to nature there, in touch with a wider experience.

Then one night in early autumn, Wally couldn't sleep. He carried a tackle box and a fishing pole out to the end of the dock, baited a hook, and caught a fish. It weighed over five pounds and was followed by six others, ranging between two and four pounds. He put them all on a stringer, tied the stringer to the end of the dock, and went back to bed. While falling asleep he thought about batter-frying the smaller ones and taking the biggest to a man who smoked fish inside a metal drum behind his garage. But after he went to sleep Wally dreamed of an elegant woman with a sensuous smile and a bulbous eye on each side of her head.

Since his wife's death, Wally had become increasingly sensitive to any signals from the next world—a sensitivity he consciously nurtured. He wanted to be ready to calmly greet whatever waited for him after his death, and he tried to live accordingly. Because of his dream, Wally decided to free the fish on the dock. But first he wondered if his grandson Kevin might want to see them.

“I caught some nice fish last night,” he announced Sunday morning while he, Buck, Florence, and Amy ate scrambled eggs and buttered toast. “I'm going to turn them loose, but I wondered if the boy would like to see them first.”

“I'm sure he would, Wally,” said Amy, setting down her fork. “I'll ask him.”

When Kevin was dressed they all went outdoors together. Buck carried his son, the nurse followed with the oxygen tank, and Amy and Wally helped Florence, who brought a camera.

“Put me down, Dad,” said the fourteen-year-old, and Buck set him on the bench beside the gazebo. The boy's eyes followed the stringer over the dock and into the water. Wally stepped forward and drew it up. Six ragged heads dangled in midair, their bodies missing. The nurse muffled a shriek with a gasp. Kevin drew back in horror. Unable to interrupt her intended movements quickly enough, Florence took a picture.

Wally dropped the stringer.

Kevin's face darkened.

“Turtles do that,” said Wally, trying to sound comforting in an informative way. “A turtle leaves heads.”

“He ate them while they were alive?” asked Kevin.

“Well, yes, in a manner of speaking.”

“I want to go back inside now,” said Kevin.

“Sorry, Amy,” said Wally as they walked up to the house.

“It will be all right,” said Amy. “I know it will.”