Jewelweed (6 page)

At first it seemed as if Amy's resolute optimism might prevail. After several weeks, Kevin again was drawn to the water, and once again ventured out to the gazebo.

Migrating geese stopped that autumn, sometimes a hundred at a time. They dove beneath the surface looking for food, slept on the water, and talked to each other in wild squawking tones.

As Kevin watched them, he tried to imagine being a goose, having feathers, and floating half in and half out of the water, webbed feet dangling. He wondered what it would feel like to be surrounded by an enormous extended family of geese, to fall asleep with your head lying on your back, the naked sun overhead and the cool water beneath—a seamless connection to the rest of the world.

That's what I want, thought Kevin, a seamless connection—every stir stirring through me.

Several days later, Kevin sat in his chair in the gazebo and an unusually large flock of geese circled the pond and landed. The noise was deafening in a good way. Kevin stood up and gripped the railing.

“We should throw out pieces of bread,” he said to the nurse. “Go get some.”

“I'll be right back,” she said, putting her book aside and slipping her shoes on.

After checking the tubing and settling Kevin back into his chair, she walked down the dock, up onto the deck, and into the house.

Kevin watched the geese. They covered nearly all of the surface. Then they rose at once in a cacophony of beating wings and loud fearful cries. Kevin sat forward. Within seconds, they were flapping over the top of the windbreak—all but one, who appeared to be having some trouble taking off from the surface of the pond. The lone goose slapped its wings against the water, lurched upward, and continued to bleat as it sank deeper into the pond. Finally, only its neck and head remained, and then these also disappeared and quiet ripples radiated from the place it had gone under.

The pond became absolutely silent.

When the nurse returned Kevin said he wanted to go back inside the house.

“Where'd all the birds go?” asked the nurse.

“I told you I want to be back inside.”

“We have to wait for your mother to come back from town.”

“I don't want to wait.”

“I'll go in and get your grandfather. He can help.”

“Hurry, I don't want to be out here any longer.”

The nurse went back inside. Kevin listened to the deafening silence of the pond and felt alone. He stood up and walked out onto the dock. Staring into the blue-green water, he thought he saw something. The color of the water seemed to coalesce beneath the surface, drawing together, taking on form.

It seemed as if the old nurse was taking forever to come back, and Kevin grew increasingly anxious. As his anxiety grew, his breathing became more labored. His chest hurt and he stared into the water again.

The greenish-blue form had turned more yellow since he last looked, and it had a definite shape now. It looked like a boulder three or four feet in diameter, lying at the bottom.

Then it slowly rose and a dark bony shell broke through the surface, wet and slick. Finally the turtle's knurled head and neck emerged. Its bright reptilian eyes contemplated him, and Kevin could not at first understand—beyond the sickly horror he was experiencing—what manner of stare it was. The neck swelled out from beneath the shell, serpent-like. The head drew closer and the mouth opened, revealing the full width of its bite. Kevin felt the animal's dark intelligence, as if all its ten million ancestors were scoffing at Kevin, laughing at evolution's latest doomed experiment. Long after Kevin had taken his last labored breath, the turtle would still be here, living beneath the surface.

Satisfied with its communication, the giant turtle then closed its mouth, drew its neck in, and slowly sank until it disappeared completely.

From then on, Kevin refused to have anything to do with the pond.

“It's the turtle, Buck,” said Amy. “You've got to get that thing out of there.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Wally said he saw it once. He poked it with a stick and it bit off a piece of the wood.”

“Seeing it and getting rid of it are two different things.”

When the DNR agent finally arrived later that morning, they stood together on the dock and Buck explained what he intended to do.

“Oh no, you can't drain the pond, Mr. Roebuck.”

“I have all the pumps I need.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Roebuck. We can't let you drain the pond.”

“I want that turtle out of there.”

“We talked about this turtle, Mr. Roebuck. I discussed it with our fish and game people and none of them think there's a snapper like the one you described anywhere in Wisconsin. They're certain, in fact, that there isn't.”

“I don't care a whole lot what your people think,” said Buck. “My father saw it. My son saw it. I'm going to drain the pond.”

“We can't let you do that. It's disruptive to the ecosystem. You already ceded this. It was part of the agreement you signed before impounding the water.”

Buck knotted his hands together.

“We can bring in a seining crew,” said the field agent. “It would be expensive, but we could drag the pond and pull up whatever you have down there.”

“With nets?”

“Nylon nets. Nothing escapes the nets, especially something as large as you think you have here. We'll bring it up and remove it.”

“What if it comes back?”

“It won't. You want me to put in a requisition for a crew? Remember, Buck, it's expensive.”

“Do it, as soon as possible.”

R
everend Winifred Helm had been thinking about visiting Blake Bookchester for a long time. Ever since her husband, Jacob, told her that Blake had been transferred from Waupun to the prison in Lockbridge, it seemed like something she should do. Lockbridge wasn't all that far away, and Blake's father, Nate, was a frequent customer at Jacob's repair shop in Words. But visiting an inmate was a good distance beyond Winnie's comfort zone.

As a younger woman she would not have hesitated. At the beginning of her ministry, Winnie efficiently converted the first twinge of moral impulse into an imperative for action. If the urge she experienced seemed sufficiently demanding, self-denying, and righteous, she at once assumed the source of the prompting to be divine—a Voice commanding her obedience. As she grew older she learned to more patiently examine the complex routes by which moral urges arrived in her conscious mind. All too often, she discovered, impulses of a self-serving and reward-seeking nature cleverly disguised their ignoble ends, professed virtues they did not have, and mimicked the Voice. With astonishing ingenuity, her desire for attention, praise, and achievement found ways of pretending to be something else, something bigger, something noble, and the ruse could be sifted out only by repeatedly testing her urges over a period of time. Consequently, though she often thought about visiting Blake Bookchester in the Lockbridge prison, she didn't go.

Then one night Winnie had an especially frightening dream of demonic creatures with purple throats, rooms with long sloping hallways, no exits, and red floors.

“Are you all right?” asked Jacob, stirred awake by the sudden turbulence in bed.

“I had a nightmare,” said Winnie, sitting up.

“You shouted something.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Can I get you some tea?”

“No. Go back to sleep. You'll wake up August.”

Their eleven-year-old son was in the room down the hall. His overly active mind had an enormous appetite for raw experience, and leaped to life at the slightest provocation. Jacob lowered his voice.

“Tell me about your dream.”

“I have to think about it first. Go back to sleep.”

Jacob worked long hours in his repair shop, so going back to sleep came easily to him after he understood there was nothing better to do. He was a good man in that and many other ways, and deep rhythmic breathing soon emanated from the other side of the bed. As the sounds grew more sonorous and underwater-like, she turned toward the nearby window and was greeted by a cool, lazy breeze.

Only a few stars were visible beyond the thickly growing pines in the backyard, blinking on and off with the movement of feathered limbs in the wind. The sporadic flickering made the distant lights seem less like objects in space and more like airborne fireflies igniting unpredictably as they flew. She smiled. The living world contained so many merry minor moments that sometimes it seemed as if fresh entertainment waited behind every turn of her head.

Yet the dream troubled her. It indicated a serious rift at the base of her psyche. There were clearly vital parts of herself she did not recognize and had not confronted. They wanted in and had assumed the terrifying shapes needed to draw her attention.

Following a successful effort to forgive her father for leaving her mother and other cruelties committed during her childhood, Winnie had been free of nightmares for several years. This was mostly thanks to her paternal uncle, Russell Smith, whose harsh and reactionary manner had slowly informed her—from the safe distance of living in another house—how someone in her own family could hurt those around him without consciously intending to. Uncle Russell responded to everything that made him uncomfortable with a habitual blind urgency. For reasons
known only at an intuitive level, he simply lacked the capacity to understand himself or his surroundings any better. Those who loved him, including his wife, Maxine, had learned to accept this in exchange for his more-agreeable qualities, like reliability and the absence of guile.

Winnie had been lulled into thinking her deep challenges were over. She assumed that taking care of her son, husband, and church family would continue to round out her life in the same hectic yet mostly satisfactory manner. The future would bring only more of the same. The trials of childhood, insecurities of adolescence, and other extra-hormonal adventures had thankfully concluded and she was now safely grounded in the staid-fastness of middle age.

But the dream indicated otherwise, and now Winnie watched stars appear and disappear through the giant pine tree, thinking about how she might know herself better. Soon, the prisoner returned to her thoughts. As she continued staring out the window, she realized that some of the blinking stars really were fireflies, and this greatly amused her. When proven to be a fool, dance, she thought, and quickly stifled a giggle.

Before committing to visit someone in prison, however, Winnie explored the idea further by preaching a sermon on the subject the following Sunday. It was a fairly good homily, she thought, seasoned throughout with biblical references. Jesus asked his disciples if they ever visited him in prison, and when the disciples dodged the question and asked, “When were you ever in prison?,” Jesus said anyone hungry, needing clothes, or in prison should be seen in the same light as himself. The Prince of Peace had made it clear: the faithful should visit prisoners.

Her congregation that day—some twenty-five people out of a total membership of somewhere between forty and two hundred, depending on how membership was defined—listened attentively, sang two hymns, prayed, and went into the basement to eat a potluck meal with hamburger casserole, cheese, green beans, spaghetti squash, Jell-O salad, peanut butter bars, and triple-chocolate cake. The conversation was quite lively, but no one mentioned visiting prisoners.

When the idea still would not go away, she took it to the Faith and Spiritual Oversight Committee, a group of two men and six women who met monthly to deliberate with her about church programs and her pastoral duties in general.

“Whatever do you mean?” asked Violet Brasso, a stalwart woman in
her eighties who, after decades of devoted service to the community, had risen to an unofficial position of authority.

“I mean,” said Winnie, enunciating clearly for the benefit of her mostly hard-of-hearing committee, “do you think it would be appropriate for your pastor to visit an incarcerated individual?”

“Incarnated?”

“No, incarcerated—a prisoner, someone locked up in prison.”

“Yes, of course, of course, visit with prisoners all you like, but try not to run the phone bill up. With the small Sunday offerings we've been collecting lately we have to cut back on nearly everything. These are hard times.”

“I don't think you can call them on the phone,” said Winnie. “You have to go there.”

“Go where?” asked Florence Fitch, sitting to Winnie's left.

“To the prison.”

“Where?” asked Ardith Stanley, sitting to her right.

“To the place where prisoners live.”

“Do you know someone there?” asked Ardith.

“Not yet.”

“I should hope not. Why would you ever go into a prison?”

“To talk to a prisoner,” said Winnie.

“My sister, Olivia's, husband, Wade, was in prison once,” said Violet.