Jewelweed (8 page)

“Then you have to choose,” Blake interrupted.

“Exactly. All loyalties are not the same, and sometimes a few of them must be forsaken, set aside for a short time. But there are some I dare never ignore because they lie at the root of me, and if I turn my back on them, well, that's—”

“That's apostasy!” said Blake, the veins in his neck bulging, his body shaking and the chains clattering. “That's the unforgivable sin, the curse against the Holy Spirit. You can't do that! There'd be nothing left of you, Mrs. Helm. All the others depend on that one.”

“Yes, Blake, and the deepest loyalty I feel is also the hardest to explain, because it's not just me at that level. It's me and—”

“Something else!” yelled Blake. “It's you and something else, something that can never be defined or casually talked about, or anticipated or even understood. It's a feeling at the ground zero of consciousness, but it's not just a feeling and it's not totally your feeling either, it's also an experience and—”

Winnie interrupted, “It's me and something sacred.”

“I understand,” said Blake.

“Thank you.”

“Please, tell me something else about you, Mrs. Helm. You're actually
talking about things that matter, real things. I never expected that. For three days I thought about a visitor coming to see me, because they told me someone was coming, and I thought about it in every way I could, but I never expected this.”

“I guess I don't know what else to say.”

“Say anything. God, you can't imagine how wonderful this is, talking with someone about something real.”

“How old are you, Blake?”

“I don't know. I've forgotten.”

“That's impossible.”

“You're right, it is. I'll be thirty-two in six weeks.”

“I'm forty-five. Do you think that's too old to sit on the hood of a car?”

“What?”

“Do you think I'm too old to sit on the hood of my car? I was doing that in the parking lot. I didn't want to come in earlier than our scheduled visit and I was trying to prepare myself. I was sitting on the hood of my car and feeling insecure about being too old. So what's your opinion?”

“What good is freedom, Mrs. Helm, if you never do anything unusual or odd? That's what freedom means—doing whatever you need to do so long as nobody else is hurt by it. That's what you were talking about before, doing things that conflict with your sense of yourself in other rooms of your mind. You have to be able to do that or you're not really alive.”

“So there's nothing wrong with a middle-aged woman like me sitting on the hood of my car?”

“Of course there isn't. Sit wherever you want and if anyone criticizes you, tell 'em to come see me.”

Winnie laughed. “Good. I wasn't sure what someone else would think.”

“Did you say you knew my father? How is he?”

“I'm afraid I don't know him very well, Blake. My husband is better acquainted with him from his repair shop. I think he currently works for that shipping company north of Grange, delivering heavy products in his truck. As far as I know he is in good health. Does he come to see you?”

“I talked him out of that. He's emotional and there's nothing the guards here like better than for relatives of prisoners to cry. It makes them feel proud of a job well done.”

“Surely that's not true.”

“Of course you don't believe it, Mrs. Helm. No reasonable person should. It's just one of those little humiliating horrors brought to you by the human garbage pit. Right now—did you know this?—someone is listening to us. Someone is actually being paid to press a tiny wire to their ear and listen to us. It's insane. Yes, I told my father to stop coming here. Having a son should not include the kind of snickering abuse that runs wild in here. He doesn't deserve to feel the way he feels when he's here, and I don't want him to. If you lived in a garbage dump, would you want your father to visit?”

“My father is deceased, but he wouldn't have visited me no matter where I lived.”

“Why not?”

“That's simply the way he was.”

“Frankly, I can't imagine that. My father is a saint and I sometimes hate him for it.”

“Why?”

“I could never live up to it.”

“Does he expect you to?”

“No, of course not. He's a saint.”

“Can I ask another question?” asked Winnie.

“Sure.”

“Have you been able to find some small measure of peace here?”

“Not really.”

“I always hoped that prisons were in some way having a positive influence on the people inside them.”

“I'm afraid you couldn't be more wrong, Mrs. Helm. Does that offend you?”

“No.”

“You have no idea, I'm afraid, what it feels like to try to understand how a single thoughtless action should result in years and years of living in a cage while fools with tiny brains poke you with sharpened sticks.”

“You're right,” said Winnie. “I have no idea.”

“What can I say? I feel small about the resentment I feel. Some guys who get sent to prison, they know as soon as the door closes behind them that they'll be treated like lizards. It's fools like me who imagine that some degree of respect and dignity should still govern the way people
relate to each other, even in here. I can't get over it. Why, for instance, do they search visitors when they don't even end up in the same building with the person they're visiting? It's unnecessary, but they do it anyway. Why do they search our rooms and throw things all over when nothing comes in that has not been inspected? They have rules for everything, but no one can tell you why using the telephone here costs ten times what everyone else pays. Why is that? Go ahead, ask them. They don't know. There are countless things like that, and it makes me angry. I can't help it.”

“Anger is never constructive,” said Winnie, “though I often can't avoid it either.”

“Anger proves I'm still alive,” said Blake.

Winnie looked at the wristwatch strapped loosely around her thin wrist. “I'm afraid my time is almost up. I'll be back though. I promise to visit you again. You have my word.”

“Look, Mrs. Helm,” he said. “I mean, you did it once and I appreciate it, but you don't need to come again. It's against nature. This is a human garbage pit. Don't come back.”

“I'm coming back,” said Winnie.

“Good,” said Blake.

“Is there anything you would like me to bring next time? I'm sure there are many things, but please limit yourself to things that are inexpensive, not difficult to obtain, and meet the narrow requirements of the prison. Let's say three things.”

“Three things?”

“Yes, three things.”

“Books, books, and books. I'll pay you back someday.”

“Do you like to read?”

“You have no idea.”

“Am I allowed to bring books in here?”

“They'll make it as difficult as they possibly can, believe me. They can't help themselves, but please, please bring me some books.”

“What kind of books?” she asked.

“Any books are better than none, of course, even books written without much thought—flavorless fantasies relying on clichés and stereotypes. I'll read those too, but what I really want are thick books with fine print, difficult sentences, long words, and enormous ideas, books written
in a feverish hand by writers who hate the world yet can't keep from loving it, whose feelings so demand to be understood that if they didn't write them down they would go blind. Bring me books by women who have fallen out of step with society and refuse to march and sing the old songs. Books by men who through terrifying sacrifice overcome all the challenges set before them but one. Find me books by sensualists who drink their cups dry every time and yet never figure out why they're so thirsty, and books by pious men and women who continue to believe that being good will save them. Bring me books about people in love, people so passionate about each other they will stand against family, community, country, fortune, and fame in order to be together, and books about people who don't have a chance in hell yet somehow find one. Bring me books about the fear of God and the depths of nature, books about history, philosophy, psychology, science, and motorcycles.”

“I will,” said Winnie. “I promise.”

“And say hello to my father. Tell him that—”

At that instant, from somewhere in the prison, the screen was turned off.

I
van asked and asked, until finally his mother arranged for him to spend a weekend with his friend August. “I'll drive you over in the morning,” she said.

After hearing this, a tyrannical anticipation governed his actions and thoughts, driving him from one frenzy of expectation to the next. He packed twice before going to bed, slept fitfully, got up at first light, dressed in his lucky green shirt and favorite jeans, and waited silently for his mother to get out of bed.

When they climbed into the Bronco at last, the drive over seemed unbearably long. They had to stop dead and wait at every one of Grange's six stoplights. Adding embarrassment to frustration, his mother blasted the horn at a driver who pulled out of the hardware store parking lot and cut her off. “Get off the road, idiot!” she yelled.

Then, after a couple of miles on the highway, they heard a sound like a helicopter. Dart pulled over, got out, walked around the Bronco, and found a flat tire.

They were in the middle of nowhere—weeds and sky everywhere, no cars, no buildings, no signs, no nothing—and Ivan's sense of urgency bloomed into horror over the likelihood that his time with August had been jinxed.

“No worry, this is a piece of cake,” said his mother, yanking the jack out of the back. “Come on, Ivan, give me a hand here.”

They got the old wheel off, but when the wrench slipped, his mother cut her hand. She wrapped a rag around it to stop the bleeding. After the spare was on it looked about half as big as the other tires. His mother said it would be fine. All spares were like that, she said.

Just as they finished, an Amish buggy came around the corner. The two horses pulling it were big and brown, with black manes and tails, and breathing hard. The buggy and its wheels were also black. Inside were maybe eight faces, old and young, a nest of humans. They all waved. Ivan started to wave back, then checked the movement in reference to his mother's expression. “Hill people,” she said, and spit into the weeds.

They got back into the Bronco and continued up the steep winding road, to the top of the ridge. Ivan looked down into the valleys extending to the right and the left. Then they had to stop at the four-way intersection that August called Creepy Corners. Someone had put a white cross about as tall as Ivan in the ditch nearby, along with some plastic flowers. After several years, black mold had grown over the flowers and covered most of the cross.

They turned right and headed down, curving first one way and then the next, heading toward the road to August's house. If they didn't turn on his road and kept going straight they would end up in the town of Words, which was so darn small there were no stores other than the Words Repair Shop, where August's father fixed things.

“We can take the flat tire over to August's dad,” Ivan told his mother.

“I'll take it somewhere later,” she said. “I'm sure he's busy today.”

That was probably true, but Ivan knew the real reason his mother didn't want to take the tire in. She never wanted anyone to know when something went wrong. “Never complain and don't bother people with your troubles,” she always said.

August told Ivan his father had so much work to do at the shop that some nights he never came home. Sometimes August's mom would get up in the middle of the night and drive into Words and yell at his dad. Whatever you're doing can wait, she said. She said she'd rather be a wrinkled old maid in a tin hut on a cold mountaintop than have a husband who didn't come home. And at that point his father always came home—because, August said, his mother was hard to refuse when she got worked up. Most people called her Pastor Winifred, some called her Preacher or Reverend, and some called her Winnie. But Ivan's mother said he was only to call her Mrs. Helm.

August also said his father had to work so hard on account of the government in Washington, DC, moving so many of the good jobs over
to foreign countries. And to make matters worse the government started gambling with all the money inside the banks. They kept gambling until just a few gamblers won everything, took their loot, and moved to an expensive island resort. And that's why the economy went bad, such that no one around here could afford to buy new things. Everyone had to take their old things to August's father for repair.

The Words Repair Shop had a pop machine next to a hunchback lathe, where curls of shiny metal piled up on the oily concrete. There was also an old woman who sold kitchen crafts in an adjacent room. But that was it. The rest of the town was nothing but houses, garages, sheds, and the church where August's mom preached. There was nowhere to buy food in Words, and you could walk all the way around it in less time than it took August to get through one of his shorter explanations of why things were the way they were. In fact, he and August had walked around it many times while waiting for August's father to stop working.