Driftless (33 page)

“I don’t know where to begin,” said Brian. “Won’t you please have a chair?”

“No thank you.”

“In the first place, laws hold our society together. They are the organizing principles. Personal possessions are everything—the essence of what we are—and it is
our money now.
When the money belonged to your friend, she had the laws on her side. But a legal contract was made—admittedly a high-risk contract, but a contract nevertheless—and the money passed into our hands. It is our money. The arguments you keep making are not legal arguments, and legal arguments are all that matter.”

“To the contrary,” said Winnie. “We can never fully place our trust in the law. You know it in your heart. The law always kills. As human beings we have the obligation to transcend law through mercy. If we all had to live by the law, we would all be condemned—all of us. It is only by showing compassion and mercy that we create a better world.”

“This world is the best it can be.”

“It isn’t. I know it. It could be so much better.”

“This is my job.”

“But it’s
not right,
” said Winnie, and her smile dissolved. Also, the
light that had been shining from her face faded as she understood—with a sense of personal violation—that even after she had revealed the whole inner truth, her petition was going to be denied. She felt diminished.

Brian, seeing her light dimming, felt his sexual interest replaced with a growing emptiness. And as the emptiness grew, he became angry.

“I would personally like to be able to give the money back,” he explained. “But I can’t.”

“Oh, you can,” said Winnie. “But you won’t.”

Brian realized the words taking shape just beneath his tongue were something like,
If you smile again with that look on your face and love me, right now, right here, with the same passion you feel for your God, I’ll give the money back.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t do it.”

“Then I am sorry for you,” said Winnie. She turned around and marched out of his office, down the hall, and into the elevator, the ends of her hair bobbing up and down.

Brian took off his coat and drank the last of the cold, bitter coffee. He shuddered, faced his computer, and resumed entering numbers into the spreadsheet.

Winnie walked out of the elevator on the first floor and into the glittering main room. She stood for several minutes looking to her right and left, then went to a long table with a roulette wheel. She gripped the wooden underside, thought of Jesus overthrowing the money changers, closed her eyes, prayed, felt a newfound strength enter her body, and lifted.

Bolted to the floor, the table didn’t budge.

She stepped back several feet, sighed, threw back her hair with a toss of her head, and walked out of the casino, assisted by a man in a red suit who opened the door for her.

In the parking lot, she climbed into her tiny yellow car and felt overwhelmed by a horrible loneliness. She fought against it, tried to pray, but was soon weeping over the immense gulf separating how society should be from how it was. The absence of benevolence
permeated everything. She felt completely shut out of the world of people—excluded.

You stop it now,
she commanded, wiped her face with a tissue paper, started the car, and drove out of the lot.

A FRAGILE BALANCE

T
HE WORDS FRIENDS OF JESUS CHURCH TOOK UP A COLLECTION to keep Violet and Olivia Brasso in their home. But the worry that they might be subsidizing gambling losses had a moderating that they might be subsidizing gambling losses had a moderating effect on the normally generous congregation, and it wasn’t as large as Pastor Winnie hoped—only sufficient to meet the mortgage payments for three months. The donation also had to be taken in secret—collected in a red, heart-shaped box that had once contained individually wrapped cream chocolates—because of the embarrassment Violet would feel if she knew about it.

The box, containing a little more than six hundred dollars, was quietly given to Olivia, who for reasons unknown to everyone felt no embarrassment at all.

Olivia simply defied understanding since returning from her night at the casino. From that moment forward she insisted on having the police scanner on twenty-four hours a day. She called Rachel Wood to inquire after her cousin’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land, when it was known that Olivia and Janice had never been fond of each other. And during Wednesday night Bible Study Violet reported that her sister had ordered library books about fighting dogs and the Wisconsin probation system, topics she had never before shown interest in.

And the situation inside the Brasso home—between the two sisters—became far from stable. Tempers flared like pressure-sensitive bombs placed at strategic locations around the house. Even a sullen expression could trigger an explosion. But that was to be expected. The fragile balance between full-time caregivers and full-time care receivers, as everyone knew, required more deep-breathing concentration than most people were capable of.

A dependent person like Olivia, by her very existence, created
burdens for an independent person like Violet. She did not have to speak or even clear her throat to have a place in Violet’s mind, where she steadily lived like an unruly flame on the edge of a continent of long, dry grass. Every creak in the night, every cough, odor, drip, click, groan, whimper, and sigh found resonance. Even complete silence—especially complete silence—could not be trusted, and Violet’s vigilance had been honed to such acuity she frequently found herself weighing the vertiginous qualities of silence to determine if she needed to walk down the hall and check again.

But Violet’s concern for Olivia was matched and perhaps even exceeded by Olivia’s preternatural awareness of Violet. The only remaining bulwark standing between Olivia and the county home was the all-too-human figure of her older sister, and to not be aware of everything about her was equivalent to a pet not knowing where its food came from.

Even in her sleep, Olivia knew, exactly, Violet’s whereabouts. From the confinement of her wheelchair or bed—day or night—Olivia deciphered the language of stirring, occupied space and could tell if Violet was in her bedroom, sitting in the living room, or at the breakfast table.

Kitchen drawers and dining room cupboards uttered distinguishing sounds when they moved. Each piece of furniture had its own voice, wood-groaning in response to shifting weight. Each door latch possessed nuance and personality. Each light switch snapped on and off with a unique tonal decay. Footsteps in the hall differed from footsteps in the dining room as clearly as oboes differed from clarinets. The sounds on the second floor—where Olivia had not visited since the days when her father had carried her upstairs—she remembered with undiminished precision. Even the boxes and crates in the upstairs storage room—a room she had never, ever been inside—made familiar faces when they were moved. They were part of Olivia’s world, and like all world travelers, she guarded their places inside her.

And when Violet was out of the house, Olivia lived like Moses adrift in a basket, waiting, waiting, waiting. And though she might also be occupied with other things—important things—those other
things were like minor skirmishes in the larger revolution against the time separating her from the satisfying safety of her sister’s presence.

The more intimate aspects of their life together further complicated this ballet of proximity. Ancestral blood and long, deep associations related them and they interacted through narrowly prescribed footpaths, each path worn shiny smooth by the need to avoid dangers on either side, where unsleeping family demons crouched, ready to spring. A false word or gesture could bring to howling life an ancestral civil war of ritual meanings in which hundreds of thousands had perished but neither side could ever confidently claim victory.

Olivia’s very life depended on Violet’s good graces, and she well knew the boundaries of her own desires, though she frequently did not—to her own regret—always keep within them. She understood not only
when
to ask for a glass of water or a ride into town, but also
how
and
why.
She tracked her sister’s changing moods like a flower following the sun.

As for Violet, she had, to be sure, made a heroic choice to care for her sister. It took sterling courage to stand against the prevailing notion that those who care for others do so because they lack the superior qualities needed to excel in the marketplace of personal achievement. The pervasiveness of this demeaning judgment—known only to those who have stood against those snarling winds—seeped into every corner of popular thought and accounted for, Violet thought, the main division between the “church” and the “world.”

The “world”—meaning the world of embodied ideas and spirits—insisted on the rule of individual rights and freedoms, and anything that curtailed their full expression was seen as illegitimate insurgency. The “church”—meaning the world of disembodied ideas and spirits—insisted on the rule of personal duty and mutual, deferential obligation. For the “church,” the curtailing of individual rights and freedoms was not just desirable but fundamental. The two civilizations viewed each other with uncomprehending hostility, and Violet remained ever watchful for signs of enemy advancement.

For these reasons it was absolutely necessary for Violet that Olivia be of high moral quality. Whenever Violet was convinced of
this—that Olivia was worth it—she felt content with her life. But whenever she became unsure about whether the burden she carried served some heavenly purpose—if the scales of eternal justice might balance more evenly with Olivia sermonizing and hurling insults at strangers from a bed in the county home—then her life became more difficult.

And so the delicate counterpoise between Violet and Olivia suffered greatly when Olivia returned home covered in urine in the care of a violent-looking young man after gambling away their life savings. And it didn’t help when days later the crude fellow returned and took Olivia away again, only to return in a loud green vehicle with hell’s flames rendered in perfect detail on the front fenders, the two of them sitting inside, eating something from a shiny bag and laughing like wicked children.

Two days later—when Olivia announced that she had agreed to go with Wade to the dogfight the coming weekend—Violet said she would refuse to dress her.

“Of course you will, Vio,” said Olivia. “You know how much it means to me.”

“That’s what concerns me,” said Violet. “You’ve lost your mind mostly. Why would you have the slightest interest in going to a dogfight where they fight dogs?”

“Now, we already talked about that, remember? I agreed to tell you where we were going if you agreed not to judge.”

“I’m going to refuse to dress you for your own good. You have no business in a place like that. It’s against the law and that’s bad.”

“Plenty of things are against the law, Vio,” said Olivia. “Freeing slaves was once against the law.”

“Oh, just stop it, Olivia. Just stop it. That old slavery thing can’t be brought up every time a person wants to do something against common sense. This is just the opposite of that. The current laws need enforcement, making stronger, not changing them. Those poor dogs need to be rescued and given a real chance to have a happy life.”

“That’s what I’m talking about!” said Olivia. “This is my chance to be happy.”

“If you’re not happy it’s your own fault. You have a perfectly good life and there’s nothing on earth wrong with it.”

“Yes, I know I do, but you have a life too and it’s so very much bigger than mine. This is my small chance. Please don’t prevent me from taking it. Please, Violet, you’ll get me dressed.”

“What kind of person takes a poor crippled woman to a dogfight? Indecent is what it is, Olivia, indecent.”

“Don’t be so harsh, Vio. He’s young and I’ll admit he doesn’t think through things as well as you or I, but that’s the very definition of being young. He has a good heart.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“I know I made a mistake. I know that and I’ve admitted it—how many times? I’m really sorry, Vio, but God will take care of us. See, that’s what I learned. God will take care of us.”

“What you mean is I will take care of us. But I don’t know how I’m going to be able to. We can’t continue much longer.”

“Yes, of course, Vio, and I’m forever grateful for you, but God will take care of us.”

“He was doing a good job of it before you gambled away all the money He provided for us to live on. And now, not ten days later, and that’s a very short time, not long, you want to go to a dogfight.”

“Jesus would have gone to a dogfight, Vio,” said Olivia. “He spent His entire life ministering to those on the margins. He called tax collectors, lawbreakers, and lowlifers to be His most trusted friends. Jesus would not refuse to attend a dogfight. He loved all people.”

“The question is if Jesus would have dressed his delusional sister so
she
could attend, if He had one, a sister. And no is the real answer. No.”

Finally, Olivia frowned until her eyebrows nearly touched and said sternly, “I’ll never forgive you if you don’t dress me, Violet.”

“Yes you will, when you see I was right you will and you’ll see.”

“I won’t ever.”

“Yes you will.”

“I won’t and you know I won’t. You know how long I can hold onto things. You may someday forgive me for losing all our money,
but you know in your heart that I will never forgive you if you don’t get me dressed this weekend.”

“That’s unfair,” said Violet.

“I know it,” said Olivia. “But I’m that way. I’ll hate you until the day I die.”

Violet remained silent, communicating her surrender.

“Thank you, Vio,” Olivia said. “I’ll never forget you.”

“Yes you will,” said Violet. “But you have to promise to tell me everything.”