Jewelweed (3 page)

“No, I haven't.”

“Families are what we have to fall back on in hard times,” said the woman.

“Some, maybe,” said Nate. “My family was the kind you fell away from.”

“You've got to go see her,” said the cook. “That's what this means.”

“Of course,” said the young man. “You must go see her.”

At that moment the front door opened and four people came in and sat down at one of the tables.

Nate left money on the counter and returned to his truck.

Inside the cab, he started the diesel and thought about Bee. Though his recollections of her were shamefully dated, their vitality remained astonishingly vigorous. He could picture her standing before him, and his heart beat with enthusiasm. Among his other memories, she stood out like a single red flag in a yard of drying army blankets.

There was a bang on the cab door and Nate opened it. Below, standing on the asphalt in her white and gray uniform, the old woman looked up at him.

“Did I forget something?” he asked.

“No,” she said, and turned away from him several degrees. “I probably shouldn't say this, but I don't think you should look for your cousin Beulah.”

“Why not?”

“Leave the past alone.”

C
ripes, still in the fifth grade.

Ivan couldn't get over it, no matter how many times he tried. The shame burrowed into him from wherever he looked, from inside every thought. It was true and nothing could change it. They'd kept him back. Everyone agreed—his teacher, Mrs. Beamchamp the guidance counselor, Ms. Spindle, and the director of special education. “Hold him back,” they all said, as if they wanted to grab his shoulders and waist to keep him from running off.

Of course they had their reasons. And they explained them before the Grange School Board, after his mother's repeated demands for what she called a “fair trial.”

“Ivan doesn't know his numbers.”

“He can't spell.”

“He's incapable of following the simplest directions.”

“This was a probationary year for Ivan because he failed to meet the performance and proficiency standards as determined by the state at the end of fourth grade.”

“His test scores barely reach the bottom lip of the bell curve.”

“Oh sure, he has adequate language dexterity, but those skills don't outweigh his impaired abilities.”

“He has delayed social functioning and immature decision-making.”

“He can't concentrate or sit still.”

“Ivan has no apparent aptitude for conceptualizing integers or manipulating numerical tokens of quantity.”

“He's unsuited for the more demanding curriculum of sixth grade.”

“He doesn't try.”

His mother stood her ground. A defiant stare burned from beneath
her Brewers baseball hat, and at the bottom of her faded jeans her feet were planted inside new white running shoes, fished out of the bargain bin the day before. She folded her arms in front of her and from time to time tugged on the bill of her hat—a quick, nervous movement that seemed to Ivan as if she were batting away the words being thrown from the authorities sitting behind the tables.

As far as Ivan was concerned, she was the fiercest defender anyone could ever hope for. If the enemy hadn't outnumbered her ten to one she surely would have prevailed. She cut through even the most tightly bunched arguments with comments like “He isn't like that at home. So how come he acts like that here? Whose fault is that?”

“Those records don't prove anything.”

“He's as smart as all get out when he's interested in something.”

“Is passing out tests all you people do? I thought you were supposed to actually teach something here.”

“You're wrong about that.”

“I don't believe it.”

“You're lying.”

As the night wore on and the slippery yellow files of evidence mounted into a pile, a few stray ends of her curly black hair came jutting out through the metal eyelets in her hat, like burned tufts of grass through holes in concrete. It seemed like a bad sign to Ivan, and he got a sick feeling. At around seven thirty, just as the light began to die in the windows in the conference room, she lost her temper and called Mrs. Beamchamp a rotten excuse for a woman and said Ms. Spindle didn't have sense enough to come in out of the rain. Then she threatened to hit the director of special education if he didn't stop looking at look at her the way he was.

Ivan thought he should have warned her. It never paid to get excited in school. The whole place was crouched down and ready to pounce on the slightest twitch of real feeling. Anyone who smuggled the tiniest smidgen of emotion into those airless halls had better beware. There was no limit to the forces that could be set loose on someone who didn't talk quietly, stand still in line, and wear the fake smile demanded inside that building.

Frankly, Ivan was a little alarmed she didn't understand that. She must have gone to school herself, and how could you possibly ever forget? They
practically beat you to death with boredom; he couldn't imagine anyone ever getting over it.

But there were many mysteries about his mother's past that he hadn't solved yet.

After her outburst, all Mrs. Beamchamp had to do was put the files down on the table and cast a long sad look from his mother to the committee, making it clear that a vote for passing Danielle Workhouse's son into the sixth grade was a vote for parent terrorism.

“We approve the decision to hold him back,” said the head of the school board.

Riding home in their Bronco, his mother gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles and explained in a worried voice that Ivan shouldn't worry. Everything would turn out all right. Plenty of successful people had repeated fifth grade and many others would have been successful if they had only had the opportunity to repeat fifth grade. Abraham Lincoln, she was pretty sure, had repeated fifth grade, following in the honored footsteps of Benjamin Franklin and Saint Paul. All of them had repeated fifth grade and gone on to marry attractive women, own fancy houses, and earn the respect of all their neighbors. Besides, she pointed out, Ivan was a little small for his age, and this would give him a chance to catch up.

Unfortunately, this seemed a lot like the problems he always had with math. How was he supposed to catch up to the size of others when they kept growing too? As soon as he got to where they were now, they'd be bigger. Shouldn't he go ahead in size instead of being held back? Wasn't that what had gone wrong with his size in the first place? The whole thing seemed a lot like second-grade subtraction.

“See, Ivan, here, look at the board, look: you have twelve and you take away three,” Mrs. Wallington would say.

“Take three away where?”

“It doesn't matter. You just take three away. Look up at the board here, Ivan. Look up here. You start out with twelve, and—”

“Twelve what?”

“It doesn't matter, Ivan. Twelve anything.”

“Could it be twelve cats?”

“Yes, twelve cats. Then you take three away. Look at the board.”

“How do I do that?”

“We subtract. This is called subtraction, Ivan.”

“How do you take away three cats? Where do you put them? Who's going to feed them?”

“It doesn't matter where you put them. You just take them away. Ivan, look here, look up at the board. We start with twelve.”

“Who starts with twelve cats? That's a lot of cats.”

“The problem starts with twelve.”

“Where'd they come from?”

His mother went on to explain how repeating fifth grade would teach him patience, and because of it he would be offered many important opportunities for achievement. People would trust him because they would see he would not run off before the job was finished. When he got bigger, everyone would see how much he had to offer—all because he had repeated fifth grade. He would become a great man.

“Was my father small?” he asked. “I mean, was he small like me?”

His mother was silent as she leafed through her memory and measured the height of his father. “No,” she said.

“Then why am I small?”

“You get it from your father's mother, your paternal grandmother.”

“Is she small?”

“She was.”

“Is she small now?”

“No, she died.”

“Did they die together?”

“No.”

“How did my father die?”

“I already told you, Ivan.”

“You said he died in a car accident, but you also said he died in the hospital.”

“He was in an accident, and he died later in a hospital.”

“How did he get to the hospital? Did he walk? What happened to the car?”

“I told you, Ivan, it's just you and me now. We're together, we'll always be together, and that's all that matters. Just forget about your father.”

“You can't forget someone you never met.”

“Stop thinking about him.”

“Trying to stop thinking about him just makes me think about him even more.”

“Stop it.”

“But I don't see why you can't just—”

“I said stop it and I mean it.” She gripped the steering wheel in a way that began to worry Ivan.

“It's not fair that—”

“There are many things in this world that aren't fair, Ivan. And I know one young man who is about to get the whipping of his life if he doesn't respect his mother enough to do as he's told.”

Ivan looked out the window then and thought about his friend August, who was probably the only good thing about repeating fifth grade. Now they'd be together all the time.

August was a little different, Ivan knew. There was no doubt about that. He was a lot different, really. He thought things and did things and said things that no one else would, like the time he said, “You know, Ivan, your mother is unnaturally quick to violence.”

It was because August was homeschooled before coming to Grange Elementary, and his mother mostly taught him from religious books on account of her being the pastor for the Words Friends of Jesus Church. August said she never wanted him to go to a public school at all until he began spending so much time alone, roaming through the woods and fields around their house. Then, after August got a pet bat and named him Milton and started talking to him, his parents began whispering after they thought he was asleep. His father said it didn't matter if August was a little different from other people. But his mother wasn't so sure. She said if he got any more comfortable out of doors he'd never be comfortable in human society. She feared he'd have trouble when he got older—turn out too much like she was. Anyway, his mother won the whispering contest and they put August in Grange Elementary so he could be around kids like Ivan and learn to be normal.

They were best friends. August and Ivan didn't get along very well with most other people, but together they got along fine. For the same reason most other kids didn't like August, Ivan liked him and he liked Ivan. August's mom once said they were good company because they understood each other, but Ivan didn't think that was right enough. There was a difference between understanding and liking, and liking was bigger.

“Look, Ivan, I've got to make a quick visit up here,” said his mother, turning down a long rutted drive. Because of the bumping, several balled-up candy bar wrappers and a bent plastic straw jiggled over to the rust hole in the floor and fell through. At the end of the drive was a shack with a tin roof on one side and some regular shingles on the other. “This won't take long. After I come back we can go home and I'll fix you something to eat.”

“Okay,” Ivan said, and watched as the rottweiler living in the abandoned automobile in the front yard came over, barking. His mother took off her baseball cap and arranged her black hair with her hands while looking in the rearview mirror. Then she found her name pin inside the bag of cleaning supplies and stuck it to her shirt. She stepped outside, ignored the dog as if it had no teeth, threw the bag over her shoulder, and walked to the front door.

Ivan had done a lot of waiting in the truck while his mother visited. About a year ago she started working for Ace Cleaning. She cleaned people's homes and did other jobs. Some people simply hired Ace to clean while they were at work, but others called when they got sick or needed help of some kind.

The rottweiler went back to the abandoned car, but before climbing through the back door it noticed Ivan in the Bronco. It came over and started barking again until the window fogged up on the outside. Ivan felt empty inside, as if the dog knew he'd flunked fifth grade. He almost started crying, but instead he made his hands into fists and squeezed until they hurt. Then the anger came and he felt a bit better.