Jewelweed (54 page)

“Name it,” said Skeeter.

“I need to know if Danielle Workhouse is seeing someone. If she is, I want to know as much as you can find out about him.”

“I can do that,” said Skeeter.

A siren came toward them through Luster.

“I'll take this,” said Skeeter. “You stay here.”

Skeeter turned on his headlamp, rode out of the park, and waited for Luster's deputy sheriff to see him. He led him out of town before opening the Duck up, putting an eighth of a mile between them, and then taking the bicycle trail over the ridge and into Thistlewaite County.

Blake remained in the park long enough to reflect on his recent victory. For several minutes it seemed significant, and then all the importance drained out. Skeeter had gotten older. In his prime—back when Blake had really cared about beating him—he was still untouchable.

Looking up at the sky, Blake smiled and rode back home.

A
my Roebuck was working in the garden on the north side of the house. Dressed in faded denim overalls, a leather apron, canvas shoes, and an enormous straw hat that fastened under her chin with long pink ribbons, Amy transplanted a row of perennials along the edge of the lawn, carefully moving the plants from black plastic pots into evenly spaced holes in the ground.

Dart watched her from the window in the laundry room. She was stacking clean towels and facecloths into rising towers on top of the washer and dryer, staring outside periodically and wiping perspiration from her forehead.

On her knees, Amy spread out the delicate roots of a purple New England aster and pressed them gently into loose soil sprinkled with organic fertilizer. She pulled more dirt into the hole with her cupped hands and patted it down, making sure the plant stem poked straight up. Then she carefully added water from a galvanized can with a narrow curved spout. The liquid spread into a black puddle around the plant, then shrank from the outside in, leaving a dark, concave indentation. She added a little more water, leaned back on her ankles, put her hands in her lap, and tried to imagine what it might feel like to be plucked from the nursery's niggardly container of vermiculite and implanted in the wet earth, to feel your life grounded and reaching down into the world.

Dart's fluffy tower of facecloths grew unstable. The vertical reiteration of monogrammed
R'
s running up one side was in danger of bending. She began another stack, and searched through the basket for more facecloths to pile on it. Then she turned toward the window again.

Amy finished her row and refilled the watering can from the green hose
snaking away from the house's stone foundation. One by one, she added more water to the asters, soaking the soil around them. At the end of the row she set the can down, folded her arms, and looked at the new line of plants in relation to the rest of the garden. For a delightful moment, she could see the garden of her childhood, the way it had looked when she would visit her grandparents. She had loved it here—away from town, away from the incessant demands of school, away from mocking classmates, neighbors, and the familiar anguish of her daily routine. As soon as her father's old Plymouth came to a stop at the end of the drive, she'd throw open the back door and run madly toward the house, as if she were rushing into the refuge of the afterlife. Amy had always felt a strong connection with her grandparents. They shared the same emotional rhythms. Being with them always felt right.

Dart finished folding the laundry and set the towels and facecloths in an empty basket, to distribute later through the house. She looked out the window again at Amy. She'd never known anyone so private, gentle, and contained. A terrible sadness bloomed inside Dart—remorse without bottom, beyond tears, as if someone had split open the skin of rage to reveal its bitter contents. She took the sheets out of the washing machine, put them in another basket, and carried them out to hang on the clothesline.

As she walked across the yard, Amy intercepted her. Dart set the basket of laundry on the grass.

“Do you think your friend Winifred would be willing to come over and help with the garden?” asked Amy. “I keep seeing her annuals, especially the patch of marigolds next to the fountain.”

“I don't know,” said Dart, looking away from the taller woman. “She's not really my friend, anyway.”

“Dart, what's wrong?”

“Nothing,” she snapped. She tried to find the courage to look directly at Amy, but her hat framed her face in such an alarmingly beautiful way, accentuating her eyes and cheeks. Dart had to look away.

“Tell me.”

“Ivan and me,” said Dart. “We're leaving at the end of the week.”

“What?”

“We're out of here Friday afternoon.”

“What do you mean?” Amy took her hat off and held it by the long ribbons hanging from the sides of the brim, looking both surprised and hurt.

“I quit. Ivan and me, we're moving on to better opportunities.”

“Oh really. Which ones?”

“None of your business.”

“I thought you liked it here.”

“Well that's just stupid.”

“Why are you doing this, Dart?”

“It's time to move on. We've been here too long. I've got to do what's best for my son. You should be able to understand that.”

“Look at me,” said Amy, dropping her hat and taking Dart by the shoulders.

“Take your hands off me,” said Dart.

A brief gust of wind carried Amy's hat several yards away.

“Look at me.”

“No.”

“Look at me.”

Dart pushed Amy's hands away and stepped back.

Amy stepped forward and took hold of her again.

“Look at me.”

Dart looked at her.

“Tell me.”

Dart's eyes moistened. “I stole the necklace.”

“What necklace?”

“This one,” said Dart, taking it out of the pocket of her jeans and placing it in Amy's open hand.

Amy spread the necklace and the lattice of diamonds fell open like a minor galaxy. Her eyes hardened and a look of resigned disappointment swept over her face. “Dart, this isn't mine,” she said breathlessly. “I could never afford something like this. Where did you get it?”

“I would never take something that belonged to you,” explained Dart.

At that moment Buck's truck drove up the driveway and parked next to the shed.

Dart looked frightened.

Amy put the necklace in the pocket of her leather apron.

“Go inside,” she said sternly. “Now.”

Dart went into her apartment, locked the door, and began packing.

I
n a truck stop just off 1-10 in New Orleans, Nate was eating a bowl of gumbo. He remembered a time when he didn't like okra. Since then his tastes had expanded, and a good meal was now more complicated, open to the influences of mood, opportunity, and whim. The favorite dishes of his childhood were still important, of course, but he had also discovered many other good foods and ways to prepare them. He finished off with a piece of peach pie, and while he was forking in the first bite he remembered canning peaches with Bee in her kitchen.

The pie was exceptional—the crust chewy yet flaky, with a bumpy sprinkle of cane sugar on top, the peaches not too sweetened by a custard that had a lemon afterthought. His second bite only reinforced the first impression.

His thoughts turned to Bee again, and he noticed the absence of the distress he often experienced when thinking of his relationship with her. Testing this new circumstance, Nate took another bite. And again, the nagging shame that had always accompanied his feelings for his cousin—the familial dark taboo—was no longer there.

Nate celebrated his good fortune as he finished the pie and explored how it might have come to light. The new freedom of his imagination was surely not an inevitable result of having lived longer and experienced more. Individuals had little control, Nate believed, over the moral alarms instilled in early years by their families and cultures. With age, the alarms often became more sensitive, easier to trigger, reinforced by earlier eruptions. Cousins were off-limits. There were good reasons for that, and the happy fact that Bee was no longer of child-bearing age had utterly failed to dampen the feelings of distress surrounding his longing for her—until
this current moment in a humid truck stop in Louisiana. But whatever the reason, his desire for Bee now acknowledged no obstacle to securing its prize.

When Nate returned home three days later, he went to see his cousin and learned that she had—a week or so earlier—experienced a similar freedom to imagine herself entwined with Nate. Her first encounter with this phenomenon began, she said, on the drive back from the tavern, after she and Nate picked up his son. Something about the way Nate shifted gears that night had opened the gate. She hadn't said anything, though, because she didn't want to rock the boat and because she was older and thought Nate might need a couple more years before his own imagination found this new authority to go places formerly forbidden to it.

“We should be careful,” said Nate. “We could be talking ourselves into this. The old demon may still be waiting to catch us in the act.”

“Maybe,” said Bee. “But I know how to find out. Let's spend some time in Slippery Slopes. If there are any taboos lurking, they'll turn up there.”

As children, the two cousins had frequently visited their grandparents' home in Slippery Slopes, Wisconsin—a little town seventy miles north of Grange. The long sleepy drive on country roads had always made it seem as if they were traveling to a foreign country. On more than a few occasions their respective families had visited simultaneously, bringing Nate and Bee together. The house occupied a prominent place in their shared memories; it was a reservoir of initial encounters, explorations, and early adventures in places other than home. It was also the embodiment of family traditions.

The old Slopes mining community was named after its hilly terrain. Comprising a three-block-long collection of stores and other businesses surrounded by an expanding kaleidoscope of homes of different sizes and shapes, it sheltered about eight hundred residents. Built before the advantages of modern construction equipment, most streets connected through precarious inclines, and to children raised on flat, isolated farms, it seemed marvelous to walk a short distance downhill from your home and find yourself inside a grocery store or barber shop.

Bee had tasted her first buttermilk pancakes inside the summer kitchen toward the back of the house. The maple syrup was always warmed, which she didn't like at the time because it seemed thin and watery. But
now she always heated the syrup when she made pancakes, to evoke those earlier days.

There was a dark alley behind the towering three-story buildings along Main Street, and a rickety wooden staircase on the back of one of them led up to a tiny apartment on the third floor. An old woman lived up there and hung her laundry out on the roof—a wondrous fact for a rural child, and the knowledge had lived on to this day in a special place inside her. The alley ended after several buildings, sheds, and rubbish bins in a used-car lot with grass growing up through cracks in the concrete, where a soda machine stood—a locked red refrigerator—guarding the cars for sale.

Nate, on the other hand, remembered many features from inside the house particularly well: pictures, furniture, flooring, windows, wainscoting, and deep bottle-fly-blue and violet glass vases and pitchers, which his grandmother collected and set in the bay window. The rooms were small and the hallways narrow, as if the place had been built by dwarves for the occupancy of children. The walls were papered over with vegetative designs, and the beds were high and lumpy with noisy springs. The thickly varnished wood floors creaked loudly, and the banister going upstairs consisted of a water pipe with fittings on the ends, painted glossy white. He remembered seeing his first harmonica in a cabinet drawer in the living room. He picked it up, blew through it, and made a broad, fuzzy sound. Then Bee—whom he had just met for the first time he could remember—took it away from him and put it in the pocket of her yellow dress. “You're too little,” she said. “This is a very expensive mouth organ and I'll keep it for you. That way it will stay safe.”

Bee claimed to have seen Nate a number of times before this encounter with the harmonica, when Nate was too young to remember. She remembered carrying him around, feeding him, changing his diapers, getting him to stop crying, and taking him for walks in a stroller. Nate always enjoyed hearing these memories of which he had no recollection, though he often wondered how much Bee herself contributed to their content. Somehow the details surrounding the time when he was a helpless infant and she a competent girl with precocious child-rearing skills always seemed to exceed the narrative material available from other periods in their lives.

It didn't take long for Nate and Bee to make a decision. And so Nate called their uncle Dan and asked after their grandparents' house.

Daniel Bookchester, now in his eighties and talking on the white phone in the beige room of his retirement home, explained to Nate that the old couple who rented the house for fifteen years following the death of their grandparents had recently moved out to live with their children. The real estate agency that managed the property had made repairs, replaced the furnace, refrigerator, and stove, repainted, and listed it again. It was currently unoccupied.