Nick Reding

by Methland: The Death;Life of an American Small Town

  Working with DHS, where she’s essentially a freelancer, gives Jamie the feeling that she is doing all she can in order to help people who would otherwise not be given any help. The job’s frustrations, she says, stem in part from the fact that Jamie sees a lot of the same people over and over again. Trouble often seems to wrap itself around certain families—the Jarvis clan is one—whose members show up constantly in jail, in halfway houses, and on Jamie’s list of appointments. The rest of her frustrations Jamie characterizes in stark economic terms. Rural Iowa grows older and smaller each year, while the number of cases Jamie is assigned seems to stay stable. The region’s poverty means there are more problem behaviors, and also less money to minister to those behaviors—especially under the kind of long-term treatment that Jamie says would be needed in order to turn a family like the Jarvises around.

  What Larry Murphy says is that there is always greater pressure amid a fiscal crisis to cut spending altogether on non-revenue-generating programs like human services. Fayette County and the town of Oelwein are businesses like any other, and presently both of them are losing money. Sociologist Douglas Constance’s observation that ours is a psychological rather than a socio logical culture is once again apt. Much of what Jamie has to deal with are the ravages of meth; when one is forced to choose between blaming the addict and blaming the system that created the addict, it can be difficult to blame the former. During the late summer of 2005, three of the five members of the Jarvis family—Roland, his mother, and his brother—were in jail on drug-related charges. The brother was in federal prison and would not be paroled for another half decade. Instances like this make Jamie wonder if some people can ever be helped.

  The instinct to assume that the Jarvises will not change no matter how much the state intervenes might begin to explain how Jamie was out of work for over a year, between mid-2005 and mid-2006. The theory of one of Jamie’s co-workers was that, with money tight all over Iowa and public sympathy at ebb tide regarding drug addicts, it had become more convenient than ever for state government to look at a man like Roland Jarvis and throw in the towel. In that same year, says the co-worker, nine out of ten social workers in northeastern Iowa lost their jobs. As a result, Jamie had taken the only job she could find, as a bartender in a little town called Strawberry Point, twenty miles northeast of Oelwein. During this difficult time, Jamie moved in with Nathan. She could get only a few shifts a week, mostly during the daytime; the woman who worked nights had no intention of handing Jamie the only lucrative shifts in a small-town bar. Money was short, given Nathan’s modest state salary, and Jamie spent a lot of time around the tiny house, trying to keep busy. The arguments she had with Nathan were a case study in relationships being tested by hard financial times. For his part, Nathan couldn’t understand why Jamie didn’t get up and go do more—though exactly what more she should be doing wasn’t clear. From her perspective, she’d gone and gotten the work that was available, even if it embarrassed her: she was too well educated to work in a bar, never mind a bar that was forty miles away, round-trip, in a time of rising gas prices. What did he want her to do beyond swallow her pride and work as best she could? She said to Nathan over and over that she was the only one who hated all the time she had on her hands more than he did.

  Meantime, Nathan kept up his usual schedule of working at the office during the day and going to the farm at night. His parents loved Jamie; they’d met her at David’s funeral and taken an immediate liking to her. Unaware that they were living together, Nathan’s father asked him all the time if he’d heard from Jamie or seen her. He wanted to know why Nathan didn’t bring her to the farm at night to help, or why Nathan didn’t bring her by for Thanksgiving supper or on Christmas eve. It’s an interesting question, and one that Jamie herself was anxious to know the answer to. After all, she and Nathan were living together in a small, tight-knit, gossipy community just twelve miles away from Nathan’s parents. It couldn’t long remain a secret that they were in love and were living in sin. Nathan’s parents might be Luddites, but they weren’t living on Mars. And if Nathan was so adamant that Jamie do more than work in a bar while she waited for another social worker position, then why didn’t he bring her to help at the farm? That was the good, honest kind of work that Nathan could respect, and it would help his family, to boot. What was with all the secretiveness?

  Nathan’s response was that, no matter how interested and nice his parents seemed now, they would eventually turn on Jamie. That’s what they’d done his whole life, he said: lured women in, only to then become so critical that it ended up ruining Nathan’s relationship. Because he cared about his relationship with Jamie more than any other, he wouldn’t let that happen this time. He’d finally learned his lesson, he said, and had no interest in subjecting Jamie to his parents’ scrutiny. And so until something happened—what that something would be Nathan couldn’t say—he and Jamie would have to keep their living arrangements a secret from his parents, and Jamie would not accompany him to the farm.

  As far as Nathan was concerned, this represented a genuine coup in his love life. He was in love, even if he couldn’t say it to Jamie. He was living with her and happy with her and his parents were not angrily shunning him. Eventually, the situation began to feel pretty natural to Jamie. Her training in psychology made her more sympathetic than most people might have been to Nathan’s plight, and she was genuinely able to help him. That in turn made Jamie feel needed in a time when she had to work in a bar in Strawberry Point. Her family loved Nathan, and they weren’t any the wiser when, on holidays, Nathan went alone to his parents’, then came home in the afternoon or the evening to have a second Thanksgiving or Christmas meal with Jamie and her parents. For Nathan, it was as good as it was likely to get, for things with the girl were splendid. Problem solved.

  Around the time that Nathan’s brother died, Clay Hallberg entered a rocky period in his life. One night, Clay played a gig at a bar called the Eagle’s Roost, in Hazleton, Iowa, just five miles south of Oelwein. As usual, much of Clay’s compensation had come in the form of beer. After a couple of rowdy encores, Clay had sat around with the bar’s owner, an old friend from the better times of the 1970s, and drank until closing time, before loading his equipment into his Toyota Highlander and heading home. Knowing he was drunk, Clay skirted town, instead taking South Frederick north, past the Country Cottage Café and Lake Oelwein, before hanging a left on Tenth Street SW. When he got to his street, Q Avenue, he knew he was safe, for Q Avenue is nothing more than a farm road that was graded back when the prairie was divvied up into quarter sections. But after driving a few hundred yards, Clay fell asleep. He missed the right-hand turn into his long gravel driveway, jumped the irrigation ditch, and T-boned the fence. His truck, with significant damage, came to a clattering stop in his cornfield.

  The real wake-up call for Clay, though, came at the end of 2005, just a week before the two-year anniversary of his mother’s death. Again, he’d been down in Hazleton, playing a gig. And again he had stayed too late and driven home drunk. Only this time, an Oelwein cop pulled him over just north of the Fayette County line. Clay had been smoldering for two years about what he saw as the complicity of the Oelwein police in the death of his elderly mother. She’d been complaining to the Cop Shop for months about an Amishman whose Clydesdale was always wandering onto Highway 150 in the evenings, thanks to a hole in the Amishman’s fence. But the police had ignored her pleas. That was the very horse that, startled by her headlights as she drove home late one cold winter night, bolted onto the road. The collision killed her, totaling her car and throwing it into the ditch out of which the horse darted.

  Clay was also boiling mad over police treatment of a young meth addict in town, Alan Coffman. Clay and Tammy had all but adopted Alan, who was best friends with their son back when he was a kid because Alan’s parents were never around. Now twenty, Alan had landed a good job as a welder in town. He’d started doing meth, and after an arrest had been compelled to become a co
nfidential informant by the Oelwein police. Alan had to wear a wire each night and make the rounds of the Oelwein bars, trying to make deals with people on the police list of most wanted meth manufacturers while the cops listened. Many of these dealers and batchers were Alan’s friends, and would kill him, he said, should they find out about the wire. If Alan could help the cops get convictions, the charges against him would be dropped. If not, he’d go to jail. It was all part of Oelwein’s new hard-line stance on meth. Clay thought this was a gross infringement of civil rights, though he reserved his disdain for the police rather than aim it at his friends Murphy and Nathan.

  So when Clay was pulled over while driving drunk on his way home from Hazleton, he unleashed a year’s worth of frustration at once in the form of an expletive-laced tirade. The incident didn’t end well for Clay, who claims that the officer assaulted him verbally and threatened him physically. In retrospect, Clay says, getting pulled over amounted to a kind of breakdown for him, unleashing aggression and animosity that had been building for several years. Things in Oelwein weren’t good. Things at the hospital weren’t good. His twin brother had moved to Cedar Rapids, his mother was dead, and his kids were grown and out of the house. Insurance rates were making it harder to practice medicine, and the bud get cuts the hospital was facing made it harder to get the most basic supplies Clay needed to do his job. In order to make money, he couldn’t be the old-fashioned doctor that he’d once been, and that his father had been for fifty years. That’s to say, Clay couldn’t take his time with people; he had about fifteen minutes to listen to and diagnose each patient. Dr. Clay couldn’t solve everyone’s problems in fifteen minutes. And it was killing him.

  As a result of the drunk-driving incident, Clay was charged and pleaded no contest to operating a vehicle while intoxicated. The county installed an Intoxilock on his truck, which consists of a long tube attached to a breath-analysis machine on the steering column. Clay had to breath into the Intoxilock, registering less than an illegal amount of alcohol on his breath, in order to start his truck. He also had to attend substance-abuse meetings. For these, he chose an Alcoholics Anonymous group in Iowa City, a two-hour drive southwest of Oelwein. It was these meetings, which he went to once a week in the relative anonymity afforded by Iowa’s largest city, which had begun to mold Clay into a new man by May of 2006.

  I went to Oelwein for two weeks in the spring of 2006 to spend time with Clay, Nathan, Jarvis, and Murphy, and also to In dependence to visit Major and his son Buck. Phase II of Oelwein’s refurbishment was under way. The streets had been torn up, and the new sewer lines had been marked in the dirt with wooden stakes topped with bright pieces of orange ribbon. The mood around town was expectant, though there was a good deal of crankiness and doubt, if not outright cynicism, concerning the notion that so much money had been spent in order, it was hoped, for Oelwein to lure businesses. After all, when was the next time Oelwein would be able to come up with money for anything, never mind the ten million dollars Murphy and the city council had raised in order to complete the refurbishments? Slowed by excessive spring rains, these improvements were nowhere visible. Indeed, much of Main Street appeared to have been razed by an invading army. The questions were obvious: What if Murphy was wrong? What if he’d gotten people on board, via tax hikes and referendums and bond issuances, only to invest that money poorly? What the hell was Oelwein going to do then?

  One night, just as I’d done the year before, I joined Clay at a party. Only this time, it wasn’t a Fourth of July shindig at Clay’s house; it was a Saturday-night hoedown at a neighbor’s farm. A few dozen people had decided to get together in a barn and eat from an enormous table covered in the usual potluck delicacies, which, for all their varying applications, traced their origins to two sources: pig and potato. Soon people would start dancing in the dust and the dirt and the hay chaff, once they finished their smokes and beers. Clay was set to go onstage—this time without Charlie. That in itself was a development, a sign of progress, as though Clay were growing more independent, not just of his twin but also of his old self. For now, he sat at a picnic table drinking Diet Coke. Not surprisingly, he was talking about the reformulation of his life in terms of the Whorfian hypothesis, one of his favorite theories, which he sketched by drawing a number of concentric circles on the back of a paper plate.

  The upshot of the exercise was essentially that Clay, unanesthetized by booze, was freer to hear the disparate rhythms of his life’s burdens, and that this clarity was helping him to minister to his needs. Clay was finding out who he was. As a side benefit, he was turning into one hell of a musician; he’d stopped standing onstage in his own selfish, alcohol-fumed cloud and had started to learn how to be a part of something bigger than himself.

  “I’ve been reduced to a precognitive state now that my booze-hole no longer needs constant filling,” Clay said. “I’m learning all over how to communicate. This Whorfian shit really works, okay?”

  As Clay and I sat there talking in the barn, I was reminded of something that had happened almost exactly a year before, when Nathan had seen Jenny for the last time. It, too, was a moment of clarity—a clear line between the beginning of one thing and the end of another. Nathan and I had gone to Waterloo to see the exhumation of a murder victim. Afterward, Nathan had gone briefly to Jenny’s place in a three-story apartment complex next to a park on the East Side. The murder involved two identical twin brothers in their late twenties named Tonie and Zonie Barrett, from Waterloo. Zonie had just gotten out of jail for attempted murder; according to the confession that Tonie had given the Oelwein police the previous evening, Zonie had instructed Tonie on how to kill his girlfriend, Marie Ferrell. Marie was a recent arrival in Oelwein and had lived downtown on the second floor of an old building just across the street from the movie house, kitty-corner from Leo’s Italian Restaurant. Nathan said that Marie had been encouraged by a DHS caseworker in Waterloo to move to Oelwein, for the reason that so many people—Nathan and Jamie and Murphy among them—resent: lower taxes and a lower cost of living. Apparently, Marie had been cheating on Tonie.

  Tonie had let himself into Marie’s small apartment on Main Street in Oelwein and bludgeoned her to death. Then, as his twin Zonie had instructed, Tonie rolled Marie’s body in a blanket and drove her to Waterloo. There he stashed her beneath one of a long line of disassembled tractor trailers that had been sitting in disuse for a decade or more outside the abandoned Rath meatpacking plant. He’d dug a shallow grave, put the blanket-wrapped body in it, and covered the whole thing with an old wooden shipping pallet. That was four days before the rains started.

  By the time Nathan and I got to Waterloo to see Marie’s body exhumed, it had been lying there in the 105-degree heat for the better part of a week. It had also rained five inches the night before. According to Tonie’s videotaped confession, he’d “missed” his girlfriend, as he put it, and wanted to “check on her,” which he did twice, apparently just crawling beneath the eighteen-wheeler and squatting there for an hour or two at a time. On one of those visits, he took advantage of the privacy offered by the line of flatbeds in the dead of a sultry June night and moved his bowels next to the grave. The smell of human feces—compounded by the rain and the heat and the raw, visceral stench of the woman’s decomposing corpse—was indeed remarkable. So much so that nine vultures had gathered on the ledge of the packing plant’s roof as Buchanan County detectives readied themselves to remove the body by rubbing Vicks vapor rub beneath their noses.

  Maybe being that close to a body had solidified something for Nathan. After all, it was only a week since he’d buried his brother and unburdened his heart to Jamie Porter. It’s hard to say exactly why Nathan got in his white Diesel Jetta and drove from the disinterring of Marie Ferrell—whose case he would eventually try and win—straight to Jenny’s apartment. But that’s what he did, and when we arrived, Nathan walked familiarly through the glass security door at the side of the building and up the stuffy back stairs to the second fl
oor. Jenny’s door at the end of the hall was open. As it happened, she was moving to another apartment in town now that her roommate had decided to move in with her boyfriend.

  Jenny’s place smelled like fabric softener, for she’d been washing her clothes. Jenny sat on the floor with her legs tucked under her and her back against the foot of the couch, surrounded by boxes of varying sizes. When Nathan walked in, she rose and they stood a moment, facing each other. The pause was awkward. Then Jenny, who is five three, hugged Nathan—or, rather, disappeared against his nearly seven-foot frame. Neither of them said anything for a while. Then Jenny said, “I’m almost done.”

  Nathan looked around and nodded. There were small nails in the walls at even intervals where Jenny had hung her photographs; next to them were the roommate’s pictures, which had yet to be removed. In the little eat-in kitchen, an open cabinet revealed four shelves, two of them cleared of plates and glasses, and two of them still fully stocked. It was as though the whole place had been cleaved in two, and the half emptiness filled the place with a heavy sadness.

  Then Jenny looked high on the wall adjacent to the kitchen entryway, where a series of three plates had been hung decoratively down the middle of the wall. Two of them were packed; but the third, the highest, was still hanging. Jenny would have needed a stepladder to get it off the wall, though even then she might not have reached it. In a flash, Nathan had noticed her gaze resting there, and without a word, he had unfurled his full height, stretching out his hand and gently lifting the plate from the two small wall-hooks.