Jewelweed

by David Rhodes

  “Why does buying a license mean there will be more hunters?”

  “Not necessarily more, just more determined. When people pay for a license they expect some return. It used to be that ginseng hunters were more casual. Most of the people who found it were loggers or fence builders. But the new license requirements changed all that. Now people think, By god, if I bought a license I’m going to find some.”

  “What are you doing now?” asked August, watching him crush red seed berries.

  “These seeds have matured early, so we’ll pick them, crush them, and plant them in a circle around the mother plant, starting a future crop. It takes about ten years to grow a big root.”

  “What’s that plant?” asked August, pointing down.

  “Jewelweed,” said the hermit.

  “It looks like little pieces of jewelry strung on heavy green thread.”

  He reached for the plant.

  “Easy there, August. Jewelweed is a touch-me-not, a succulent. They shrink up if you pick them. Best to enjoy them where they are. Their juice is also a natural treatment for poison ivy.”

  They moved along slowly, observing more plant life, and after several hours the air became even more humid. The milky haze covering the sun darkened to greenish purple, and the lazy breeze died. The birds, squirrels, and insects grew silent. It was as if the entire valley were holding its breath, waiting.

  “You’d better be getting home,” said the hermit. “A big storm’s coming.”

  “I don’t care if I never go home again,” said August. “I want to join the Wild Boy.”

  “Well, I’m heading back myself. Come with me if you want. This is going to be a gully-washer.”

  They climbed up onto the nearest ridge and followed it in the direction of the hermit’s hut, then descended into an open meadow where even the butterflies remained still, clutching the tops of coneflowers, their wings folded tight.

  The hermit stopped. “Listen,” he said.

  “What?” asked August, looking into the darkening sky.

  “The plants are talking to each other about the approaching rain. They can already taste it.”

  The heads of prairie grasses jiggled and danced, and the leaves on distant trees turned on their stems and began to rattle and hum. The ground quivered. A few warm drops fell out of the sky, plummeting to the ground like arrows of clear glass, disappearing without a trace.

  They picked up the pace, moving quickly through the thigh-high prairie grass. The drops increased, along with a louder rattling of leaves and faint, distant thunder. Layers of the greenish purple western sky ignited briefly along the horizon.

  Reaching the end of the prairie, the hermit and August followed a deer trail uphill, climbing through bracken, young white pine, and scrub oak. Up ahead of them on the trail, a shape darted in and out of view. A little ways farther, August saw it again, moving between trees.

  “It’s—”

  “I know,” said the hermit. “The child’s been with us for an hour or so.”

  “How can you know that?” asked August. “It’s not like I haven’t been paying attention.”

  “You have to know what to pay attention to.”

  The rain picked up in intensity, and thunder shook the limbs of trees, then tore into the sky. The first bolt of lightning leaped into jagged view, bright and searing.

  As the hermit started into the next valley, the Wild Boy stepped into plain sight in the distance. He stood on a piece of rock at the top of the hill.

  “It would be best for you to go home now,” said the hermit, looking from the child on the rock to August. “We’re going to get a lot of water here.”

  “I told you,” said August. “I want to join up with him.”

  And then August took off, running uphill.

  The hermit continued into the next valley while August ran up the hill. But when he reached the top the Wild Boy was gone.

  That makes sense, thought August, feeling abandoned and winded. What would he want with me, anyway? I’m nothing but a traitor and a coward. I don’t even want myself.

  The full fury of the storm was now directly overhead, and the locomotive sound of the wind against the trees was broken only by the thunder and lightning. The rain fell in buckets, blown into slanting sheets and waves.

  August felt his way under a protective overhang in the rock. He tried to bring his breathing under control. He swung his legs over the ledge, leaned back on his arms, and watched the wall of rain.

  An hour or so later the rain began to let up. The sky turned from black to gray.

  The earth had absorbed all it could, and now water poured out of the rocky sides of the hills across the valley, turning the little creek at the bottom into a raging torrent. August watched on as the water moved beyond its banks, forming a river beneath him. Soon the valley floor was covered by brown rushing water, carrying limbs, branches, rocks, leaves, and uprooted plants.

  After another twenty minutes, the clouds cleared enough to allow the sun to break through, and a double rainbow arched across the sky. Still, the valley floor remained under roaring water, and the smell of soaked earth rose up.

  August left the protection of the overhang and slowly began to make his way down the hill. By the time he reached the bottom, the river had returned nearly to the banks of the stream, surrounded by a muddy prairie. The prairie grass had been flattened, and clumps of moss, twigs, and leaves deposited in woody shrubs about two feet in the air, marking the earlier water level.

  The melon field was too muddy to walk through, but August found what looked to be the safest path and continued on. He’d left his canteen somewhere behind him, but he didn’t care enough to return and look for it.

  When he finally arrived at home, August took off his muddy shoes and headed for his room. The sight of the sofa struck him like a blow to the chest. The scene of his shameful betrayal three days before unfolded in his memory in dreadful detail.

  In his room, August took off his wet clothes and put on dry ones. Then he lay down on the bed and fell asleep.

  Minutes later, the door opened silently and Winnie looked in. Her hair was matted against the sides of her face and her clothes were soaked, muddy, and alive with leaves and clinging pieces of humus. Her arms were scratched and bleeding in places. She held in her hand the strap attached to August’s canteen.

  Fortunes Never Spent

  The morning after the flood, Wally and Ivan took the four-wheelers out for a ride. Some of the flooded areas were bigger than baseball fields. They parked and waded into the backwater with landing nets, looking for fish that had washed over the riverbanks.

  If the fish were still gulping air, they carried them to the river and put them back. Wally figured they saved some seventy-five of them, and he kept track of the different kinds in his notebook. If the fish were already dead, they threw them into coolers with ice.

  When the two coolers they had brought were full, they took them back and put the fish in the freezer in the back of the pole shed. Most were carp and other bottom-feeders, and they didn’t bother with any that were less than a couple of feet long. At the end of the morning they had the freezer filled with what Wally called “our turtle food.”

  Then they found a big tractor-tire inner tube, inflated it, tied a rope to it, and attached the other end to a coffee can filled with concrete. That was the anchor. When the tube was fully rigged they rowed out to the middle of the pond and left it floating there with a couple of dead fish hanging from lines. All day long the tube floated out on the pond like a giant bobber, with the dead fish dangling several feet down into the water.

  They were after the giant turtle. They wanted to catch him, or at least to see him close up. But first they had to form a relationship, make a connection. That’s what Wally called it, a connection. In time, he said, they’d find the right place to anchor the tube and get the big turtle’s attention. Once he started eating the fish, they’d feed him more and more, until he got used to coming t
o the same place every day. Then they would have him.

  After no luck the first day, they moved the tube to a different spot. The next day they rowed out and pulled up the fish tied to the tube. They had clearly decayed, but none of them had been touched.

  “Maybe we should replace these with fresher ones,” Ivan suggested.

  Wally declined. “Turtles smell underwater,” he said. “Before long he won’t be able to resist. The more rotten those fish are, the more they’ll smell like a morning bakery shop to that turtle.”

  Then he took out his notebook and wrote, “No. 289: The smell of baking bread.”

  Ivan rowed farther away from the dock, towing the tube. “What’s the point of writing down all those things you’re going to miss after you die? It isn’t going to change anything.”

  “I don’t want to be surprised.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “A great deal, I think,” Wally replied, relaxing in the back of the boat and gazing over the pond. “You see, Ivan, after my wife died there were many things about her I missed, and I was unprepared for most of them. I knew I’d miss her, but I didn’t know I’d miss her when I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. And there were all kinds of things like that, like how she hummed when she drank coffee in the morning. That little habit seemed like nothing at the time, and I paid no attention to it. But after she was gone, for crying out loud, remembering those things nearly killed me. I should have just sat there in the kitchen every morning and done nothing but listen to her hum while she sipped coffee and looked out the window. It was like having a fortune in my own house that I never bothered to spend. I should have paid closer attention.”

  “Well, why didn’t you?”

  “Because I was a damn fool, Ivan. I didn’t have enough sense to know what I was going to miss. Like this one time twenty years ago or more. I was driving down the road and saw something that looked like a white camel standing in a pasture. I just kept on going, and I wonder to this day what it was. But I don’t intend to miss anything from now on. I finally woke up.”

  “How about here?” asked Ivan. They were just beyond the edge of some floating weeds, twenty or thirty feet from shore. The flat shiny leaves rolled in the waves made by the boat, and minnows darted just below the surface.

  “This looks pretty good,” said Wally.

  Ivan helped him pick up the cement-filled coffee can and throw it overboard. It made a sploshing sound and then sank down quickly through the water, yanking yellow rope after it.

  “Do you think he might be close by?” Ivan asked, staring into the water.

  “You bet,” replied Wally. “One thing for sure, he knows about every movement on this pond, every ripple. This is his kingdom. He sees all, hears all, and knows all. He’s the boss of this pond world. Every time an oar slides into the water—no matter how quietly—his eyes pop open.”

  “Then he knows we’re here now? He knows about these dead fish?”

  “He sure does.”

  “Why hasn’t he eaten any yet?”

  “He’s still watching, thinking, waiting for us to move them into just the right place. He might even wait and see what happens when something else eats one or two of those fish before he does. See, that’s why those government men couldn’t net him when they dragged the pond. They moved too quickly, without showing respect for his age and intelligence. I bet that turtle just dug a hole in the bottom of the pond and climbed into it. And he lay there smiling as the net passed over him.”

  “But we’re going to catch him, aren’t we?” said Ivan, looking into the water and wishing he could see the turtle.

  “You bet we are.”

  As Ivan rowed back to the dock, Wally wrote something else down in his notebook.

  When they went inside, the house was empty. Dart had gone shopping, Amy had driven Kevin into town for a checkup at the hospital, and Buck was in Red Plain at the work site. Wally went upstairs to his room to lie down. The afternoon light was just right for dreaming, he said.

  Ivan went into Kevin’s room, fired up one of his video games, and was just getting into it when the doorbell rang.

  It was the ex-prisoner, standing on the other side of the door in a tight-fitting black T-shirt, jeans, and boots. Ivan hadn’t heard anyone drive up, but now he saw the motorcycle out in the front lot.

  “I’m Blake,” he said. “I don’t know if you remember me, Ivan, but I met you the other day at your friend August’s house.”

  Ivan said he remembered. Then he noticed a couple of insects flattened against the man’s face, and a whole lot more splattered on his T-shirt and arms.

  “Is your mother here?”

  “She went to the grocery store.”

  “How long do you think she’ll be gone?”

  “Maybe an hour.”

  “Do you think it would be all right for me to wait here until she comes back?”

  “Maybe,” said Ivan.

  “Is there someone else here I should ask?”

  “Wally’s taking a nap and Flo is beading, so it’s probably better not to disturb them.”

  “I’ll just wait out here then,” he said. “Is that all right with you?”

  “Sure.”

  Ivan closed the door and went back inside.

  About ten minutes later he came out again. Blake was sitting on the front steps, smoking. When he saw Ivan he flipped the cigarette into the yard.

  “What do you want with my mother?” asked Ivan.

  “I need to talk to her,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “We used to know each other.”

  “When?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Were you a friend of hers?”

  “I’d like to think so.”

  “Does that mean yes or no?”

  “Mostly yes.”

  “You took August’s bat from his dad,” Ivan said. “You said the government testers would kill him, and you said you hated bats.”

  “That’s right.”

  “August would rather have died himself than have his bat die.”

  “I feel really badly about what he’s going through,” said Blake. “Really, I do. It’s hard to get over something like that.”

  “He’ll never get over it,” Ivan said. “Other people might, but not August. He wasn’t made that way. He’s different. Once something gets inside him it never comes out.”

  “He’ll get another bat,” Blake said.

  “See, that’s just what I mean. People always say things like that, but to August that doesn’t mean anything. Milton wasn’t a bat for him. He was Milton.”

  “Ivan, I promise your friend will get another bat,” said Blake.

  “I know him a lot better than you do, and I promise he’ll never get over Milton. I know him better than anyone. Nothing will ever come between us.”

  “How did you two get to be such good friends?”

  “It just happened, I guess.”

  “Are you in the same grade at school?”

  “This year we will be. They’re making me do fifth grade over again.”

  “That sucks.”

  “No kidding. But at least August and I will be together.”

  “When I was your age I would have given anything for a friend like that,” said Blake. “And as far as that goes, I’d give anything now.”

  Ivan sat down next to him on the step. Blake smelled like cigarette smoke.

  “So, how do you like living here?” Blake asked.

  “I like it fine and so does Mother.”

  “It’s an awfully big house.”

  “It doesn’t seem that big anymore.”

  “A person could get lost inside a place this big.”

  “Naw,” said Ivan. “If you want, I could show you around. I mean, while you’re waiting.”

  “Do you think it would be okay?”

  “It’s my house too,” said Ivan, and with that they went inside. After Blake t
ook off his boots, Ivan showed him the first floor.

  “Someone’s been doing a lot of work here,” he said in the dining room.

  “That’s Mrs. Roebuck. She’s getting everything just the way she wants it. We all help her, but mostly she does it herself. This house used to belong to Flo, and Mrs. Roebuck wants it just the way it was back then.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “This is our apartment up here on the right, and this here on the left is the kitchen and pantry.”

  “I suppose your mother spends a lot of her time in there.”

  “She spends a lot of time everywhere.”

  They went out on the back deck and looked over the pond.

  “Impressive,” Blake said. “How deep is it?”

  “Real deep,” replied Ivan. “See that black tube out there?”

  “What about it?”

  “Wally and I put it there. We’re going to catch the devil. Kevin says he’s hiding inside a giant turtle. Wally and I are after him.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  On the second floor they walked around whispering because they didn’t want to wake Wally. Ivan took his guest through the old billiard room and past the door to Buck and Amy’s bedroom, then up the back stairs to the third floor. They crept past Flo’s room and Ivan showed him the door to the library.

  “You’ve got a library up here?”

  “Mrs. Roebuck’s grandfather used to teach college. He kept his books here—thousands of ’em.”

  “No kidding.”

  “They keep it locked, but the key’s right here in this crack in the baseboard. I’ll show you.”

  Ivan opened the door and they went inside. All four walls were covered with books. There was a table and two chairs, and nothing else but the smell of old paper.

  “Why do they keep this locked?” whispered Blake.

  “Something about protecting books. Mrs. Roebuck says she’s going to wait to the very end to fix this room up. It’s what she calls her jewel—something to do with her grandfather. I guess he wrote some books himself.”