Jewelweed

by David Rhodes

  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.

  Slippery Slopes

  In 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 const
ruction 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.

  “Would it be possible for Bee and me to stay there a couple days?” asked Nate.

  “What?” said Uncle Dan, adjusting the little knob on his hearing aid.

  “Could we rent it for a short time?” asked Nate again.

  “I don’t know,” said Uncle Dan, his voice rising with uncertainty. “I don’t have anything to do with it anymore. Call the realtor.”

  “Which realtor is it?” asked Nate.

  “I don’t remember. Look it up. How many can there be in Slippery Slopes?”

  “We’ll find it,” replied Nate.

  “Who did you say this was?”

  “Your nephew Nathaniel.”

  “Oh, right. Is that boy of yours still in prison, Nate?”

  “He’s been out awhile now and he’s doing real good.”

  “No kidding. What do you hear from your cousin Beulah? I don’t think she ever got married, did she? Cute girl she was, but strange as a one-eared donkey. Gave my sister fits. Anyway, I’ve got to go now. It’s lunchtime.”

  At work the following day, Bee talked to a woman at the real estate agency in Slippery Slopes. She agreed to rent the house short-term, though Bee said she had to talk to Nate before setting a firm date.

  When she spoke to Nate, Bee explained that if they were going to do this—the two of them, really do it—she hoped they would try to get it right. There was no sense going to their grandparents’ house to confront the hoary past and see if they could finally become lovers in the most unambiguous and consummated sense if they didn’t intend to stay long enough to have a meaningful experience, ten days at the very least. Otherwise, they might as well not go at all.

  “That means,” said Bee, “I’ll have to find someone to stay with Mother, and you’ll have to get that shipping company to give you a vacation.”

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” asked Nate. “Ten days is a long time.”

  “Not if you don’t want to.”

  “Oh, I want to.”

  “So do I,” said Bee. “I can get Rufus to stay with Mother, or Gladys or even Margaret. Do you think they’ll give you some time off?”

  “No problem,” said Nate, though he knew it was a stretch. Ten days was a long time in the transit business. In this bloody-knuckled economy, shipping companies were constantly looking for excuses to hire new drivers who spoke no English and were willing to work longer hours for less money and no benefits. Unlisted contractors trained them, licensed them, marketed them, and whisked them out of the country if problems arose.

  The agreement Nate finally made with the dispatcher and freight manager was for one week, but he also agreed to check his phone messages daily and be available for an unlikely emergency. He did not tell Bee about this improbable contingency though, and merely explained that he had the week off.

  Bee didn’t know if one week would be long enough, but she decided to go ahead anyway. If they were still bound by the old rules after that much time, then there was nothing to be done. The past would have its victory and she would go on living as she had for this long.

  Nate and Bee drove up in Nate’s pickup, and when they arrived in Slippery Slopes they discovered that the town had grown considerably since they’d last seen it. Excepting the downtown area, the streets had been widened and there were now four sets of stoplights instead of one. Pastel vinyl siding covered most of the homes, and only a few people kept gardens in their yards. There were also signs of encroaching tourism: antiques and gift shops, two motels, several B and Bs, and three restaurants on the six-lane strip leading to and from the interstate.

  They parked behind their grandparents’ house and stood in the backyard, reluctant to go inside. The backside of the steeply peaked house looked especially imposing, if smaller than they remembered.

  “Maybe we should walk around town for a little while,” suggested Nate.

  “No, we should go in,” said Bee. “We need to get these groceries in the refrigerator. Oh my, look at that.” She pointed to a bent iron hook on the door leading down into the cellar. “It’s the same one.”

  “I remember,” said Nate, opening the tailgate on the pickup. “It has an odd shape. And look up there.”

  Halfway up the linden tree, a platform of rotten boards rested between three branches. “You helped build that,” said Nate.

  “I didn’t help build it,” said Bee. “I built it all by myself to give Rufus something to do, so he’d stop following me around.”

  “He practically lived up there for a couple days, lowering strings to haul up things he needed,” said Nate.

  “You were with him much of that time,” said Bee.

  “I know. The strings were my idea.”

  “And a dumb one at that.” Bee snorted. “Everything you pulled up there fell down at some point.”

  Nate felt the more rece
nt stages of his life unraveling, peeling off in irrelevant episodic scrolls. He and Bee were reverting to their younger selves, and they hadn’t even gone inside the house yet.

  “This isn’t going to be easy,” he said.

  “Come on,” said Bee in a commanding voice. “No time to waste. Let’s get this stuff inside.”

  The key they’d received from the real estate agent fit perfectly and turned smoothly in the lock. The back door opened silently. They walked into the kitchen, plugged the cord attached to the refrigerator into the wall, and stuffed it with food.

  “You go get the luggage and boxes,” said Bee. “I’ll open some of these windows.”

  For the rest of the day Nate and Bee explored the sparsely furnished house. Many of the wood floors had not been carpeted over. The light switches, doorknobs, and electrical outlets were all the same, as were the basement, the attic, the windows, and the sink in the summer kitchen.

  Two of the upstairs bedrooms shared a single large closet that could be entered by doors in either room. Like much of the rest of the house, the closet was empty, which made it seem remarkably different from earlier times, when moving through the secret passageway included a hanging jungle of aromatic old-people clothes, many of them with silky textures. Yet standing inside it now still brought a glimmer of the old enchantment. Nate and Bee put their clothes in this closet.

  The bed in their grandmother’s old room was the biggest one in the house, and so they put the sheets on it, along with a green and red blanket. An empty silence surrounded them as they worked, the air monitoring their movements.