Stillwater

by Nicole Helget

  Clement slid over a gray mass bulging from the ice, a squirrel trapped and dead, as if the Lord had planted this creature as a symbol for him to interpret. Like the women who raised him, this prisoner was forever finding cryptic signs in nature meant to test his intelligence and morality. Though spring was near, small mammals—bats, moles, squirrels, skunks—were most likely to freeze or starve at this time of year, fooled by fleeting moments of sunny warmth into waking from their deep sleep and leaving their dens.

  He didn’t want to look over his shoulder, but he felt he had to. He hoped there’d be no man there, only a hole in the ice. He turned. The guard was watching him. Clement sighed. “I warned you to stay on the shore,” he said. “I did. I told you the ice was thin.”

  The man in the water said nothing. He closed his eyes in deference to deep thought or exhaustion. The guard had led him to the river on the warden’s errand, to chop and collect a sled full of ice blocks for the warden’s personal icebox, in which the rich warden was supposedly keeping a tall white cake with currant jam, a gift for his wife’s birthday the next week. Whereas most prisoners would have welcomed this occasion to stretch legs accustomed to a cramped space measuring five feet by seven, to breathe clean air into lungs accustomed to inhaling dust mites and the smell of shit and dirty feet, to open their sorry eyes to a bit of blue sky rather than bars, stone, and guards, it was an errand unloved by Clement Piety, a thin man sensitive to cold and prone to shivering, to chills in his bones and sickness in his lungs and weeks of headaches after such an outing. Even now, the wet air seemed to penetrate his cotton coat, his striped prison issue, his itchy flannel, to settle upon his skin like a premonition of impending demise.

  But now there was the matter of the guard in the water. Instinct had moved the prisoner away from the open hole, away from the drowning man. His own desire to live cautioned him against helping. Clement clenched his jaw. He looked away from the hole and toward the safe shore, a few more feet away. There was no time, no rope, nothing long enough to reach the guard while keeping himself out of harm, except the pick in his hand. It would do.

  If he and the guard weren’t back to the prison in half an hour, the warden would have the dogs out, and he’d be answerable for this event. And what could he say? How was it that he, the prisoner, the one charged with being on the ice, had not gone under? How was it that the watcher had? A month in the prison basement, at least. There wasn’t a speck of God’s light down there. There wasn’t a unit of the devil’s celebrated heat. That basement was a no place, worse than hell, worse than any war camp or battlefield.

  Fractures, webbing from the hole in the ice each time the fallen man adjusted his grip, crept toward the prisoner. He perked his ears, chary of the high-pitched crack he’d heard before the guard dropped from sight, that brief note of warning the ice gave before crumbling beneath the guard’s feet, delivering the poor man to his probable doom. Yet as Clement Piety, Stillwater Prison inmate 1024, convicted of murdering a man with an ax on the banks of this very river, regarded the scene before him, he observed the guard holding strictly to the ice and not succumbing to the rushing water. Clement’s heart beat like a ringing bell in his chest. His breath rose like cannon smoke. He lowered himself to lay the pick and hammer on the ice and rid himself of the extra weight. As he crouched, he looked to the guard again, who was looking at him. Both were silent but for their haggard breathing. Fifteen feet separated them. And fifteen feet lay between Clement and the shore.

  He rose slowly and backed away again. “I can’t,” he said again. The guard closed his eyes. Here was his chance to run. Or his second chance to save a drowning man.

  That the handle of the pick was long enough to reach the guard was a truth plain to Clement. He could try. The guard was a decent man, one who talked with the prisoners in the dark, solitary rooms of the prison basement, one who would shake dice or flip cards with the inmates through the bars, one who asked about the prisoners’ families and offered to write letters for the inmates who couldn’t write. This was the guard who, upon first seeing the wild-eyed vulnerability of Clement Piety when he arrived at the prison seven years ago, spread news of his mammoth wrath and unpredictability among the rest of the inmates, in hopes of securing a measure of fear and respect for the scrawny man with the strange mismatched eyes. Eyes, the guard had told the others, that were a devil’s mark, a demon’s gift. The guard told Clement what the stronger, bigger men did with the smaller ones. The guard said he didn’t like men turning worse than animals, away from their religion. The guard said he had hoped to spare him, and Piety had been spared. This was the guard who had written the letter of appeal to the state’s attorney general, Barton Hatterby, on Clement’s behalf. And the guard who checked the mail each week for the pardon that never came.

  Clement Piety remembered those kindnesses now. He bent again to grab the pick. “I’ll probably end up same as you,” he told the guard. “A dead man, frozen like that ill-fated squirrel there.” He twirled the wooden handle toward the guard and kept the pick end in his hand. He crouched and spread his feet as far apart as possible, as he’d seen the old bullfrogs do on lily pads. He waited until the guard opened his eyes again and looked him square in the face. “Once you’re out, I’m off.” Clement raised his eyebrows. “And I don’t expect you to follow me, understand?” He extended the pick to the man in the hole.

  The guard was silent but for his choppy breath. But his fingers inched toward Clement and the pick.

  47

  Clement Goes Underwater

  CLEMENT TOOK A BREATH of the cool, moist air and heaved again. He wasn’t pulling as hard as he could. He was tentative, afraid to burden the ice shelf with too much weight all at once. In truth, he didn’t believe this act of saving the guard had a chance in hell of working.

  “I can’t see us both coming off this still breathing,” said Clement. The ice seemed to be sizzling with cracks and bobbing beneath him.

  “Here we go,” said Clement. “Hang on.” He gripped the pick and heaved with every sinew in him. The ice, the entire sheaf from the middle of the river to the bank, gave way into dozens of pieces shaped like maple tree leaves. Clement teetered back and forth on a slab, and though he tried to steady it, the venture was hopeless. He went under, swallowed by the river.

  Clement dropped the pick and kicked to the surface. He got one big breath before the guard grabbed him by the collar and pulled him back under. Clement blew out all of his air and swallowed a mouthful of the water. The guard tucked Clement under his arm like a parcel and used his other arm to navigate the water, sometimes bobbing up between ice chunks for air and then going under the long, jagged sheets again. Thirty or forty seconds later, the water slowed and warmed in a depth where Clement could set his feet down on the firm bottom. The two men stood and walked to the shallows. Clement threw the guard’s arm off him.

  Clement breathed heavily. “I thought you were trying to kill me.”

  The guard’s lips and eyelids were purple. The whites of his eyes had turned gray, and the irises rolled back into his skull. The guard’s knees folded under him, and he collapsed back into the water. Clement grabbed the back of his hair and pulled his back against his own knees. Clement grabbed him under the armpits and dragged him toward the shore. He was as heavy as a dead horse. Clement dropped the man onto the bank and rolled him out of the water. Clement fell beside him, coughed, and caught his breath.

  “Get your coat off,” Clement said. His teeth chattered like a beaver at a stick. “You look nearly gone already, but you might make it if you get these wet clothes off.” He unbuttoned his coat and raised him a little, to get his arms out.

  The guard coughed up a big black spew of water and let it run down his chin. He sat up, grabbed Clement by the coat collar, and pointed to his eyes. Clement needed no translation.

  “I know it,” he said. “Hard to disappear with eyes like these. But I’m off.” Clement patted the guard on the shoulder. The guard nodded, then vomited a
gain. Clement used the guard’s shoulder to heave himself up the slope. He gripped the trunk of a small willow and was off into the forest, a rare wonder and thick with pines, an easy place for a small man like Clement to disappear. He looked like a creature meant for those trees.

  48

  The Good Sister

  ANGEL HATTERBY LAWRENCE stood at her window, wringing the baby’s diapers in soapy water, rinsing them, and laying them over a cord she’d strung from the mantelpiece to the curtain rod above the window. The housekeeper would be horrified by the makeshift drying line in the middle of the parlor, by the water dripping all over the handsome carpet. But she didn’t care. She’d dismissed all the servants and the nanny for the day. Most of the time, she appreciated them and liked their company, even if they didn’t speak to her and talked about her personal matters all over Stillwater. Angel Lawrence was a lonely woman, and the simple presence of the help and simple noises of their work made her feel safe, made the days pass a little faster.

  Today she’d wanted to manage things in the big house herself. She’d been having trouble getting her daughter to tinkle in the little chamber pot, and she didn’t like the nanny’s advice about tying the girl down until she went, so she dismissed her along with the rest, including the housekeeper, who was best friends with the mayor’s housekeeper and whispered everything she heard about Angel to the mayor’s wife. That was how so much tattle about Angel had spread around the town. Sometimes Angel felt like screaming from the rooftops that the mayor’s wife sold herself like a regular prostitute to him, that she’d only bed down with him for trinkets and sweets, and see how that old witch liked the same treatment.

  Angel stared out at the bare, twisted trees around her house and gazed into the pine forest beyond. Beyond that, the St. Croix River was strung like a silvery necklace over the valley, and Stillwater Prison sat on the hill, somehow menacing and comforting at the same time. It both pained and soothed her to know her brother was there. She lifted her fingertips from the water and placed them on the window, where they bit into the frost and left small dots of clear heat. She scraped away frost to get a larger look at the Minnesota landscape. She hated winter here. She hardly left the house, beyond going to the stables and carriage house, from the time the first snow fell until the last flake melted and floated away down the St. Croix. She felt imprisoned by the weather and thought she might visit her mother.

  Although Angel’s husband considered his mother-in-law a madcap embarrassment and hoped against hope that her fits would not fall upon his wife, he had benefited well from his father-in-law’s political position and the negotiations Hatterby had made on behalf of his business. The timber industry was growing in importance, and he appreciated the influence of Barton Hatterby. Still, he wondered whether he had been tricked—he first met his mother-in-law at his wedding to Angel, perhaps by design or just by oversight. Prior to the engagement, Hatterby had touted his wife’s lineage, descended as she was from the French aristocracy in French Haiti. When Thomas made inquiries about this, he discovered that it was true. Shortly thereafter Thomas Lawrence had produced a ring for the girl’s hand.

  Every second Saturday afternoon, Angel took great care to have the nanny bathe and powder and dress the girls warmly and smartly in their lace pantalettes and fancy dresses: a blue silk style with a matching jacket for Roseanne, a velvet black dress with a high collar for Dorothea, and a burgundy silk with a white apron of embroidered flowers on the hem for little Goldenrod. Angel herself chose between a visiting dress of blue watered silk with the full hoops and her tiered dress of black lace over emerald silk. She lately opted for the tiered piece, as she felt that the hooped style was going out of fashion, though she liked the material and color of that gown more than the other. The driver would take the four of them to St. Paul to attend prayer with her mother, in the chapel her mother had commissioned on her own property, and then dine with her in the old territorial governor’s mansion, which the Hatterbys had acquired through favors that Angel’s father had done for some friends.

  Angel was careful not to allow her mother to be alone with any of the girls. She had come to attribute her mother’s peculiar behavior to a tumultuous early life, without a mother of her own to guide her. But Angel’s knowledge of her mother’s sins and her mother’s knowledge of Angel’s origins bound the two in a powerful complicity. Each kept silent about the other’s secret, but Mrs. Hatterby had the upper hand. She kept Angel chained to her.

  Yet Angel understood that in her old age, her mother needed the company of her daughter and grandchildren. In a way it pleased Angel to show off her own plump, vivacious daughters to her mother, as if to say, “See. I know how to do this. I know how to keep them alive and healthy. I have succeeded where you failed.”

  The world outside Angel’s window stood absolutely still, as if all that had once swayed on the wind or opened and closed with the rising and falling sun or moved with the mood of the moon had been switched for glass replicas. Everything looked exactly as it had the day before, and the day before that. The same icicles hung from the eaves of her enormous home, warning any friend or neighbor away. The same brick fence licked around the yard. The same trees stood bare. The same pale sky like dead skin over the earth. The minute the river froze, the entire town filled with the walking dead.

  Her daughters had been holed up like nocturnal animals for far too long. Their skin looked blue for lack of sunlight. Purple half-moons cradled their eyes. Where they once had muscles in their arms from swinging in the trees, they now had pallid sheets laid over bones. Unable to go outside or attend lessons or play games with the nanny, the girls were bored and constantly looked at Angel in expectation. “Go play,” she’d told them a thousand times today already. “You’re underfoot,” she’d said as she shooed them away from her skirts.

  Angel’s heart fluttered and her breath came short. Perspiration gathered on her upper lip though her fingertips were frozen. She had an odd feeling. She placed her hand on her chest and pressed.

  She felt a breeze on her ear. She held her hand to the window and ran it all along the sill, checking for a draft.

  Breathe deeply. Keep going.

  Angel’s heart thumped. She swallowed. “Girls?” she said. “Did you say something to Mama?” She turned and spotted the children playing.

  “Nothing, Mama,” said one of her daughters, her head tipped quizzically.

  Then she heard the faint but unmistakable voice again. Jesus. Blow into your hands. Rub your arms. Keep moving.

  What was happening? she wondered. She exhaled and tried to remember the last time she’d heard this voice. She tried to remember the last time she’d heard this voice in this way. Clement.

  Angel spun around. She looked up at the ceiling and down to the floor. But she knew where the voice was coming from, and it was not from inside her house. “Calm down,” she said. She pressed her fingers to her temples.

  Don’t tell me to calm down, goddammit.

  “Don’t cuss at me,” she said softly. Clement had grown some teeth, it seemed. She tried to remember if he had ever before sworn at her. Angel could hear teeth chattering, though the sound was distant and tinny. “Oh my Lord,” whispered Angel. “Clement, are you dying? This only worked for me if I was nearly dead.”

  She listened, but she heard nothing for a long while. Then, just as her shoulders drooped, she heard him again.

  Is this how you did it? Did you have to nearly die every time?

  “Yes,” she said. She was calm now. “Yes. Where are you?”

  Am I dying?

  The cold sweat spread to her neck and her chest. She panted and spread her hand over her chest. She willed warmth and safety to extend from her hand to him. “I can’t,” she said. “My girls.”

  I’m so cold. I’m freezing to death out here. You owe me something, Angel.

  As she got ready, pulling on long stockings and tying boots, she thought of her worldly comforts. These clothes, this house, a fire in the f
ireplace. She had always possessed every material contentment imaginable, and yet her life had not been easy either. She had never had peace or the protection of a mother. Clement had grown up poor, but the old women had loved him and shown him every kindness. What could she owe him? And yet, she felt she must go to him now. As much as she tried to occupy her mind with managing the house and arranging the gardens and rearing the girls, her brother and his trials always lay on her chest, a heavy, tangible weight of guilt and obligation and resentment and anger.

  Angel’s daughters scurried about her feet. Roseanne and Dorothea stomped after a mouse in the corner, trying to trap it in a teacup. “Roseanne,” Angel said. She took a breath and exhaled slowly. Her voice became calm, even lazy. She would not alarm the child. “Watch your sisters.” She pulled her shawl from the nail by the door and then changed her mind and took the stunning swan boa out of the armoire instead. She wrapped it around her shoulders. He’d recognize it, she thought. She selected a red fox cloak for Clement, as well as clean warm socks, pants, and boots.

  Angel smiled at her daughters. “Leave that mouse alone. How would you like to be trapped in a cup?” She patted Roseanne on the head. “I’ll be back soon. Stay in the house.”

  Angel walked out the door and toward the stable. She was worried and angry and urgently fed up and concerned all at once. More than anything, she wondered if she’d ever be rid of him, this constant tether to the old, to what wasn’t and couldn’t be, to dead parents and imagined connections. Go forward or die.