This Land

by Dan Barry

  This winter has been especially austere. As part of the drive to cut spending, the Obama administration and Congress have trimmed the energy-assistance program that helps the poor—65,000 households in Maine alone—to pay their heating bills. Eligibility is harder now, and the average amount given here is $483, down from $804 last year, all at a time when the price of oil has risen more than 40 cents in a year, to $3.71 a gallon.

  As a result, Community Concepts, a community-action program serving western Maine, receives dozens of calls a day from people seeking warmth. But Dana Stevens, its director of energy and housing, says that he has distributed so much of the money reserved for emergencies that he fears running out. This means that sometimes the agency’s hot line purposely goes unanswered.

  So Mainers try to make do. They warm up in idling cars, then dash inside and dive under the covers. They pour a few gallons of kerosene into their oil tank and hope it lasts. And they count on others. Maybe their pastor. Maybe the delivery man. Maybe, even, a total stranger.

  Hometown Energy has five trucks and seven employees, and is run out of an old house next to the Ellis variety store and diner. Oil perfumes the place, thanks to the petroleum-stained truckers and mechanics clomping through. Janis Carlton, 35, tracks accounts in the back, while Diane Carlton, 64, works in the front, where, every now and then, she finds herself comforting walk-ins who fear the cold so much that they cry.

  Their boss, Mr. Libby, 53, has rough hands and oil-stained dungarees. He has been delivering oil for most of his adult life—throwing the heavy hose over his shoulder, shoving the silver nozzle into the tank and listening for the whistle that blows when oil replaces air.

  Eight years ago, he and another Dixfield local, Gene Ellis, who owns that variety store next door, created Hometown Energy, a company whose logo features a painting of a church-and-hillside scene from just down the road. They thought that with Ike’s oil sense and Gene’s business sense, they’d make money. But Mr. Libby says now that he’d sell the company in a heartbeat.

  “You know what my dream is?” Mr. Libby asked. “To be a greeter at Walmart.”

  This is because he sells heat—not lumber, or paper, or pastries—and around here, more than a few come too close to not having enough. Sure, some abuse the heating-assistance program, he says, but many others live in dire need, including people he has known all his life.

  So Mr. Libby does what he can. Unlike many oil companies, he makes small deliveries and waves off most service fees. He sets up elaborate payment plans, hoping that obligations don’t melt away with the spring thaw. He accepts postdated checks. And he takes his medication.

  When the customer named Robert Hartford called on the after-hours line that Saturday afternoon, asking for another delivery, Mr. Libby struggled to do what was right. He cannot bear the thought of people wanting for warmth, but his tendency to cut people a break is one reason Hometown Energy isn’t making much money, as his understanding partner keeps gently pointing out.

  “I do have a heart,” Mr. Libby said. But he was already “on the hook” for the two earlier deliveries he had made to the couple’s home. What’s more, he didn’t even know the Hartfords.

  Robert and Wilma Hartford settled into the porous old house, just outside of Dixfield, a few months ago, in what was the latest of many moves in their 37-year marriage. Mr. Hartford was once a stonemason who traveled from the Pacific Northwest to New England, plying his trade.

  Those wandering days are gone. Mr. Hartford, 68, has a bad shoulder, Mrs. Hartford, 71, needs a wheelchair, and the two survive on $1,200 a month (“Poverty,” Mrs. Hartford says). So far this year they have received $360 in heating assistance, he said, about a quarter of last year’s allocation.

  Mr. Hartford said he used what extra money they had to repair broken pipes, install a cellar door, and seal various cracks with Styrofoam spray that he bought at Walmart. That wasn’t enough to block the cold, of course, and the two oil deliveries carried them only into early January.

  There was no oil to burn, so the cold took up residence, beside the dog and the four cats, under the velvet painting of Jesus. The couple had no choice but to run up their electric bill. They turned on the Whirlpool stove’s burners and circulated the heat with a small fan.

  They ran the dryer’s hose back into the basement to keep pipes from freezing, even when there were no clothes to dry.

  And, just about every day, Mr. Hartford drove to a gas station and filled up a five-gallon plastic container with $20 of kerosene. “It was the only way we had,” he said. Finally, seeing no other option, Mr. Hartford made the hard telephone call to Hometown Energy.

  Panic lurked behind his every word, and every word wounded the oil man on the other end.

  “I had a hard time saying no,” Mr. Libby said. “But I had to say no.”

  When Mr. Hartford heard that no, he also heard regret. “You could tell in his voice,” he said. Two days later, Mr. Hartford drove up to Hometown Energy’s small office in his weathered gray Lincoln, walked inside, and made his desperate offer: the title to his car for some oil.

  His offer stunned Janis Carlton, the only employee present. But she remembered that someone had offered, quietly, to donate 50 gallons of heating oil if an emergency case walked through the door. She called that person and explained the situation.

  Her mother-in-law and office mate, Diane Carlton, answered without hesitation. Deliver the oil and I’ll pay for it, she said, which is one of the ways that Mainers make do in winter.

  PART SEVEN

  Grace

  Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life

  He Befriended a Serial Killer, and Opened the Door to God

  COTTAGE GROVE, WIS.—MARCH 11, 2007

  The big wall clock tells the minister he has less than an hour before tonight’s Bible class down at the church. No time for supper.

  He finds his keys in the tight apartment that he and his wife, Susan, have rented for 16 years, shared now with an adult daughter, two cats and a dog. In this space the clock looms large, a treadmill dominates the living room, and bunny knickknacks everywhere signal the approaching season of rebirth.

  A goodbye to Susan, a pocket pat to jingle those keys, and out he goes into the wintry Wisconsin sunset, Roy Ratcliff, minister of the Mandrake Road Church of Christ in Madison. No different from any other preacher, save for one baptism he performed long ago.

  “My friend Jeff,” Mr. Ratcliff often calls him. A child of God.

  His friend Jeff was killed in prison in 1994, several months after his baptism and in a brutal fashion too quick and clean for some. To say that he confessed to killing 17 young men and boys only begins to hint at his grisly crimes. His full name was Jeffrey Dahmer, and his depraved actions once made the world recoil.

  Mr. Dahmer left behind confused parents, dozens of distraught relatives of the victims, the traumatized city of Milwaukee—and this white-bearded minister, struggling still at 60 with the sense that he, too, had been condemned, for having the audacity to grant God’s blessings upon the devil.

  “I’m marked as the man who did that,” Mr. Ratcliff says, his tone suggesting frustration, not regret.

  Before this singular act came to define him, Mr. Ratcliff was just another modest minister of modest means, addressing the temporal and spiritual needs of a few dozen congregants. He tended to speak rapidly, with New Testament references seeming to tumble from his lips with each exhalation.

  Then, one day in April 1994, Mr. Ratcliff found himself in a small room at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, where an inmate had expressed a desire to be baptized. He had never met a serial killer; for that matter, he had never been inside a prison.

  The young man entered smiling and unshackled. The minister calmed himself and got to the point: “I understand you want to be baptized.”

  In Mr. Ratcliff’s mind, the shocking crimes of Mr. Dahmer were stipulated; the inmate had readily confessed to everything after his capture in 1991. What mattered now
was whether this blond, pallid man before him understood that baptism cleansed his sins against God, not his crimes against the state.

  “He was seeking redemption,” Mr. Ratcliff says, recalling how Mr. Dahmer often spoke of being the worst of sinners. “He was seeking forgiveness.”

  A few weeks later, Mr. Dahmer donned a white polyester robe and climbed into a steel-silver whirlpool normally used by inmates with physical injuries. The minister gently pushed him under the water until he was fully immersed, and baptized him with a short prayer.

  Roy Ratcliff, minister

  When the convict emerged, the preacher said, “Welcome to the family of God.”

  Jeffrey Dahmer smiled.

  Every Wednesday for months afterward, Mr. Ratcliff met with Mr. Dahmer to pray. The convict said he should have been put to death for his crimes, and his minister agreed. He talked about suicide, something the preacher had flirted with many years earlier, after being fired from another church. A shared faith drew the different men together.

  A few days before he was killed in November 1994, Mr. Dahmer handed Mr. Ratcliff a Thanksgiving Day card that the minister keeps wrapped in plastic. “Dear Roy,” the note begins, in loopy handwriting. “Thank you for your friendship, and for taking the time and effort to help me understand God’s word.”

  After a discreet memorial service at the minister’s church in Madison, after the notorious surname had slipped into the recesses of public consciousness, Mr. Ratcliff continued to be identified as the man who baptized the serial killer. Both in and out of the Church of Christ community, some embraced him for it, while others shunned him.

  People would walk away when introduced to him or argue that they wanted no part of a heaven that included Jeffrey Dahmer. Some would praise him to his face, only to tell others that he had been duped. He was rarely invited to other churches to talk about the salvation of the least of us, because, he guesses, “there is a sense of shame.”

  At gatherings of preachers in the region, he says, one minister from Milwaukee constantly points him out to others and says: Do you know who that man is? Do you know what he did?

  “I’ve become a little bit jaded by the hypocrisy,” Mr. Ratcliff says.

  Last year Mr. Ratcliff wrote a short book about what he calls Mr. Dahmer’s “story of faith.” The book, “Dark Journey, Deep Grace,” has sold poorly—perhaps, he says, because people cannot see that a story about Mr. Dahmer is a story about all of us.

  Mr. Ratcliff says he is a better man for having known Jeffrey Dahmer, but knows that some people will have trouble understanding this. He says he now visits several prisons a month. He says he has a keener understanding of faith, and of mercy.

  It seems that Mr. Dahmer is rarely far from the preacher’s mind. For example, that large clock looming in his family’s apartment was bought at a kiosk in the mall, with the honorarium the Dahmer family gave him for arranging the memorial service. The Ratcliffs call it “Jeff’s clock.”

  By the time that clock strikes seven, the minister is already at his church, turning on the lights, checking the heat, greeting congregants. Soon he joins them in song.

  20,000 Days Down the Road, a Night on the Path

  JAFFREY, N.H.—OCTOBER 14, 2007

  Let us take a walk in the woods.

  With no afternoon commitments, one of the great perks of retirement, this is what Jim and Eleanor McQueen decide to do: take a walk in the woods on a pleasant September afternoon. Nothing ambitious. Back in time for dinner.

  Truth be told, Eleanor could do without the walk; she would be just as happy to work in her flower garden. But Jim has always loved to hike, and now with this new right knee of his, he is eager to make up for lost time. They are both 81; best they go together.

  Twenty minutes later, their white sedan pulls up to a sign that welcomes them to the densely wooded Heald Tract. It refers to a “short, 1.5 mile hike that is part of a more extensive trail system.” That’s the one, says Jim, who researches these things—though Eleanor describes this research as getting mailings “from every cuckoo outfit out there.”

  Yes, the McQueens have quarreled now and then during their 55 years of wedded bliss. Or, as Eleanor puts it: “We’re at swords’ points all the time. All the time!”

  The only trail opening they see is a few yards down the road; blue rectangles on trees seem to suggest the way for this short hike. If it’s 3 o’clock now, they reason, we’ll be out by 4. Short-sleeve shirts over T-shirts are fine. In they go.

  They hike under maple and beech, past stone walls and small ponds, through an old orchard where they pluck some apples to eat. After a while, Eleanor says this is the longest damn mile-and-a-half she’s ever walked.

  Jim studies the pink map he picked up during his research, but it provides no comforting, geo-specific certainty. Overhead, a canopy of trees blots the sunlight. They keep walking, hoping to find that certainty around the next bend.

  After another while, Eleanor asks, What time is it anyway? Jim reaches for his glow-in-the-dark Timex, the one with the broken wristband. Seven o’clock, he says, and they both know they have to get out of here now.

  Their hopes dim with the fading light. They are not lost so much as trapped by the descending darkness. Jim suggests that they plop down for the night. Eleanor readily agrees, which pleasantly surprises Jim.

  Are you having fun yet? Eleanor teases. Yeah, yeah, Jim says.

  They do not worry about things that go bump in the night; they are 81. Their concern is the dropping temperature. They try to snuggle on the rocky, sloping ground, but their exposed arms are too cold. They slip their arms into their shirts, sit beside each other, and begin to talk.

  If this were a movie, the McQueens would now reflect on their shared 55 years and profess their love for each other. But this is real life. Some things are just understood; stipulated, you might say.

  Stipulated: That they were introduced at a Catholic social at Columbia University in 1950. Jim was a World War II Navy veteran of the Pacific theater and Eleanor was a nurse. They married and eventually settled in Somers, Conn., where they had three children.

  Stipulated: That over the next half-century, they did the best they could. Jim, a chemical engineer, often suffered the vagaries of big business; the toughest came in 1970, when a new job meant uprooting the family and moving 100 miles north to Jaffrey. Eleanor kept the house together, then returned to nursing to help pay the tuition bills coming simultaneously from three colleges.

  Stipulated: That in retirement, they may still butt heads, but they also still put heads together. On the dining room wall, for example, there hangs a framed saying: “May You Live All the Days of Your Life.” She did the calligraphy; he made the frame.

  Eleanor should be taking her blood pressure medication about now. Felix the cat is probably waiting to be let in. The cellphone is sitting on a windowsill. Jim wouldn’t use it anyway, reasoning that the situation isn’t dangerous enough; Eleanor would, though, just to alert people.

  They amuse themselves by imagining their children’s response to all this (“You did what!”), and shouting to a passing airplane (“We’re here! We’re here!”). They seek warmth by lying on top of each other, though this proves awkward, what with their arms inside their shirts.

  We’re babes in the woods, Eleanor thinks, and suddenly she is a child again, watching one of her older sisters—Grace, wasn’t it?—in a junior high school production of the Humperdinck opera “Hänsel und Gretel.” Grace would die in her mid-20s, but now here, in the wooded darkness, her baby sister is singing the evening prayer:

  When at night I go to sleep

  Fourteen angels watch do keep

  Two my head are guarding

  Two my feet are guiding

  Two are on my right hand

  Two are on my left hand

  Two who warmly cover

  Two who o’er me hover

  Two to whom ’tis given

  To guide my steps to heaven.


  Hansel and Gretel veer between dozing and shivering. I wish two angels would bring us blankets. Having fun yet?

  Dawn comes, and two people who have spent more than 20,000 days as husband and wife continue their walk through the woods—to the way out.

  Soon the children will find out. Soon Eleanor will write down her account of the night, which will prompt Jim to write down his account. They don’t exactly match.

  But right now Jim and Eleanor are finding their way again, and she is carrying some of those plucked apples.

  A Story of Exile and Union Few Are Left to Tell

  KALAUPAPA, HAWAII—DECEMBER 1, 2008

  The peace of morning comes to the small village of famous isolation called Kalaupapa. Breezes rustle the berry bushes. Myna birds call from treetops to wild pigs below. Life stirs on this spit of land between the soaring Molokai cliffs and the stretching Pacific abyss.

  The residents who call themselves patients move about in the hours before the day’s few tourists arrive. Here is Danny, who first came here in 1942, lingering a moment in the peekaboo sun; Ivy, who arrived in 1956, standing outside the gas station she runs; Boogie, here since 1959, driving a clattering old van.

  Boogie, whose given name is Clarence Kahilihiwa, gently explains why he considers himself a patient, not a resident. Some people, the state health employees and National Park Service workers, live here as part of their jobs. Others live here because this is where they were sent, against their will, long ago.

  You see, he says, “We are—and you are not.”

  Those who are have Hansen’s disease, also known as leprosy. Those who are represent the last few of some 8,000 people who, over a century’s span, were banished to Kalaupapa because of an illness once called the “separating sickness.” Many never again felt the embrace of loved ones living somewhere beyond the volcanic formations that rise like stone sentries just offshore.