Jewelweed

by David Rhodes

  When the idea still would not go away, she took it to the Faith and Spiritual Oversight Committee, a group of two men and six women who met monthly to deliberate with her about church programs and her pastoral duties in general.

  “Whatever do you mean?” asked Violet Brasso, a stalwart woman in her eighties who, after decades of devoted service to the community, had risen to an unofficial position of authority.

  “I mean,” said Winnie, enunciating clearly for the benefit of her mostly hard-of-hearing committee, “do you think it would be appropriate for your pastor to visit an incarcerated individual?”

  “Incarnated?”

  “No, incarcerated—a prisoner, someone locked up in prison.”

  “Yes, of course, of course, visit with prisoners all you like, but try not to run the phone bill up. With the small Sunday offerings we’ve been collecting lately we have to cut back on nearly everything. These are hard times.”

  “I don’t think you can call them on the phone,” said Winnie. “You have to go there.”

  “Go where?” asked Florence Fitch, sitting to Winnie’s left.

  “To the prison.”

  “Where?” asked Ardith Stanley, sitting to her right.

  “To the place where prisoners live.”

  “Do you know someone there?” asked Ardith.

  “Not yet.”

  “I should hope not. Why would you ever go into a prison?”

  “To talk to a prisoner,” said Winnie.

  “My sister, Olivia’s, husband, Wade, was in prison once,” said Violet.

  “He was never in prison,” corrected Florence Fitch. “He was in jail. Olivia says there’s a big difference. Jail is not nearly so serious. People end up there almost by accident. Or at least that’s what I heard.”

  “I think that’s right,” said Earl Forester, choosing his words with great care. “There’s a difference between jail and prison.”

  Winnie looked around the sanctuary, from one committee member to the next. Their faces were in many ways better known to her than her own. Afternoon light streamed through the windows and glowed around them, bringing to life the familiar smell of aging carpeting and pew upholstery. The long history of their togetherness seemed almost overwhelming, as if anything unfastened to that history would be absorbed like a ripple into a pond—the new made old.

  Sometimes Winnie could hardly remember who she had been before she came here. They had welcomed her straight out of seminary—a fragile, confused young woman—into their small circle. She owed them, especially Violet, more than she could ever imagine repaying.

  Violet had repeatedly encouraged Winnie to accept life as it presented itself, to stop letting her religious ideals get in the way of her happiness, to trust herself and marry Jacob. Violet had stood in the very front at their wedding. Later, after it became uncomfortably apparent that the pastor’s first child was going to be born a couple of months early, it was Violet who told everyone, “Most children are born to a man and woman in about nine months, except the first one. That one can come at most any time. It’s the Lord’s way.”

  By now Winnie had been preaching in Words for over sixteen years. She and Violet and the rest of her church family had sailed in the same boat for such a long time that Winnie seldom needed to think beyond their mutual shoreline.

  That’s why the things going on inside her—the nightmare and the impulse to visit Blake Bookchester in prison—were so disquieting. They lay deeper than belonging, possibly deep enough to upset everything.

  She gently pressed her committee. “As you will recall from the sermon several weeks ago, Jesus commanded his disciples to visit those in prison.”

  Long pause.

  Earl Forester spoke deliberately out of his white beard. “It was needed in those days.”

  “We live in a Christian nation now,” said Delores.

  “Our laws are God’s laws,” said Violet.

  Once again, Winnie found herself standing against them in her mind. She rearranged her thin legs in the pew, folded her hands, and said: “Yes, Violet, but in your heart don’t you sometimes think that very little has changed since John the Baptist and the Lamb of God were executed? Herod’s Army still lusts for power and continues to sharpen its long swords. Injustices are commonplace and ordinary people are often crushed by civilization.”

  “I don’t think that at all,” replied Violet. “The founding fathers and mothers of this country were devout Christians. It’s written into the Constitution. The leaders of the United States of America serve with God’s blessing, though occasionally they may fall a little short of what is expected of them, as we all do. We’re only human.”

  “Besides,” said Delores, “there is so much work to be done here, among your church family.”

  “That’s right,” said Ardith. “The need is great right here at home.”

  Winnie felt a sinking fatigue; her wish for everything to remain the same was dying inside her. She closed her eyes. She didn’t understand what was happening.

  The next Monday—her official day off—she headed out to the prison in Lockbridge. In the hope of quieting her apprehension before she arrived, she took the long way, driving sixty miles of back roads along the sprawling beaches of the lower Wisconsin River, where eagles posed in trees and turkey vultures unfolded their black wings above the moving water.

  The prison wasn’t hard to find. Set off from the highway and isolated from the rest of town by a thick stockade of black pines, the low-lying complex squatted squarely in the middle of a desolate field. A long horseshoe drive led up to the main building.

  Inscrutable, the brick exterior seemed to willfully obscure the purpose of its cavernous interior, as if the designers had wanted the building to resemble nothing in particular. Four empty exercise cages extended around the northwest corner, chalky-white concrete slabs with high cyclone fencing and loops of razor wire.

  An iron sign bolted to a brick-and-mortar stand in the parking lot stated: Wisconsin Secure Program Facility. The shapeless name suggested a warehouse of locked file cabinets, and Winnie had reason once again to wonder at the deathless ingenuity of government language.

  She parked in the visitors’ lot, walked toward the front door, and checked her watch. Ten minutes early. She stopped walking. A length of discarded red thread hurried over the asphalt, chased by a lively wind, and she went back to her car to wait. She didn’t want to be early. After deliberating for a moment, she sat on the car’s yellow hood.

  The smooth sloping metal felt good underneath her, surprisingly comfortable, and yet she worried the video guards might think she was a vain woman in her forties who wished to appear younger by sitting on the hood of her car. She nurtured this unflattering thought as long as she could keep it alive, then gradually felt even better about sitting where she was. A late-morning sun crept shyly across the southern sky and lit up the left side of her face as she reviewed everything she knew about the prison. It had been imagined, planned, built, and sold to the State of Wisconsin to lock people inside with the least expenditure of effort—509 windowless, single-occupancy cells, doors that opened and closed from a centrally located electronic panel, iron slots (chuck holes) through which to shove food trays in and out, lights that never turned off, wall-mounted metal toilets, concrete-slab beds, and small cameras to search into the most forlorn crevices without leaving the surveillance room. An innovation in population management, the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility was one of the newer additions to the state’s ever-expanding penal infrastructure. It was intended for prisoners too dangerous for even maximum security, or too psychotic to be around ordinary prisoners. When it opened, the governor called it a place for “the worst of the worst.”

  This phrase bothered her most. How could there be over five hundred worst-of-worst? Shouldn’t that number boil down to only two or three? And on top of that, who determined which criminals belonged in these categories? Wouldn’t those people need to be the best of the best?


  “You take things too seriously,” Jacob often told her. August mostly agreed with him, and maybe they were right. Some people had come up with an idea for making money and built a prison. They hired lobbyists to market it to the appropriate government bodies, the complex was purchased, government speech writers made up some exaggerated things to say about the need to spend the money, and the overcrowded prisons in the rest of the state began shipping inmates they didn’t particularly like to Lockbridge.

  It was time to go in.

  A uniformed guard pushed a button, allowing the front door to open. Winnie stepped into a glassed-off entry booth and placed her driver’s license in the metal drawer. Another guard, stationed in an adjacent glass booth, pulled the drawer inside his fortified space, inspected her card, looked up her name on his computer, returned the card, and then pushed another button, allowing a second door to open.

  Behind a curved counter, a guard asked which prisoner she’d come to see, and checked a second computer file to verify that her name appeared on a list of approved visitors. He watched as Winnie put her handbag on the conveyor leading to the X-ray machine and walked through the detector arch. She signed her name and printed the date and time on an official form. The guard handed her a key to open one of the nearby lockers, where she put her handbag and car keys and everything else that she wasn’t allowed to take with her. Then he picked up a telephone and called for another guard to escort her deeper into the prison.

  She followed the pressed uniform down a long corridor and into a narrow room unlocked by remote control. Inside the windowless enclosure stood a single chair and a small monitor mounted on the wall, a video camera above it. Prisoners housed at Blake’s level of security were not allowed face-to-face visitors, even preachers. They were kept in a separate building. She sat in the molded plastic chair and waited for the image of Blake Bookchester to appear.

  When the monitor came on she saw a young man wearing a flat green V-neck pullover shirt without buttons. He looked at least ten years younger than her, his skin unnaturally pale.

  “Who are you?” he asked. Winnie could hardly hear him, and she wondered if the volume had been turned down on the electronic apparatus between them. He seemed to be looking at the floor, but every so often his eyes darted up, studying his own monitor in furtive glimpses.

  “My name is Winifred Helm,” she answered, as calmly as she could. “I live in Words with my husband and son. I’m the pastor of the Words Friends of Jesus Church.”

  “Why are you here?” he asked, rubbing his hand quickly through his short ragged hair. The chain from his wrist shackles clattered like loose change. Though she couldn’t be certain, he looked no taller than five-nine, muscular but not heavy.

  “To be honest, I’m not sure why I came here. Your father told my husband you’d been transferred, and he told me. I made an appointment to come.”

  “Why are you here?” he repeated. The chains rattled again. As if he was annoyed by the sound, he jerked his shoulders and looked down to where the wrist chains connected to a larger loop of chain around his waist.

  Winnie spoke again, unsure of what to say. “Not far from the church, my husband owns a shop for repairing mechanical things. He knows your father and sometimes works on his truck, or at least that’s my understanding. About five years ago I think he put in a new clutch.”

  “I remember the place,” Blake said, cocking his head like a gun and staring straight ahead for a brief moment. “Look, lady, why did you come here?”

  “I told you,” said Winnie, her temper flaring up unexpectedly from its shallow trench in her anxiety. “I don’t know why I came here and I don’t appreciate being called lady. I don’t believe there are any of those left anymore, and the way you’re using the term is insulting. I thought you might appreciate someone to talk to.”

  He glared back at her, his eyes hard. “Whatever you have to sell, I’m not buying. And I’m not going to pretend that your religion or whatever you think—”

  “I should hope you wouldn’t pretend anything,” interrupted Winnie, crossing her long skinny legs inside her ankle-length dress and folding her arms on her lap.

  “Then what do you expect us to talk about? You’re a preacher. Isn’t it your job to convert me?”

  “I gave that up a long time ago. I’ve had to edit my beliefs so many times it wouldn’t make sense to insist that someone else subscribe to them.”

  “You’re a preacher, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but stop making assumptions about me from that. I’ve tried very hard not to make any about you.”

  “I didn’t ask you to come here,” he snarled.

  Winnie found herself on the edge of an abyss. What a colossal mistake, coming here. But rather than backing up, she threw herself over the edge and waited for something to catch her.

  “Let me try to explain,” she said, exhaling. “See, after I learned you’d been transferred here it occurred to me that I should visit. At first I ignored it. Then I started having nightmares, indicating to me that I needed to push myself into uncomfortable psychological areas. Either that or live the rest of my life wallowing around in past realizations.”

  Blake starred out of the monitor at her.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “To explain this next step you need to understand something I believe. It’s fine if you don’t believe it yourself, but to understand why I came here you need to understand something about what I believe. Can I tell you?”

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Thank you. I believe that who I am is made up of many loyalties. I feel loyal to preserving my physical body, to surviving. I feel loyal to my husband, Jacob, and to my son, August. I’m loyal to my congregation. I’m loyal to my community and to preserving my good standing within it. I’m loyal to many other things, too, like being honest with myself, or at least trying to be. I feel loyal toward many cherished memories, like my mother and my loyalty toward—”

  “And these loyalties,” Blake interrupted, “they connect to each other, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” said Winnie. “If you could feel the tugging of all my loyalties at once you would know what it feels like to be me at any particular moment. And the very best moments occur when all my loyalties are in harmony—when the loyalty to my church, for instance, does not conflict with the loyalty I feel toward my husband, and the loyalty I feel toward my husband does not inhibit the loyalty I feel to my son, and so forth.”

  “But sometimes they do,” said Blake cautiously. “Sometimes they surely do.”

  “Yes, sometimes they do, and that’s when everything gets mixed up. That’s when holding myself together becomes more difficult, when it becomes—”

  “Then you have to choose,” Blake interrupted.

  “Exactly. All loyalties are not the same, and sometimes a few of them must be forsaken, set aside for a short time. But there are some I dare never ignore because they lie at the root of me, and if I turn my back on them, well, that’s—”

  “That’s apostasy!” said Blake, the veins in his neck bulging, his body shaking and the chains clattering. “That’s the unforgivable sin, the curse against the Holy Spirit. You can’t do that! There’d be nothing left of you, Mrs. Helm. All the others depend on that one.”

  “Yes, Blake, and the deepest loyalty I feel is also the hardest to explain, because it’s not just me at that level. It’s me and—”

  “Something else!” yelled Blake. “It’s you and something else, something that can never be defined or casually talked about, or anticipated or even understood. It’s a feeling at the ground zero of consciousness, but it’s not just a feeling and it’s not totally your feeling either, it’s also an experience and—”

  Winnie interrupted, “It’s me and something sacred.”

  “I understand,” said Blake.

  “Thank you.”

  “Please, tell me something else about you, Mrs. Helm. You’re actually talking about things that matter, real things. I neve
r expected that. For three days I thought about a visitor coming to see me, because they told me someone was coming, and I thought about it in every way I could, but I never expected this.”

  “I guess I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Say anything. God, you can’t imagine how wonderful this is, talking with someone about something real.”

  “How old are you, Blake?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve forgotten.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “You’re right, it is. I’ll be thirty-two in six weeks.”

  “I’m forty-five. Do you think that’s too old to sit on the hood of a car?”

  “What?”

  “Do you think I’m too old to sit on the hood of my car? I was doing that in the parking lot. I didn’t want to come in earlier than our scheduled visit and I was trying to prepare myself. I was sitting on the hood of my car and feeling insecure about being too old. So what’s your opinion?”

  “What good is freedom, Mrs. Helm, if you never do anything unusual or odd? That’s what freedom means—doing whatever you need to do so long as nobody else is hurt by it. That’s what you were talking about before, doing things that conflict with your sense of yourself in other rooms of your mind. You have to be able to do that or you’re not really alive.”

  “So there’s nothing wrong with a middle-aged woman like me sitting on the hood of my car?”

  “Of course there isn’t. Sit wherever you want and if anyone criticizes you, tell ’em to come see me.”

  Winnie laughed. “Good. I wasn’t sure what someone else would think.”

  “Did you say you knew my father? How is he?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know him very well, Blake. My husband is better acquainted with him from his repair shop. I think he currently works for that shipping company north of Grange, delivering heavy products in his truck. As far as I know he is in good health. Does he come to see you?”