Page 27 of The River We Remember

“Thank you, ma’am,” Del replied.

“Scott, I need you to take this to the jailhouse for the sheriff.” Angie held out a brown paper bag. “It’s lunch.”

“Someone in the clink?” Del asked.

“It’s for the sheriff,” she replied. To her son, she said, “It’s a busy day for him, and I know he doesn’t eat right.”

“Did you hear about Mr. Quinn?” Del asked.

“Yes, Del. Tragic. And that’s why I think our sheriff could use a little help today. If you want to go along with Scott, that would be fine.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Madison, but I’ve got things to do. Later, Madman.” Del gave his friend a slap on the shoulder and returned to his motorbike.

Through the screen door at his mother’s back, Scott could hear the sounds of the busy kitchen as the lunch crowd gathered—meat sizzling on the grill, pans and platters clattering on steel counters, the hiss and bubble of deep fry, the call of orders.

When Del had gone, Scott’s mother gave her son a quizzical look. “Madman?”

Scott shrugged. “It’s just a nickname.”

“From Madison?”

“Yeah.”

“Madman.” She thought it over and seemed amused by it. “Well, Madman, scoot yourself over to the jailhouse. And I’ll need you back here this afternoon. Your grandma has a doctor’s appointment.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Angie!” came a cry from inside.

“Off with you now.” She spun away and disappeared into the clatter and sizzle and roiling aromas of the kitchen.

THE WORLD TO Scott Christian Madison was Black Earth County. He’d seen pictures of other places—New York City, the California coastline, the mountains of Colorado, the Florida swamps—postcard images. But his own experience was limited. He knew the way the tar on the streets of Jewel turned to putty in the hot summer sun. The feel of the Alabaster when he swung from a rope and dropped into a cool, tea-colored pool. The scents as he walked the alley behind Main Street—the sweet yeasty aroma of Smith’s Bakery, the clammy smell of the steam that shot from the back of Myers Dry Cleaning, the chemical odor of perms emanating from Marie’s Beauty Salon. His world in Black Earth County was bitter blasts in the winter that threw sleet into his face like needles or brought great curtains of snow that fell and lay in drifts for months on end. It was summer storms he could see coming from a million miles away and the wet-earth scent that came before them on the wind. It was also loneliness.

Scott Madison had been born with a hole in his heart, what in those days was sometimes called a “blue baby.” He had no father—well, he had a father, didn’t everyone?—but Scott’s father had been killed in the war, and all he knew of the man were the photographs his grandmother kept in profusion and the stories she told again and again in a way that made the remembrances feel like ritual. Scott even thought of his grandmother’s repetitions as a kind of transubstantiation, a word Father Gregory had explained in his Lutheran catechism class when talking about how Roman Catholics viewed the Eucharist. It seemed to him his grandmother’s words and remembrances, in repetition, became flesh and blood to her, just like the wine and wafers did to the Catholics. But not to Scott. He didn’t mind hearing the stories, but they remained to him just that, stories.

His grandfather had died when Scott was five, and the boy had only the vaguest recollections of the man. So he’d been raised by women, his mother and grandmother. Because of that hole in his heart and because they’d lost every man they’d ever loved, these women fussed over him and were full of cautions that made him feel sometimes as if he couldn’t breathe.

There were men in his life, sure, but only peripherally. Wendell Moon, who worked for his mother and grandmother in the café. The Lutheran pastor, Father Gregory, but only so far as religion was concerned. His scoutmaster, Mr. Sorenson, who was nice enough but had sons of his own. And more and more, there was Sheriff Brody Dern, whose eating habits his mother had recently taken a particular interest in. The sheriff was often at the café around mealtime, and if he was not, Scott sometimes caught his mother gazing across the rooftops of town and up the hill toward where the jailhouse stood. What he saw in her look made him think of his own loneliness, and that of his grandmother, who’d lost both son and husband, and even that of Father Gregory, whose face reminded Scott of a camel’s, long and thick-lipped, with enormous nostrils, and who, though he was Lutheran and could have taken a wife, never had. Very early in his life, Scott Madison had come to believe that loneliness was the normal condition of people, and he didn’t think of it, his own or that of others, as a terrible thing.

He reached the jailhouse and tried the door. It was locked. He didn’t know where Sheriff Brody Dern was or when he might be back. But he’d been given a duty to perform, so he sat down on the curb in front of the jailhouse to wait. Although it was only the town of Jewel in front of him, he imagined himself on a mountaintop in Colorado, and in his mind’s eye, he could almost see the whole world.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

AFTER HIS MEETING with the Quinns, Brody spent an hour or so with Mayor Jack Harris reviewing some logistical issues with the parade the previous day and possible changes for the next year’s celebration. Then he went back to the jailhouse, where he found Scott Madison waiting. The boy sat cross-legged in the shade, his back against the door, idly tossing bits of gravel into the street. As soon as Brody pulled up to the curb, the kid stood. In his hand, he held a brown paper bag.

“Hey there, Scott. What’s up?”

The boy showed him the bag. “Lunch. Mom thought you might be hungry.”

“Did she now?”

“She worries about you.”

Brody came around his cruiser and stood smiling down at the boy. “She told you that?”

The boy nodded.

“Worries about me? Really?”