What’s remarkable is that Murphy and the city council got the money they needed for the planned improvements and more—enough to build a new library with Internet access. Raising the money was in some ways the easy part. The hard part would come next, when Oelwein would either be buoyed by an economic resurgence or sink further. Once ground was broken for the street revival project in May 2006, it was anyone’s guess what would happen. Maybe in twelve months the shops would fill up, the call center deal would go through, and the long-empty Donaldson plant, with 160,000 square feet of prime industrial space behind the roundhouse, would find a new tenant. Maybe Logan would continue to keep the meth users under control and would prevent a new crop of batchers from moving in. Maybe In dependence wouldn’t use Oelwein as its ghetto. Echoing the Kantian philosophical tradition that pervades that part of the Midwest, and through which Murphy, like Clay Hallberg and Nathan Lein, understands the world, Murphy said that his only wish was to provide the genesis that Oelwein so sorely needed. Oelwein in the spring of 2006 was in the midst, as Kant describes it, of acting to the limits of its knowledge and its environment. From there, only a leap of faith would carry the town forward, no matter what actual advances it made. If Oelwein failed, then a subsequent generation would have to address the same issues. At the very least, said Murphy, Oelwein, just for trying, would regain the very thing that had been missing these many years: its dignity.
CHAPTER 8
WATERLOO
Ever since Nathan had moved back to Iowa in 2001, he’d wrestled with what he referred to as the Girl Problem. The Girl Problem was formed when he’d fallen in love with Jenny, the woman from Indianapolis whom he’d met in law school and who moved with him to Waterloo, Iowa, where he worked as a judge’s clerk, she as a public defender. There, they lived together while Nathan’s parents smoldered with indignation, for to them, cohabitation before marriage is a sin. Because Nathan’s parents would not be damned by God, they would be damned if they spoke to their son. In a roundabout way, it was the Girl Problem that brought Nathan back to Oelwein, putting him in a position to help his hometown rebuild itself. In another way, the Girl Problem represented a once-intractable dilemma, like meth in Oelwein, that seemed suddenly to be solvable.
Nathan might have been mad as hell about his parents’ treatment of Jenny, but his anger didn’t change the fact that he had been raised to respect their judgment. Add to that the idea that any hope of ever being involved in the central feature of their collected lives—the farm—would vanish if his relationship with his parents disintegrated, and Nathan was caught between two very powerful gravitational forces: anger and honor. He assaulted the problem with all the intellectual tools of his training in philosophy, to no avail; it was like a fortress whose walls would not be breached. He appealed to instinct, and this proved murkier still, for he did not see himself as the marrying type. And yet the idea that he and Jenny might never legalize their love did not minimize the obligation he felt toward the woman who had moved to Iowa to be with him. As the problem churned in his gut, he grew more and more withdrawn, more inward. For a year, it went on like this, with no answer. The war between his instinct and his desire settled into the trenches, where it threatened to destroy his life, not via entropy, but by attrition.
Then, in 2002, Larry Murphy had called and offered Nathan the job of assistant Fayette County prosecutor. He moved to Oelwein, and Jenny stayed behind in Waterloo. He still loved Jenny, he said, and she him. But the one-hour drive between the two towns felt longer all the time. Slowly, wordlessly, Nathan began spending more time at the farm. His parents never talked to him about the fight they’d had, and the familiarity of the silent understanding they’d reached reinforced the pull of his family. The very fact that nothing needed to be said made him feel the weight of his place back in the fold. With Jenny, he said, everything had been about discussion, about argument. When he and Jenny talked, it was like two lawyers debating. Though he understood the emotional liabilities of silence, Nathan found he preferred not talking to arguing. Nathan saw other women, including a DHS caseworker, though he couldn’t commit to anyone. He bought a tiny, two-bedroom house on in Oelwein’s Ninth Ward. And then, in June of 2005, Nathan’s half brother, David, died of heart failure in San Francisco at the age of thirty-eight.
David was Nathan’s closest confidant; being raised together in that house on the prairie gave them a shared understanding. It was thanks to David, who’d had the courage to get out of Iowa for good, that Nathan could see that leaving wasn’t an ideal solution. And it was thanks to Nathan for having the courage to return home that David still had an advocate for him with his difficult mother and his stepfather, not to mention a connection to the place where he’d grown up. When David died, Nathan was crushed.
Nathan’s parents had no money to go to California for a funeral. So it was he who went to get David’s cremated remains and bring them back to Iowa. Burying his brother was the hardest thing Nathan Lein ever did. He said a few days afterward that it would be a long time before he was “right again.” Three years later, he still, he said, wasn’t right.
But David’s death had also offered Nathan a solution to the Girl Problem. He didn’t ask Jenny to accompany him to the funeral—he asked the DHS caseworker, whose name is Jamie Porter. Why he did so was unclear. Perhaps, he said, David’s death put his own life in perspective. After the funeral, Nathan unburdened himself to Jamie of all the secrets he’d kept pent up for twenty-eight years. And so, as the town of Oelwein began rebuilding itself from the ashes of the meth epidemic, so began a new era in Nathan’s life, born out of the ashes of his brother’s death.
Jamie Porter is a year younger than Nathan. Standing next to him, she looks small, even at five feet seven. She has blond, shoulder-length hair and blue eyes bordered by long, delicate lashes. With her red cheeks and porcelain skin, she has the flushed, healthy look of someone just coming in from the cold. She attended Wartburg College in her nearby hometown of Waverly, Iowa, where she was an All-American softball player as a second baseman. She is still built in a way that suggests a home-run threat: strong, powerful legs and wide shoulders. She knows her way around a pheasant stew and is perfectly at home in a tent pitched somewhere on the Volga River. In the evenings during December’s late bow-and-arrow deer-hunting season, Jamie is known to climb into the tiny hayloft above Nathan’s woodstove-heated garage and sit next to the swing-door. There she can look down on a small field bordered on one side by an unincorporated spit of timber and on the other by the neighboring houses; Nathan’s street defines the point at which Oelwein ends and the country begins. Dressed in heavily insulated camo coveralls, with a book in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, Jamie waits in the ambient heat of the woodstove for the whitetails to pass through the field. Next to her is the bow Nathan bought her for their first Christmas together. To date, she has killed three deer from the garage window—two bucks and a doe.
Jamie has an undergraduate degree in psychology. She has worked since mid-2006 as a contractor for the Iowa Department of Human Services. DHS contractors are assigned cases by the courts; much of their work is in-home visits. On a typical day, Jamie might have three appointments: one with a child who has complained of physical abuse; one with a child whose mother or father is in jail for manufacturing meth; and a third with a recent parolee in the halfway house in West Union. Aside from the Northeast Iowa Behavioral Health Clinic, which has only six employees, there isn’t much in the way of other job opportunities for social workers in Oelwein.