Working with DHS, where she’s essentially a freelancer, gives Jamie the feeling that she is doing all she can in order to help people who would otherwise not be given any help. The job’s frustrations, she says, stem in part from the fact that Jamie sees a lot of the same people over and over again. Trouble often seems to wrap itself around certain families—the Jarvis clan is one—whose members show up constantly in jail, in halfway houses, and on Jamie’s list of appointments. The rest of her frustrations Jamie characterizes in stark economic terms. Rural Iowa grows older and smaller each year, while the number of cases Jamie is assigned seems to stay stable. The region’s poverty means there are more problem behaviors, and also less money to minister to those behaviors—especially under the kind of long-term treatment that Jamie says would be needed in order to turn a family like the Jarvises around.
What Larry Murphy says is that there is always greater pressure amid a fiscal crisis to cut spending altogether on non-revenue-generating programs like human services. Fayette County and the town of Oelwein are businesses like any other, and presently both of them are losing money. Sociologist Douglas Constance’s observation that ours is a psychological rather than a socio logical culture is once again apt. Much of what Jamie has to deal with are the ravages of meth; when one is forced to choose between blaming the addict and blaming the system that created the addict, it can be difficult to blame the former. During the late summer of 2005, three of the five members of the Jarvis family—Roland, his mother, and his brother—were in jail on drug-related charges. The brother was in federal prison and would not be paroled for another half decade. Instances like this make Jamie wonder if some people can ever be helped.
The instinct to assume that the Jarvises will not change no matter how much the state intervenes might begin to explain how Jamie was out of work for over a year, between mid-2005 and mid-2006. The theory of one of Jamie’s co-workers was that, with money tight all over Iowa and public sympathy at ebb tide regarding drug addicts, it had become more convenient than ever for state government to look at a man like Roland Jarvis and throw in the towel. In that same year, says the co-worker, nine out of ten social workers in northeastern Iowa lost their jobs. As a result, Jamie had taken the only job she could find, as a bartender in a little town called Strawberry Point, twenty miles northeast of Oelwein. During this difficult time, Jamie moved in with Nathan. She could get only a few shifts a week, mostly during the daytime; the woman who worked nights had no intention of handing Jamie the only lucrative shifts in a small-town bar. Money was short, given Nathan’s modest state salary, and Jamie spent a lot of time around the tiny house, trying to keep busy. The arguments she had with Nathan were a case study in relationships being tested by hard financial times. For his part, Nathan couldn’t understand why Jamie didn’t get up and go do more—though exactly what more she should be doing wasn’t clear. From her perspective, she’d gone and gotten the work that was available, even if it embarrassed her: she was too well educated to work in a bar, never mind a bar that was forty miles away, round-trip, in a time of rising gas prices. What did he want her to do beyond swallow her pride and work as best she could? She said to Nathan over and over that she was the only one who hated all the time she had on her hands more than he did.
Meantime, Nathan kept up his usual schedule of working at the office during the day and going to the farm at night. His parents loved Jamie; they’d met her at David’s funeral and taken an immediate liking to her. Unaware that they were living together, Nathan’s father asked him all the time if he’d heard from Jamie or seen her. He wanted to know why Nathan didn’t bring her to the farm at night to help, or why Nathan didn’t bring her by for Thanksgiving supper or on Christmas eve. It’s an interesting question, and one that Jamie herself was anxious to know the answer to. After all, she and Nathan were living together in a small, tight-knit, gossipy community just twelve miles away from Nathan’s parents. It couldn’t long remain a secret that they were in love and were living in sin. Nathan’s parents might be Luddites, but they weren’t living on Mars. And if Nathan was so adamant that Jamie do more than work in a bar while she waited for another social worker position, then why didn’t he bring her to help at the farm? That was the good, honest kind of work that Nathan could respect, and it would help his family, to boot. What was with all the secretiveness?
Nathan’s response was that, no matter how interested and nice his parents seemed now, they would eventually turn on Jamie. That’s what they’d done his whole life, he said: lured women in, only to then become so critical that it ended up ruining Nathan’s relationship. Because he cared about his relationship with Jamie more than any other, he wouldn’t let that happen this time. He’d finally learned his lesson, he said, and had no interest in subjecting Jamie to his parents’ scrutiny. And so until something happened—what that something would be Nathan couldn’t say—he and Jamie would have to keep their living arrangements a secret from his parents, and Jamie would not accompany him to the farm.
As far as Nathan was concerned, this represented a genuine coup in his love life. He was in love, even if he couldn’t say it to Jamie. He was living with her and happy with her and his parents were not angrily shunning him. Eventually, the situation began to feel pretty natural to Jamie. Her training in psychology made her more sympathetic than most people might have been to Nathan’s plight, and she was genuinely able to help him. That in turn made Jamie feel needed in a time when she had to work in a bar in Strawberry Point. Her family loved Nathan, and they weren’t any the wiser when, on holidays, Nathan went alone to his parents’, then came home in the afternoon or the evening to have a second Thanksgiving or Christmas meal with Jamie and her parents. For Nathan, it was as good as it was likely to get, for things with the girl were splendid. Problem solved.
Around the time that Nathan’s brother died, Clay Hallberg entered a rocky period in his life. One night, Clay played a gig at a bar called the Eagle’s Roost, in Hazleton, Iowa, just five miles south of Oelwein. As usual, much of Clay’s compensation had come in the form of beer. After a couple of rowdy encores, Clay had sat around with the bar’s owner, an old friend from the better times of the 1970s, and drank until closing time, before loading his equipment into his Toyota Highlander and heading home. Knowing he was drunk, Clay skirted town, instead taking South Frederick north, past the Country Cottage Café and Lake Oelwein, before hanging a left on Tenth Street SW. When he got to his street, Q Avenue, he knew he was safe, for Q Avenue is nothing more than a farm road that was graded back when the prairie was divvied up into quarter sections. But after driving a few hundred yards, Clay fell asleep. He missed the right-hand turn into his long gravel driveway, jumped the irrigation ditch, and T-boned the fence. His truck, with significant damage, came to a clattering stop in his cornfield.
The real wake-up call for Clay, though, came at the end of 2005, just a week before the two-year anniversary of his mother’s death. Again, he’d been down in Hazleton, playing a gig. And again he had stayed too late and driven home drunk. Only this time, an Oelwein cop pulled him over just north of the Fayette County line. Clay had been smoldering for two years about what he saw as the complicity of the Oelwein police in the death of his elderly mother. She’d been complaining to the Cop Shop for months about an Amishman whose Clydesdale was always wandering onto Highway 150 in the evenings, thanks to a hole in the Amishman’s fence. But the police had ignored her pleas. That was the very horse that, startled by her headlights as she drove home late one cold winter night, bolted onto the road. The collision killed her, totaling her car and throwing it into the ditch out of which the horse darted.