“I don’t know if I can trust anyone like that,” he said. “Or, frankly, if I can be trusted with someone’s heart.”
Nathan said his father still asked about Jamie, despite the fact Nathan had not brought her to the farm in nearly a year. His mother, though, said Nathan, never breathed a word about Jamie. While his father’s good-natured inquiries felt to Nathan like the faintest kindling of familial warmth and acceptance, his mother’s silence was like a bucket of cold water, Nathan said. Eventually, Nathan began ignoring his father’s questions altogether, leaving them to smolder and die beneath the weight of his mother’s coolness. It was not hard to imagine the three of them in the tiny farm kitchen, bundled in wool, taking a quick, standing dinner on a brutal winter night before going back into the barn to help the ewes lamb out. Briefly, they would all look at the green, peeling linoleum floor to which his father’s questions had silently fallen. Nor was it hard to see how, eventually, Nathan’s father would surely stop asking about Jamie.
As far as Nathan was concerned, this was fine—at least until he figured out some other way to deal with it. When I wondered aloud what that way might be, there was a long silence while we both pretended to look across the frozen plain for pheasants. Finally Nathan said, “Jamie doesn’t complain, but I know it’s hard for her.”
Nathan was fully aware that he was crippled, as he put it, by an irrational fear of conflict. He knew Jamie was not going to wait around forever. She had turned thirty-one in 2007. She wanted to get married and have children, and she wanted to do those things with Nathan Lein and no one else. They’d been living together close to eighteen months. Jamie wanted to be included in his plans about the farm. Yet, still she ate dinner alone in Nathan’s house on the nights he was at his parents’ place, or else she tried to work late herself so they’d get home at the same time. Sometimes she didn’t know what she was doing, coming home to a house that wasn’t hers, sitting there alone waiting while the man she wanted to have a family with ate dinner with his family. Then again, she didn’t know what else she could do. To say that it was hard for Jamie—and for Nathan—doesn’t quite give the situation its due.
“I’m sure that eventually,” said Nathan, “something will give. Till then, here we are.”
With that, we pulled into the courthouse parking lot, the Jetta’s tires making a sound like crinkling paper on the frozen crust of the snow. It was eight A.M. sharp. With no overcoat on, Nathan stood behind his car for a few long moments, with his briefcase on the ice-slicked trunk, going through his papers as though the cold were of no concern.
The Fayette County Courthouse, in West Union, was built in 1905. Inside, there is a marble atrium, and three stories above it, an enormous round skylight of green stained glass. Everything is clean and polished, including the granite drinking fountains, which are the size of a tollbooth. The staircase is marble, and Nathan and I walked up to the third floor, past mothers and fathers in work pants and parkas sitting with their children on comfortable benches in the high-ceilinged hallway outside the juvenile courtroom. Beyond this was an old oak door with a plaque that said law library. On a bench beside that door sat two young men in orange jump-suits, their hands manacled to chains on their waists, and from there, to cuffs on their ankles.
“Howdy,” said one man.
“Back again,” said Nathan, as though he were talking to someone who’d just left a store and then returned, having forgotten something on his shopping list.
The Law Library is where the three Fayette County assistant prosecutors and the various private and state defense attorneys have their coffee and go over the day’s cases with one another. The Law Library, with its twelve-foot-high bookshelves of polished cedar, hardly has a tense atmosphere, in part because very few cases are actually tried in Fayette County. Much of what happens is confined to the workmanlike procedurals of plea bargains, parole renewals, and county-jail incarcerations. Add to this that many of the attorneys have been coming here five mornings a week for one or two decades—and will continue to do so until they retire—and the result is a measure of familiarity that would be unattainable in, say, Miami-Dade County. Streamlining one’s strategy with an opponent not only gets everyone out of court sooner; it is also simply a matter of course, and a benefit of the attorneys’ personal fluency.
From the window in the courtroom, three stories high in a building that sits on a slight rise in the prairie, one can see the First National Bank and Steege’s drugstore across the street, and beyond them, over the tops of the surrounding houses, the thirty or so rolling miles stretching east between West Union and Mississippi Lock and Dam Number 10, near the confluence of the Wisconsin River. Along the way, there are Elgin and Gunder, St. Olaf and Farmers-burg, Froelich and McGregor. Halfway to the river, the land bucks and jumps, the river valleys tighten as the grade increases, and there is a proliferation of timber and coal. Twelve thousand years ago, an iceberg the size of Wisconsin flattened most of Iowa, and as it receded, deposited scree and lime along what would one day be called the Mississippi. For a time, this tiny area of Iowa was called Little Switzerland, so lush and fertile did the hills appear to the Prussians and Austrians who settled those valleys in the 1850s and ’60s.
First on the docket that morning was the man in shackles who’d said hello in the hallway. Though he looked twenty-five, he was in fact thirty-eight. He had blond hair, a blond beard, blue eyes, and a nose like a falcon’s beak. He entered his plea of guilty with a good-humored tinge of a Minnesotan accent.
He was a familiar sight in the Fayette County Court, and he’d been, like Roland Jarvis, in the clink off and on for years. Several months before, he’d been put on probation for driving under the influence of an illegal substance, in this case meth. A week ago, he’d been picked up after driving erratically up in Winneshiek County, northeast of Fayette. Now he claimed not to know that both driving and leaving the county violated the terms of his probation. Nathan had grown weary of him. Sipping his coffee half an hour before, Nathan had said to the judge, who sat just a few feet away from the attorneys in the Law Library, filling out papers: “I can’t stand it when someone patronizes me.”
“Me neither,” the judge had said without looking up. Then Nathan said he wanted the maximum sentence of three years. The judge and the defense attorney agreed. What they all knew was that because of overcrowding in the Iowa prison system, the man would be out in six months.
In the courtroom, it was a matter of going through the formalities of reading to the man the charges, the meaning of his plea, the basis for sentencing, and the philosophical tenets on which rest the power to incarcerate a human being in the state of Iowa. From the bench, the judge started by reading all of this. Then he recited the rest from memory while filling out paperwork, only occasionally glancing up at his charge. The judge had a white beard and white hair, and he’d recently retired. He and his wife were planning to drive their camper to Florida, but the county had asked the judge to come back to work until his replacement could be hired. He’d agreed, but his patience was short. He’d just turned seventy, and he was tired of the cold.