A Very Small Cemetery.

Gildner, Gary

Border Days in Grangeville have been held annually since 1911. Three days--July 2, 3, 4--of parades, cowboy breakfasts, pretty girls on horseback, and the oldest professional rodeo in Idaho. Pioneer Park at one end of town is given over to bluegrass pickers, jewelry makers, landscape painters, another church stepping up (a different one every year, it seems) to push the best strawberry shortcake anywhere. Heritage Square downtown offers opportunities to show off your softball throw, put your tots on kiddie rides, watch crazy teens go wall climbing, or to brave eats not normally tried in these parts, plus your usual burgers and dogs. Over at the rodeo grounds a country baritone behind the mike brings out the next bulldogging, bronc-riding, calf-roping event: "Let's getter done!" Now and then a participant is whisked away by an ambulance, applause for him chasing after the siren; but only once has anybody been killed--a cowboy from White Bird down the road was thrown and kicked in the chest by a bronc a few years back.

Where the Border Days notion came from depends on who's talking. It might could be, as some put it, a celebration of settling a border dispute with Oregon or Montana, or with the Nez Perce, or some combination of these neighbors. Possibly Border Days celebrates Idaho entering the Union on July 3, 1890, and folks up here in the panhandle needed a couple of decades to get excited about the idea. Some longtime locals still can't get excited and during the hoopla go off in the woods with their tents.

In any case, a good many people born here who moved away come back for Border Days; they stroll Main Street and check out all the old photographs put up over nearly every inch of storefront glass and squeal at seeing themselves so skinny, finding a teacher they liked, picking out that dopey first boyfriend, the girl who married the rancher and had six damn fine-looking kids. School reunions are organized around Border Days. The Chamber of Commerce reckons this single week clears the goods off many a shelf and fixes tons of potholes. On the last night, after the dust at the rodeo grounds has settled, folks and kids not worn out yet spread their blankets on the grassy slope below the school track and oooh and aaah at the fireworks show. The whole thing (except for a rare black cloud like the death of the White Bird cowboy) makes people feel part of something fine--exactly what, it's hard for them to say. "But what the hey, look at who finally turned up!"

After a hot day working in the garden or slapping fresh cedar stain on the house, I clean up, then open a bottle of India Pale Ale. I said to Michele once, "I prize this ale. I will miss it when I am dead." "Nora Ephron says she will miss pie," Michele said.

"The one about a circle and its distance?"

"I believe the one you eat with a fork."

"I will miss all kinds of measurements, mysteries, and tastes," I said.

Here is a local mystery--about a likeable, attractive woman with a great smile named Laurie Rockwell. Laurie served as executive director of the Syringa Hospital Foundation in Grangeville. Over a three-year period--2008 to 2011, when the stock, housing, and many other markets were hurting bad--she embezzled almost $200,000, according to the Idaho Attorney General. In a town of 3,141 (2010 census), no one, apparently, suspected anything funny--neither her fourteen-member board of directors nor her husband, James Rockwell, owner and COO of a local E.K. Riley franchise.

James and Laurie and four of their five children live in a large house they built shortly before the pilfering. Around the same time, James purchased a former clothing store on Main Street, basically tore it down, and put up a modern stone-and-glass structure with space for his financial offices, plus space to rent out. If he could find good renters, he said one day, showing me around.

Previously, James worked in a small office in Grangeville's first E.K. Riley franchise, two blocks down the street. In town to buy groceries at Cash & Carry, I sometimes walked across Main Street and sat in his comfortable visitor's chair. He and I were on the board of Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic School. He was a member of the parish. I wasn't, but my daughter Margaret attended Sts. Peter and Paul; after school she played with the Rockwell kids. When James learned that I had graduated from a Catholic school in Michigan in the 1950s, at a time when parochial schools were staffed almost exclusively by nuns and the students typically wore uniforms, he asked if I would consider joining the school board. He and Laurie and other parents were keen to dress the students in uniforms--an idea that was meeting with resistance, some of it fierce. The pro side liked uniforms because they were an inexpensive, practical way to clothe the kids and, in the bargain, eliminate that sometimes neon-bright divide between kids who wore nice new clothes and kids whose parents could not afford nice new clothes.

In favor of egalitarian measures, I joined the board. Many assumed I was a practicing Catholic. The pastor knew otherwise but said nothing, perhaps hoping I would come clean and make my Easter Duty. He favored uniforms, but mindful of conservative parishioners mumbling about threats to individual freedom and creeping socialism, he broadcast peace from the pulpit. Quietly he urged the pro-uniform group to stick to its guns.

Laurie's committee proposed uniforms of khaki, blue, and white: trousers and polo shirts for the boys, skirts and blouses for the girls. Still, parishioners mumbled. One fought the board on this issue as if his life were at stake, sending his wife, who favored uniforms, in tears to the pastor. The pastor invited her and her children to move into the convent behind the school, empty since the last nun had died. The tearful woman accepted.

The board voted to adopt uniforms but, to avoid serious trouble, held a parish-wide vote; the pro-uniform side squeaked to victory. Laurie drove to Lewiston with a list of sizes and color preferences and negotiated a discount with J.C. Penney. Parents who were strapped paid nothing for uniforms, the parish picking up the bill.

I liked Sts. Peter and Paul School. The building contained only four classrooms so the sixty-some students in the eight grades were grouped thus: grades 1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6, and 7 and 8 were combined. The older kids in each pairing got to act as mentors, passing on to their younger roommates what they had learned the year before, creating an intellectual camaraderie. I liked the student-teacher ratio--about fifteen to one. I liked the teachers, all lay, who invited me to visit their classes anytime and who struck me as educators first, dogma-pushers a respectful second. There were no discipline problems. Margaret was happy at Sts. Peter and Paul for three years, then her mother decided they needed to move to Moscow. I retired from the board and saw the Rockwells less and less.

What gave my relationship with James and Laurie an extra tick was that we all had lived in countries deeply scored by Communism. James gave me to understand that we had a special bond, a honed insight into evil, due to my living in Poland before the Berlin Wall came down and in Czechoslovakia soon after, and his and Laurie's time in Vietnam after the war there. Early in their marriage, they operated a Hanoi glove factory, he told me. "What kind of gloves?" I asked. "Oh, ski gloves, work gloves," he said. James had read The Warsaw Sparks- he liked how I describe the difficulties the Poles faced making their way under a system they hated. He, too, hated that system. But he did not make speeches against it; indeed his references to politics in my presence--in the beginning--were sparse and usually muted. (My politics in The Warsaw Sparks are clearly liberal.) By and by, he let me know his by explaining why he had dropped out of Seattle University: "To help Walter Hickel become governor of Alaska." Hickel, a Republican, was still a player, James said, adding that he had Hickel's phone number--had a lot of phone numbers--implying he could reach some pretty' important people.

James also let me know that he and Laurie had written a book about their Vietnam experiences, and asked my advice about getting it published. I told him how to query editors and agents and warned against vanity presses. He never asked me to read their manuscript and I never offered. They sent it off to publishers a few times and then gave up. Rejection was not easy for James. Asked how things were going, his response was always, "Great! Just great!"

In town James wore a dark blue blazer, rep tie, white shirt and tan slacks, a high mahogany shine on his tasseled shoes. His closely shaved jaws also shone and his short dark hair always seemed fresh from a barber. Once, low on firewood, we went into the winter woods and cut down a dead red fir to share; and several times we took our kids mushroom hunting. He wore jeans on these occasions and looked awkward in them, off his confidence. At the house he and Laurie rented before they moved into the new one, he proudly showed me a wood cabinet he built for drying mushrooms. I admired it. He built the cabinet in a shop class before he left to study--briefly--with the Jesuits in Seattle. He coupled his story of dropping out to work for Hickel with stories of the rampant student drug use he claimed to have witnessed and clearly did not approve of. Here, he did make speeches. "They injected themselves with anything and anywhere. Even in the eyeballs!"

James's father, Dr. John Rockwell, a respected Grangeville physician, was long retired--and suffering from Parkinson's--when his daughter-in-law began stealing from the Foundation. He and his wife, Blanche, lived with James and Laurie, in a private wing of the big new house. Laurie's son Chase, from her first marriage, was living there until he graduated from high school. He was attending the University of Idaho in Moscow during his mother's unlawful withdrawals. James ran, as a conservative Republican, for one of the three seats on the Idaho County Commission and won, I think, without breaking a sweat.

In office, he backed a proposal to build a landfill in a pretty hay field three or four baseball tosses from Pioneer Park that would have brought garbage trucks from four (possibly five) counties rumbling through Grangeville at an ugly clip of no fewer than five hundred tons of waste around the clock every day year-round for a projected fifty-year period; but even worse, the hay field covers a portion of the Columbia Plateau aquifer system supplying fresh water to 44,000 square miles of eastern Oregon and Washington and western Idaho.

James heard such loud objection--including threatening phone calls from his own livid base--he no doubt began to sweat. There was also a lot of hate mail, he told me, when I called to ask why he supported such a bad idea. His fellow commissioners, also Republicans, felt the heat too, and all three backed off a landfill in Grangeville. When news of the devastating assault on the Foundation first broke in the conservative-leaning weekly Idaho County Free Press--on March 30, 2011, almost two months after the crime was reported to the sheriff--Laurie's name was not mentioned; it didn't need to be since her replacement was mentioned--at almost the end of the story. As more than one citizen said--in so many words--"If you listed everyone in town and had to rank them according to who might do something like this, starting with the most likely, Laurie Rockwell's name would be dead last." The news was incredible, way beyond what almost everybody called the colossally dumb landfill idea. Why would she do it?

Thirteen months later, on April 11, 2012, the Free Press reported that Laurie Ann Rockwell faced five counts of grand theft and five counts of computer crime "on allegations she embezzled thousands of dollars" from the Syringa Hospital Foundation. Due to a conflict of interest--her husband's public office--the Idaho Attorney General's Office would prosecute the matter. In a box in the middle of this front-page story, in boldface type, James declared, I turned her in." He goes on to say (aware of rumors in the community) that he also turned over to investigators all of the hospital's computers and files in his wife's possession, plus copies of his and Laurie's personal bank accounts. He says the investigators "didn't ask; I offered, and I delivered [these documents] to them. [...] That was fourteen months ago."

In the main story, he says he took Laurie to St. Joseph's Hospital in Lewiston, where she was diagnosed with manic depression. I try to comprehend this; I can't. It is simply impossible to comprehend mental illness." He says he prays for Laurie. "We are defined by how we deal with challenges. These dark days of challenge give me the opportunity to live my faith without judgment and to be there for my wife, to honor my vows to her, through good times and bad, sickness and health, till death do us part. I will be there."

Two weeks later--on April 25, 2012--a letter from James' mother, Blanche, appeared in the Free Press. "Doctor Rockwell and I love our son, James' wife, Laurie, as our own daughter, and we, of course, are here for her during this ordeal." What follows--the bulk of her syntactically awkward letter--is devoted to reminding us of her husband's career in Grangeville (41 years), how much Syringa Hospital meant to him, the lifelong friends he made there, and how overwhelmed the family has been "by the outpouring of good wishes, solidarity, love, and prayers."

In these public declarations, were James and his mother, some citizens wondered, steadfast, loving relations, sensitive to life's twists and mental turns, or was a story being shaped about one crazy operator? "How many husbands do you know would turn in their wives and then go to the newspaper to have it broadcast?" was a response you heard in more than one quarter in the seat of Idaho County.

On July 25, 2012, almost four months after she was charged with those five counts of grand theft and five counts of computer crime, the Free Press ran a story well inside the paper and below the fold, saying that, in a plea deal, Laurie A. Rockwell, forty-nine, pled guilty to one count of grand theft and one count of computer crime and agreed to pay restitution ordered by the court. The Idaho Attorney General's Office spelled out the bill: $176,300.29 wrongfully taken from the Foundation, $58,291.60 in statutory interest, and $6,200 for forensic accounting services, as well as bank fees to obtain records. The total came to $241,289.89.

The IAGO, presumably, wanted all of it. The Foundation wanted a bit more, claiming the amount wrongfully taken was "no less than $185,000." The forensic accounting turned up no evidence of big purchases by young Mrs. Rockwell during the spree. No shopping trips to New York City, no new Jag, Gucci bag, or Versace glad rag. Conclusion: the money went for ordinary household expenses. She spent $176,300.29--or "no less than $185,000"--on ordinary household expenses? That's a lot of milk and peanut butter, you heard Grangeville people say. And her husband, a financial advisor, didn't notice?

A citizen of nearby Cottonwood, in a letter to the Free Press, put the question this way:

   Idaho County has a proverbial elephant in its china closet.
   Apparently no one has the public courage to acknowledge
   it. Laurie Rockwell, wife of County Commissioner James
   Rockwell, has pleaded guilty to felony theft from our public
   hospital's foundation. Press reports on the matter have thus
   far been so cryptic they could pass as a deliberate attempt
   to suppress general knowledge of the felonies. The favor of
   an esteemed' reputation apparently has its value, broken
   china notwithstanding. [...] How is it possible, absent
   in situ birth, that elephant came to be inside the china
   shop? After all, it simply is not possible that the elephant
   entered via a standardized door, at least not without notice.
   Given that Mr. Rockwell's profession (and his public
   office) is one of fiduciary responsibility, how is it possible
   he did not know these significant sums of unaccounted
   monies entered his own household? Worse, why did the
   accountant and tax preparer fail to know? It is therefore
   fair to conclude that either Mr. Rockwell has (a) not been
   forthright about his knowledge of that elephant or (b) he
   is grossly inferior to the requirements of his profession and
   public office. In either case, Mr. Rockwell should resign
   as county commissioner. Might I suggest instead, Barnum
   and Bailey?"

What Michele and I noticed was our garden greening up. Back in May when my rototiller wouldn't start, I used a spade to prepare the soil--the same method I used as a boy in my parents backyard garden. It felt good, pushing the spade in with my foot, lifting and turning over the blade full of black, wormy, compost-enriched dirt. The tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, chard, beets, parsley, oregano, mint, rosemary--everything was properly showing off.

Weekdays, we drove to town for the noon lap swim. We crawled up and down the lanes with Pauline, Judy, Mary (who was doing the "egg-beater" that summer) and, if he missed the 7 a.m. swim, Judge Jeff Payne, who married us. Between the two lap hours, Ciara and her crew of instructors gave lessons to children. The kids ranged from toddlers, who started out in the shallow end in the arms of a parent to get used to this big water, to the sprouts not yet worried by any sharp existential or ontological problems. Michele and I usually arrived at the pool a little early and were often reminded of those existential/ontological problems we all face, sooner or later, as we make our way trying to stay intact.

Reviewing certain points, for example, Ciara regularly held Q and A sessions in the shallow end with youngsters advanced enough to "make your bubbles" and stay afloat. Question: "We're on the ocean, our boat has sunk, and now we're in the water--what do we do first!" Answer (in unison): "Form two circles, little kids in the middle!" Question (to a boy in the middle circle): "Jonah, what do we do if we see a shark?" Jonah (quickly): "I'd get out! Good man, Jonah, I'm with you.

Back m April, a neighbor of the Rockwells, outside working on his deck, could see across the field separating their properties that James was outside, too, operating an excavator in his back yard. "Hey, Louise," he called in to his wife, 'James Rockwell is digging a grave." She said, "What?" He repeated the comment. "Oh, stop it," she chided him.

A popular explanation developed regarding how Laurie was able to slip around her board of directors. First, the Foundation, like the hospital, kept track of its own monies; unlike the hospital, it did not have an accountant watching out for mischief. Add to that Laurie's habit of holding only three or four meetings a year. She would send out a memo saying that the few items on their agenda were not worth a meeting and she would take care of them. Like filing the annual IRS Reporting and Disclosure documents required for tax-exempt status--which she ignored. The board trusted Laurie with tax matters because, after all, she worked part-time in her husbands E.K. Riley office and knew about such things. But it wasn't only tax matters they trusted her with: they trusted her in all matters--completely. Plus, she had that knockout smile.

James Rockwell did not have her winning smile. Tall and thin, he smiled, you could hazard, with real intent to make the smile's recipient feel at ease and perhaps even like the smiler; but what emerged above James shiny jaw emerged, much like his overall manner, a bit on the thin, stiff side. His wife's smile was spontaneous and generous; his was guarded, as if the tobacco under his lip might slip a little. Copenhagen, I thought, didn't quite fit a rep tie and tasseled-shoe kind of guy, but for years be had the habit, despite, he said, his father's warning him against it many, many times.

He sat, that April day, at the controls of his little runabout excavator and dug what certainly seemed to be a burial plot, the neighbor thought. And it was. And it was intended for Dr. Rockwell, who died at home on April 25,2012, the same day Blanche Rockwell's letter about standing with him in support of Laurie appeared in the Free Press. He was eighty-eight. James obtained a variance from the city to bury the respected doctor in his own backyard, with the proviso that if the Rockwells moved, they had to dig the good man up and take him with them.

I used to see Dr. Rockwell on the White Bird Battlefield walking the breaks. Walking the breaks--what a large, rich, wonderful phrase. (Perfect for describing the art of writing.) A dozen miles directly south of Orangeville, the Battlefield is rangy, rippled, grassy, open to a vast sky, and cluttered by nothing; it feels and smells natural because it is all-natural, basically undisturbed since the fray that named it. Few people go there--retired physicians fingering their rosaries, poets conjuring their lines, and, letting her dog run loose, a woman who had known the White Bird cowboy.

White Bird Battlefield of the Nez Perce National Historical Park--its full name--spreads out next to the little town of White Bird: 1,245 acres [degrees]f hills and meadows and draws and ponds, plus 655 scenic easement acres--and all of it rising and falling. This was where a small band of Nez Perce, armed mainly with bows and arrows, were waiting. Waiting to be punished for some mayhem got up and fueled largely by temporal and spiritual greed; by a mix of squabbling Christian missionaries, gold, railroad expansion, and land on which the Nez Perce (a peaceful people who in 1806 saved Lewis and Clark's bacon) had lived for a long time. A rift developed between those who wanted to keep to their land and traditional ways and those who favored the missionaries and a reservation, the latter signed a treaty that angered the former, including the lyrically named Toohoolhoolzote and White Bird. Indians were assassinated and some young Nez Perce bucks, heated up, struck back. Now they waited in that rising and falling geography to be punished. General Oliver O. Howard, upon dispatching the punishers, telegraphed his commander in San Francisco: Think we will make short work of it." Two companies of U.S. Cavalry arrived on June 17, 1877, almost a year to the day following Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn. Under a white flag, the Nez Perce walked out to meet them, hoping to discuss matters. Several soldiers opened fire. The Indians took out one of the cavalry's two buglers; their means of communication cramped, the punishers quickly became a confused mess and the Nez Perce, who knew the territory, taught the army a lesson. The army lost thirty-four men, the Nez Perce none.

When Dr. Rockwell's Parkinson's no longer allowed him to negotiate the breaks, I would see him in the Grangeville Centennial Library reading the newspapers. We would nod to each other. He was tall and thin, of dignified bearing, with little hair and, some days, a little drool on his chin that he eventually caught up with and wiped away with his hand. One time a man in the library, near us, was on his cell phone. Loudly. He was visiting in the area and trying to locate, call after call, old acquaintances. I approached the man. Would he mind taking his cell outside? "Why?" he demanded. This is a library, I said. Oh! Oh! Well, holy slut, a library in big old Grangeville! Excuse me!" He left. Dr. Rockwell seemed stunned, trying to say something. Finally he managed, with gravity, "Yes, this is, after all, a library."

He was buried in James and Laurie's backyard on a sunny May Saturday. A great many showed up at the visitation of the body on Willowrock Drive and for the rosary in Sts. Peter and Paul Church; fewer showed up--invitation only--at the burial. James' neighbor, who had observed the event across the field between them, said that after the priest finished with his last sprinkle of holy water over the casket, colored balloons were released into the air.

When the end came to Laurie Rockwell's spree, it came in three parts: one, there was no more real money to withdraw; two, her hoard, becoming less trusting by the minute, was asking questions it had never asked her before; and three, Laurie took off running.

On my knees planting a new crop of lettuce, I remember something, farmer-dreamer-thief that I am, and "Spring Evenings" begins in my head:

   Growing up in Flint I turned the dirt
   with a spade in our family's garden
   while my sister Gloria watched the baby
   and the baby, on bowed, rubbery legs,
   watched our dad roll his eyes and wink

   leaning on his rake. Mother was the one
   who got this going, at the back door
   wiping her hands on her apron and warning
   we didn't have much time left--"Everything's
   almost ready." I love this homely scene

   I can't hold still. Fifty years later--
   that first garden long gone, Dad too, and last
   fall my sister, who looked up from her usual morning
   toast and coffee to say something funny
   was going on--I turn the dirt in the raised beds

   on my Idaho mountain: there's Mother again
   wiping her hands, and there's Dad, almost
   falling over, making the baby dance and laugh,
   though what I'm smiling at are Gloria's
   last words working to keep something

   alive. Which is why we can't just quit
   and go in right away, right? Why we can't
   help helping ourselves to a little more,
   never mind that it's so small
   we can only get lost in it.

The drama tightened as sentencing time got closer. Would money talk? James' political connections in a cherry-red state? Would privilege once again get away with a crime that commoners would damn well pay for? But the favored, in this case, were already paying, no? Whatever the sentence, wasn't it hard for the Rockwells to walk in public like they used to? As for the backyard burial, was that paranoia, a circling of the wagons?

The sky over our part of the Idaho panhandle became very smoky that late August from a wildfire in central Washington and Idaho fires south and east of us. I was reminded of the major fire that threatened us in 2005. Planes and helicopters dropping red retardant and water, smoke jumpers and hotshots landing, pushing back the flames. Margaret and I had been to dinner in Kamiah an hour away and driving home after dark across the prairie, we could see a bright red glow in the mountains close to our place. I knew it was a fire. I also knew we still needed at least thirty' minutes to get home, where Margaret's puppy, Saffy, was waiting for us. To delay anxiety and fear as long as possible, I said, calmly, "Well, an interesting reflection over there." Margaret chewed on that "reflection" for about three beats, then said, "That's not any reflection! That's a fire! ' She was eleven and loved her little dog waiting in the run beside the barn, so I drove faster than was wise on that winding two-lane.

Two miles from our house the police had set up a roadblock, turning cars back. Ibis was on the Mount Idaho Grade, the hard surface road that led to our gravel road that in turn led to our driveway up to the house. I told the deputy where we lived, about the dog. He glanced at Margaret. He said, "Be quick." At the gravel road another deputy stopped us. I repeated what I'd told the first one. He said, Five minutes. Five." At the house, Saffy ran straight for the pickup and jumped in the back seat. In the house, I had baseballs signed by Ted Williams and Bob feller, plus a card collection that included Al Kaline, Ernie Banks, Roberto Clemente, many others. If I could have put my hands on this stuff without breaking stride, I'd have taken it. But all I brought from the house were one eleven-year-old, her pillow, blanket and toothbrush, and a bottle of my sweet well water that I kept in the fridge. My mouth was very dry.

In the pickup, Margaret sat with her pillow under one arm, Saffy under the other. I drove back down the mountain through a sharp, smoky stuffing everywhere in the darkness.

Just before that 2005 fire, the Rockwells got involved in a hot legal drama--or so James flushed face suggested whenever he mentioned it to me. I learned of this drama one day running into him on the street. I asked how things were going, not having seen him in a while, and he said great, that he and Laurie just got back from Detroit where they were "pursuing justice" in court. A former partner in Vietnam, he said, owed them money. I assumed he was referring to the glove factory, said something to that effect, and he nodded. Over the next year or so I'd see James on the street and he'd say, getting a little excited in the telling, "Just back from Detroit. Big stuff. The trial still going on? "You bet.' But he offered no details.

He and Laurie were in Hanoi from 1992 to 1998. According to Christopher W. Runckel--a former U.S. diplomat in Asia who has called James Rockwell "a longtime friend"--[James was] "the first U.S. businessman to receive a license by the Vietnamese government to operate a business in Vietnam (a license for Consulting and later Trading) ..." When President Bill Clinton lifted the U.S. Embargo with Vietnam in March 1993, James was on site, U.S. and Vietnamese flags hanging side by side in his office, ready to deal as VATICO (Vietnam American Trade and Investment Consulting Company).

In April 1994, court records show, he entered into an agreement with Hughes Aircraft to serve as Hughes' nonexclusive sales rep for the sale of an air traffic control system to Vietnam. Either party could terminate the agreement upon thirty days written notice and ninety days after termination no commissions would be paid. In 1997 Hughes merged with Raytheon. Raytheon decided it no longer needed James' services, so in 1998 he was cut loose and the Rockwells came home. The next year Raytheon sold a radar and flight data processing system to Vietnam.

In 2004 the Rockwells sued Raytheon-Hughes, saying they were owed a commission on that 1999 sale. James says he made a deal with the Vietnamese, prior to 1996, regarding those systems; essential terms were agreed upon; all that was left to do, the Vietnamese said to James, he said, was obtain financing. Nothing was in writing.

The court dismissed the Rockwells' lawsuit for lack of evidence long before the case came even close to a trial. They appealed, d he Michigan Court of Appeals sent the case back down to allow the Rockwells to produce evidence which would support a claim to compensation, but not before commenting on how unlikely that prospect appeared. By the end of 2006, James and Laurie agreed to dismiss the case. The courts docket indicates only that the case "settled." There was no victory. On Main Street in Orangeville, however, James said to me, We won. But we 11 never see any money." A rare gloomy remark. But the fact was, their lawsuit was a fizzle.

It wouldn't be all that long before Laurie began withdrawing money from the Syringa Hospital Foundation accounts.

I was beginning to wonder about all the time I was spending on the Rockwell story. Was it that interesting? That new? Lots of people in positions to do so will embezzle. From the privileged on down. They have a gambling problem. A sex drive problem. A drug habit. Resentment. One day, perhaps accidentally, they push a button that results in an opportunity--whoa--that no one would know about. The head becomes lit up with, well, lightness, the tongue turns more than a smidgen dry, the eyes widen. A worm has crawled intimately into the scene--a nice-looking worm, actually and our lit-up citizen, who is really, truly not a real thief yet, cannot help but hug it a tiny bit. You cute little worm, since you are already in my lap, let's have a kiss. Anyway, our thief who is not a thief yet, just morally flexible, has that quick money and spends it. She/he, standing taller, thinks, "I deserve this." Time goes by. Hey, just for fun, let's see if that wrong button works again. Bingo, it does! A rush of blood to the face. Game's on.

The Rockwell story held my interest because I knew Laurie and James, and thinking about them called up Tolstoy's famous line that all happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion. Moreover, the players in this story occupied the kind of stage--stretching from one end of Grangeville to the other--that only a small town can support. Though many citizens declared, "I am so sick of that Rockwell business," they still had something to say. "The judge will sentence her to a couple of years, then suspend them. Give her probation, maybe some community service. Is that right?" The ladies volunteering at the hospital thrift shop--a steady source of Foundation income--were quietly appalled but, like a Greek chorus, seethingly in tune: "We want our money back." My neighbor Fred, a law-and-order man, even he could not abandon the story to a temporal authority: "She's such a nice person, every Sunday I pray she doesn't have to do jail time."

Originally, Laurie's restitution hearing and sentencing dates, respectively, were July 27 and September 21, 2012. Her attorney requested a postponement--it was granted--moving her new dates to September 21 and October 4. On the morning of September 21, however, Judge Jeff Brudie, who had driven down from Lewiston to preside, announced in District Court in Grangeville the case against Laurie Rockwell would be continued because the Rockwells had just produced checkbooks, receipts, and credit card statements that they felt would modify the amount of money she allegedly stole. The State had received these documents at 8 p.m. the previous night and needed time to examine them, Judge Brudie said. Then Laurie's attorney, Tom Clark, who also came down from Lewiston, asked to speak. Judge Brudie told him to go ahead. Barely audible, Clark spoke at length about his client's wish for that day's hearing to be held as scheduled because she fervently wanted a speedy conclusion to this case. During what many in the courtroom viewed as Clark's disingenuous commercial, Judge Brudie, glancing at him once or twice, shuffled papers. After Clark finally sat down, Judge Brudie said he would announce the new restitution and sentencing dates later. I heard someone in back of the courtroom stage whisper, Now she 11 get to be home for Christmas."

One month earlier, on August 22, James Rockwell sent a letter to Judge Brudie, saying, "Here are the facts." James distributed copies of the letter to the IAGO, to Tom Clark, and to a number of citizens in the community; copies of the latter copies found, as they were bound to, a wider audience.

The five-page, single-space letter starts with James saying he supports and loves his wife. Then, "On or about the night of February 2, 2011, my wife called my brother in a state of high distress. She told him she had taken $58,500 from the Syringa Hospital Foundation. She asked him for money to repay the hospital. She told my brother not to tell me. She told him she had decided to kill herself. My brother called me in the morning, told me the story, told me to find my wife as she would not make it through the next 24 hours. I was at the office and raced home." He finds her car and her Foundation files and computers gone, he says. He searches for her, makes phone calls. "Nothing for 20 hours." Then, "I awoke to find Laurie on our sofa, bedraggled and unkempt. She'd spent the day and night in Riggins contemplating death. I had her tell me the story. She did."

The letter goes on in this melodramatic way, demanding to know, in a refrain, "Where's the money?" He reports asking the IAGO's chief investigator, Scott Birch, where he thought it went--on drugs? gambling? family? He says Birch "said something to the effect that the only thing they could figure was that she spent the money on clothing and lattes." "Ridiculous," James writes. "Laurie drank two lattes a day and owns a total of 15 pair[s] of pants, half of which she bought at the Syringa Hospital Thrift Shop (sic) for $1 each."

He says or implies that the money she allegedly stole (he ups the State's figure to $179,000) was spent to "outfit" the hospital's clinics in Grangeville and Kooskia, plus "the new VA Clinic," and on items like cupcake holders, shotguns, Christmas wreaths, wine, meat, M&M's, hotel rooms, vacations, paintings, flowers, Frisbees, and bottled water for such events as the Border Days rodeo and parade, the Festival of Trees, the Firecracker Run, and the Health Fair. He attributes her legal problems to "lousy" bookkeeping by the "go-to girl [who] was expected to make things happen." (He himself, he notes, "keep[s] an impeccable check register.") In addition to being a bad bookkeeper, she was "mentally ill." Then he says, "Dishonest? Nah. Stupid? Yes. Someone in a position of authority at the hospital should have questioned it." What he means by "it" is not clear, though the little pronoun seems to stand for pretty much everything that got her into this mess--bad bookkeeping, mental illness, and, last hut not least, stupidity.

Bad bookkeeping, illness, and stupidity, however, are only commercials here; the feature presentation is the accusation aimed at "[s]omeone in a position of authority"--presumably the hospital's CEO, Joe Cladouhos--who should have been watching, as if the Foundation were simply one more department in the hospital, like the lab or the ER, which was not the case. The Foundation and the hospital were separate entities, though having a single chain of command up which to pass along ultimate blame for sloppy shopkeeping would serve James--and Laurie, too, of course--much better.

As for Laurie's guilty plea, James says, "On 13 medications, including lithium, after 14 months of waiting, faced with the specter of 10 felony charges from the Attorney General, scared and mentally unstable, Laurie plead [sic] guilty to 2 felonies. She didn't ask for the plea bargain. The AG made the offer, but only after describing in years a 10 count life in prison." James implies that his wife went up against the AG all by herself. He leaves out that her attorney, Tom Clark, was representing her all the way in the negotiations and cut the best deal she could get.

James concludes his letter to Judge Brudie, "I think it is incumbent on the hospital and the prosecution to recognize the mental illness, to prove that unreceipted purchases were criminal, and to prove that money is in fact missing. I want truth. I ask for justice for my wife."

Does such a letter call up the spoiled noises of the youngest child who usually got his way in a family to which the town gave plenty of room? The combative rant of a child who usually did not get his way and is still brooding about it? Who dropped out of college and learned how to move/sway/manipulate large numbers of voters--plus carried the phone numbers of important players next to his heart? Who, with those credentials in his blazer pocket, should really be in charge of--of what? Whose political ambitions were now in an awful state? Who, lacking wit, likely misses the bitter irony of his wife disappearing on Groundhog Day after seeing a long, cold winter ahead?

Judge Brudie ordered Laurie Rockwell and the attorney general's office to the mediation table. This meeting resulted in an agreement--reached after three hours--that Laurie would pay the Foundation $114,793 plus interest. Thus the $58,500 figure that she had confessed (to James' brother) stealing was almost doubled and the $176,300 that the State said it found missing was reduced by a little over $60,000. Neither side was happy, which is usually taken as a successful mediation. The Foundation expressed relief that the ordeal was over and presumably a measure of relief was felt in the Rockwell keep.

Laurie agreed to pay $15,000 right away and $500 a month until the full bill--principal and interest--was paid. Some wondered why she (and James) didn't just cough up the full amount now? Show the community that she (they) wanted to make nice ASAP? James had claimed in his August 22 letter to Judge Brudie that he earned "in excess of $100,000 per year," and before that publicly announced he would immediately pay back every cent his wife stole--why couldn't he make restitution happen bingo-bango? Or had too many big changes come to the Rockwells, including a somewhat ironic new sign on James' place of business? "Summit" had replaced "E.K. Riley." Had James, though linguistically elevated, been lowered? Plus, the IRS would have an interest in this matter. And the bill from Tom Clark, Laurie's attorney, would likely eat up the major portion of James' yearly earnings, if not all of it.

On December 6, 2012, in front of a full courtroom audience, including her five children, her husband, and her mother-in-law, Judge Brudie sentenced Laurie Rockwell. But first he allowed some final witnesses. Darla Anglen-Whitley, the Foundation's new executive director, took the stand and cited figures showing that donations following allegations against Laurie Rockwell had fallen by fifty percent. She said donors were angry, volunteers quitting, board members resigning. The hospital's CEO, Joe Cladouhos, said that at the rate of $500 a month it would take Laurie Rockwell thirty-five years to pay off her debt. "Is this another example of a good deal for the defendant?" He pointed out that during the period of her thefts she was being paid about $138,000 by the hospital, plus benefits, for her part-time position--while also working in her husband's stockbroker office.

On Laurie's behalf Lynn Fraley, a mental health counselor, spoke via a conference call from her office in Moscow. "It's a shame," she said, "that it took [the thefts] to reveal her manic depression." A woman, who described herself as Laurie's best friend, said, "I love her and her family." A farmer said he had seen the Rockwells at least once a week for seventeen years and thought that Laurie was "a loving mother and valuable member of the community." Then James was sworn in.

Still standing, facing the judge, he started to speak. Judge Brudie told him to sit down in the witness chair, which seemed to surprise James. The position of the witness chair encouraged its occupant to face the audience, but James wanted the judge's attention--man to man, his tone and manner said, they'd get this matter taken care of--and sat sideways, on the edge of the chair, which made him appear somewhat foolish. "Christmas is a good time," he began again, "to understand the true nature of family." Not for the first time, I thought that James would really like to be some important prelate's wisest adviser.

When James finished his speech, Assistant Attorney General Jason Spillman asked him three times, with slightly different phrasing, if it was James' sworn testimony that his wife had hid her criminal activity from him until February 3, 2011--the date on which James said he "asked her to tell me the story." Three times James answered, "Yes." These were the only questions Jason Spillman had for any of the witnesses; and it was the first time in this long case against Laurie Rockwell that James had put himself in a potentially perjurious position.

Then Judge Brudie sentenced Laurie to what the State had asked for: two years fixed, up to twelve and fourteen years indeterminate, respectively, on the two counts she had pled guilty to, to be served concurrently in the women's penitentiary in Boise. At that moment, Laurie, sitting beside Tom Clark, her back to the hundred or so citizens come to see justice or a forgiving angel, seemed to clench. She bent forward, her hands gripped in a posture of prayer. She wore her black hair in a bun and the bun bobbed. Then Judge Brudie suspended that sentence to seven months in the Idaho County Jail, located just a few doors down the hall from where we all sat. Outside, the marquee thermometer scrolling over the entrance to Irwin Drugs on Main Street had dropped close to freezing, but in the packed courtroom it was warm enough to bring out a flush on many faces. Then Judge Brudie lopped thirty' days off the seven months. But he wanted Laurie to know she had brought real harm to a town that once trusted her. It was unlikely, he said, his voice rising to a level of sharpness that no priest in his pulpit could thrust more deeply into the heart of a miscreant mother in front of her most precious issue, that she would never be so trusted again.

She would report to the County Jailor by 5 p.m. on Friday, December 14.

The Free Press, on its editorial page, said: "Certainly, no recent crime has been of such interest and regional impact as the case of Laurie Rockwell, who [...] stole thousands of dollars of--and let's be clear on this--the time, generosity and hard work of county residents, patients, volunteers and hospital staff." It went on: "We're not at all pleased with the restitution settlement that allows $500 monthly payments for the next three decades." The editorial echoed the talk around town: "[T]aking out a loan to pay the balance would have been a good start at reconciliation ..." A letter from a citizen called the restitution payment plan "preposterous!" The citizen also said that James "must have known something was going on," an opinion that many in Grangeville seemed to have formed long ago.

On January 25, 2015, almost four years to the day Laurie Rockwell left home in a panic and her husband said he could not find her, some children were playing around an abandoned cabin on an old homestead property on the Salmon River in Keuterville, less than an hour's drive from Grangeville. Exploring the cabin, one of the children found and showed her father a "package wrapped in black plastic and secured with black duct or Gorilla-type tape," the office of Idaho County Sheriff Doug Giddings said. The wrapping was cut through and "inside was a red velvet-lined jewelry type of box" packed with cash. The riverfront property was owned by Salmon Canyon Ranch, a limited liability corporation formed in 2010; its registered agent was James Rockwell.

Members of the LLC were immediately contacted, the Free Press reported, and they "disavowed any knowledge regarding the money, which was then turned over to the sheriff." The packaging and money were sent to the state lab for fingerprint detection and the Federal Reserve was asked to identify, via serial numbers, which financial institutions the bills were shipped to. "Who left a sealed container of tens of thousands of dollars at a remote Keuterville property, and why?" the Free Press asked.

A man named George Brown showed up at Giddings's office and demanded the money. It was his, he said. Brown and his wife, formerly residents of Washington State, were now living in Grangeville in the old family home of Dr. and Mrs. Rockwell. Mrs. Brown was a sister of James Rockwell. Her husband, according to court records, was being sued by creditors, including a foreclosure on land in Idaho County. Brown paid several visits to Giddings' office demanding his money.

Three months later the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco notified Giddings' office that the $100 bills in that jewelry-type box had been shipped to banks in Tacoma and Renton, Washington, in December 2013 and January 2014, respectively. Giddings turned the money over to Brown.

"The money didn't connect to anything or anybody," the sheriff said. "This is my job to make sure, and we did that." As for why Brown stored the money where he did, the Free Press said, "Giddings declined to elaborate, referring inquiry to Brown who is currently unavailable."

A report from the state lab regarding fingerprint identification still had not arrived in Grangeville.

Let's get some fresh air. The sweet and thoughtful, the arrogant and cunning, the meek, greedy, hard-working, lazy, long-suffering, hopeful, pious, shy, proud, loud, wholly together, cheerful, bad, bold, and generous will continue, as will the nitwits who get to be in charge for a while. Walter J. Hickel, a former governor of Alaska, became, briefly, Secretary of the Interior. Friendly to developers eager to get at Alaska's mineral and timber holdings, Hickel said, "We can't just let nature run wild." President Nixon, who appointed him and could have used a jester, fired the man many called a clown. Hickel was not a clown. Red Skelton and Emmett Kelly were clowns. They reminded us of our membership in a fragile humanity, and our ability to laugh at ourselves. Hickel was altogether something else.