by Cathy Lamb
I like routines, and I would have to figure out one for my time in Scotland.
Routines mean I can have control over my life, that there will be no surprises.
I lie to myself sometimes. There are always surprises in life.
When I drove to our cottage, I took a slight detour to the place where Toran and Bridget’s old home had been. There was nothing left. Any scrap of the building had been ground into Scottish land. In fact, judging by the ground, I think it may have been set on fire.
It was as it should be.
Bridget and I, even as little girls, used to write letters to each other. She told me one time that when she was sad and lonely at home, that’s when she would write to me. I kicked a few charred pieces. When we saw each other at school, or when we were playing near the ocean, she would give me the letter.
She wrote me many letters. From right here.
I kicked another charred piece of wood. Hard. Then three more.
I let out a scream, too. It echoed off the rolling hills in the distance and came right back at me.
I knew what I had to do first when I arrived at our cottage. I could not start anything else until it was done. I heard my grandma’s voice saying, “It will be the time of the bees.”
I found our old ax with a red handle in the barn and stomped back to the trumpet vine, my hands trembling as one memory after another rushed in, stabbing and cruel. I cut the trumpet vine down, right at the base, my mouth trembling.
Whack.
I remembered everything.
“You stupid vine,” I said to it. “You did it. The bees did it.”
Whack.
It will be the time of the bees.
The tears streamed down my face.
My mother had taken this very same ax to it, years ago. She had been crying, too. And the damn thing had grown back again.
Whack.
I sobbed, my breath catching.
No, that damn trumpet vine could not stay, no matter how pretty the orange flowers would be this summer.
Whack.
Out.
Whack.
Out.
My grief rushed through, in screeches of pain. It had been twenty years ago, but still, here the grief was back again, mangling my insides.
When the vine was down, and in a dead pile, which I would later set on fire, I tossed the ax, sunk to the ground, and covered my face. I let all my tears out. My glasses fell off and I rocked back and forth.
It will be the time of the bees.
Yes, it was. She had known it was coming.
It was the time of the bees, and that’s when it all went to hell.
I lay down on the trumpet vine, in victory. It was gone, and I was here. I won. It was dead. I watched the clouds, my tears sliding out the corners of my eyes. I hadn’t won.
Silver Cat came and lay on my chest.
“Nice to see you again, mouse killer,” I managed to rasp out.
Silver Cat meowed until I meowed back at her.
I later used a water bottle to clean off my face and hands, then grabbed a plastic trash bag and pulled on thick work gloves I had borrowed from Toran.
A towing company had already been here, thanks to Toran, who had said he would call. The two old cars in front of the property were gone, as were two ruins of cars in the garage, a motorcycle without wheels, and a camper trailer without, curiously, a roof. There was also an enormous bin in front, about fifteen feet long and six feet high.
I took a deep breath and told myself to buck up. I opened the door to our near-destroyed cottage as a mouse skittered across the floor. The mouse was in mouse heaven in a second as Silver Cat streaked in and snatched it up.
“Perfect execution. Take it outside.” I pointed. She took the dead mouse out. Cats are obedient to me. I don’t know why.
I quickly filled two trash bags and dumped them in the bin. I worked for about two hours, nonstop, and got rid of the porn magazines, the kennels, two tires, a six-foot stack of newspapers, and piles of clothes, among other bizarre things.
A car headed down the driveway and stopped. Two ladies climbed out and walked underneath the tilted arc holding up Purple Lush.
“Hello there!” one woman, with a white braid, called out. “Greetings! I’m Olive Oliver and this is Gitanjali Chavan.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet both of you.” I took off my gloves and we shook hands. Olive was tall and thin, wide boned. She was about sixty-five. Gitanjali was much shorter, East Indian, very pretty, and wore an embroidered blue tunic with small mirrors attached to it. Hard to determine her age. Probably fiftyish.
Gitanjali said, her voice gentle, like molasses on ice cream, “I learning English. Pardon me for mistakes I give and take generously. A pleasure on meeting you.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, too.” I turned to Olive. “So you’re the one whose chickens my tenant stole?”
“Yes, he did. Mr. Greer, chicken eater.” Her face showed her disgust. I noticed she was wearing a knitted green scarf with a white cat on it. The white cat looked dizzy, eyes slightly crossed. I don’t think it was intentional. “Did you find evidence of the crime?”
I nodded. “I did. I found chicken bones. One full skeleton in the kitchen sink and two other full skeletons in the bathtub. I don’t know why he put them there. I apologize for his actions.”
“I knew it. He ate Lieutenant Judith.” She snapped her fingers. “And Lizbeth and Smelly Toad.”
“You name your chickens?”
“I don’t have that many. It’s unfortunate that Mr. Greer did not care for the garden, either.”
“It’s a regrettable mess,” I said. “My mother would be disappointed.”
“I’m sure.” She nodded, wisely. “Do you like to garden?”
“Yes. It’s a compulsive habit.”
“Compulse iv hab eat?” Gitanjali said. “What is that?”
“It means I have to garden or I get anxious. Nervous.” I wrung my hands. “It’s a calming mechanism. Some people do yoga. I pull weeds, dump snails in buckets, and design garden rooms.”
Olive Oliver flipped her white braid over her back. “That’s how I feel. Nothing more emotionally stimulating than gardening.”
I thought of a naked romp with Toran. That would be more stimulating. “Nothing more stimulating except for sex.” I cleared my throat, surprised by my bluntness. “Pardon me. I can’t believe I said that.”
“No need for pardon,” Olive said, waving a hand. “I agree. My husband knows after I garden is the proper time for post-planting coitus.”
Gitanjali’s eyebrows shot up and she laughed. “Ah, sex. I know that word. The making loving. That not better than gardening, but still pleasing, I hear. I don’t know. It not happy for me. Not much had in long time for me.”
“I’m sorry about that, Gitanjali. Me either.” I thought of Dan The Vibrator. He didn’t count, as he doesn’t have testicles or kneecaps.
“Ah,” Gitanjali said. “Maybe one day or one week. New man come in the life for you. Say hello.”
“Sex could be better than gardening as long as he’s talented in the bedroom,” Olive said. “I’ve had both. Sex less stimulating than gardening and sex better than gardening.”
“Talent in the bedroom is a requirement,” I said. “And lusty. Who wants a prim man in bed?”
“Not me. I like the creative type.” Olive put a finger up. “Nothing hurtful.”
“I agree with your opinion,” I said. “No spanking for me.” I thought of Toran. “At least not hard spanking.”
“I have not making love in my bed for long years, so my garden feed my soul,” Gitanjali said, pressing her palms together. “The world down upside. Wars. Starving. I feel I do so little. But my garden is peace. A place for me.”
“That’s how I feel,” I said. “I like to watch things grow.”
“Watch things grow, plant, nurture, then drink Scotch,” Olive Oliver said. “Scottish Scotch only.”
I nodd
ed. “It does have a special smoothness after one has spent time cutting back the roses or tying up a wisteria just so.”
“It is thrilling to the heart when pure dirt can be transformed with love and care,” Olive said, “with a shovel and your bare hands, to flowers, trees, vines, and vegetables.”
“From dirt to color. From nothing to an Eden. From plain to a place where butterflies and birds come to visit.” I choked up. “Like friends.”
Gitanjali reached for my hand and patted it. “We make the vegetables in dirt. We make the fruits bloomy. We talk, say hi to them, thank you for being over here with me. Then we share with others. Ah, gardening.” She tapped her chest. “Here.”
“It’s a damn gift,” Olive said, dabbing her eyes with her dizzy white cat scarf.
“Yes, a gifty.” Gitanjali smiled, a dimple in her right cheek. “Damn.”
“And I will forgive you for having a chicken stealer in your home,” Olive said.
“Thank you. I appreciate your understanding. I had no knowledge of it. I will replace your chickens.”
“No need.”
“Please. I insist.”
“We’ll argue about chicken replenishment later,” Olive said. “For now, I would like to formally invite you to attend the St. Ambrose Ladies’ Gab, Garden, and Gobble Group.”
I experienced some befuddlement.
“We get together with a group of women and talk gardening. Plants, flowers, plans, failures, and successes,” Olive said, “then we gobble food, tea, wine, and gab. Talk.”
“Would you like come?” Gitanjali asked. “Not much yelling at Gabbing and Gobbling Group. Sometimes. We control.” She sighed. “We try control.”
She was a sweet, compassionate person, I could tell. I wish I still had that side to me. I think it left me when I left Scotland as a teenager, the land absorbing my tears.
“We say what we please about men, marriage, women’s roles in our changing society, politics, and social issues after we talk about gardening,” Olive said. “We don’t always agree about those issues or how to kill slugs. One time one of the ladies threw a bag of daffodil bulbs at one of the women, and another time we had a yelling fight and one woman landed in my geraniums, but that was all the violence.”
Violence? In a garden talk group?
Gitanjali cleared her throat. “Not yet all. I be truth. We have one sad and scary incident with apple tree.”
“It wasn’t sad,” Olive argued. “Two of the women were having an argument about who had better apple trees. They brought in apples for everyone to taste in a blind taste test. Well, the Obnoxious One, Lorna, lost and she threw a fit, then threw apples. One forehead was bruised.”
“And there Hydrangea War.” Gitanjali shook her head, made cluck-cluck sounds. “That another problem.”
Olive waved a hand as in, “Let’s not bother.”
“People feel strongly about hydrangeas and soil composition,” I said. “The colors, acid, lime, pruning . . .”
“I will admit our talks on politics and social issues can become a mite heated. Scottish temperaments in the room altogether.” Olive exhaled.
Gitanjali’s gold bracelets tinkled. “I say the politics not belong in same room as roses and the zinnias.”
“Dangerous nights, they are,” Olive said.
“I’m in,” I said.
“You’re in what?” Olive said.
“I mean, I’d like to come.”
“Tuesday night is invitation,” Gitanjali said, smiling, her dark eyes shining. “It will be delight. No throwing.” Her brows came together. “Probably no throwing.”
“With a pinch of excitement and minor violence and small temper tantrums,” Olive said, playing with the dizzy white cat. “Don’t you mind it now.”
I wondered at my easy acceptance to the St. Ambrose Ladies’ Garden, Gobbles, and Gabbling Group. Was that the correct name?
I avoid people. I don’t like them much. I don’t like groups of women, either, whose conversations can be too fast and too confusing, sometimes shallow and mundane. Not enough science or math, conversations that don’t allow for emotions, which is, I know, partly why I’m attracted to both subjects. But what to say when I can’t relate to the subject?
But this was gardening. I had longed for someone to discuss it with.
Maybe I longed for people to talk to about anything?
No.
That could not be true. Could it?
“Thank you, Gitanjali and Olive. I’ll be there.”
We chitchatted, they drove off, and Silver Cat wrapped herself around my legs. I picked her up and stared into her eyes. “I miss my cats. They are the best company of all, but you’re acceptable, too.”
I thought of Toran.
“Toran is more than acceptable.”
Silver Cat leaped out of my arms and killed another mouse.
“You’re an adept killer.”
She dropped the dead mouse out of her mouth and meowed. I meowed back.
I put my garden gloves back on and started hauling out junk. Broken lamps, couch cushions (now mice homes), piles of moldy clothing and blankets, a wad of rubber bands, a massive collection of beer bottles, and the entire contents of the refrigerator, which I was sure was growing things that had never been seen before, including something red that resembled an electrified blood clot and something deep gray that appeared to move on its own.
Yuck and yuck. I like biology but not refrigerator biology.
I didn’t see it at first. It was covered with food wrappers, a bicycle tire, a truck bumper, and a medium-sized cage. But once I cleared that off, my parents’ dining room table appeared, built by my granddad.
“Oh.” I ran my hand over it. “Oh.” I wanted to hug it. “Oh.”
We had eaten here. My father and mother and I. I had rolled bread with my mother and grandma, made jams and jellies, cut out Christmas sugar cookies, and made black buns with currants. I had helped my father make salmon noisettes with watercress and tomatoes. I had helped my mother make honey cake. We sang Scottish songs here. My grandma made her Scottish Second Sight predictions. I couldn’t believe the table was still here.
I heard my granddad’s booming laugh ringing in my head . . . my father’s Scottish stories and legends . . . the bagpipes he used to play . . . my mother singing American rock songs and quoting Gloria Steinem.
I looked underneath it. Yes, there they were.
My granddad and grandma’s names, my father and mother’s names, my and Bridget’s names. One rainy afternoon, Bridget and I had made a tent over the table with sheets and blankets and had played with a kids’ laboratory my parents had bought me. We decided to sign the table as Scientist Bridget and Scientist Charlotte inside a red heart.
I ran my finger over our names, and my eyes became misty. Ah, poor Bridget. I sat cross-legged under the table. Poor Bridget. What nightmares came clawing for her later . . .
“What else is here?” I asked Silver Cat before I lost my emotional control. I found our armoire, which was now crooked, in one of the three bedrooms upstairs, clothes strung across it so that it was almost hidden, with a kitchen sink and bicycle handlebars on top. My granddad had built it for my grandma, a honeysuckle vine carved into the doors. The armoire had held my mother’s china from her wedding and frames of our family.
I found two of our wood chairs in the master bedroom, upside down, near a car engine, two shovels, a tent, and a tarp. Each had a wobbly leg. My granddad had made them, too. My mother would sit in them while braiding my hair.
All the furniture had to be restored. Every piece needed to be sanded and restained. There were dents and scratches and structural problems, and they were filthy. They would all look much better when a trained hand was done with them. I had never thought of them as special when I was a kid, but now they were priceless.
They had belonged to my parents and grandparents. They were part of our past, our history, and our memories.
I missed my father. I miss
ed my grandma and granddad. I even missed my ball-breaking mother in South Africa already. Contact with her for the next year was going to be sketchy because of the phone service.
I missed our life here in Scotland. I missed Bridget.
I heard a grumbling truck and peeked out the window. It was Toran. I wiped the tears off my face, refastened the clip on top of my head, forced myself to think of Madame Curie and her research to gain my composure, and headed out.
He smiled, then his face grew concerned. “What is it, Charlotte?”
I waved my hand. “Nothing. Dust in my eyes.”
“Ah, Char.” He gave me a hug. “I know. You have not been home in so long and yet this is what you find. Your childhood home in disrepair, a wreck, filled with the trash of someone else, nothing of what you remember here. The house has changed, but the memories remain of your father, bless his soul, your mum, your grandparents, and how you were as a family here together.”
I nodded, sniffled too loud.
“This was your life, your home, and it was all lost to you so quickly. And here you are, twenty years later, a huge task ahead of you, to clean it out, and maybe sell it. Ah, too much. Too hard.”
I took a tissue out of the pocket of my skirt. Never travel without a tissue. I couldn’t help but snuggle into the warmth of his arms.
“I cannot take away the pain of what you’re feeling, the loss, but I can help you. I have taken the rest of the day off to get this cleaned up.”
“No, Toran. This is not your problem.”
“Aye, it is. I want to help. I got up early to work on the farm. I thought you would be asleep for hours after your long flight. My employees are doing what needs to be done. So I’m here. Let’s have a look, shall we?”
He stood in the doorway, those shoulders filling it. “Worse than I remembered from yesterday. Give me a minute, and I’ll make a call. We’ll get this fixed straight away.”
He drove off, went home, came back, and half an hour later at my house there were six men who worked for Toran. They were friendly, cheerful.