The Distant Land of My Father

by Bo Caldwell

  At the start, the afternoons I spent out there were for him, so that I wouldn’t hurt his feelings. When I got home from school I found him watching for me, eager to show me what he’d done that morning, or what he planned to do next, and I said how different it looked already, then I changed out of my school clothes and into old jeans and went to work with him. But soon I began to look forward to being out there with him, not just for him, but for myself. The place really did begin to change, and my father began to change as well. He filled out and looked more his age, and, for the first time since his return, he seemed content.

  My grandmother drove us to the nursery, my father with his gardening books in hand, and he would ask what might work where. Strangely enough, many of the plants that had thrived in Shanghai would grow well here, despite the fact that we were half a world and an ocean away, and we started with those: wisteria and camellias, bougainvillea, gardenias. My father added red geraniums, which I wasn’t crazy about, but which he loved because of their brightness—and which I grew to love because of him. We planted small Chinese blue column junipers along the back fence for privacy. My father said that they’d come in handy at Christmastime because we could make wreaths from the cuttings.

  Along the side were the roses. Everything else he let me work on, but the roses were his, and he attended to them as though they were his life. “To grow roses isn’t difficult, Anna,” he told me. “But you have to follow some rules. You have to buy varieties for your climate. You have to buy the best plants available, number one grade. You have to locate and plant them properly. And you have to attend to their needs: water, nutrients, pest and disease control, pruning.” He taught me how to plant a bare-root rose, and I watched as he soaked it and dug the hole with a cone of soil in the middle, and then how he spread the roots over the cone so that they would fit it without bending, and how he placed the plant so that the bud onion was just above the soil level. He was protective of the roses in the extreme, and if I wanted to so much as cut a few buds for the table, he supervised, showing me exactly where to cut. When he pruned them back and I argued—rare—he reassured me that they would grow all the better because of it.

  By late summer our garden was filled with roses. Pink and red China roses grew along the back, the flowers huge and heavy, and their old rose fragrance so strong that I smelled them as soon as I stepped outside. Climbing roses and miniature ones grew along the fence, and across from them were white damask rose shrubs. Light pink sweetheart roses grew next to the patio, for me, he said, so that I’d always see them first thing. And in the corner was a small shrub called Father Hugo’s rose, the golden rose of China, my father’s favorite. There were always roses on our kitchen table, and I often found a rose in a juice glass on the desk in my room. I came to think of that summer as a whole summer of roses, like a summer of gifts, one after the other, with my father at the center.

  That fall I started eighth grade, my second year at the junior high. In those last weeks of summer, I came to believe that eighth grade was going to be a good year. We weren’t the youngest kids at school anymore, we knew our way around, and the older boys—the ninth graders—now and then took an interest in the eighth-grade girls. I looked forward to it as a year of increased independence and possibility, and as my first whole year in school with my father home. I planned on showing him off whenever I could, at school plays and Back to School Night and PTA meetings, whatever I could get him to attend.

  In those first weeks of school, my father’s garden had a lot of com-petition for my time and attention, and I often begged off from working outside. My father waved away my reasons and went out by himself, and I felt like a traitor, but I did what I wanted anyway. I went to junior-varsity cheerleading tryouts and to the Rialto with girlfriends and met groups of kids at Fosselman’s after school, especially if I thought a boy named Skip Mitchell would be there. I had told no one of my interest in him, not even my best friend, Heather, because I was certain that I was in love with him, and I was worried about finding my true love at such a young age. He sat across from me in math, and my heart beat faster when he asked to borrow my eraser, a ruse, I hoped, to talk to me.

  On a Tuesday afternoon in late September, I found my father sitting in the shade of the pepper tree outside, sipping a glass of water. He smiled when he saw me, and he motioned to the back corner of the yard, where a hole had been dug. Next to it stood a small eucalyptus tree in a nursery container. I looked at it, then at my father, and waited for him to explain.

  “I thought we’d try a eucalyptus back there,” he said. “What do you think?”

  I put my books on the patio chair and went and stood next to him. “You said eucalyptus was too temperamental.”

  He shook his head. “You have to plant them right, is all. How they’re planted affects their growth for their whole lives. They have to be in good condition and you have to start with a vigorous plant. You don’t want any can-bound roots. But I think we can manage those things, no?”

  I nodded. “And if I’m not mistaken, you like eucalyptus. In Shanghai, when you were little, you liked the way they smelled after the rain. And you liked the color of their leaves, and the smoothness of their bark.”

  “I love them,” I said, surprised that he remembered things I had nearly forgotten, and even more surprised that he was mentioning Shanghai. He had never talked about what had happened to him there, or even what our lives had been like before the war, and the few times I had dared to ask, he had waved my questions away.

  “Well, this is a good one. It’s Eucalyptus nicholli, a Nichol’s willow-leafed peppermint gum, a perfect garden tree.” He stood then, and I followed him to the small tree. It did remind me of Shanghai: its narrow leaves were a light green, barely tinged with purple. There were a few small white flowers, and its bark was light brown.

  I touched the slender trunk and said, “It’s so soft.”

  My father nodded. Then he plucked a leaf and rubbed it between his fingers and held it to me. “Smell,” he said.

  I breathed in. “Peppermint,” I said.

  “You like it?”

  “I love it.”

  He smiled, pleased, and then he stared at me for a moment in a way that looked so serious that I wondered if I’d done something wrong. But all he said was, “I’m taking a picture of you up here,” and he tapped his head. “You’re getting prettier all the time. Did you know that?” I felt myself blush and he laughed, and I wondered if I had imagined the sadness in his voice. And then he said something in Chinese, “His hua hua chiehkuo, ai liu liu ch’êngyin,” and although I didn’t remember the meaning, the sound of the words was familiar. My father looked at me carefully. “Do you remember?”

  I hesitated, willing myself to remember. “Almost. I think Chu Shih said it when he pruned the roses.”

  My father nodded and smoothed my hair. “That’s right. Seems like a hundred years ago.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “‘Love and attention make all things grow,’” he said, and I nodded, for I did remember once he said it.

  We took turns digging. After nearly an hour, he finally said he thought the hole was deep enough. “Hold the can, Anna, and I’ll take the tree out.”

  I knelt and held the edges of the can as my father jostled and pulled and finally slid the base of the tree and then its roots from the can. Then he set the tree on the ground and knelt next to it. “A little root-bound,” he said under his breath, “but we can fix that.” He told me to turn on the hose a little and bring it over, and when I did, he gently rinsed the soil from the tree’s exposed roots. Then he told me to shut off the hose and he said, “Do what I do, like so,” and he began to spread the roots out, gently untangling them the way you would wire, and arranging them in a sort of fan shape coming out from the tree’s center. “This will help,” he said.

  We worked at the roots like that for perhaps ten minutes, both of us on our hands and knees. He was humming something, and I smelled sweat and
Vitalis and Black Jack gum. Finally he sat back on his heels and looked at the roots. “Looks about right,” he said, and he stood and brushed his dirty hands on his already dirty khakis. “I think we’re ready,” and he picked up the tree near the base of its trunk and lowered it carefully into the hole. “Fill her in,” he said. We knelt again and gently pushed moistened soil into the hole, surrounding the roots, pushing in more soil, gently packing it down.

  “Now we’ll water,” my father said finally, “and she’s on her way.”

  He turned on the hose and handed it to me, and I stood next to the tree, moving the hose around the trunk, trying to make sure that water soaked in evenly. He watched for a moment, then nodded his approval. “Little by little, you see, Anna? This will be a good tree for you. Vigorous, durable. Your own peppermint tree. It can remind you of Shanghai, of the good parts.” And then he said he was going inside for a drink of water.

  “I’ll come in a minute,” I said, “I just want to look for a while.”

  He nodded and looked around the garden. “I know what you mean,” he said. Then he went inside.

  When I’d soaked the base of the tree, I turned off the water and coiled the hose next to the house the way my father had taught me. Then I sat down on the step and took a deep breath. My hands and knees were caked with dirt, and it felt good somehow, not like dirt but like earth, even under my fingernails.

  Sitting there alone, my father inside, the sounds of my mother moving around in the kitchen, all of a sudden I felt content. Not just happy, but something deeper, quieter, as though the three of us had finally landed. For the first time in a long time—maybe since I was a little girl in Shanghai—everything seemed truly all right. Maybe we, too, had been successfully transplanted; maybe that long move from Hungjao to South Pasadena had worked, and maybe we really could adapt. My father had been home for nearly ten months, and I had started to believe that what I had wished for had come true: he seemed to consider this home.

  I looked at the roses along the side fence, still blooming though October was only a week away; the junipers along the back, already starting to grow and spread out a little; the bougainvillea and wisteria along the other side, romantic and a little wild, a concession to my mother. In three rectangular beds to my left were tomatoes and lettuce and strawberries, and in the narrow bed closest to the kitchen, a few herbs, parsley and thyme, rosemary and chives. “You see,” my father had said, “you’ll have a whole salad here, everything you’ll need.”

  I breathed in and smelled eucalyptus and roses. I looked around once more for anything amiss. But there was nothing. It was perfect.

  I went in to wash my hands and found my mother and father in the kitchen. My father had brought the mail in and was standing at the sink, gazing out at the garden. He had opened a quart bottle of East Side beer and poured himself some in a juice glass. My mother was sitting at the table, her hands spread out in front of her, a gesture I knew well, one that meant she was trying to stay calm.

  “What?” I said.

  My mother did not hesitate. “Your father received a letter,” she said simply. Her tone was one of forced evenness. “A letter from an old friend from Shanghai, Shang Chen. In China he was governor of the Hove province. Maybe you remember him, Anna. Your father’s polo team used to play his. He was quite good, your father says.”

  I nodded stupidly, with no recollection of the man she had named. It was as though she were asking me to recall some other child’s life.

  “Well,” my mother continued, stretching her hands out further on the table, “Shang Chen is now General Shang Chen, and he is the Chinese military attaché in Washington. It seems he can do something to help your father. He has a position for your father in Chungking, as a liaison between the American and Chinese troops. It sounds very interesting, doesn’t it?”

  I wanted to ask her to speak English, please, as I had when I was small and Chu Shih asked me something in Mandarin. My mother’s words felt like some kind of code.

  “Chungking,” I said, a guess of a response.

  “Yes,” my mother said. “Chungking.”

  My father faced us then. At least he faced my mother, and I saw that I’d walked into something that I shouldn’t be in on. “You have to see this, Eve,” he said. “There’s a war on, and they’ll send me someplace if I don’t go first. In my experience, the military sends you exactly where you don’t want to go, simple as that. Where would that be? Where would they send me? To Europe, where things are a mess.”

  My mother said nothing.

  I went to the counter to read the letter, which said just what my mother had said: that General Shang Chen was requesting that my father act as a liaison between American and Chinese troops in Chungking, the seat of the Nationalist government. He asked that my father travel to Chungking as soon as possible.

  I looked at my father. He had turned on the water and was washing two beefsteak tomatoes my mother had set out for dinner. He set them on the cutting board and began slicing them into fat round slices that we would salt and eat cold. He put the slices on a plate and tossed the ends into the grocery bag under the sink. He rinsed our small wooden cutting board—my mother and I had bought it at Woolworth’s, one of our first purchases, and one my mother had let me pick out—and I watched the red watercolor juice from the tomatoes run into the sink. He dried the board, put it back in its place against the drain board, and wiped the counter, the picture of calm. Then he turned to leave the room. This was my father: no fuss, no muss.

  At the door, he turned to us. “I’m going to clean up,” he said.

  “What letter?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “What letter?” I said again. “He says he was surprised to receive your letter.” I held the general’s letter out to my father, not worrying about my dirty hands.

  My father shook his head as though I were asking the obvious. “A letter I wrote to him a while back,” he said. “To find out about things.”

  “When did you write to him?” I said.

  Now he looked me in the eye. “It’s not a daughter’s place to cross-examine her father.”

  I looked outside at the garden and saw holly seedlings and junipers and I remembered his encouragements. You’ll have pumpkins at Halloween, and your mother can bake the seeds for you. You can cut branches from the junipers for a Christmas wreath, and you can decorate the table with holly cuttings. You’ll have lilies just in time for Easter, and strawberries all summer long. Only he always said you, never we.

  I said, “You knew,” and it made such sense. It made everything fit together so neatly that it almost didn’t hurt. “You knew all along. That’s why you’ve been so happy lately. Because you were leaving.”

  My mother looked up, and I addressed her, as if explaining things she didn’t know. “He never planned on staying with us. That’s why he didn’t argue about this house, it’s why he didn’t move us to someplace bigger. He knew this was just a visit.” I looked at him then. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  It was the first time in my life that I had spoken angrily to my father, and he looked stunned. He said nothing. It was my mother who spoke.

  “I know that, Anna.”

  My father was looking at me as though appraising me. “Why don’t you get cleaned up for dinner? This conversation’s gone far enough.”

  “But how can you leave us? You don’t know—”

  “I know exactly as much as I need to know,” he said. “I already explained. This is my only decent choice here. So we might as well not dwell on it.”

  I said nothing.

  “Don’t cloud up on me, Anna. No melodrama. It’s how things are.”

  I nodded, stung. It was the first fight we’d had like that, where it seemed there was no allowance made for my age. I felt not rebuked so much, which I often had, but more pushed away, and it hurt.

  “Are we clear?” he asked. “Yes,” I said softly. “That’s my girl,” he said, and he walked out o
f the room.

  My mother didn’t wait for me to say anything. She came and stood next to me and held me to her as I began to cry. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

  That was a Tuesday. My father made arrangements to leave ten days later, on a military transport that would depart from Los Angeles on the first Friday morning of October.

  Over those ten days, I worked hard at convincing myself that his leaving would be a relief. It hadn’t been that bad without him, I thought. In a way it was simpler. Without him, I had spent more time with my grandmother. My mother and I had eaten out more. We’d done what we’d wanted, and we hadn’t had to worry about those quiet moods of his. We were both so good at catering to him, at revolving around him, and we’d picked it up again so thoroughly and so immediately when he’d come home—home?—that the mood and feeling of our lives had changed a lot after he joined us. So, I thought, back to what we were, which hadn’t been so bad after all. Be grateful, I thought, and I worked at keeping my mother’s words in my mind: we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine, we’ll be fine.

  All that effort paid off, to a point. It must have because I got through those awful days that precede separation. Things were almost festive that week, on the surface at least. I helped my father pack, and I laid out his new and laundered and patched clothes in the living room until he packed them the night before he left. We put a good face on it all, and the only time I let myself feel the huge sadness that I carried around was in my bed, once the lights were out and the house had been still for a long enough time to make me think my parents had fallen asleep. That was when I knew I would miss him the most. I loved that time of night, when I knew my parents were both asleep in their bed in the very next room.

  And then it was his last night.

  Dinner was an occasion—steaks and baked potatoes, ambrosia and angel food cake with strawberries—and after dinner, my father and I stood in our garden for a long time, sipping our drinks, his a glass of Scotch, mine a juice glass of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which he was allowing me this once. I didn’t like the taste much, but I liked the way the cold beer felt in my stomach and the way it made my head feel a little blurry. Inside I could hear the sounds of my mother and grandmother talking in low voices as they did the dishes and made coffee, while outside in the garden, my father reminded me about all the care it would need. When he started sentences with phrases like, “And then, in three or four months, Anna,” I didn’t, as he would say, cloud up, something I considered an accomplishment, one I was proud of. But when we came inside, my mother and grandmother had only to look at my face to know how much it hurt.