She was wearing a high-necked blouse with an ivory brooch—one of those carved ovals with a woman's profile. She'd occasionally dressed this way after her divorce. She called it "retro" but really it was like Emily Dickinson in her Sunday best. It was as if she rejected not just her ex-husband, but the entire era in which he lived. "Fine," I said.
"Isn't it good to work with your hands?"
I took a bite of sausage. She'd boiled wieners and sauerkraut because she didn't want Marta driving in the rain. "It takes my mind off things," I said with caution, wary of a trap.
"Exactly." She sipped white wine, eyes glittering behind her upraised glass. "Now do you see why gardening is so appealing?"
No, I didn't. If she wanted to work with her hands, why not knit? Or weave? Or do papier mâché? "I still fear it will take attention away from your charitable efforts," I offered.
She took another sip. "It's hard doing things that only have benefits you can't see."
"Think of everything you might do. Endow starving artists. Bring children's literature to Africa. AIDS research."
"I never knew you were interested in those things."
"Think of the impact. All those starving children…"
"There will always be starving children."
Since when had she become so hard-hearted? She set down the glass. "This is what I want, Milo. To start doing something here, at home."
"Because of him? The man who has our key?"
Had I said this aloud? I wasn't sure. She didn't move, didn't respond, just gazed at her fingers snaked around the wine glass' stem. "I've made up my mind," she finally said. "I only wanted to tell you . . ."
Lightening struck the nearby woods. It made a damp sullen whump. I leaned forward. "See? You've made the heavens angry."
She raised her eyebrows as if I'd just blasphemed something.
"You don't remember?" I said incredulously.
She shook her head. I had to spell it out. "You told me exactly those words when I was in the third grade. During one of your lessons about cumulus, cumulonimbus, and altocumulus clouds. You told me I wasn't concentrating on the differences between them. Then it thundered. You said I'd made the heavens angry and you hit me right here"—I pointed at the top of my ear—"and I still have a scar."
She took a deep breath. "Those were difficult times with Mother always gone."
"Well these are difficult times, too," I said. "Now that both of them are."
She sat back, shoulders drooping—all the resolution drained out of her. I picked up my fork and continued eating. I wouldn't let good sausage go to waste. Still the silence was oppressive—every raindrop like a finger's impatient tap.
That night we watched television. Some Like It Hot. Klara burst into frantic giggles every time Tony Curtis adjusted his wig or push-up bra. I pretended to laugh too, but it was difficult. Nothing in this film was funny. Cross-dressing? Girl bands? I suffered every minute. It was no wonder our country had to invade weakling states like Granada and Panama and Iraq to prove its national manhood.
But this movie did get me thinking about what makes something humorous and whether I could make Klara smile, even laugh. I suppose I hoped that if I did, I could take it as a sign—that the plot forming in my mind was wrong. Almost desperately I cast about for a laugh-worthy topic. The idiocy of our President? The mangled grammar of billboards? Homosexual marriage? All seemed too obvious and contrived. The following day I picked up a copy of the newspaper's Living section and remarked that I'd never understood its title. "Are the other sections not about living?" I asked. "Are they about dying?" I tried to move my face in a humorous way like I'd once seen Johnny Carson do, but she just looked at me and said: "Oh Milo, you're trying to be funny."
The Mormon boy came that afternoon, during a brief break in the weather. He had horrible acne and unblinking eyes, and every month he trekked up our winding driveway to insist we let Jesus in. They're making inroads in Vermont, these Mormons. They're like Postmen—neither rain nor sleet nor snow can stop them. I told the boy what I always told him: that Jesus and those other prophets were welcome but that he himself was trespassing. Then I pulled my old trick, reaching behind the door where many local residents store firearms. The boy turned and ran, and I laughed and laughed. Was this the sort of thing Klara would find amusing? Somehow I knew it wasn't.
Afterwards I finished installing the trireme's bottom deck. This was where the thalamioi, or lower rowers, were stationed. These were the ones who suffered—from the dank close quarters, from frequent seawater intrusions, and from the worst torture of all: the foreknowledge that if the ship were rammed, they'd be doomed.
Klara went to bed early, complaining of a headache. Mother had suffered terrible migraines too, losing entire days twisted like a mummy in her bed sheets with dark patches across her eyes. I made Klara another cream of mushroom soup. I stood in front of her door, waiting for the proper words to come: soothing sympathetic ones that spoke of brotherly love. Then I heard a sound. I put my ear to the door. She was whispering. Whispering so I wouldn't hear. I hurried downstairs. By the time I lifted the receiver in the kitchen she'd already hung up. I held the soup until it turned cold and filmy, then dumped it into the sink and scoured the bowl so she'd never know.
The rain stopped the following morning, leaving behind puddles and worms on the patio and fingers of fog in the distant trees. I didn't bother with breakfast. I wasn't hungry. I went to the entrance hall and reached for my shoes. To my surprise I saw that they were caked in mud. Had I left them outside? Or fetched the mail or spare modeling tools from the garage without remembering? I didn't know, and this disturbed me, so I tried to forget it; I kept my slippers on and began my morning's work. Soon I was preoccupied with sealing moisture cracks in the trireme's lower deck. But then came something else—a movement beyond the patio. It was Klara. She was in the bushes, sweeping aside branches and peering at the ground. I saw her perturbed expression, her London Fog's hood flat against her bony cheeks. I hurried to the French doors and removed the rags, cracked open the doors just enough to feel the damp on my face. "Taking a stroll?" I called out. "When it's still so wet?"
She stopped and shielded her eyes. The grooves of her cheeks were cut deeply by perspiration, giving her the appearance of a pale moist pumpkin. "Have you seen Henri's spade?" she asked.
I cocked my head. "Spade?"
"He left it here. To take soil samples after the rains."
"Whatever for?"
"It's how we decide on a fertilizer, Milo."
I paused, noting the plural, turning it over in my mind as I realized it wasn't meant to include me. "I'm sorry, I thought that after the past couple of days you'd decided . . ."
"Never mind," she said. "Don't trouble yourself about it."
She turned and continued on. I closed the doors. I returned to my desk, yet it was impossible to concentrate with all that stomping and bushwhacking outside the window. I glanced at the bottom drawer of my rolling cabinet, at the worn steel handle and crude lock. Should I say something? No. Let her discover the truth for herself.
At last I heard her slip back inside, her boots in the entrance hall and slippers in the kitchen. Then came a click, a whisper, and the hushed tones of another telephone conversation. I knew whom she was calling, but I didn't care—she was distracted, and that was enough. I fumbled with the key and pulled open the drawer.
It wasn't there.
I looked in all the others. I pawed over the desk, the bookshelves, even patted down my blazer. Had Klara taken it? No, she would have confronted me right away. Then who? I thought of my muddy shoes. Had I walked off with it myself, in a kind of film noir stupor? Then I remembered the face in the window.
Every sweat-moistened molecule of me screamed don't do this, yet I did—I slipped on my spare loafers and strode out the French doors, across the patio, past the Roman, the bushes, the litt
le skirt of grass. Beyond the grass rose a hill. Atop the hill began a path—a path into the woods with their needles and looming shade, tangled oaks and ghostly beeches and dead undergrowth humid beneath my feet. I thought of Father's midnight walks, how these woods were a refuge for him, and I was certain that if the face in the window had been his—if he'd returned somehow to warn me, and perhaps taken the spade as a sign—I'd find the answer here.
I stood for a time atop that rise, the trees swaying in an almost ritualistic beckoning. Why? it was like they were saying. Why do Klara and Henri want to destroy us?
Exactly what I asked myself as I ventured forth.
I used to know these woods like my own pale knees—every crevice and stump and knoll—but now I found myself groping, led by instinct and half-memories down a path that was hardly a path anymore, just a gap between the trees marginally wider than all the other gaps. I fought through every branch—every greedy limb desiring a touch, a scratch, a raking caress—fighting through my own rising panic as I scanned the ground, strobe-lit by a leaf-pierced sun, for a white stone marker I'd made when I was small. "This is for you, Klara. So you won't get lost." Could I really expect to find it now, after all these years? Something told me I would. After a few twists and turns I noticed a fallen branch. Underneath. I pulled it away.
There it was. The white stone. And on it a childish arrow perfectly drawn, eerily visible. As if I'd done it only yesterday.
It pointed to the right. I knew I was close. Here was even less of a path. I had to push through the trees with both arms high—through wet leaves and branches and, once, a spider web I hacked away with a stick—until everything began to thin and I found myself stumbling into a sun-lit realm, a circle of vibrant grass between the trees.
"Momma had a baby and her head popped off!"
It was a magical place, one of endless possibility where I lay on the grass snapping heads off dandelions while Klara shrieked and ran around, arms outstretched, legs a bony blur. She was chasing pigeons. She hoped to train them to carry messages to distant shores. "We can have Pen Pals," she said. "And no one will ever know."
Laughter, forts made of fallen branches, endless wars against savages in the woods. We were pioneers living off the land—this was our country. In early spring, when sap began to flow, we marched about with hammers and spikes and buckets, harvesting maple syrup to sell to a local dealer. He'd give us a dollar per bucket—extravagant riches in those days—which we'd use to buy provisions for our rustic outposts: canteens and freeze-dried ice cream, pocket knives and signal mirrors. We were a rough-and-ready family, Klara and I, combing each other's hair, sucking the venom out of each other's snakebites, huddling together for warmth under scratchy Indian blankets. How long can we last out here? we kept wondering, leaving unsaid our deepest private hopes:
Forever.
But no. It couldn't be. No walls were high enough, no pocket knives sharp enough to protect our childish fantasies.
At first the savages infiltrated under cover of darkness, stealing food and spears, leaving behind huge footprints and the occasional crumb. It felt like a game to heighten our suspense, and each of us secretly suspected the other of playing it. Then one day, in the center of the clearing, we stumbled across ashes from a fire and scattered pigeon feathers. We were stunned. "What do you think happened here?" Klara asked almost indignantly, hands on slender hips. I shook my head. The whole forest felt on edge—the birds gone, the animals strangely silent. I'd noticed this on my way in, but had dismissed it as the product of my imagination, and now I struggled to keep this same imagination in check as I spotted one of the trees behind her. It was staring at me. How could that be? Gradually it came into focus. Still I didn't believe it. In the center of the trunk, nailed to it, was the oozing gelatin of a bird's dead eye.
I must have screamed. The next thing I knew we were running, breathless and frantic and more than a little excited by our find. For days we talked about it, in private whispers, while playing board games and hopscotch on the patio. Eventually the woods called us back, spoke to us in the language of children. We tiptoed into the clearing again. Everything was still there—the ashes, the nail, the eaten-away eye—shrouded with a reality that smothered any attempt at fantasy. We huddled beneath trees with sharpened spears, watching for what the woods would bring us next.
I saw him the following afternoon—a middle-aged man. I didn't get a clear look at him—just a face between the leaves—but I saw him scribble something in a notebook, a gesture that I knew with an intimacy that frightened me. "Milo?" My sister called to me as if from far away. I didn't respond, couldn't—I was too busy trying to trick my eye into not seeing him. Suddenly her hand gripped my shoulder and her uncertain smile hovered in front of me. "Is it another . . . ?"
I nodded. He'd dissolved into a cluster of maples. Still I recognized Father all the same. Then everything became clear, but no less terrifying. "Let's go," I said. "We're not safe here."
"What did you see?"
She looked at me, and that's when something came over her, because she gripped my shoulders hard and continued in a shaky dramatic whisper: "The devil?"
And now, as I stepped across the ant-eaten logs, I half-expected to see him again—older, leaner, but with the same savage gleam. The grass was overgrown and weedy, and everything looked smaller—the forts gone, the arsenal of spears and rocks weeded over. Still the sense of magic remained. I glanced at the trees. Many of the maples still bore crusted-over wounds. I picked a dandelion and popped off its head. It fell.
That's when I heard footsteps.
I whirled around. There, behind the trees. A shadow. In dark clothing. It melted away into the woods. Klara? Henri? Or was it. . . ? No, it was nothing. Just a breeze rustling branches. Or a nosy deer. Or maybe one of the 2,500 black bears, or Ursus americanus, still living in Vermont.
Or so I hoped.
It was on the way back that I spotted, buried in the trunk of a maple, a metallic glint that I first took to be an old spike. I blinked several times until I saw it, then wished I hadn't. I stumbled on, faster now, not looking at anything, the image burned into my mind of a slender pale trunk, cuts in the bark, and the spade's red handle sticking out of a gaping, sap-filled wound.
There is a feeling when first waking up in the morning, before dusting off the cobwebs of the mind, of being locked in a fiction—of knowingyou're locked in a fiction yet being unable to do anything about it. This was the feeling I had as I stumbled into the entrance hall. I heard myself in words: Milo stumbles into the entrance hall. I began removing my shoes when . . . Klara strides out of the kitchen, wondering where he's been. I wanted to embrace her, to feel her corporeal existence, but it seemed, as in a dream, that too much lay between us: the black-and-white checkered tiles, the wooden bench, one of Mother's fuzzy fruit paintings and the chandelier with its crooked flame-shaped bulbs. And Klara's own implacable face, hovering before her like a slightly detached mask.
"Where were you?"
Her apron flapped with accusation. Beneath it she wore a white cotton blouse with puffy sleeves that gave her a vaguely piratical air. Her face, too, was slightly puffed, as if she'd awoken from a long but not restful slumber.
"Gathering supplies," I offered, stumbling through an implausible story about using real tree-pitch for the trireme's hull.
"In the woods?" she asked, narrowing her eyes.
"Is that a problem?"
"I'm just surprised, that's all. That you'd go traipsing around there on a day like this."
I shrugged. I knew I had to get away before I'd be tempted to blurt out the truth. So I started walking in the direction of the study. "Listen, Milo," she called after me. "There's a television program at six o'clock that I'd like to watch. If you'd care to join me for supper, I'll be at the table at five."
Klara spent most of the meal gazing at Mother's antique china cabinet, the one with the gla
ss doors and interior lights. I stared at the opposite wall, at one of her paintings—a red rose in full bloom, its petals swirling toward a turgid center. I felt the ineluctable pull of falling, of invisible forces taking me into the dark heart of something.
"Marta is coming in the morning, now that the rains have stopped."
I blinked. Klara was looking at me, her knife and fork upon a smeared-empty plate. I had no memory of her eating.
"Good," I said.
"And Henri, too. I've asked him to come in the afternoon, after Marta leaves. I thought it might make things easier for you, not having so many people here at once."
I nodded. I didn't know what else to say. Finally I asked, "Do you think Father would approve of your garden?"
She pushed aside her plate and sighed. "Isn't it time we became our own people? And stopped doing what Father and Mother always wanted us to do?"
She didn't say a word during the television program—some interminable costume drama—and afterwards went straight to bed. I stayed up, unable to sleep, staring out the window at the trees, their leaves rippling like an ocean's waves. I kept thinking of an early Hawthorne tale, Young Goodman Brown, where the pious townsfolk reveal their true natures only in the woods, as "rampant hags" and "polluted wretches" in communion with the devil. It was the first story Father ever read to me, the first time he ever told me how perceptive I was, when I pointed out that Goodman Brown ought not to have seen his fellow townsfolk's true natures because it only made him unhappy.
But how perceptive was I now? I had only the vaguest notion of what was going on. A notion as implausible as a John Crane plot. And what was Klara's role? How much was she herself involved? All I did know was that our lives were about to change for good—that any hope I'd had, in those rainy days, that Henri wasn't coming back or wasn't what I feared him to be, was a Great False Hope akin to alchemy or world peace.
Wild nature tamed is nature lost, Keith thought,
The Garden of Blue Roses Page 6