“Setcreasea!” cried Mrs. D ——, clapping her hands. “Utterly lovely! The long, purple stems and leaves, like the most beautiful twilight has gathered right beneath your windows and stays all day! And then the pink flowers, the crowning glory! Yes, setcreasea love the cramping for their roots. Don’t water the boxes too much! But your grandmother knows that; she’s been at it longer than most and knows what they all need, every last bloom. I think they tell her, the flowers. Do you think?” She batted my arm again, jovially. “Here we are! Thank you so much, you dear, gallant gentleman!”
I was grateful that we’d arrived at her gate. I was feeling worn out, and not from the shopping burdens.
“And what’s it to be at the back?” asked Mrs. D ——, taking the basket and package from me. “There in the shade, where the trees lean in? She always has the best ideas for what to put there!”
I thought for a moment. “I think she said fuchsia,” I said. “For the butterflies.” By habit, I said “I think” so as not to sound too forceful, but I knew that’s what Grandmother had planted there.
“Fuchsia! Of course! Like lanterns in the dark—a brilliant choice. Fuchsia will outshine her trumpet vines of last year, and we all thought those were divinely inspired! Such a sharp, clever young man you are, to keep all these names straight—not that I’m surprised, considering the source. ‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’—that has a good meaning, too, you know. Well, now, thank you again, dear sir. I suppose you’d best hurry on back to her. Good work to do!”
I thought nothing at all of the conversation then, only that I was glad to be out of it. I hardly thought of it when I told Grandmother I’d helped Mrs. D —— with her groceries, and Grandmother had asked me to repeat the conversation word for word.
“What did she say then?” Grandmother asked. “And what did you say? What did she say next? What did you say?” Unlike Mrs. D ——, Grandmother waited for each of my answers with her full attention. Even then, I didn’t understand her interest.
When Grandmother didn’t say a word to me for the rest of the day and all through supper, I began to think back through what had happened, what Grandmother had asked me to repeat. As we finished washing the dishes in utter silence, Grandmother’s movements brisk and icy, I felt a growing, hollow ache in my chest. My eyes filled with tears.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.
Grandmother looked up at me from drying her hands. “What are you sorry for?”
I hung my head, unable to endure her gaze. My stomach hurt, and my face burned. Somehow, I had transgressed; I had let Grandmother down, and I hated that I’d done so. I still didn’t understand it exactly, but it had to do with telling Mrs. D —— too much.
“Your business is yours,” said Grandmother, and I thought at once of my letters, my trip to the post office. “My business is mine. We don’t talk about the garden. It reveals itself in its own time.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, really crying now, my nose streaming.
“You didn’t know. Now you do.” Grandmother rinsed a cloth, wrung it out, and handed it to me. “Wipe your face.”
* * * *
Spring became summer, and Mrs. D —— learned that it was no use asking me anything else about the garden, though it did nothing to dampen her good cheer. I was greatly relieved when the garden finally revealed itself, for I felt a stab of guilt each time a villager said to Grandmother, “I hear it’s to be setcreasea this year, and fuchsia in the shade!”
More than once, when Grandmother seemed to be in the best moods, I asked if we could go up into the forest. She nodded and said we would soon, but in the moment, there was always something to do in the garden or something to buy or mend or clean. Once I’d taken note of the fact that Grandmother didn’t seem to share Mrs. D ——’s dread of the woods, I asked her why Mrs. D —— was afraid.
Grandmother shrugged. “She can’t see into the woods, so she assumes all the bad she can’t see is there. She thinks the sea is friendlier, but if she were out in a little boat, or swimming in it, it would occur to her that she can’t see under the water, either.”
* * * *
I liked the postmaster, who at first pretended I was his boss. The joke began because I was always bringing him work to do, my letters to weigh and stamp. He would snap to attention when I’d come in and tell me that he’d just swept the floor or organized the closet. Once, he said, “I washed the window, Boss. Does it pass inspection?”
“It looks good,” I said.
“Too clean, though. Now V —— can see me when he goes by, and he comes in and talks both my ears off. Man should be in politics. I can only get rid of him by saying you’ll fire me if you catch me standing around.”
“I won’t fire you,” I told him.
“You’re a good boss. Got more letters for me today? I won’t let you down, Boss.”
After a few weeks, when we both got tired of the game, he would ask me about myself, leaning on his elbows, peering at me over the tops of the eyeglasses that clung to the last half-inch of his nose but never fell off. He had thick black hair, a lean, droopy face, and huge eyes that rarely blinked. It impressed me how he could be kind without ever laughing or smiling. Although he was curious about what I found to do in the village, what I was reading, what I wanted to be, or what I thought, he never asked about the garden or Grandmother beyond whether she were well. I’d learned from the Mrs. D —— incident to be careful of what I said. Still, the postmaster was the one grown-up that I usually saw on my own, without Grandmother, so he felt like my friend.
“Your father,” he asked me, “he’s an officer in the Army, isn’t he?”
“Yes. A captain.”
“That’s very fine! You should be proud of him. Are you proud of him?”
I nodded.
“Good man,” he said, and I wasn’t sure whether he meant my father or me. “I remember him here. Smart! Always first in the school, always doing things—involved, you know, and famous. Famous as one can be here!” He laughed softly. “He used his head, didn’t he, before they got him into the Army? In the city, he was some kind of a . . .”
“Locomotive engineer,” I said. “He designed a diesel engine.”
“Smart,” said the postmaster with admiration. “You got his smarts?”
I shrugged and looked at my shoes.
“Sure you do. You got them.”
One day, the customer in line ahead of me, an old man in a brown hat, told the postmaster about some wild vegetables he’d gathered in the forest. Of course, I paid close attention when the man muttered about how dark it was up there, even in the morning.
The postmaster looked hard over his glasses. “Not up here!” The gesture he made with his head seemed to indicate the mountain slope above our end of the village.
“No, no, of course not!” said the man. “Above the old harbor, past the point.”
The postmaster nodded, and the man added, “Hard telling what grows up there!”
When he’d left, the postmaster and I were alone.
The postmaster greeted me by name, not with “Boss” anymore. “Been writing again, huh? How much paper you got up there, anyway? Do they bring it to you in trucks?”
As I handed over my letters—one each to my parents, and one each to my friends—I asked, “Are the woods above my grandmother’s house really haunted?”
He froze, staring at me with his wide, dark eyes. Then he looked at my letters for a long time, as if the addresses were new to him. Finally, he glanced back at me and opened the stamps drawer. “Yes. They’re haunted.”
“By ghosts?”
“I don’t know what ghosts are,” he said. “But there are places that belong in the past and need to be forgotten.” He paused then, and for the first time I’d ever seen, he pushed his glasses higher on his nose and resettled them. “You don�
�t want to go up there, G ——. You shouldn’t ask about the woods, either.”
I was too respectful to ask him why not, but the question was burning in me like a coal.
He could see it. “They teach curiosity in school, don’t they? It’s not always a good thing.” He leaned on his elbows and gave me a long, sober look. “The world’s getting worse. Until it gets a lot better, it’s best not to ask too many questions.”
I supposed he was thinking of the war. But he was afraid of the woods, afraid like Mrs. D ——. I didn’t see how the war could relate to the forest, or how the forest could relate to a past that needed to be forgotten.
* * * *
And so the spring passed, gardens all through the village sprouted into blazes of fragrant loveliness, and we came to the day of the shot-down airplane, when it crashed into the waves and sank into the unseeable depths, down to the gardens of the mer-people. I imagined them all in a wide circle among the coral, holding their tridents, their hair floating, their silvery tails slowly fanning to keep them upright, as the wrecked plane floated down to rest in their midst.
That very night—quite late in the night—Grandmother and I were awakened by a rapping at the door. I was jolted to full consciousness at once and sat up in my squeaky bed, my heart pounding. Of course I imagined soldiers, come to tell us to evacuate. In the faint light of the lowering moon, I located my suitcase, always packed with the things I considered most important, always ready to be snatched up in a dash out the door. But in another moment, I realized that the urgent tapping came from the back door, where a single mossy step led down into the garden—hardly the entrance soldiers would approach. Nor was the sound very loud; nor was it accompanied by any shouting.
I swung my feet to the floor, the boards cool and smooth. In the next room, Grandmother rustled about—pulling a housecoat on over her nightgown, I supposed. After turning the cast-iron doorknob, I peered out into the darkness of the main room as Grandmother emerged from her bedroom.
Her expression was serious but not afraid, which I found reassuring. The knocking had stopped, and a silence descended that was more nerve-wracking than the knocking itself. With hardly a glance at me, Grandmother crossed to the back door, picked up the walking-stick from the umbrella stand, and demanded, “Who’s there?”
I heard the murmur of a reply but could make out none of the words. Grandmother, from her position, heard enough to satisfy her; she put down the stick, lifted the latch, and drew open the door.
Though the garden farther out was bright with slanting moonlight, the back step beneath the trees lay in deep shadow. The silhouette there belonged to a thin person in a rumpled felt hat and a long coat. When the door opened, this person began to bow and speak in a soft torrent of words—a man’s baritone—sonorous, like that of a singer or radio announcer.
“My dear M ——, forgive the intrusion.” (He called my grandmother by her first name.) “I am so sorry to disturb you at this hour, but a matter has come up . . . or down, rather . . . and it would seem swift action is called for. It is—well, you know better about these things.”
Grandmother had been listening with a fist on her hip, her other arm gripping the hat rack to steady her. Now she smoothed her tangled hair and pulled her housecoat closer about herself. “Come into the garden,” she said to the man. “You always think more clearly in the moonlight.” With a stern look at me, she added, “You stay there.”
I nodded readily.
The man in the felt hat seemed to notice me for the first time, and his frame stiffened.
“It’s my grandson,” said Grandmother, pushing the man ahead of her. “I told you he was here. Have you forgotten, or were you not listening again?” Her glance repeated her orders to me, and then the door closed.
I stood in the doorway of my room, bewildered. Even after three months, I knew so little about my grandmother. Apparently, this man was no stranger to her, and their conversations frequently took place by the light of the moon. Grandmother, who never went into the street by day without her headscarf and her collars buttoned, thought nothing of being outdoors in her nightclothes with this gentleman. My parents had mentioned no other relatives in the village.
The main-room windows looking out on the garden were shuttered at night. I considered opening the door just a crack—but I didn’t want to disappoint Grandmother again. I hovered on my threshold for a long time, then sat on my bed. For reassurance, I glanced at our family photo, but it was too dark to see us. Still, I knew we were all there, inside the frame, and my parents were smiling, my sister newly born.
The night was warm; summer had fully arrived, and it came with an airiness much more pleasant than the muggy nights in the city, where the heat took on garbage smells and lay heavy and still among the buildings. Grandmother’s front and back gardens were overrun with blossoms and aromatic trees. She was trying to teach me the names of them, but most flowers were as new and strange to me as the village. I suspected, moreover, that the names by which Grandmother knew them were not always their names as listed in books. I left my room’s shutters open at night, because I didn’t like pitch blackness. My window peered out over one of the fuchsia boxes. I could look at it without guilt now. One afternoon, out of the blue, as if reading my thoughts, Grandmother had said, “I was mostly angry at H —— that day.” (She meant Mrs. D ——; that was her first name.) “Using you like that—bah! She knew what she was doing.”
I sometimes crouched among the fuchsia, in the shaded gallery of the side yard, where the white and magenta blooms draped down from the box like a primeval jungle. Turning my head now, I could see the moon touching the treetops—only a few nights past full, and still mostly round.
After what seemed a long while, the back door opened again, and I returned to my open doorway.
“Get dressed,” Grandmother said, marching past me. “It will be light soon. We may as well start today early.”
“What’s happening?” I asked. “Who was—”
“Get the big shears and the brush knife,” she ordered. She paused in the door of her bedroom. “There’s a place you should see, anyway. I’ve been meaning to show you, and time is getting on. Today’s the day. Yes, you should come: I may need your help.”
“My help?”
“Get dressed.”
“But—” I was speaking now to her closed door. I could hear her bustling about on the other side. “But where are we going?”
Her words were hard to catch as she opened drawers and lifted squeaky lids. “You like your stories of the long-ago, don’t you? Curious and strange things—monstrous creatures?”
I held my breath and hurried closer to her room, my heart racing again. She’d closed the back door; our visitor was either gone or waiting outside.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, we’re going to the grove of monsters.”
* * * *
With the moon down, the night was very dark as we left by the kitchen door, let ourselves out by the back gate, and climbed through the steep field of arbors and the open meadow. From every side came the scent of living, growing things, so different from the city’s smells of dust, rust, and engine exhaust. Grandmother carried an old-fashioned lantern that she’d lifted down from a shelf and lit with a match. It smelled of heat and the oil it burned, and it threw a circle of golden light around us.
There was no sign of the man who’d come to our door. “That was Mr. Girandole,” Grandmother explained when I asked her again. “He’s a very old friend. He’s gone ahead of us.”
I was overawed by this sudden turn of events—we were really going up into the forest, the place I’d wondered about for so long. It crossed my mind that I might be dreaming, but everything was too detailed and continuous to be a dream. I could feel the tag of my shirt scratching against the back of my neck; occasional birds called. I didn’t want Grandmother to change her mind, so
I kept all questions to myself. Somehow, talking would seem intrusive in the night. Besides, I was burdened with a bucket, a metal pan inside it, and the garden tools Grandmother had asked for. She’d tied them in a canvas bundle and put other things from the kitchen into a large carpet bag while I dressed. The bag hung from her shoulder; in her free hand, she gripped her briar walking-stick. I marveled that we were doing this, all before Grandmother had had so much as a cup of tea.
The grasses glistened with dew that soaked my pant cuffs in no time and dampened my ankles, though my old leather shoes kept my feet dry. Mist flowed along the ground under the grape trellises. Insects sang all around us. The sky was a deep blue, sparkling with stars. I’d never seen so many stars in the city. By the time we reached the forest, I’d already seen two shooting stars flash and vanish.
I suppose it would have made sense to feel some kind of dread. But Grandmother was not afraid.
We didn’t follow a path. The lantern’s glow fell in warm swaths on the moss and leaves, sending shadows lurching among the trunks. We switched back and forth in the steeper places, sometimes coming to outcroppings of bare stone where Grandmother would perch for a while to rest. In one narrow ravine, tree roots formed a natural staircase. The mist floated thick in places, its frosty whiteness broken by glistening black trees.
Beneath the hem of her dress, Grandmother wore thick woolen stockings, and her feet were snugged in sturdy leather high-topped shoes that I suspected had once been my grandfather’s, though he had been dead for many years. Like most villagers, she was accustomed to walking. Had Grandmother lived in the city, I doubt she’d have considered taxis worth the fare.
As we progressed up the mountain, the stillness deepened. The voices of insects and night birds faded away, and even the wind ceased to stir leaves or creak the high boughs. I wondered if this solemnity always filled the last hour before sunrise, or whether it was because of the place. Were monsters watching us now, lurking beyond the lantern’s shine?
A Green and Ancient Light Page 2