by Steve Himmer
“He understood not needing to speak, and not having something to say all the time. So when your mother insisted you see a doctor about your new quiet, your father told her to wait, and he put his spoon down beside his bowl of soup—remember how big his bowl was!—and he looked you in the eyes and he asked if you needed a doctor. You didn’t say anything, you didn’t nod or shake your head, so your father told your mother no doctor was needed. And that was the end of that, wasn’t it?”
And that was also the end of her work for the day, because Mrs. Crane set the canvas against a tree trunk while she folded her easel and packed up her case. I climbed down from my branch and tried to look at the painting, but she turned it away from me and said, “What do you need to see that for? I’ve already told you your story.”
25
It occurs to me sometimes that there must be goings-on going on in the world, current events more current than the ones I remember. The last news I knew of was Mr. Crane’s downfall, if downfall is the right word. And even that, though it happened right here around me, I don’t know much about, not much at all. Only that he was here and then he was gone. The whole story must have been larger, more lurid, played out across TV and papers and blogs. None of which reached me up here, and I can’t say I mind. I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it before, because my life went on more or less as it was; I had to provide my own food, set my own schedule, but I stayed in the garden and, if anything, my life became simpler once I was alone. I wondered, of course, where he’d gone, but only in the most general way—I never concerned myself with the specifics.
I might have felt a bit lonely, at first, in such a vast space without even Mr. Crane and his mansion, but lonely for what? Not for the life I’d left behind, a life no less solitary but far less satisfying than the one I live now. Lonely, perhaps, for some idea of what I had once expected my life would be like, or what I’d thought other people’s might be. A useless, distracting loneliness, in other words, a longing for things that didn’t exist. And what I had gained for giving up all of that, what had been granted to me in its place… I would have given up so much more had so much more been demanded of me. If all this hadn’t come as a gift.
I lay in bed last night in the dark—the real dark, not the dark of my eyes—and asked the scribe if we knew anything more of Mr. Crane’s fate, if there were clues I hadn’t considered, but no, there was nothing. We only know what we know, the known knowns. Whatever happened to my employer, I knew as little of what happened right here at his home as I did of what was to come, the courts of law and of public opinion that must have held session, and for all I know he deserved what he got—I don’t know what he was accused of, or if he’d done it, so perhaps it was something awful. Or not. I’d like to think that it wasn’t, and that Mr. Crane is free somewhere else, away from these acres he left behind, perhaps living in his own cave in some other forest.
Should I have wondered? Should I have taken an interest when he was still here, an interest in him, in his wife? In Smithee? I wasn’t being paid to take an interest in them—I was being paid for the opposite, even—but now whatever questions I may come to wonder about are never going to be answered whether I want them to be or not. What did I owe Mr. Crane, a job well done or more than that? Now that he’s gone, now that he’s given me this, I owe him a life well-lived, so that’s what I’ve tried to accomplish in the years since his departure. I’ve thought, at times, that I knew just what that meant: a life of desperate quiet and sharp attention, of solitude and self-sufficiency, secure from the ups and downs of the world that are always, always the same however they change, and because of that are never worth knowing.
There was a war underway when I entered this garden, economic collapse on the horizon and the prospect of worse years to come. Maybe they have come, and maybe they haven’t; the world for me is like that cat in a box that might be alive but might be dead, and until the box opens is somehow neither and both.
I don’t want to know what’s become of the world, but some days I wonder. I wonder in the safety of knowing I’ll never find out, like playing a game. In the morning, most often, as I sit on my cave and watch the sun rise I imagine it glancing off clean cars and black top and tanning pale skin at the beach. I prefer to think it’s all gone on the same without me, that my absence was swallowed like some lost explorer in quicksand—visible one moment, vanished the next, and the surface settled back into order as if it was never disturbed.
I suppose I imagine the world as a river in which I’ve settled onto the bottom, the Old Man’s reach flowing from one pole to the other and around the equator and washing across everything in between. He taught me another way to be in the world, to be still and small and quiet in ways I never had been. Not that I’d ever been noisy or taken up very much space, but my insignificance had come from being anxious, being nervous or distracted or worried about looking busy, looking important, looking like somebody other than who I was. The Old Man, the days I spent afloat on the river, eyes open or closed, anchored by fallen trees or my toes in the sand, showed me that insignificance could be intended. That I was already dwarfed by the clouds and the trees and, most of all, by the river, so why pretend not to be? Why trouble myself to be something larger than I could possibly be?
I had the river, or the river had me; there was quiet and calm and there was the cave. There was the house on the hill and the appearance of food in the niche in my wall twice a day, and most of all there was time. Time enough, at last, for nothing at all. Time to think. And then the house and the meals and the Cranes were all gone, but I still had all that time. Maybe even more of it.
And it went on that way until the hikers arrived, but I know now—or I can admit what I’ve known all along—that it would have changed with or without them. Without my eyes, once they’re really gone and not just slowly going, I will be swallowed up by quicksand, too. I will get lost some day or the next, and wander in circles with nothing to eat until I give up and lie down and die. Or go the wrong way and find myself out in that world beyond mine, which would be just about the same thing.
This morning I went to my garden as always, after my breakfast and after my swim. I crept past their tent quietly on my comfortable, much-improved crutch, thinking they were asleep—they seem to be recovered from their mushroom ordeal, but still sleeping more than usual, still healing perhaps. But when I passed the bright bulb of their tent and went behind the barrier of blackberry brambles—every year they grow thicker and creep closer up to my garden, and every year I spend more time breaking and trimming and burning them back from the edge of my field—when I moved past the bushes and past the strange, clean-scraped circle on the ground by their camp (something I hadn’t spotted before, and noticed first with my bare feet), I heard them at work in my garden. One blur—him, I think—in the carrots, hunched over and weeding. And her with my watering can—I could tell because it was made from a dried and hollowed-out almost neon green gourd, and even its blur stood out against everything else—dowsing the thirsty young corn.
No one else has worked in my garden, no other hands have planted or weeded or watered my crops. No one else has even been in it, not since it was truly mine. Inside I raged despite myself, despite knowing in some smaller part of my mind that I need other hands if I’m going to survive. My hands balled into fists, then relaxed, then they tightened again, as confused as the rest of me was—it was clear they were helping, or thought they were. It was clear they were sharing the burden of work, but it was my work, in my garden, and not a task I wanted to share.
But maybe, I thought, as that quieter voice spoke up for itself, maybe the sharing, the intrusion, the arrival of these hikers into my garden, is what the Old Man has directed, and their work this morning is his loudest message to me. I won’t know without more reflection, until I’ve spent more time on the river in thought, but in the meantime what could I do but go on with routine, do what I do every day? Go on, at least, with what I think I do every day—lately
, with all these disruptions, it’s been hard to tell and I often worry I’m getting things wrong, changing my routine from one day to the next because I’m unable to keep it all straight.
So I stepped into the rows of the garden and I firmed up the stakes for my beans and tomatoes. I guided the pumpkins on their prickled vines back into their corner and out of the peas they were chasing again. Always. Every year they roll into the neighboring patch, and every year I roll them out. And though my hands can work without eyes after doing this work for so long, I did everything slowly, as I always have. I savored each turned scoop of soil and each seed tucked into it and every pumpkin rolled out of the peas. And though I didn’t ask the hikers to pay attention, I willed them to notice, to see what I was doing and how, and to learn how to care for this garden. I can’t say if they were watching, or went on doing things their own way. But whatever they did, and however they did it, it dawned on me that the hikers weren’t speaking any more than I was, and that I hadn’t heard them speak at all, in fact, for a few days—not since their laughter while picking the poisonous mushrooms and complaining while they were sick. Did it mean something, I wondered, or had they just run out of words for a while?
And like that we worked through the morning, the three of us side by side in the field, each bent toward the ground and getting on with what had to be done for life to go on in this garden.
26
Every morning I emerge from my cave to stretch and scratch in its mouth and to present the performance of my regular wake-up routine to the world. First I lean left, hands on my hips, and push until my spine pops. Then the same to the right, before raising my arms up over my head and straining my body to reach as high as it can, up past the top of the cave’s mouth toward the always blue, always untouchable sky. The ritual hasn’t changed much over time, but the more mornings I’ve done it, the longer I’ve lived in this garden, the louder my body becomes: my back, my knees, my gas and my groans, everything is louder than it was long ago but my voice. I’m not sure I’d have a voice left if I tried to speak, or if it’s atrophied over time and left behind little but a weak whisper. Perhaps someday I’ll give it a try just to know, but not yet.
I went about breakfast as always, and climbed to my rooftop in time for sunrise and spent some time after the sky was lit blue with my eye on two squirrels who were chasing each other from branch to branch, from tree to tree, chattering and chirping and tsktsking each other before they finally got down to the business of mating far out on a thin branch that rose and fell so vigorously I thought it might break with the weight of their passion. But no, the branch held, the squirrels had their moment, and perhaps the next generation was secured for my garden.
They finished and went their separate ways—for the morning, I wondered, while gathering food, or had they parted for good?—and I thought back to another morning, other moments soon after sunrise, when Mrs. Crane came with her easel and paints. I moved to climb down from my cave but she said no, I should stay where I was, she would paint me there, in the first light of day. My face must have signaled that the sunrise had already ended, because she explained she would paint it from memory and imagination. Which was, I suddenly realized, what had been missing from my own paintings, and it seemed so obvious now—I’d been so caught up in giving Mr. Crane exactly what was in his garden that I never thought to paint the garden other than it was at the moment I painted. I’d been too caught up in the truth to get anything done.
“That’s what I do, Finch, haven’t you noticed? I pretend that things are what they aren’t. I pretend everything is what I want it to be so I won’t have to face what it is. That’s what I’m told, anyway.” She sighed, loud enough that it carried up to me on my cave. “It won’t be hard to paint a sunrise not so long after it’s happened, not for someone whose whole life is pretend.”
She didn’t seem quite herself, that particular morning, and in retrospect I suppose I knew something would happen. Her shoulders drooped, her whole body drooped—not really, of course, a body like that couldn’t droop, but she carried herself like she was tired or bowed under weight. She painted quickly, with sharp, violent stabs of her brush. She didn’t talk to me at all while she worked, which wasn’t our normal routine. We worked a long time that day, and I found posing difficult because of her anger, the sour mood she radiated right up to me overhead. She kept me on edge, made me skittish and easily startled, and it was hard to fully focus on the nothing of what I was doing. She was still working when I became hungry for lunch, and when my body and mind both longed for their swim. She was still working as the sun blazed from yellow to orange; the ribbons of pollution in the sky to our west, out over the valley and ocean beyond, blossomed in purple and pink. It was the longest I’d posed at one time, the longest I’d ever held still, and as much as my body was screaming and sore and as much as I longed for my swim (and now wouldn’t have it, as late as it was), I was pleased with myself and my effort, my effort at expending no effort at all and my accomplishment of sitting still for so long.
And Mrs. Crane had painted as long as I’d sat. She looked exhausted, her hair come undone and imperfect, one strap of her overalls hanging down on her arm, her face smeared with sweat and with paint, and the back of her neck badly sunburned—she looked a long way from the actress I’d seen on TV, or from the first time I’d seen her walking toward me down the hill, in the mist of the morning with a pail at her side. And I noticed now, at the end of our day and in fading light, that her toenails weren’t even painted. I imagined the ways I might ask how she was, how I might ask if she was all right or if there was anything wrong. I imagined how Mr. Crane might ask her himself, and the conversations they might have that evening up in their big house, but then I stopped because I never liked to picture the inside of the house or to be reminded the big house was up there at all.
“What’s here for you, Finch?” she suddenly asked, her old question again, and in thinning sunlight it was like her voice came out of the dark, disembodied. “What’s here for any of us, except him? I don’t know how you can stand it. I can’t, not anymore, not all alone. It’s too lonely here. Too far from town, too far from my friends. My family. My life. I should have gone back to my life a long, long time ago.”
I think now, so long after the fact, that I knew she was telling me something. That I knew she was asking me something, or inviting me to ask her. When my scribe reminds me what happened, how that final conversation of mine with Mrs. Crane came and went, I can’t help but think I knew there was more to it than I let myself know—she must have known she was leaving, she must have already realized that change was awhirl in the world, a tornado sweeping across the estate, but had I?
How could I know, in my cave, in my silence, deep down in doing my job? Then again, how could I not?
I wonder, too, if I could have kept her from leaving. Maybe if I’d made a sign, or offered a gesture to show I understood what she was telling me. Just so she knew I was listening. But why would I have done that, and why would she have wanted to stay? She said she had a life to get back to, and I wouldn’t have kept her from that so she could hang around talking to someone who wouldn’t talk back. She was right: I can’t imagine what there was for her here, and there would be even less with her husband gone as, by then, she must have known he would be. And I don’t think she understood what there was here for me, she never saw what I saw, and I wasn’t going to speak; she’d said once she thought she would make a good hermit, and once I’d almost agreed, but I suppose both of us were wrong. I wasn’t going to risk my place in the garden—if I did know that trouble and changes were coming, I wasn’t aware that I knew it. I was living too much in the moment, living like there were no past and no future and focused only on spending each day in the garden as if my contract would never be up. She had a life to go back to, she said, but I had a life to preserve and a job to be done.
We stood in the half-dark of the garden as the lights of the big house above us came on one after ano
ther, like a fire was burning its way through one room at a time.
“Good night, Finch,” she said, and I realized that while I’d been thinking she’d packed up her paints. And Mrs. Crane walked away up the hill for the very last time, though I didn’t yet know it would be.
The evening drew the color out of her shadow in just a few seconds, and I watched her silhouette move off into the distance and dark. Then I climbed down and was surprised, but not really, to find my dinner steaming and ready to eat in my cave; it had arrived while I sat right above it, presumably by Smithee’s invisible hand. More surprising was that Mrs. Crane’s painting was in my cave, too, left behind and propped on my bed where I’d be sure to see it. It was dark in the cave, lit only by a small torch that stuck out of the nook on my wall where I’d wedged it, but I could make out enough of the painting to be confused.
It was me, on the cave as expected, but I didn’t look much like myself. She’d captured my beard hanging over my chest, and my body looked accurately skinny and filthy and raw from all my scratching and scabs. But she’d painted me feathered, and crowned my head with a white plumage crest. And the sun wasn’t rising behind me so much as it was bleeding, the colors the same as the ones in the sky, but somehow she’d made them look violent. And she’d painted the house, over my shoulder, but as she’d painted it had actually stood over hers. Mr. Crane was there, too, though we hadn’t seen him that day. He was walking down the hill from the house in his usual gray suit, trailing a wake of money and blood, and leaving a dead, yellow swathe in the lawn.