by Steve Himmer
I realize now that there was something to what Smithee said, though it’s taken a long time to see it behind the screen of his confusing—at the time—rage. Which was all I could see at the time.
Smithee laughed, a cold laugh, a laugh that sounded like resignation and revenge at once. Then he stepped toward me again and, despite myself, I backed away.
“I was going to say that it will all change for you now. But I’ve just realized it probably won’t, not with all the money he’ll give you. You’ll go on playing your games someplace else while the rest of us go look for jobs.”
Smithee advanced while he spoke, but he stopped at the crate of tools I’d dragged over and knocked open the lid with the toe of his shiny black shoe. He looked down, then reached into the crate and pulled out a hammer. “Maybe,” he said.
I looked around, knowing that Mr. Crane’s cameras were watching, wondering if he was paying attention or if anyone was. Hoping there was someone up there in the house who saw what Smithee was doing, or what I thought he was going to do. Hoping they’d come running down from the house to step in, and maybe they would be able to tell me what it had all been about. But if someone was watching, they didn’t come.
Smithee kept moving closer and I continued backing away, and we could have gone on like that for a while, making our way around the garden hour after hour like some kind of boring performance. But he raised the hammer up to his shoulder, as if he was going to swing—or more like he was going to throw the hammer out into the grass, which turned out to be better for me, because in that instant a howling came from behind me, a long, low howl I knew well.
Jerome charged toward Smithee, his whole body bounding so hard that the ground shook beneath and the tools rattled and clacked in their crate. He wanted to play, he’d seen Smithee’s gesture and thought the hammer was about to be thrown the way I threw him sticks—he wasn’t much of a cat, as I’ve said—and so here he was. But Smithee didn’t know what Jerome’s approach meant, and instead of throwing the hammer he turned and he ran, away from the cave toward the river with Jerome on his tail. I watched the two of them vanish over the hill, past the hives, and listened to Jerome’s howl fading into the distance.
I’d been frightened, I realized after the fact, as soon as Smithee was gone. In the moment, when he was before me and threatening violence, I’d been too confused to know what I was feeling. I needed a moment to think about it, and as I sank onto the stump by my dormant fire ring my body quivered with all the leftover fear and adrenaline and whatever else I was feeling.
At the time, and for a long time after, I only thought Smithee was crazy, that his attack—does it really count as an attack?—had nothing to do with me, really. And once things had changed in the garden, once I knew what he must have already known, I assumed he was angry about losing his job. But now, after thinking about it for all these years, after asking the scribe to remind me what happened again and again, I know there’s more to it than that. I know he was right, in some ways, about the bubble I lived in and the illusion of my self-reliance. But all that did change, and part of me wishes Smithee had been here to see it. And part of me is glad that he wasn’t, because Jerome wasn’t here any longer to intervene on my behalf. Because neither the lion nor the butler ever came back after running away down the hill, though I did find the hammer in the grass later on.
Losing Jerome as a friend was the bigger disappointment, perhaps my biggest in all the changes that came in those days. Even after I was alone here, I held onto a nostalgic image of Jerome and myself in the garden. It would have been poetic, the two of us side by side, never talking but always knowing the mind of the other. Had I been able to choose a companion, I think I would have chosen Jerome. He had his difficult moments, but in our time together we’d come to understand each other as well as I’ve known anyone in my life.
Then again, his medication would have worn off and run out, and he might not have behaved the way I recall—better to be left with the friendship I remember and have no doubt distorted, than to be shredded by the claws of a lion. Perhaps Mr. Crane knew that, perhaps he thought of it first, and had Jerome taken away. He might be in a nature preserve with other lions somewhere—that doesn’t sound so bad for him. Or perhaps he chased Smithee down out of these hills, into the city, and is wandering the alleys somewhere like any other stray cat.
30
The last morning of my first new life, the end of my first life in this garden, began like every other morning had for a long time. Breakfast and tea, sunrise on top of my cave, my swim and reflections, and into my vegetable field for the day’s labor. The day didn’t feel any different, and I had no warning there would be change—no ominous weather or murder of crows the way I might expect if I were in a film, no heavy-handed music rolling out of the speakers that hid in the trees, none of that. Just the river, the garden, and me going about being me as always, as ever.
But it changed, it all changed, as I was re-staking a tomato vine that had shot up beyond the control of its too short post—I’d only recently realized that the plants might be staked, that they might grow better supported, but hadn’t yet found the appropriate height for the sticks I shaved with my chisel and plane, and tied with braids of long grass from the banks of the river.
Then there it was, there he was, Mr. Crane’s voice through the speakers, rumbling and buzzing and crackling out of the trees, shaking loose birds who burst into flight, up out of my pestered rows (and sometimes I wish now those speakers still worked, to drive the birds from my crops).
“Finch,” he boomed from above and below both at once, from speakers in the branches and brambles. “Listen. This is important.”
As if in that moment I could hear anything but his voice.
“I’m leaving. It’s all over here. I only have a short time until I need to go.”
Go where, I wondered, what was he talking about, but even if I had asked he wouldn’t have heard (or maybe he would have—there were microphones, too, after all—but I didn’t ask outside my head).
“My wife has already left, and so have the staff. Smithee went sometime last night, and he was the last.” He sighed, and a few seconds of crackling hung in the air, tense like a record player had started up and the world was waiting for music. “I don’t blame them,” he said. “They did what I paid them for, and I gave them what they were owed. There’s nothing left for them here.
“I’ve taken care of you, too, Finch. There’s nothing to worry about. I’ve honored our contract. The full amount plus a bonus has been deposited into your bank account, the one we set up when you were hired. You can claim it whenever you want to, even before the rest of your seven years has been served.”
My stomach sank like a rock in the river, and I fell onto my knees. I was being expelled from the garden. He was pushing me into a world that I didn’t miss. I’d lived here as if I wouldn’t have to leave, I’d found the place I belonged, and it was about to be wrested out of my hands.
“But listen, Finch. You don’t have to leave. You don’t have to go anywhere. I’ve called in some favors, and when they take everything else they won’t be touching the garden.”
The relief of those words made me almost more overcome with nausea than the first shock had done, but he went on, so I listened and held my quivering stomach in check.
“The garden, the whole estate, has gone into a trust. It can’t be taken or altered in any way, unless it’s by you. It won’t be on maps, there won’t be a driveway or road, and I’ve had my landscapers raise cliffs and create barriers on the edge of the property, to discourage any intrusions. And you have been assigned a legally binding lifetime right of occupancy. So it’s up to you—you can stay for as long as you want to, or you’re welcome to leave any time and be a rich man.” He paused, and the whole world was silent except for the hum of his speakers, then the ratcheting rumble as he cleared his throat came like thunder.
“You don’t have to decide now. You don’t have to decide at
all, Finch. You have the rest of your life. And thank you.”
Then the speakers were as silent as everything else, for a very, very long moment. Then birds began chattering about what had occurred, and bugs buzzed again, and the wind returned to the trees. A soft splash fluttered up from the river and into my ears, and I sat on the ground looking uphill toward the house, at the dark upstairs window, wondering if he was behind it, where he was going and why, and what had just happened to me.
For once I had known what I wanted, exactly what I wanted, and I had—in my own idle way—worked as hard as I could to obtain it. And somehow, for some reason, it worked. The life I had found here would still be mine.
But why? I wondered if I should go up there, if I should knock on the door and ask. Or give him a handshake or hug. What would he do now, fire me for talking? The terms of my contract were broken, by Mr. Crane and not by me, and I supposed I could talk if I wanted to. I supposed I could do whatever I liked.
But he was my boss, not my friend. He didn’t need questions or concern from me. Friendship wasn’t the job I’d been hired for, and he had given too much for me not to do what he asked now. So I did what I had been doing since entering my cave, and what I have done ever since: I sleep and I wake and I garden and I swim, and I sit by the fire and I sleep again.
It was a shock the next morning when food didn’t come to my cave. At first I thought breakfast was late, but it wasn’t late, it was over. Like he’d said, the servants were gone and only I was still there—and perhaps Mr. Crane, if he hadn’t left yet, though I didn’t expect him to walk down with my breakfast even if he was in the house. But I was well-supplied by my garden, I had plenty to eat on my own.
In time, after a few weeks perhaps, I was disturbed at work in my garden by a great rumble from up at the house and turned to see wrecking balls knock it down. And in what seemed like no time it was gone, the hill bare as if it had never borne the concrete footprint of a mansion at all, and I was truly, completely alone.
The first thing I did was peel off my tunic, to parade my nude self through the grass and the garden and trees, past inert cameras and speakers and microphones, and I’ve never put that cursed garment onto my body again; it’s withering now on the sticks of my useless scarecrow.
In my first days alone, I went through the motions. I climbed to my cave top and went to the river, I worked my garden because I needed to eat. I learned—slowly—to fish, and through trial and error, but mostly error, to clean and to cook what the river provided. But I thought constantly about Mr. Crane’s words, about what he’d said through the speakers before he was gone: I was a millionaire now, I could leave, I could do almost whatever I wanted. I might have had enough money to build another garden like this one, another cave, in some other place if I wished. Anything I’d ever dreamed of was small, simple, and unambitious, and now I could afford all of it if I decided to leave Mr. Crane’s… my garden.
If I decided to leave and go back to the world and the valley and city, with its traffic and TV and cubicles—not that I’d need to work in one ever again.
Without Mr. Crane’s notes and directives to break up my days, they all ran together like a pool of still water, growing murkier the longer it sat. Sometimes it rained, sometimes I caught cold, but mostly the days ran together, and if not for the constant needs of my garden, which was really just my need to eat, I might have even grown bored.
Maybe I did, a little.
I spent the better part of a week weaving a welcome mat from reeds and rushes and grass I chose from the banks of the river, not for any particular reason, not because I expected a guest, but because having a project—even one as pointless as a welcome mat for a home without visitors—filled up my days.
Then one afternoon on the river, while I watched what might have been the nine hundredth lion-shaped cloud I’d seen since I came to the garden, a voice spoke to me. No, not a voice, that wasn’t it… the words, or their meaning, were in my head, but even without being spoken aloud it was the voice of a very old man. And I knew right away that he was the river, that his was the comforting presence I’d felt that long ago morning trapped under the ice. The calm hand that had guided me through growing my first crop of beans and had taught me how to sit still. He’d been there all along, all over the ground and up in the trees and across the skin of the river, but he’d never once spoken until I thought I had been left alone and he revealed to me that I hadn’t.
He told me I had more to do in this garden. He told me I wasn’t done, that I should do more than just grow my carrots and beans and potatoes. I should create new ones, I should cross one vegetable with another, cross fruits with fruits, and bring something into the world. Something more than the boredom that had begun creeping in.
So I did. I took his direction and spliced carrots and parsnips together and slipped them anxiously into the ground. I wedged cloves of garlic inside small potatoes, in hopes of pre-flavored spuds. I tried to make blackberry apples and strawberry pears—and I thought back to my inept paintings—and most of my experiments failed to grow altogether. But there were exceptions, successes encouraging me to go on—the carsnip being the first—and there was the Old Man, my constant companion though he hardly spoke more than I did. He was always over my shoulder, he was always watching my hands at their work, and guiding me in my tasks. Revealing the world to me one secret after another. A mentor. A manager.
If I’d felt a few weeks of boredom, if I’d felt for a moment I’d seen all there was in this green world of mine, I was far from such foolish thoughts now. I could never grow tired of this place and the fresh mysteries it serves up every morning, arrayed in the soft light of sunrise and all within reach of my cave.
31
Those hikers I hid from have stayed, and it looks like they plan to keep staying. This morning I returned from my swim in the river to find them at work by their tent, on the round patch cleared of grass I spotted in their campsite yesterday morning. The circle seems to have been dug down a few inches or maybe a foot—I stuck an arm in to feel for its depth while they wandered away—and they’ve ringed it with the stones they dragged up from the river. They must have worked through the night, by the golden glow of the headlamps they wear (how I hope for those batteries to wane!), and I wonder why I didn’t hear it. Now he’s adding another layer of rocks while she encircles the inside of the ring with tall branches broken from trees in the garden—that explains the pile of bark and small twigs I came across on my way to the river, and I think those branches were also the base of the sledge with which they hauled stones up the hill and crushed that long stripe of grass.
So they’re building a hut, they’re going to stay, and who’s to say that they shouldn’t? There isn’t another cave for them here, only mine, so I suppose they have to build something, and at least they have no power tools to tear up the quiet and calm of my home. Most of the time, those two are pretty quiet themselves. I haven’t heard them speak since their mushroom hunting—have they given it up altogether, or is it only when I’m in earshot?
They don’t appear to have brought any tools, except for a knife with a thick, heavy handle they’re passing back and forth to share as a hammer. And here’s me in my cave, sitting on top of a whole box of tools that I’ll no longer be able to use once my vision has faded completely. All the tools Mr. Crane left me, revealing them to me one at a time as I built my life in this garden, all the tools those hikers will need to build here a life of their own. I’ve been sitting on this box most of the morning, waiting for the Old Man to tell me I should drag it out, share my tools with the hikers, or that I should push it back into the shadows of my own home and keep the secret all to myself.
I sit here as if he hasn’t already answered, as if my mind is not already made up and is still mine to make. I won’t be able to drag the tools to them, not with my knee as swollen and sore as it is. There’s no way I’ll be able to reach them without doing myself greater harm. But I’ll pull the toolbox as far as
I can, beyond the dark mouth of my cave and out into the sunlight where the hikers will see it. I’ll find some way to get their attention and make them look in my direction, lead them to discover what I have to share—the tools they will need, and the tools I will need them to use if I am to go on with something at all like the life I’ve been living.
But not yet. First I’m going to sit here by myself, alone for another moment or two, before the brambles creep into my cave and the clatter of metal on stone and the clamor of building drowns out the hum of the bees.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Big thanks to my parents and brothers, for indulging my daydreamer’s mind, and to my wife, Sage, and daughter, Gretchen, for living with it. To Michelle Bailat-Jones and Laura McCune-Poplin, the best first readers and friends a person could want, and to Tom McCarthy, Rick Reiken, Michael Kindness, Peter Grandbois, William Walsh, Lise Haines, and Jessica Treadway for their support. To Nora Fussner at Pindeldyboz, Roxane Gay at PANK Magazine, Amber Sparks at Emprise Review, Laura Ellen Scott at Everyday Genius, Matt Bell at The Collagist, and Steven Seighman at Monkeybicycle for publishing excerpts, and to Jeanne Holtzman, Kevin Fanning, Rob Kloss, and Erin Fitzgerald for reading along the way. Also to Meng-hu, host of the invaluable Hermitary.com, Tony Robinson of The Worst Jobs In History, and AKM Adam for the inspiration, and of course thanks to Dan Cafaro, Libby Kuzma, Lindsey Kline, Jamie Keenan, and Angela Gabriel at Atticus Books. In memory of Checkers, who always knew when I needed a walk to think about the next bit of writing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Himmer’s stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he edits the online journal Necessary Fiction. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston, where he also earned his MFA, and he has a website at http://www.stevehimmer.com. The Bee-Loud Glade is his first novel.