Women always forget what they don’t want to remember, and remember what they don’t want to forget. In the end the dream is the truth. I wonder, “Did you have many suitors?”
She seems to stare over my shoulder back into time. “Oh, yes, I had many beaus.”
“Why’d you pick Granddaddy?”
“I liked him the best.”
“When did Granddad resurrect the hummingbird?”
“Oh, it was long after the girls were gone.” Nanny brings her gaze to my face and smiles. “Probably in the sixties. You know, Cage, time means so little to me anymore. Time flies by so fast now. I’m so lucky. Most old people sit around with nothing to do. I don’t have time to catch my breath. There is always a chore around the house or at my desk. It seems like Christmas was yesterday and tomorrow will be Easter.”
After breakfast, as I am scraping the bits of egg and toast on top of last night’s collard greens and chicken bones into a plastic bucket, Nanny asks with a slightly tentative note in her cheerful voice, “Do you want to feed Sam this morning?”
I laugh loudly at my pitiful condition. “You mean since yesterday was the first time in three months I was able to make it all the way out the door and down the steps and across the yard?”
“It’s good to hear you laugh again. I missed that sound. You had the most wonderful laugh as a little boy. You were the most merry little elf, more than all my grandsons.” Nanny sets her hands on the table and slowly pushes herself up.
I set the plates in the sink and pick up the bucket. “Wish me luck.”
“I’ll come as far as the back steps.” Nanny takes down Nick’s old Kappa Sig windbreaker off the hook by the door to the back porch. “I want to see the February gold.” I slide the two chains off the heavy wooden door, then unlock the glass storm door and hold it open for Nanny to step into the shadows of the back porch, where the screen walls are shuttered for the winter.
“Oh, how beautiful, how gorgeous, my, my.” Nanny shades her eyes with one hand, looking at the golden field of daffodils stretching back a hundred yards toward the wide black lake and then the gray wooded hills at the bottom of the blue sky. “Like a golden cashmere blanket. You know they’ve been here forever. I think as long as the Cages. I planted some in the thirties, but they were here long before.”
I smile and walk through the yard. Coming around the corner of the house, the crow sees me and dives off its perch, calling, Caw, caw, caw! It lands on a sycamore, screams and flies again, circles me twice, and touches down on the top of a cedar that resembles a tall green flame. At the edge of the lawn the strands of old barbed wire are barely visible, running through young cedars and dogwood along the property line. Screaming, the crow dive-bombs within an inch of my hand on the bucket handle. I pour the scraps at the bottom of a fence post, where a few bones remain from yesterday. Hidden by the wall of bristly cedars, something bounds through the woods, crashing through the thick bush. Startled, I clench the bucket and restrain the urge to run. Breathe in. Breathe out the paranoia. It’s just deer. Shivering in the cold, I jog across the yard, back up the steps, and into the house.
“Did you chain the door?” Nanny asks from her heavy electric reclining chair by a big, ugly gas heater set in the fireplace of her sitting room.
“Yes, ma’am, but even if I hadn’t, I think we’re pretty safe at dawn way out here in the country.”
“Cage, there have been invasions. Not a mile away, some young men just burst into a home and robbed the family on a Sunday morning,” Nanny says urgently as if to a stubborn child. “With so many people on drugs these days, nowhere is safe. You must always lock the doors.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Nanny nods and looks back at CNN, where Senator John McCain says, “Remember all the establishment is against us. This is an insurgency campaign. I’m just like Luke Skywalker trying to get out of the Death Star. They’re all coming at me from everywhere.”
“Nanny, would you like for me to drive you into town?”
She smiles and her eyes light up as if she’s just witnessed a miracle. “Why, Cage. What a wonderful surprise.”
“Yeah. I feel like Forrest Gump today,” I say. “Brave enough to face Wal-Mart.” Every citizen of Thebes, every pedestrian, every shopper and uniformed employee, will be watching me, judging me, aware of what a freak I am, but I will breathe through the terror, dispel the delusions like bad breath, and walk on down the aisle.
Nanny laughs delightedly as the recliner back rises with an electric whir. “Oh boy, I won’t have to wait till Thursday to pick up a new humidifier.”
Harper
I wake up around five about to wet my bed from the gallon of water that I drank to dilute the coming hangover. There is a dream vivid in my head. My great-grandmother Madora was behind the wheel of a Mercedes convertible. I was overjoyed to see her because she’s been dead for so many years. I jumped in and hugged her, saying, I’m so happy to see you. And I started crying. I noticed in her handbag a book that said Hannibal on the spine, saw it twice, once up close, like a camera zoom.
She said, You can’t know someone in death.
No? I asked.
She shook her head and said, But I’ll be your little friend.
I got the sense that she would always be there to comfort me. In the backseat was my grandfather Rutledge, stooped over, like when he was dying of cancer, but with black hair that I’d only seen in old photographs. When I leaned over the seat, he sat up straight and said, I’m growing now. Madora waved as they drove off, leaving me in a Baton Rouge bar called South Downs, where the dream turned suddenly to black-and-white. The bar was full of high school friends, and Nick’s friend Rowan Patrick was there with President Clinton. I joined a greeting line and spoke to Clinton in the flash of many cameras. Caitlin and Betsy and five other girls I slept with surrounded me in plastic raincoats and I knew they were vampires and I left and was suddenly back in Technicolor in my father’s two-story paneled office and I went to his desk and saw two signed and rubber-stamped letters. I picked up an embossed stamp and impressed the letters, feeling I was doing something wrong, then I walked out a big arched window onto the balcony with the view of the Mississippi and the two humps of the bridge outlined in twinkling lights and Isabella Ballou was there in a fifties Sunday dress. She looked up at me and smiled and said, I thought you would never come.
The lights of the bridge changed into the lights of all the cities of earth far below. Isabella and I were in a gigantic Concorde, which I understood to be a sort of staging area for death. We had just died. The flight attendants wore futuristic plastic uniforms and little caps like the ones in Kubrick’s 2001. I asked one, So there is no consciousness after death? That’s right, she said pleasantly, adjusting my seat belt. But you have nothing to fear.
An old man originally from Atlanta who went to seminary at Sewanee before studying Jungian analysis in Switzerland, Dr. Pearce has a kind, bearded face and a fondness for western string ties. He never takes his eyes off me as I read my dreams from my Palm. This is my favorite hour of the week. It’s better than the grind of work and the mindless pursuit of excitement in nightclubs and always feels somehow cleansing. It is my confession. Dr. Pearce pulls the unlit pipe out of his mouth and asks, “So what do you make of it?”
“I woke up almost as if I was supposed to remember this one.” I yawn and stretch out on the leather easy chair. “Madora, my great-grandmother, was this very dignified, upright figure, so it’s interesting that she was driving the car. And Grandfather Rutledge was the opposite. He was handsome and charming and a philanderer who abandoned his family in the Depression. I think my father became a priest as a reaction to his father’s behavior. I think old Grandpa Rutledge is my shadow. He said he’s growing, which is sort of alarming. Then Clinton is clearly another image of my shadow—a celebrity sex addict.”
“Like your recurring Elvis impersonator.”
“Yep. And all the pretty girls—vampires, sirens calling out to
seduce me, who would drink my blood and trap me in the night world. Then I’m not sure about my father’s office—the rubber stamp and the embossed stamp.” I pause, picturing the stamps, struggling for associations.
“Are you carrying on the work of your father?” Dr. Pearce suggests. “Are you seeking his authentic approval, not simply his rubber-stamped approval?”
“Definitely only his rubber-stamped approval—his approval of my income,” I say. “He would be disgusted, literally nauseated, if he knew what a sexual glutton I am.”
“Whom do you think your great-grandmother represents, assuming that she is symbolic of a component of your psyche? She drives up in an expensive sports car to ‘comfort’ you?”
“Anima? My undeveloped femininity?”
“Great-grandmother,” Dr. Pearce says slowly. “The great mother. And Hannibal? The dream zoomed in on that word.”
“Hannibal the Cannibal, the serial killer who eats his victims,” I say quickly.
“The Great Mother, your little friend, will eat you alive.” Dr. Pearce looks hard at me, waiting several seconds for me to say something, goes on, “Then, passing through your father’s workplace, you are delivered to the lovely, chaste Miss Ballou and a peaceful vision of the night.” Dr. Pearce rises, heading with his empty cup for the espresso machine.
“As if by following my father’s ethical code I will attain a girl that I can love and a sense of peace?”
Dr. Pearce turns back to me and nods almost imperceptibly.
“My unconscious is giving me moral advice?”
“In so many words.”
“But then we die. Twice I asked people—”
“Women, you asked women.”
“—if there is some form of life after death. Do you think my unconscious is telling me that there is not?”
“No, I think these are just expressions of your fear of death. Perhaps the death in the dream is a symbolic death.” The steamed coffee hisses through the tube into his cup. Dr. Pearce clears his throat. “The death of your old self, the death of your shadow, that you will have to survive if you are going to change your life.”
“You can kill off your shadow?”
Dr. Pearce laughs gently. “Most guys and gals never change. Some do through serious psychotherapeutic experience or near-death experience. Is this part of your psyche going to die and go away? No. You’re going to have to live with the son of a bitch for the rest of your life. The Elvis impersonator is pretty well entrenched and it’s going to take a while to be sure that he doesn’t get out. It’s going to be a slow, hard-fought battle.”
Suddenly I twig Madora’s words, You can’t know someone in death. You can’t know someone while you’re a creature of the night.
Cage
The early shrubs flower in March. The snow-on-the-mountain bushes pile up against the house like high drifts left after a winter storm. Around the columns supporting the porte cochere roof over the drive are yellow forsythia and white lilies. Along the five-foot-high stone foundation of the front porch are pink and blue hyacinths. At the edge of the front lawn, a shaggy row of burning bush—reddish pink and orange japonica—flickers in the wind like a wall of fire. Beyond, on the field of tall grass that rolls a quarter mile to the road, the tall oaks and elms are bare skeletons, and under their lowest branches dogwoods and redbuds tremble white and red. In the clear sky a V-shaped line of geese heads north. The murmur of a ceaseless stream of cars swooshing along the road reaches the front porch. Cage’s Bend is my Walden Pond. Thoreau’s cabin was only a stone’s throw from Concord and my little sanctuary is hemmed in by Nashville sprawl.
There’s a low diesel rumble from the gate, hidden behind a stand of cedars, and a minute later a tractor comes slowly up the drive. I go down the steps and along the walk to the flaming row of burning bush, nervous about meeting John Henry Clay, who is from a long line of farmers, the owner of the last big farm on the road, though he’s retired now and only keeps some cattle while his descendants wait for him to die so they can sell the property for millions. I used to duck-hunt on his ponds when I was twelve, thirteen. I haven’t seen him in years but he must have heard that I’m a nut. The old man’s weathered face looks severe as he rolls to a stop at the end of the walk. Nanny comes out on the porch and waves just as he cuts the throttle down to idle.
“Morning, Mr. Clay,” I say. “Thanks for coming.”
“Morning there, Cage.” He climbs down and takes off his faded Ford cap and waves it by the bill. “Morning, Mary Lee.”
“Good morning, John Henry,” Nanny calls from the porch. “Isn’t it a beautiful day? So much rain over the winter, bound to be a beautiful spring.”
“Yes, ma’am,” John Henry yells. “Everything is going to blossom like wildfire.”
“I can’t wait!” Nanny calls with delight.
John Henry laughs and says, “She sure is a sweet lady, your granny.”
“Yes, sir.” Looking at my feet, I wonder if he knows that years ago I got her to sell ten grand in stock, a huge hit for her, to keep Korean loan sharks in Nashville from killing me. I look back at John Henry’s craggy face. “Yes, sir, she sure is.”
“You go on in, Mary Lee. It’s too cold for a ninety-year-old lady to be standing politely on the porch.”
Nanny laughs. “What about an eighty-three-year-old man out driving a tractor in this wind?”
“Cage is going to till his own field. I’ll be in directly for coffee.”
Nanny waves and goes inside and immediately locks the winter storm door.
“So, son, you going to try your hand at farming?”
“More of a garden, really.” I look past him at Nanny now locking the glass French doors. “I worked on some organic farms out in California.”
“I hear out West they’re crazy about organic farming.” He stretches out the term sarcastically. “Hell, all it is is going back to the forties before we had good fertilizer and pesticides. I don’t know why they got such a fancy name. Might as well just call it primitive.”
“How ’bout natural?” I force my eyes to stay on his face.
“Cage, son, you can call it whatever you want. It’s going to be you toting buckets of cow shit around, not me.” John Henry laughs and claps me on the shoulder.
I try to smile. “I’ve got it staked out behind the house, down near the lake.”
“Then let’s get at it.” John Henry climbs back on the tractor.
At a slow jog I lead him past the house, past the ruins of the formal garden of tall hedges and a dry wishing pool, past the boarded cabin and the low foundation stones of three others to a flat stretch of crabgrass before the land slopes another hundred yards to the lake.
“Reckon you got about an acre and a half,” John Henry says from the tractor seat. “This is where the Cages always kept their kitchen garden.”
“When I was a little boy.”
John Henry nods. “Started long before that. About the time they built the new house, I imagine. The turn of the last century.”
“They were organic farmers.”
John Henry laughs and climbs down from the tractor, with the engine still idling. “Cage, you ever driven a tractor?”
“Yes, sir, in the summers at Rugby when I was a teenager.”
“That’s a mighty pretty place up there on the plateau,” John Henry says, squinting, then he smiles. “Well, I’m happy to let you borry it. I ain’t got much use for it anymore. Hardly use it at all.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Climb on up. You got your work cut out if you want to have it planted out by Easter.”
The old metal seat is worn silver except at the rust-brown edges. I sit astride the thrumming transmission and go through the pedals and handles and John Henry nods and says, “You still know your way around. Bring it back when you’re finished.”
“How are you getting home, Mr. Clay?”
“Call me John Henry. I’ll take the old path. If I’m lucky, I’ll see a pileated
woodpecker.” He turns abruptly and walks toward the back porch.
I lower the disks behind the tractor and commence to till the old garden for the first time in thirty years, ripping out the grass along the boundary between the stakes with the satisfying feeling of immediately seeing the results of the work, of finally being back at work after so many months. A few cedar waxwings dart over the field. Sam flies over and sits on a bare oak branch, watching from a distance. A plane circles over the lake, passing almost directly overhead. Is it looking at me? Strange synchronicity of flying objects—the waxwings, the crow, the plane, which is now coming from the lake back over Cage’s Bend. Listen to the sound of your breath coming in through your nose. Exhale. Tell yourself it’s just a plane. After plowing the perimeter I till the first row again, then tear up the grass in parallel rows, laying out the garden in my head, the seedbeds for corn, beans, peas, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, celery, garlic, eggplant, and even asparagus, a four-year commitment. One corner will be for a variety of lettuces, another for cut flowers—statice, purple cornflower, stock, nasturtiums. On the end by the lonesome faucet sticking up out of the open field, from a kit with a hooped metal frame and plastic, I’ll build a little greenhouse to start seeds. The wind drops and the sun feels warm on my face.
Sowing seeds, preparing the way for life to come, is like stepping forward in time. And then, in only a few revolutions of the world, before the oaks and elms are even showing leaves, the first shoots appear in the long straight rows raised between the furrows. My mind burrows beneath the soil like a mole, imagining the exploded seeds, the white net of little roots spreading deeper. The voice of a towhee darting over the garden is like a fine silver wire singing of the peace of wild creatures who cannot burden themselves with the forethought of grief or sins gone old unforgiven, and I see that to be at home in this world I must like a thrush travel beyond words, outside of regret and fear of the future.
At dawn, past tall cedars standing like guardians, I walk across the dewy grass into the rows of black mulch, careful not to break spiderwebs shimmering like sails between poles where tomato vines are starting to twine skyward. I stand looking at the first bunches of lettuce, half mature, thinking how my body will one day nourish the soil, how farmers embrace death yearly in the darkness of winter and come back with the lengthening light. My life stands in this place, rooted like the garden.
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