The Princess Gardener

by Michael Strelow

  And so I began to wonder how Alyssa and I could make the swap into two months…or longer? I didn’t dare think it: how could we make it permanent? Alyssa would have to love her new life as much as I loved mine. She’d have to love the pinching shoes and fake smiles and old men with their nose hair combed out into their moustaches. How could she? There was the banging around of guards to show they were vigilant, the flapping castle flag outside her window at night, the cold breakfast table in that ghastly, empty room instead of the warm farm kitchen. How could she, indeed?

  I wish I could bring dragons and monsters into this story. It would be so much easier to explain the world falling to pieces. We could have one medium-sized dragon eating an important person—wouldn’t matter who—and then everyone running around excitedly and the kingdom coming undone. The monsters and dragons that appear are only the kind that are pictures of what we imagine we’re afraid of. You know, what’s under the bed, in the closet, lurking in that shadow behind the old tree. These are the hardest dragons to slay because you can’t see them. And it turns out that sometimes the things we can’t see or, worse yet, the ones that are right there under our noses every day are the most dragonish!

  Dragon number one was a gentleman. At least that was his title in the world of the castle. Arbuckle Pemberton III was a cousin, twice removed (or maybe a second cousin once removed), of my mother. His only real problem was that he didn’t have enough to do. His whole life would have been saved if he had found a passion; even a silly pastime like collecting history would have saved him. But he had gone round the bend without even seeing that the road was curving. I grew up with Arbuckle lurking there in court, climbing up on chairs, being insolent, trying, oh trying so hard, to be a Someone in his distinguished and historic family of Someones.

  He had a rat face that contained an awful hole of a mouth. He was lipless as a lizard, and the lizard/rat combination startled people who were meeting him for the first time. But the zoo of his impression continued. He had long thin feet covered by rare, brightly colored leather sewn into shoes for him by the court cobbler. The effect was something startling too, as if half of his being had been turned under to prop up the rest of the menagerie that was his face. Ears? Oh, yes, like two bats unfolding from roosts. Hair that he’d purposely pompadoured into a tower and then powdered a gray-blue not seen in nature. And so the total effect was that natural and unnatural had joined into the perfectly absurd. When he wore his yellow shoes especially, he gave the impression that a paint pot had exploded nearby. I, and many others I assure you, snickered behind our hands as he paraded into sight with all the concocted confidence he could pretend to muster. A one-man parade on a holiday no one knew about. Not much of a dragon viewed this way, but dragons, it turns out, have many disguises.

  His role at court, he figured, was to set style. His ears, mouth, feet, hair and ears were actually quite normal if he had let them be. But each one was part of his plan to start a style in court. If you had been a fly on the wall of his bedroom in the early morning, you might have seen a perfectly pleasant young man sleeping in his bed. But when he woke, he powdered his hair, propped out his ears, painted his mouth into a hole, made his face rodent-like and tugged on a pair of his silly shoes. Ah, I’m sure he thought, looking at himself in his full-length mirror, there it is!—everyone will want to look like this soon.

  At court we watched him move quickly from chair to chair so as to appear to be everywhere at once, the faster to make his style seem unavoidable. And each day at court he would try to make a convert or two: shoes, ears, hair, makeup. But progress was slow, and if he, for example, had instead taken up hunting or horse racing or the plight of the unfortunate or education standards and practices, well, none of this style-pretending would have happened. Setting style was such time consuming and heroic work for him because of having to sell it daily to the largely disinterested court.

  But then he found a hobby—Alyssa. Something was not quite right about the princess, he noticed one day. Alyssa wrote down the discovery in her letter about the same time Jake had declared me a fake. It was somehow her eyebrows, or something. Somehow about her whole head, its shape maybe, its topography had changed. Anyway, Alyssa reported to me that he studied her and studied her from across the room. He even forgot to circulate from plush chair to plush chair in the court. What…was…it…about…her…? She was a young girl. They change. Every day. But… Alyssa said it was unnerving at first. She thought certainly he’d found her out. But his dressing weirdness combined with his new gawking weirdness combined with his overall unseemliness, well, the combination was tolerated at court since his family had been so prominent, so full of important people at one time. But his behavior was wearing out for everyone. And with it his standing at court.

  Then Arbuckle began to let his style campaign go by the wayside. He had less and less interest in the hard work of the pompadour, the bat ears, the rat face, because Alyssa began to take up all his concentration. What was going on with her, he obsessed? Alyssa reported that all his world seemed to come tumbling down: the courtiers paid him no attention without his style campaign, his rather regular features blended him into the court, and he failed to move chair to chair and so became more of a piece of furniture himself than a person of substance.

  And here is where I have to fill in what I think happened because Arbuckle was not a stupid person, just one who didn’t have enough to do and so had gone rotten, like fruit left out in the sun. Arbuckle thought and thought and thought, and at night he lay in bed staring at the ceiling and thought more, two more thoughts. I think it must have gone that way. He was always thinking and thinking, though, as we already know, the results were sometimes not very valuable. And then it must have come to him that the princess had somehow been replaced with a look-alike, well, an almost perfect look alike. But why? I’m sure he began with theories: who would benefit from the scheme? Enemies, that’s who. Enemies of the realm, of wealth, of privilege. The substitute was sent into court like a worm into an apple. He would be vigilant; he would wait and pounce. And this is what I think was going through his mind, because Arbuckle Pemberton III was a child of great and devastating privilege. I like to think that his birth kept him from tending plants or other useful work, and so that led him astray. My birth almost did. I got lucky, and luck on top of privilege is a very useful combination.

  The other monster was Jake, not so monstrous at first. A shiny stone, a pat on the head and he was (sort of) tame. How could he be a monster; he was just a kid brother? But Jake was a boy who wanted. He wanted more than a farm, than the simple meals, than dirty knees and Sunday dinner. But he was very young to know much more than that everything he found around him seemed sadly lacking. Tired and worn out. I could see quickly that each day he took a deep breath and went through the motions. But always like a silent song or a voice in the wind, he wanted, wanted some vague thing or things that weren’t there. That’s all he really knew: what was absent, that’s what he wanted.

  Each day the voice, the sad song, seemed to get a little clearer. And this clarity in combination with his immediate realization that I was not his sister any more, created a small whirlwind that grew and grew, gathering sticks and dust and then small stones as it whirled. He wanted. I think the wanting was why he always climbed into the highest places as if maybe he could see what he wanted from up there.

  Meanwhile I was finding everything I wanted in crops and goats and chickens and horses and sheep and cows. And kittens. And puppies, of course, in season. Live things everywhere that seemed to rise up out of land itself.

  I marveled at the obvious things: you fed the cow alfalfa and there was milk. You kept cats to clear the barn of mice, and there were soon more cats. The goats took care of themselves, nearly. And sheep wanted you to think for them, so there were the dogs to do it. The rhythm of living things making more living things as fast as they could—I felt I had lived my whole life waiting for this rhythm to kick in, like it was always just over the
re where I suspected it could be, but I was not quite part of it. There had always been the gardening, but that was just a taste. Now I found myself filled up every day with chores that seemed more like play and a tiredness at night so perfect that I only had a moment to smile to myself as my head lay on the pillow. And then it was morning. And I could smell the earth from my window, hear the animals, taste the wind. I always had suspected this happiness was here, and my bones were glad every day. So, of course, I understood Jake’s vague and unfocussed wanting. I had it too, but I had found what I wanted by coming down, down from the castle to the fine, brown dirt.

  Jake was somehow empty. I was full. Summer was almost over. There were the crops to harvest, the preparations for winter, and then there would be school, another world I longed for. I saw the other children in the school visit. And all summer I saw them again on market day in the village. Alyssa had given me the friend list: close friends who knew secrets, friends who were just smile-and-wave friends, and then the others. I would have to make my way with these by the time school came after the harvest.

  Market days, the first one especially, were tests. I had Alyssa’s descriptions of friends I should greet and how warmly I should greet. I thought of it as a game, but as the first market day approached, I returned to the letters that Alyssa wrote to help me. There was Angela, who was not an angel, according to Alyssa—whatever that meant. There was Elizabeth who was never Betty or Bettes, but always Elizabeth pronounced A-liz-a-beth, not E-liz-a-beth. Angela was interested in boys. Elizabeth was not. Then there were the three sisters, each a year apart from the others. They moved together like a flock of birds. If one was angry, all were angry. Keep one as a friend, and they were all your friend. Noted!

  Market day was bright and warm, the stones of the village scrubbed and still wet. An old man scurried from place to place cleaning up after the horses and cows brought to market. The sheep and pigs were sold outside the village in a special pasture. Children were running everywhere getting more numerous by the hour as sellers set up stalls and stopped to gab with friends. I kept close to my father, worked with my head down at first so I could peek out and see if I recognized anyone from Alyssa’s descriptions. There was the trio of sisters across the way, but they were hard at work unloading vegetables.

  Then suddenly behind me, “Alyssa! Alyssa.” And there was Elizabeth. I would try out what I had learned.

  “I haven’t seen you since the wedding in the spring,” I began. “Wasn’t that fun? The dancing. I thought it would never stop.”

  Elizabeth, without a hitch, began to tell me about what happened after we left the wedding and her family stayed. “…and then the two soldiers got into some kind of argument and they had swords and everything. And someone tore her dress on a nail. Oh, and then the constable came too. I couldn’t tell what happened then because my father and mother scooted us all out of there. Said it was time to go. And we went, but I could hear something noisy happening even as we went down the road home.”

  Let’s see, I thought. After the wedding there was something…oh yes, the brother with the broken leg. Or was that the other girl, Angela? I couldn’t come up with the answer right away, so I thought it was best not to bring up the broken leg at all. Elizabeth was a talker, so I let her go on. And then she brought up her brother’s broken leg and how she had all that extra work to do. I shuffled through Alyssa’s letters in my head, mentally flipping through the pages for the next clue. But I didn’t need to do that, it turned out. I could just listen and talk back, and soon Elizabeth had to help her family set up. And I had learned that I could pick up Alyssa’s life by mostly listening.

  Jake cruised the market, I assumed looking for a high spot. And very quickly he found one, up a fountain wall where the village water ran from four spouts so four jugs at a time could be filled. Above the spouts was a carved lion and perched on its head was Jake like a gargoyle. Mother and father apparently had every confidence that Jake was safe perched up there, or anywhere he perched. He had convinced them he could seek out high places and study the world from above.

  Then the three sisters came over. I wasn’t sure which was the one I knew best. The tallest one, I thought. She looked like the leader. But it was the middle sister who seemed to run the trio. I had learned from Elizabeth not to offer too much and then just go along with the present conversation. The market by this time had begun to sing with voices of all sorts, “Onions, carrots, herbs and thistles. Beautiful ham, a fruit pie for your table.”

  The sisters, too, immediately accepted me as Alyssa, and I actually felt like I had now become her, got inside the story of Alyssa and become part of it.

  The middle sister, blonde braids poking out both sides of her head, sealed my confidence. “OK, Alyssa. We all have birthdays coming up. We’ll see you then.” And the first market day buzzed past with heaps of mushrooms like tiny umbrellas, garlics in braided bunches, and tiny new red potatoes with dirt still clinging to them.

  Chapter Four

  Alyssa wrote that the life at court and the duties of being a princess were endlessly fascinating as long as they didn’t repeat. I remembered them as achingly repetitious, so she must have been experiencing them a different way. She was a very smart girl, and maybe the newness of everything, every ritual, every historical necessity was like dessert to her soul. She worked very hard to learn from my letters why the blue sash was necessary for the evening meetings of councils because blue was the color of the first sash used 800 years ago by ancestors so old they didn’t even have portraits on chamber walls. Red was for daytime frivolous parties because…there was the history to learn. Black was only for… Yellow could be substituted for red when… It all seemed to tie together.

  The more she learned, the more the parts fit as if the whole meaning of the castle and its history had been spun out like a spider’s web. There were old men and women to consult if something didn’t make sense. And after they explained, the pieces fit. This because of that, they said. This cape, this hat, those shoes, the tiara—all spoke in silent ways to the task of keeping all the people accepting the story that we told about ourselves. And woe be unto any break in the story, because the fractures would grow and grow (this had happened to a neighboring kingdom, they warned, and they all ended up living in the woods and eating worms, it was said). And that would be the end. Protect the story and you protected civilization itself, they said. Glory to ritual and glory to story.

  I knew what she was going through. I had been trapped by it all my life and every day, so that the whole spider’s web that ensnared the castle seemed to make sense and, yet, be frankly silly at the same time when you’re in it. For Alyssa, though, all the flash and glamour, responsibility and self-importance seemed to please her. I wrote to her that even the empty gestures were useful threads binding together the nation. Better her than me. I liked the sense that seeds gave me when they grew into plants.

  The whole summer for now-princess Alyssa bloomed with newness and the fall too. But then a repetition began to set in, as I thought it would. Do that same curtsey again to the same old gentleman, the same young dance partner, the sashes of many color codes. And then she could see that the newness would come to an end in time, and she would have to do the same hundred things over and over. She wrote to me that it might be time to trade back. Or to stay permanently and move into the princess part that would grow larger each day instead of repeating.

  That letter I was both expecting and fearing. I had come too far by then to give up what seemed glorious to me each day, my new life. I had doubled the size of the garden by digging the warm dirt and turning it under. I kneeled my way through the weeding and wore my knee mud badges proudly. The smell of new dirt seeing the sun for the first time! The surprise of the worms as they turned around and headed back into the dark soil. I laughed to myself that I could see the surprise on my worms’ faces—no faces, of course, but the ones I imagined.

  But Alyssa found that getting in touch with me was getting
to be much harder than she expected. Here’s why. A princess, as I well knew, had to do three things that might lead up to a fourth that would then present the possibility of a fifth that might then present the opportunity to do what she really wanted—like contact me. I knew that particular tangle and the ways out of it. But that part of my life, that cleverness that had taken all my years to develop, that set of skills and miss-directions, she didn’t have yet. It should work like this. She must suggest an afternoon meeting that would then lead to a series of similar meetings that could then, possibly, become a school visit or another farm visit and then… Unless, of course, I was, by chance, tiring of my new life and was trying to get in touch with her. Maybe that would be the easiest way. If I could visit the castle, then we could consult. But my peace was Alyssa’s anxiety, my daily joy her impending sense of doom.

  Part of Alyssa’s discomfort, the main part: Arbuckle Pemberton III was doing more and more noticing. Alyssa’s walk seemed to plod sometimes, he noticed. When she was tired, maybe, or just not paying attention. Sometimes, just for a second, she’d seem to lose focus at state events, stare into space as if her mind were elsewhere. And since Arbuckle had dropped many of his “style” affectations, he now blended in more with crowds and could get closer and closer to the princess. Something is not right, must have echoed in his mind: I will find it out and reveal it at the right time, the right place. As I said, he was not stupid. And not being stupid presented Alyssa with another set of problems just as the shine of court life was wearing off for her.

  Jake continued to want, and he didn’t know exactly what. I would pat him on the head (Alyssa had never done that before; she always tried to hug him), I read him stories endlessly until he fell asleep, where before, Alyssa had a strict two-story bedtime rule. And sometimes he could hear me outside humming a song Alyssa had never hummed before as I went about chores. He liked the owl song. The sheep dog, Rex, had once growled at me before I made friends with him by feeding him table scraps. Jake was another level of difficulty. If only I could have fed him table scraps to get his loyalty. Sweet egg pudding was good enough in the short run. But that was not to be enough, eventually. Sparkling stones and pudding only work for a short time, it seems.