The Princess Gardener

by Michael Strelow

  Jake loved games and games with secrets even better. From where I watched it was hard to tell exactly what was going on in his mind, whether he was just fooling around with Arbuckle to kill time, or whether he was taking the bait Arbuckle offered—the sister puzzle.

  Jake said, “She’s right. She’s good to me. She really loves that garden of hers. So, yes, she’s right, the right one for my family.”

  Arbuckle sighed loud enough for me to hear from the barn, a sigh from deep somewhere in his bones. He was a man caught in his own fits of curious distrust of the world; he was growing tired of being that way. Standing in the sun on a strange farm with an impish boy and a threatening girl—surely this was not the life he was made for. Like his ancestors, he was made for much more important things. I had heard the whole “alas-speech” before. But still—something was not right with the way everything lined up crookedly. Things were not in their proper place. Not at all! A courier to a farm? The girl who was somehow not what she seemed? This boy who seemed to live in trees?

  And the peculiar cooperation was born. I guessed at this boy-pact, because I could see them nodding together, Arbuckle gesturing to the wind as was his habit, Jake closer to the vest, hand in pocket.

  They, together and seemingly all at once I imagined, must have exhausted the topic of the sister and the princess and how strangeness had suddenly descended on both of them at about the same time. And, hmmm, what could that mean? They would stay alert. They would tell each other if something important turned up, something unusual and revealing. Jake would watch for the courier. Arbuckle would try to follow one again. Something was rotten, they certainly agreed. Something didn’t smell quite right. I watched them shake hands. More nods.

  A few days after the appearance of Arbuckle, I breathed a sigh of relief. Though Jake seemed extra nice, almost as if he were pretending to be something he wasn’t, more grownup or something, things went back to normal. Neither Eugenie nor I needed the courier; we returned to settling in to each other’s life like cupcakes into muffin tins. I began to ask for my new mother and father’s farming books: pig breeding, woodlot tending, the many uses of manure, the proper way to trim a fruit tree. They didn’t have many books. Much of what they knew about farming, it turned out, had been passed on from the fathers and mothers who came before them, and the best way to tap into this information, I found, was to get them talking about what they were doing as they did it. I had to be careful not to sound too pushy when asking, just casual interest. I found they would talk easy about mending harness, preserving the harvest, tending sheep through their birthing, horses’ hooves, chickens’ beaks, and seed saving if I worked my questions into regular conversation. When it rained I talked drainage. When it was hot, soil moisture. When it was windy, the thickness of wheat stalks and bend resistance.

  We’d sit by a small fire in the evenings. The days were getting warmer but the night chill still had a pinch of winter in it. My father’s stomach would rumble after dinner and he would sometimes snooze in the rocking chair sitting straight up and seeming to look into space with closed eyes. Jake was busy on the floor taking something apart, something that looked like a wooden puzzle with small iron pins. My mother made a pattern with fine yellow thread on a disk of linen. I could only keep my eyes open by wanting so much to remember every second of this, this tiredness and fullness. My hands were a little sore from weeding, my back warm with muscles well used. I smiled at my cracked fingernails and how they had been sacrificed so that plants could grow. I wanted to fill myself up with the smell of smoke and the flash of yellow thread and the snorts of Jake as he wrestled his puzzle together. One light hanging from the ceiling kept us all under close watch.

  For days at a time I forgot the palace, the deceit, the pretending, and even, sometimes late in the evening when the beautiful tiredness of work crept into my bones from the long day, I forgot who I was. And wasn’t. There was no was or wasn’t, only becoming. For flickers of time it seemed I was always Alyssa, and that far off over the hill, that other girl always had the bother of court dealings clanging in her ears. And I had the soft wind in mine.

  In the palace, I could imagine Alyssa sighing as her head sunk into the fine down pillow and the sheets whistled their silkiness at her. She was now growing more delighted to spend the day in gestures and appearances and protocol. She was finding home too in another place, another skin that fit better each day.

  Chapter Six

  And one day, after a time, it happened, of course. It had to. There were so many changes that one thing had to crash into another, the wheels had to begin to wobble before they fell off, and like all complicated things, the pieces began to fly off in all directions. It could have started in any number of way. So many things to go wrong. The courier was an obvious place, but it wasn’t him. We used the courier less and less. And it wasn’t that one of us forgot her Ps and Qs, her shoulds and ought tos. No. It was a small thing, an accident really, something that normally meant nothing at all. A small thing that was huge. Arbuckle spied from his place in court and came up with nothing. Jake burrowed into the family and waited for me to reveal myself, but I didn’t. You’d think that two dragons, two girls and a fragile world would be the deadly combination. But it wasn’t.

  It was water. Water that rained on places fair and foul. Water that collected in the ditches and made its way into the great reservoirs of the earth. Water that made it possible to have both farm and palace. Water that had been clean and delicious one day, and the next became sickening.

  On the farm, what was left over—food scraps, paper, broken tools, manure—all found a second home: scraps to the pigs, paper to burn for heat, tool parts used again, manure to the fields for fertilizer. But in the palace, there was an old man in charge of making sure all the waste that wasn’t wanted—human waste, animal waste, kitchen waste, old clothes—all were taken far away from the King and Queen’s sight and smell. We all called him “Carrier” because that was his life. Carry it all somewhere else. Do something with it, something not near here; that was the court order. Waste was supposed to disappear. And while the Carrier was young, he hauled it far from the castle and buried it deep. But, as he got older, the burial got shallower and nearer until at the end, the Carrier didn’t have the energy to go far. Finally, he pulled his loaded cart just out of sight of the castle, into the closest depression, the one I remember from a summer picnic when I was very small, a sort of sheltered place of blue and yellow wildflowers and deep cracks in gray rocks. And so the great waste of the castle crept closer and closer and lay next to the great river that fed the rest of the land. Then one day the sickness came to farm and castle at the same time. Some bomb ticking inside the waste, some careless and unhappy soup there got cooked into a disaster.

  Sickness was everywhere, and everywhere was the monster of more sickness coming. An old aunt once said that only when the monsters are defeated can we begin to argue about other things. She always used to say that—one finger in the air to show how important this was.

  Arbuckle and Jake were suddenly joined by more than their mutual curiosity about the girls who seemed slightly strange in their lives. The farm boy and the fop were joined by something like the haze that surrounds a moon sometimes, the strange aura that could make any normal thing eerie. That was us, Alyssa and Eugenie—neither one quite fit in the box into which we had been stuffed by birth, and so we each sent out a haze of strangeness. And the two suspicious males didn’t know what to think of this, but they did know that they couldn’t stop feeling that something was truly wrong. Then came the bad water.

  All throughout the castle was the sound of sickness: groans and retching, scurrying to deal with diarrhea, and the word “alas” and sighing as the business of the kingdom ground to a halt. King, Queen, knave and kitchen maid alike groaned. The religious leaders of all sorts blamed hidden sins, vengeful and spiteful gods, ill-aligned planets, great wheels of fortune that had spun to the dreary bottom. But for all the explanations, no one
thought it was the water. Water festering in a shallow grave just outside where the castle dipped its barrels of drinking water; water that sang a sad and doomed song that was carried down the river to farms and villages. Even dogs and cats were not lively any more. The birds left suddenly as if they had seen something from the sky that made them abandon the kingdom. The cows and horses slowed to a stop and waited, their eyes glassy. Chickens slept in trees waiting for a chance to fly off to somewhere else where there was no sad song. The farms groaned too.

  Jake and his family—all of us—took to our beds: no appetite, no energy, sick stomachs and, finally, the disorder of not caring whether we lived or died. All of us just wanted to sit and stare instead of work and laugh. The sickness seemed everywhere—the old folks called it a miasma, bad air wafting from some dark place. Our thirst drove us to drink even more water, and the water sang its evil song in our blood. The whole kingdom was sick. When the farmers didn’t bring food to markets, no one ate. When the wind blew a tree down across the road, no one came to clear it. I felt as if something had come in the night and taken my bones.

  Finally, just when it appeared the kingdom was ripe for invasion by its war-like neighbors, something happened, an accident really, that brought the truth to light. Alyssa in the castle and me on the farm, each in our own way discovered the bad water.

  I crept out slowly one morning to see if I could tend my garden. It seemed the plants called to me. My knees buckled, and I sat in the farmyard crying. I could see my garden from there, but I had no energy as if the light inside me was slowly going out. I started to crawl because I could see the garden’s wilt, its thirst for water and need for care. I felt as if I were crawling to save a crying child. I pulled myself along until I came to the edge of my garden. Most of the plants were wilted but one, a kind of bean that never needed much water to grow, was almost glowing with health. It had shed the few dried leaves that happened when it was being watered and now reached for the sun and flowered everywhere to create more beans. I sat and stared at this dry-lover, this sprightly green thing among the brown ghosts. And I wondered why this one? Why was the healthy one the one I hadn’t watered?

  I remember trying to think, like trying to think and fall asleep at the same time. The bean plant would flicker brightly and then be gone through my tears. I wanted to sleep, but the idea of that one plant singing out to me kept me awake. Why that one? How could I be that bright green bean climbing up the poles? I felt, instead, like the crispy brown leaves on the dead plants.

  I dragged myself closer to see what magic was there. Around the base of the hardy bean was a dry circle I hadn’t watered. Every day when it was warm, I had to carry heavy pails of water from the well, and I learned very soon to use water only where it was absolutely necessary. The bean did nicely without much water. Something in that water had changed, I thought through my fog. The water was part of the three golden parts of my garden: sun, fertilizer, water. And now my golden triangle had come undone.

  About the same time in the castle, Alyssa had dragged herself up to the window of her bedroom because in her sickness she said she longed to feel the outside wind and sun on her face as if somehow the cure would be there. And she saw from her tower that one short valley away from the castle was a dead zone of swollen dirt where the Carrier had unloaded his carts into a shallow grave. No insect or animal stirred there. No plant waved in the wind. There, next to where the river sorted itself out into the land and ran off to the lower kingdom, there was no light but dry emptiness.

  So, it was the water, we decided as if our brains were the same brain. We thought, the very first thing, that the other one should know about it before we told anyone else. But there were no couriers who could still walk or ride with messages. So we, with one mind and one face, thought—I have to get well and tell the other. I made a strict plan to eat fruit to get my water and drink, like my bean plant, none.

  I tried to discuss the water with my very ill father and mother. Thy lay together in bed facing the wall. My father groaned. My mother waved her arm weakly in the air. “Take care of Jake, if you can. Try whatever you want,” she said, and rolled over.

  “The water,” I started to say. But she was groaning too, and not much fire was left in her.

  And so I hauled myself into the orchard where I gathered apples with great difficulty and pressed out the juice to drink. At first, all I could manage was to suck the juice from fallen apples. My thirst was yelling at me to drink and drink, but the image of the bean climbing its poles made me stay with only apples. Very soon I was feeling better and set out to tell neighbors. No one listened better than my parents had. Listening to young girls was not going to be the way this plague was solved, apparently. They were so used to the council of the King and the wise men that it was very hard to hear a young girl’s advice. I would have to think of some other way to show them.

  In the castle, there was a similar reaction. All the counselors told Alyssa that she was just a girl and the King had many people working on the sickness problem—men of great wisdom, of religion, of astrology, of magic even. And so she planned her own withdrawal from the sick water. As thirsty as she was, she looked for other ways to drink. She found grapes and ate them greedily for their juice. In two days she was walking among the groans and cries of the castle, helping others. She began to scour the castle, then the countryside for anything to eat, anything except the water.

  Alyssa plotted her escape to tell me the news on the farm. But finally, no plot was needed since there were so many sick people, so little attention to anything but stomachs and bowels, and Alyssa found she could walk right out of the castle and make her way toward the farm without anyone caring a jot.

  And so each of us on her own, wandered toward the other and met on the muddy trail that dipped along the river and then folded itself up into the hills between farm and castle. Alyssa wore her hunting clothes, and I wore my second-best dress in case I had to go all the way to court and talk my way in. For the moment, we looked as if we had switched back. When we spied each other, we hurried forward and waved and helloed, though quietly, each mindful that we should not be seen together even in our new disguises, but also certain that no one was abroad these days of sickness.

  We both began to speak at once as if we were one person talking to herself instead of the two fierce and separate girls.

  “Alyssa, you go first. After all, you are the princess now. I’ll listen first because I am the loyal subject of the princess,” I said, thinking how unimportant all that business seemed now among all this raging sickness. Both of us paused, eyes open in delight and began to laugh at what I had just said.

  “OK, OK,” Alyssa said finally when we were able to stop laughing. “It’s simple.”

  And then both at the same time, as if we were being directed in some great choir, “The water makes people sick!” We had the gift, but no one would accept it. We both knew the one thing that could stop the suffering, but we could find no listeners to tell it to.

  Again, it was some time before we could continue because we had so surprised ourselves by speaking as one. It was as if we had absorbed enough of the other’s life by living in her place that we had half become her. And now two half-lives were meeting in the middle. We just had, of course, really met in the middle. Spoken at once in the middle. Shined our two faces into the mirror of the other.

  I was tanned, and my hands showed the daily work with nicks and scratches and broken fingernails. Alyssa’s nails were painted and elegant, not having lifted a finger in a while, and her pale skin seemed fragile out here in the countryside. And now I had the freckles.

  She said, “We are the two that have to become one voice.” It sounded so important, so much like a proclamation that we both laughed with surprise and delight.

  “Say another one,” I joked.

  “Alright. How about this? Two stars must shine as one beam from the skies!”

  “Not as good, actually. Try again.”

  Al
yssa thought, conjured up her new princess powers and announced, “The kingdom needs the power of two girls to bring one truth. Let’s away!” And then fell to giggling. Even in this sad, sick time we were feeling the lightness of our new lives. The kingdom was groaning away all around us, and we sat making up silly lines out of a play we were inventing. It was the silly lines, though, that freed us to help. The talking, the liveliness of two girls scheming in a field to save our world—well that was glorious stuff. I realized I hadn’t said more than a few words to anyone for too many days. And without words, even though I felt better, the world was pouring out slowly in front of my eyes like thick molasses. Our silliness hatched a plan, and then another plan and another as if we had warmed the molasses.

  Alyssa proposed a grand scheme. “We can lead the way.” And here, she did that raised-finger thing my great aunt did when she made wise statements. “We know what’s wrong but don’t have any listeners. How do we change that?” And then she launched into a very complicated plan. A lot of it was going right by me, but I could see she had picked up the castle way with big words and grand schemes.

  I stopped her. “Without a place to speak from, some high place, I don’t know who will listen to us. How do we change that?”

  “That’s what I was saying. That was the plan.”

  I could see we were talking about the same thing two different ways. I had no plan, just the sad fact that no one would listen to us. Alyssa, with the same fact, had a complicated plan that included all the people who wouldn’t listen to us now. If they heard us, then her plan might work. But no one was listening.