The Princess Gardener

by Michael Strelow

So we stared over again and sat and talked about what we could do regarding the water problem, how we could help each other with fixing what was wrong, how we might get an audience that wasn’t too sick to listen. The castle’s wealth, the farm’s connection to the land—each had its power. We talked and planned until the sun was just touching the hill and about to leave us in the chill of evening.

  “Oh, I have another one,” Alyssa said, holding up one wise finger. “Two…” But she got to laughing, then stopped. “Two girls getting better each day.” I raised up an apple I had brought from the big tree where Jake made his second home. “Two girls to save the world one apple at a time.” And we toasted ourselves, the apple tree, and the world we would save. We left with no great plan except to think of ways to find listeners.

  Chapter Seven

  Just out of sight, lying on his side with father’s spyglass, was Jake, nearly recovered on the apple juice diet I supplied him. He moved the glass back and forth between the two of us. It was clear which one was his sister. He saw her every day. He had only seen the princess once, that day in the school and barnyard when the royal visit had occurred. But now he could see what he hadn’t seen then. The two girls looked something alike if you adjusted for…what? Clothes? Suntan? Hair dos? His scowl seemed to ask, why would his sister meet with the princess again? Each one was dressed like the other one. And they were jabbering away as if they were long lost friends. What is this about? Jake was entering deeper into the mystery. He’d ask me straight out. No. I’d tell him some tale. I always could do that; he liked the tales. He’d accuse me of… Of what? Of seeing the princess on the sly? So what? He’d ask his mother…no, his father…no. Ask them what?

  And so Jake watched the sun dip too, and what he saw was that we hugged, that I wore a dress and the princess hunting clothes, and that we went back to our places having discussed at length something Jake could not hear. Jake hurried back home ahead of me certainly going over and over in his head what he could do to solve the growing mystery. And what did it have to do with the water sickness? Surely the two things were not separate. I know that he believed he should try to talk to Arbuckle, and they could figure something out together.

  Arbuckle Pemberton III was not feeling well. In his chambers he had given up style and fashion, court intrigue, and even the peculiarities of the princess in the name of simply reclaiming his bowels from the galloping diarrhea he’d had for days. Nothing tasted good enough to eat. Only a vile thirst crept upon him every day so that he tried in vain to take in enough water to replace the water he was losing each day. Arbuckle was not the only one in his condition in the castle. He’d been, he felt, reduced to a tube into which you poured water so that it could come out the other end.

  Alone in the castle now, Alyssa told me she was the only one moving among them trying to help others, bringing rags and comfort and always trying to talk people out of drinking the water they all craved. She brought them grapes and juices of all sorts, but few wanted to try. Not one listener. At least I had grateful Jake.

  Nothing tasted good. Only the monster of thirst roared at them all. Some of the very old were gone already. The very young, babies, were nursing and seemed best off. The children were wretched but strongest. The castle smelled to high heaven of sickness and fear. Arbuckle sighed. Against one wall were cabinets of his clothes hanging in rows and legions, but they held no fascination for him now. Court was not meeting. Intrigue was dead. Something was making the whole world wrong, out of joint, discombobulated. He bemoaned that something awful was creeping under the entire fabric of the kingdom’s existence. Our enemies will soon come down upon us, he thought, and end everything we have built. The world was sick in more ways than one.

  Everything his relatives built was sliding away. For Arbuckle felt he hadn’t really had a chance to be considered one of the builders of the empire. His father and his father’s father, yes. His uncles and aunts all had stories of conquest and building, how each had brought some piece to the construction of the great civilization itself: the civility, the order, the art of protocol and negotiation. The Great Society was made by others. For him. And now he must make his mark, too. I had watched him as we grew up becoming more and more desperate, desperate to make his contribution somehow, even if it was only silly style. The water had him down and not caring.

  Jake, on the other hand, felt nothing so complicated. His sister, the real one, the one from before, the one who occasionally took his side, had changed. Or been changed. Or had been kidnapped and replaced with this other version. To him, the sickness was unpleasant but was only part of the more important things wrong with the world: the farm didn’t work, the animals were listless, his parents were very sick. As he got better, he began to climb again. From up high, things seemed almost normal.

  Alyssa and I had decided we had to risk being discovered if we were to save the kingdom from itself. “The water! the water!” we would say. And some person, some agency would have to listen and do something about the water. Clean it, stop the poisoning. Something. And so we went back to our places, farm girl and princess, to spread the word. But “some person,” and “some agency” proved, as we suspected, very hard to find. The people surrounding us were more than just sick; they were immoveable stick-in-the-muds. They were so stuck in the world they had known before the sickness that they only wanted it back the way it had been, so they could keep on doing what they had been doing before. And doing it the same way.

  In the castle, they yearned for the smoothness of daily duties and positions in which someone was superior to someone else and also inferior to someone—everyone but the King and Queen. They knew their place and cherished it. But the water had changed everything, and none of them knew it was the water that made everyone equal. Those who could walk around consulted the holy men, then the holy women, then, finally, the unholy witches and diviners and readers of chicken entrails. Anyone, they said, help us! Anyone, Alyssa and I both found out, except two young girls.

  And as you might expect the information from the holy and the unholy was often at odds. The church said it was sin, and so God’s punishment had come to them for their sins. Which sins, the people asked, willing to change, to give up whatever it was that offended God? But the holy men and women could not agree which sins, and so they decided that giving more money to the church would be the best place to start. Let us, they said, save the kingdom. We’ll talk to God and get back to you. The less holy, on the other hand, offered up fate itself (a complicated thing, it turned out) and said the kingdom would just have to tough it out. And, by the way, it wouldn’t hurt if large sums of money could be made available for advanced predictions and expeditions to consult other less holy experts in other lands.

  And so money seemed one of the few points in common. Out came the treasure. There were golden plates, jewels in all the important colors of red and green and blue and some in yellow. There were even jewels of no color at all, jewels that only reflected other light and sparkled. There were valuable horses and cows and sheep that one could spend like money by trading. There were rare and silky cloths that slid across the hand like water. And so the kingdom spent and spent and remained sick.

  On the farm, word trickled down from the castle that one had to spend money to make God relent and forgive everyone. But lacking gold and jewels (though in possession of a few animals, but those were needed every day) and other means of making God happy again, the farmers began to make fires, in the old way, fires that heaped up all things they thought might be offending God and requiring Him to punish his people. Old bones (this made the dogs unhappy) were heaped up, and broken furniture and cracked shingles. All broken or useless things were added to the heap and burned. The particular bonfire on our farm roared up to the sky with its message of making the old and bad into smoke that would make it new and good. The logic seemed clear while the real cause lay in the sickening water, its load of unpleasantness that made people sick and unable to work the land. But the farmers, like at t
he castle, repeated the best old ideas they could think of and made even larger fires. More of the same would be better! The night glowed with atonement and hope for a better tomorrow as farm after farm tried to burn its way into grace and salvation and health.

  Still the land lay sickened, and both of us, each avoiding water in her own way, tried to tell everyone that the water was making them sick. The people, both farmer and king’s court alike, repeated harshly to us that the water had always been good to drink and it still was. Something else, something hidden from puny human ability to see, was making everyone sick. They said, and don’t worry your young heads over the matter, the adults would ferret out the error and correct it. Even now much money was at work to aid the act of discovery, and it wouldn’t be long before the problem would be solved. Both Alyssa and I heard the same message in two different ways. But it was clearly the same: you girls are not the answer. You can’t be because you never were before.

  And so the risk, the risk of having to go back to our old lives, the risk of being punished and publically humiliated, was going to have to be greater each time we met.

  We began to try new things: elaborate disguises, complicated schemes including miss-directions and fake reasons. Alyssa’s complicated first ideas, those funny plots, came around again. This wasn’t going to be simple.

  “Mother,” I said, “I have to go to other farms and help. I’ll be gone a while. But I’ll be safe on the roads. Everyone is sick including the robbers and highwaymen.” And mother who was too sick to argue, waved her hand and marveled again at my good spirits and energy and said yes to some vague plan in a vague place with my vague details. She was beginning to believe that my recovery had something to do with my apple diet. But when I tried to persuade her that she would get well too, the old thinking got in the way. She gave me her blessing with another weary wave. She couldn’t find the place in her mind—though her heart knew—where her daughter knew better than every adult both high and low.

  “Mother,” I said again, and put an apple on her bed, “I’ll be back very soon. I love you and father and Jake. Jake is getting better. He’ll bring you whatever you need.” She looked at me with her tired eyes and smiled. I could see she knew that something would have to change soon. She was so thin and worn out from the sickness. She seemed to know that some kind of end was going to have to lead to a new beginning. And she sighed deeply and put her hand on my shoulder. I moved the apple closer. “It’ll make you feel better. Jake can always get you more, if you want more.”

  Alyssa reported the castle maladies. “Oh, the smell,” she reported to me. “With so many people in one place at one time, the smell gets worse every day. No one had the energy to clean up. The waste of all sorts builds and builds just outside the castle walls.”

  “Do they believe you about the water? I just know it’s the water. We’re living proof,” I added. “Of course, if we came to them together and stood there healthy and strong and told them we got all our water from fruits, they’d have to take us seriously.” She lowered her eyes and sighed.

  “They would know,” said Alyssa. “As soon as we stood there together, they’d make us go back. They’d see what we had done. Do you think they would punish me? You might get a scolding, but I would be…what? I’d be taken to court, my parents ruined. I’d be thrown into a dungeon and…”

  “Worse,” I said in my most serious tone. “They would be certain that we had caused the problem, that we had messed with the proper order, and that messing was what brought down the sickness on the land. I know they would. They can’t see farther than their own blind superstition.”

  “The ends of their noses.”

  “Their own belly buttons.”

  “The insides of their own eyeballs.”

  And we took off again and began laughing the way we did in the field. I think we did this to keep from imagining the real difficulties that could arise from our switching places. I didn’t really know what “they” would do. Alyssa was right, I would be fine after a lecture or two. But she might not be fine. And her family? I didn’t know, and that was the truth we avoided by goofing around with noses and belly buttons and eyeballs. What would it take to change the way so many people thought about so much? And what could two girls do? Everything, it turned out. Two girls could do everything.

  And so we agreed we’d try to show (instead of tell) people that somehow the water was making them sick. And off we went. We couldn’t even change places temporarily, we decided, since now I looked the part of a farm girl with my tanned skin, rough hands, and even my long stride that got me about my chores efficiently. And Alyssa would have a hard time standing among the farmers with her soft hands and un-sunned skin. We had become each other in many ways, and going back would require undoing all the changes we had worked on over a long time now.

  Meanwhile, Arbuckle was still sick and lifeless, lolling around from chair to chair, moaning and sighing, Alyssa reported. But each minute of weakness something in him grew more resolved to solve the problem of the land and establish himself in the pantheon of founding fathers that was his family. He resolved to find that farm boy again and get him to work to a common end. Then, finally, he would dismiss the boy and take all the credit for his discovery. I knew his thinking. He held tight to the belief if he could find that something was out of order in the kingdom, something in the wrong place, some error had occurred, the cause of everything wrong would be clear. And the cure. Set it right and everything would return to normal and he would be the hero. His whole life had been arranged by this principle of “correct order.” I was a part of this “order” business myself until I replaced it with how a plant loves light, water and food.

  “Psst. Psst. Psst!” Jake heard outside his window late at night. “Boy! Psst. Come out.”

  Arbuckle, dressed in his best disguise but barely able to stay on his feet with the sickness, cracked the quiet night air with his plea. “Come out, boy. I need you.” I could hear them both from my room, and I thought, this cannot turn out well, these two, ill and whispering in the night.

  Jake felt the pull of his bed because though no longer sick, he was young, and he was very fond of sleeping under the best of conditions. But after a while and the psst-ing and loud whispers outside his window growing even more insistent, he roused himself, put on clothes and reluctantly slipped out into the night.

  “Now what?” he said, after they had moved away from the house and into the shadow of the barn. I could hear them perfectly, their exaggerated whispers. After their first meeting, Jake had no fear of Arbuckle having completely dismissed him as a human being. If they could be useful to each other, so be it. The guy was a goof. A bag of straw.

  Arbuckle coughed. “There’s something wrong with the two girls, and you and I know it. Don’t we? Don’t we? What is it? What exactly have you seen with your sister who looks something like our princess?”

  Jake thought for a moment. “Well, Alyssa is nicer than she used to be. And…”

  “No, no, no. Not nicer! Is she…does she…?” Arbuckle looked around for the words he needed. “Is there anything you know that might explain…?” I could hear his frustrated whisper getting louder and more anxious. “Maybe what she says, or something she mutters to herself or maybe a spell or incantation or magic animals around her?” I almost laughed out loud. Arbuckle had been consulting the soothsayers and spell mongers that, according to Alyssa, now had free run of the castle. She said that when nothing else seemed to work, these folk multiplied in the walls of the castle like mice. He continued, “You know, there might be some little thing she does that she didn’t do before. Think! Think, boy. What might be out of line, you see? What is there to know now that you didn’t know before?” His voice now had broken the whisper and was climbing higher and higher like an angry bird. I could see that he had put his hand on Jake’s shoulder and was pressing him more and more.

  Jake didn’t know. What he did know was not something he could put into words; it was a sen
sation he got around me, a feeling that too much had changed. The sister was one way, then she was another, almost as if the smell of her or the color of her eyes was slightly off. He had tried talking to his father about this one time. One time. I overheard them in the hallway. Father had said that girls go through changes that boys…well, boys do in different ways, but girls…well…they change in bigger ways. Other ways than boys. Ways that are…well… And then father had asked him to do some chores, ones he usually did himself as if he were trying to get out of the question.

  Jake told Arbuckle this. “I don’t know what it is about my sister. I don’t know what’s wrong. But it’s something, and every day I get the feeling that today I’ll find out what it is. But I never do, do I? And so I wait for the next day and start over again. Waiting. I guess that’s what I’m doing. Waiting for something more to happen, and then I’ll know. But I don’t know what I’ll know. What there is to know. That’s the problem. I don’t really know anything. Well, I know she’s not sick like the rest of us. But that’s it. Oh, and I’m getting better too.” All this came tumbling out of him like a flock of birds exploding out of a bush.

  Arbuckle said that the princess, among all the court people, seemed not to be sick either. Then he proposed a plan. They would work together to see why the girls weren’t sick. That would be the first part. The second part would be to see what was wrong, why they didn’t seem exactly right anymore. “Those two know something. That’s why they’re not sick. Maybe they are causing everyone else to be sick! That has to be it. Maybe they are witches. Why else would they be the ones walking around well, while the rest of us throw up our guts and…” Arbuckle had let go of Jake and was now walking in ever larger circles in the moonlight by the barn. Into the shadow, back out into the moonlight. In and out like a crazy horse carving on a carousel that came and went. His circles got bigger until Jake seemed to have had enough and bolted up the big apple tree and disappeared into the leaves. Soon I could hear the munching of apples from up near the top. And Arbuckle, still muttering, staggered off into the pasture moonlight.