by Keith Weaver
This was a long speech for Joe. So, obviously he really was interested in it. But Sanford was surprised and a bit bothered by it all. Joe must have seen something in Sanford’s face, because he asked what was wrong.
“I thought that only women cooked.”
At this, Joe almost fell down laughing, but he stopped rather quickly when he saw Sanford looking puzzled and a bit hurt. As Joe quite often did, he treated Sanford as though he was already an adult, and told him about something called mores. “Women cook”, he said, “because it’s a form of convention. They’re expected to cook, and men are expected not to cook. It doesn’t make any sense, because men are as good cooks as women, once they learn how, but most never do learn how.” He said then, with a somewhat different look in his eye, that the expectation that men won’t cook becomes almost a rule in country areas, but that it’s a little different in cities. Sanford thought that might have been the first time he was aware of a difference between country people and city people. He was also pretty certain it was the beginning of his dislike of some aspects of life in the country.
They stood back and looked critically at the new post they had just put in place. Joe asked Sanford to trowel the last of the concrete around the post, and to make it nice and level. He said they would let it set for a day, and then tomorrow they would plant some catnip around the base of the post.
“Why catnip?” Sanford asked.
“So that cats will be attracted and scare away or catch mice and rats. The rats like to dig in the compost heap.”
“Doesn’t that bother Reggie?”
“No. Reggie seems to know his job, and his job isn’t to chase cats.”
“What is Reggie’s job?” Sanford asked.
“I rely on Reggie to scare off the rabbits”, said Joe. “There are two groups of animals we have to keep out of the garden: rabbits and deer. Reggie might be able to scare off the deer, but I have the fence to keep them out, and I’ve made it high enough that deer can’t jump over it.”
They both gazed silently at the garden. The rows of plants were very neat, and those rows that had been freshly planted still had a little stake at each end and string marking the rows. The soil was dark and damp, and there were pieces of straw visible in the soil from the manure that Joe used as fertilizer. Looking at the tiny green shoots coming up gave him a funny warm feeling. He thought about his marigolds, but didn’t say anything about them to Joe, because Joe’s garden was so much bigger than his own.
“Why is there only a third of a row of lettuce?” Sanford asked.
“Well”, said Joe, “if I planted it all at the same time there would be a huge amount of lettuce to use all at once and most of it would probably go bad. So I plant a third of a row every three weeks. That way, I have a steady supply of lettuce all through the summer.”
They stood there for a while, like two guys assessing a used car. Joe gave Sanford a sideways look. “I think you would make a good gardener”, he said. “Shall we go in and look at the herbs?”
The herb garden was laid out in squares, each square being home to a different kind of plant. There were squares reserved for parsley, thyme, tarragon, rosemary, nasturtium, sage, fennel, chives, mint (carefully sequestered to one side), and a half dozen other herbs. Each square had a little metal stake supporting a sign saying what the herb was in that square. Sanford moved closer to look at them. Some of the squares were empty, but some of them contained plants that were already large and growing. The sage was tall and woody and had dusty green leaves. The mint was bright green. The chives were small spears coming out of clumps in the ground. The thyme was a mass of twisted small twigs, and their little green leaves were just beginning to peek out of the undergrowth.
“What do you use the herbs for?”
“Ahhh!” Joe said, and the excitement in his voice made Sanford look up at him. His right hand was up before his face, he had his fingertips pulled together and was looking up at the sky. In that moment, Sanford saw a different person. In fact, Sanford thought it was just then that he realized that Joe was not just his nice neighbour and friend. He was someone who knew a lot more than Sanford had realized. Indeed, he was different from all the other people Sanford knew. In a very important way, it was evident to him that Joe was someone he had to get to know much better. Looking back, Sanford remembered the occasion clearly, but was no longer sure that it was just childhood memory. He felt that it meant as much to Sanford the man as it had to Jim Sanford the boy.
Joe continued to gaze at the sky, as if looking for something. “Let me count the ways”, he said.
Joe turned to Sanford and said, in words that Sanford didn’t understand, even though he knew they were significant, “Food is a great artistic delight, as well as an aesthetic pursuit, a backdrop for friendship, a condiment for discussion, a whetstone for intellect, and the ultimate bond between mind and body. And herbs help to extend the limits of all those dimensions.”
He suddenly shook his head, and looked slightly confused and embarrassed. “Or in other words”, he said in a more matter-of-fact way, “herbs make food taste very different, and are one of the reasons why life is worth living.”
On a whim Sanford said, “Will you teach me about herbs, Joe?”
At that, Joe broke into a huge smile, and said “Okay. But first we go inside and wash our hands. I don’t want your first memory of chives to be the smell of cement dust or cow dung.” So, they collected the tools and took them all inside, then scrubbed their hands over the big metal sink in the scullery, and spent the next hour crushing and smelling the leaves and twigs of Joe’s herbs.
This had all come back to Sanford so vividly, and so much intact, that it was almost as if Sanford had gone back there and was physically with Joe once again, reliving the entire scene.
Shaking off this reverie, and feeling more than a little pang of sadness precisely because the man at the centre of the reverie, Joe, was gone, Sanford sat down at Joe’s desk and began to get his thoughts in order. He needed a plan for what had to be done over the next week or so. The main item coming up was Joe’s funeral, and he needed to check on whether Joe had specific requests for that. But there were quite a few small things: placing obituary notices in a number of papers, making arrangements to pick up Joe’s mail, checking his correspondence and seeing who needed to be notified, seeing whether any particular items from the will needed to be dealt with, and starting the whole business of selling Joe’s property.
Picking up a pencil, he began.
Four
Joe’s will was in a sealed envelope.
Sanford hesitated to open it, because he had an absurd feeling that until he did that there was some slight hope that Joe was not really dead, some slim chance it was all a misunderstanding, and that Joe would return from the hospital, or from wherever …
He slid his finger beneath the envelope flap and pronounced Joe dead.
The will, which was not a thick document, was accompanied by a letter.
My dear friend Jim,
Since you are reading this, I am dead. As I told you many times, the thought of leaving behind all the extraordinary things on this Earth, of leaving the acquaintances who have provided such a varied backdrop to my existence, but mostly leaving my close friends, and especially you, Jim, and the thought of the grief and upset this will cause, that thought has been hard for me to bear. But as you read this I am not in a position to worry about that any longer. All I can do here is give you my blessing as you carry on. As I write this, and as I think ahead to the moment of time you are in now, I can say that giving you my blessing is an easy thing to do. Easy, because having watched you grow through an inquisitive youth, through a late adolescence that was certainly unsettled in some ways, but then transform into a confident, capable, caring, educated, and fully aware man, not only able to stand on his own two feet, but capable of bearing almost any burden – well, this has been for me a source of the deepest unutterable joy and pride. I am prouder of you, Jim, than I
would ever be able to express, and when I think that I might have played some role in that, I am prouder still. Go with your god, Jim.
The rest is details. I have arranged my papers and my affairs with you in mind. If you are reading this in what was my house, all that you see around you is now yours. Some traces of my life are in the papers in my various cabinets, and the pages attached to this letter provide what I think is the best path for you to take in going through that material.
Some of what you will find represents my own striving toward some of my life goals. I ask you to consider all those documents carefully. I am not interested in a legacy, which would be meaningless for me now anyway, but I put my heart and soul into these things, and they might have value for others.
Some of what you find will be disturbing, I have no doubt, but I ask you to consider that nothing I have done relating to you was done in any cavalier fashion, or without a great deal of thought. Whether I have done the right things, and how you judge what I have done, that is for you to determine.
Finally, I beseech you to take full account of the actions of the one person for whom you always meant the most, more even than life itself: the woman who raised you – Aileen Sanford. She is a secular saint, and my regard for her has always been unbounded.
I hope you remember fondly, as I have done often, my cows, the time we spent milking, how Reggie made us both laugh, the hours we spent in my garden, in my scullery, listening to night sounds, reading, and most of all the time we spent in our little sylvan glade. These were some of the greatest shared joys.
I hope you can carry on with a fond remembrance of these things. I hope they will be a talisman for you, as they have been for me. I wish you a life full of intellectual, artistic, and professional fulfillment. I wish you humility before the world’s riches. I wish you love.
Live a good life!
Your friend always,
Joe
Sanford knew that he would return to these words again, many times. Some of them were enigmatic at the moment, but knowing Joe he was sure that everything would come into focus and it would all harmonize.
There were twelve pages of single spaced typed notes attached to the letter, but Sanford had to go for a walk after reading Joe’s letter. It was Joe to the core. Pragmatic, caring, generous to a fault, scrupulously faithful, but really a romantic at heart. Heart. Noble heart. Now cracks a noble –.
Wiping his eyes, Sanford rose from Joe’s desk and went outside. It was a beautiful day, waning but still beautiful. The birds were in throat, and the pines were whispering their eternal message of hope, the wisdom of trees.
There were some important immediate things to be done. He fed Reggie, and spent some time roughhousing with him. He looked over Joe’s immaculate vegetable garden. He walked all around the house. Only then did he go into the “sylvan glade”.
This glade was concealed within the same crescent of pines that he had known since he was first able to walk. The pines in turn were surrounded by a rabble of chokecherry trees, and together they formed a hideaway of which there was no external hint. Pushing through the chokecherries, which were much thicker now than he remembered, he entered the cool shaded area within the pine grove. It wasn’t far to the clearing where the great table sat. King Arthur’s rectangular table.
Sanford remembered the sketches Joe had produced, for an altar stone, a chapel, a cathedral, a shrine, a meeting spot, in the middle of the pine grove, and now here was the real thing once again. Although having the pieces of stone quarried, shaped, and brought to his house had taken weeks, Joe had had them put in place in one day. But then they did consist of only five pieces. He still remembered them sitting on pallets in Joe’s driveway: large, beautiful, gleaming chunks of limestone, but looking almost like marble. They projected such an other-worldly aura that Sanford recalled being hesitant even to touch them, but when he did they offered a smooth, slightly irregular surface, covered in fine dust, having an Olympian coolness, seeming to represent time immemorial and a strong, simple, spiritual essence that easily outdistanced what he became aware of later as the confined trappings of conventional religions.
When they were finally assembled and in place, they spoke to Sanford even more strongly of radiance and power. Two very large squat blocks of stone rested in the clearing, about three feet from each other. A third piece of stone, about ten feet long and eight feet wide, a huge slab about ten inches thick, sat atop and overhung both the two squat supports. The fourth and fifth pieces of stone were solid benches placed on either side of the long dimension of the slab. Joe and Art Currie, who owned a heavy-duty front-end loader with forks, had previously identified a way into the pine grove that could accommodate, with some difficulty, Art’s loader, and after preparing the ground to support the weight, they had brought in and placed the stones. Once these stones had been placed, they weren’t going anywhere, and King Arthur’s rectangular table in its sylvan glade was an established fact.
Sitting on one of the bench stones, something Sanford had not done for a while, and feeling its hard refreshing coolness, caused memories to flare up, and he could taste once again the hard-boiled eggs, the cheese, the homemade bread, and the raw carrots and celery that Joe would bring here for their lunch.
How many hours, days, they had spent here! How many times they had shared a meal here! What things they had talked about! What visions Joe had planted in Sanford’s young mind! What love of nature, of learning, of discussion, of close and exacting inquiry, of the world’s great vistas that awaited, of friends and friendship, and of literature and reading Joe had kindled in him! How much he owed that man! How inadequately Sanford had thanked Joe!
Snatches of Joe’s letter fluttered behind his eyes. “A late adolescence that was certainly unsettled in some ways” – that made Sanford smile.
Sanford had always loved reading and studying, a legacy of Joe’s informal training, which was nonetheless just about as rigorous as it could have been. Partly as a result of that, Sanford had sailed through his final year of high school at the top of his class. His teachers had great academic hopes for him, so when he told them that he wasn’t going to university the following year, they were shell-shocked. One at a time, one after another, they took him aside.
Why on Earth would you not go to university next year?
Because I want some experience in the real world.
But you can get as much of that as you would ever want after you graduate.
Yes, of course I could, but it’s not the same.
Why? What’s the problem?
There’s no particular problem. I just don’t want to go into a hormone pressure cooker right now.
You think that’s what university is?
That’s what it can be, if one doesn’t take steps to avoid it.
But you’re aware, aren’t you, that students who don’t go straight to university run a grave risk of never going at all?
Yes.
Why would you think you’re any different?
I’m not going out into the world just to get my hands on a lot of cash.
They failed to wear him down, and lapsed into confusion and despair.
Sanford had what he considered a normal adolescence, although looking back he had revised that view slightly, later on. Out of school, he had had male friends – Murray, Ron, Claude, David – whom he played hockey with in winter, swam with in summer, went to Scouts with. But in school, he was something of a different person, studious, not without humour, but not given to giggling, sniggering, and generally foolish behaviour. In fact, the only person he spent time with in high school was Jane, and they were considered, outwardly, an ideal pair. She was fair, medium tall, had an attractive oval face, long sandy-coloured hair, a slender build, a beaming smile, and an engaging but somewhat prematurely adult personality. This contrasted to Sanford’s six-foot-plus height, curly black hair, dark eyes, solid physique, friendly but slightly impatient outlook, and skin that looked perpetually tanned. Jane’s gr
ades came in just below Sanford’s, but they found in each other early versions of intellectual soul mates. Jane had no interest in amorous affairs, since she was an ace in mathematics, wanted to be an academic mathematician, and felt there was no time to waste on frivolities. All that would come later.
Sanford left high school, and almost immediately lost contact with everyone except Jane, but even contact with her was sparse or sporadic, and eventually petered out. He later described his next four years as leaving a band of sweat all the way across Canada. He worked in a small fish plant in Newfoundland, drove an iron ore truck in northern Quebec, spent six months working in a nickel refinery in Sudbury, worked various restaurant jobs in Winnipeg, was a dogsbody helper to a professional photographer in Saskatoon, collected garbage in Abbotsford, and then spent a year and a half working the oil fields in Alberta. A little more than four years after he had left high school, he bought a ticket back to Toronto, spent three days with a human resources consultant, and armed with a professional CV and a plan for the next ten years of his life, he began knocking on doors. Within two weeks, he had landed a job at a small engineering firm. The manager who had hired him was surprised at his lack of academic qualifications but greatly impressed by his understanding of the working world. The foreman who had grilled him offered the lament “if only the people who have worked here ten years could do what that kid can do”. He arranged to start work ten days later, found himself a place to live, then spent six days in a memorable homecoming with his mother and Joe. They had been the two people he had corresponded with regularly, every two weeks, during all those four years.