The Naked Gardener

by L B Gschwandtner

  Hope nodded. She looked like a little girl. A confused little girl going on her first date. And all of a sudden I saw in her face a mirror of my own confusion about men and relationships. It was all such a bog. So squishy. You never knew quite where you stood or what to expect. And yet part of the attraction was the uncertainty of it all. Then Hope looked around, her lips turned down, eyebrows knit together, like a child who’s just been caught sneaking out of the house.

  “Oh my God,” said Charlene. “How old are you?”

  “Don’t tease her,” said Erica. “Her parents were missionaries. She’s lived a very sheltered life, growing up in Africa, working at some church her whole life, home schooled. Come on.”

  I thought about Hope at nursing school. If she could handle that … “Don’t worry or think about it too much,” I advised her. “Just let things happen.” I laughed. “Look who’s giving you advice. I can’t decide what to do about my own life.”

  “No one knows what to do. You just put one foot in front of the other and see where you’re going while you’re getting there,” Erica told her.

  “What about you, Charlene?” asked Hope. “You never told us what decision you have to make.” The attention shifted back to Charlene. She didn’t say anything. We waited. Before she did speak, she took a deep breath, almost a gasp, as if she couldn’t get enough air.

  “Yesterday, after I packed up for this trip, I went out to the drug store and when I came home, I took an HPT and it came out positive.” She took another deep breath. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “You’re pregnant? I can’t believe it.” Valerie’s voice was so high she was almost squealing.

  “You’re not the only one. I’ve been a wreck ever since I found out. I’m friggin’ forty-one and I’m pregnant. I almost bailed on this trip. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “Have you told Jake?” asked Erica. “I mean what would he say?’

  “You know our situation. We never expected to have a baby. It wasn’t ever on our radar.”

  “I’d rather have your problem than mine,” said Roz.

  “Why, what’s yours?” Charlene asked.

  “I found a lump on my right breast. I go for a mammogram the day after we get back.”

  “Oh, God.” Erica touched Roz’s arm. “It may be nothing at all. Most of the time it’s nothing. Don’t make yourself crazy at this point.”

  “My mother had a double mastectomy at fifty. And she lived five more years. Fifty-five and she was gone. So don’t tell me about benign tumors.”

  “But things have changed a lot,” I said. “Even if they find something, the treatments are much better now. Erica’s right.”

  We stared into the fire. What you feel is your own to tend. No one can share it. No one can endure it for you. No one can inhabit your world but you. These secrets we carry inside, how closely we guard them. Even from ourselves. Were any of us happy? Was happiness even a state to desire? Should we all be satisfied that we were free to do what we chose? So many women in so many places were so much worse off than we were. Sitting by the river, the fire crackling, our stomachs full. Our lives may have been in turmoil in one part, but in others they couldn’t have been safer, more secure. Or was that an illusion? We are all standing on shifting sands of one kind or another. Sunspots. Asteroid showers, melting icebergs may determine our fate. What control can we possibly have over that?

  Every once in a while someone tossed another branch onto the pile and the fire flared up. Darkness had come on by then and the night sounds of the forest surrounded us. Erica brought a bucket of water from the river and set it beside the rock where the wood was piled. The summer air was warm. There was no night breeze yet. A bird fluttered by in the dark sky above the trees. Perhaps it was a duck or maybe a Canada goose looking for a place to settle for the night. From somewhere far off another goose honked out a message.

  When Hope spoke, it came as a bit of a jolt in the silence.

  “There are only six of us. And look what we’re facing in our lives.”

  “Is there ever a time in life when things slow down?” Charlene asked quietly. “It all seems to go so fast. It’s almost too much.”

  “But some of it is good,” Hope countered. “Having a baby is a good thing. A joyous thing.”

  “I’m going to try to look at it that way. It’s just that I can’t get my mind around it. Around what it will mean. My life would completely change,” Charlene said. “But I won’t ever get this chance again.”

  “What about you, Katelyn?” Hope asked.

  They all looked at me.

  “Yes, what about you?” Erica asked. “What secret are you keeping out at the old Reichelm farm?”

  I looked around and then said, “It seems to me that life is inherently unstable. The whole world is unstable. Earthquakes, hurricanes, blizzards. And me? On the outside I know I look like I’m all neatly put together. But on the inside I’m constantly trying to find a stable core when what I feel is anything but stability. The only time I really lose this sense that the world is shifting under me is in my garden.”

  “Is that your secret?” asked Hope. “Your garden? It didn’t look like a secret to me when we were out there.”

  “Not the garden itself,” I said. “It’s just something quirky I do out there. A little odd thing.”

  “Tell us.” Valerie looked me straight in the eyes and I thought, she really is beautiful. And I wondered, even though I had always been told I was pretty, what it must be like for a woman to be born with that kind of beauty.

  “Yes. You’re the one who suggested this retreat. And you’re the trip leader. So you can’t be the only one who has an untold secret,” Erica said.

  “Okay, but just keep in mind it’s just something I started doing on a whim. It wasn’t like something I planned or anything.”

  “Come on, give.” Roz said.

  “Well, when Maze leaves, and I’m all alone at the farm … ” I hesitated.

  “Does this involve another man?” Roz asked.

  “You wish,” said Charlene.

  “No,” I said. “Nothing like that. It’s just, when I’m alone, out there with the sun and the birds singing, I garden naked.”

  “You what?” They all said it with glee, like a chorus. They gathered closer to me.

  “You’re kidding.” Erica started to laugh. “You mean all those fat vegetables you sold at the farmers market when we met last summer? I wonder what people would say if you told them how you grew those tomatoes.” She giggled like a little girl.

  It caught on and flared up like the fire. Laughter sparked here and there until we were all howling, until the tears flowed and then we were crying. Roz couldn’t stop. I moved to her side and put my arms around her and hugged her.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “Things will be fine. I’ll go to the doctor with you for the test. You won’t have to go through this alone.” I looked over at Charlene. “And I’ll be your baby’s godmother, if you like.”

  “See,” Valerie said, wiping the tears from her cheeks. “This is just what happens when girls sit around a campfire.”

  After a time, we let the fire die down until the embers glowed deep red. The moon rose above the trees. Crickets chirped. The rough rasp of katydid songs filled the night. One by one we took a cup, filled it with water from one of the gallon jugs we’d brought along, and brushed our teeth, and with water from the river washed off our faces, arms, and feet, and prepared for sleep. We crawled into our sleeping bags two to a tent and soon the only sounds came from the forest and the river, perpetually running downstream, burbling at the banks.

  * * *

  At some time during the night I stirred and opened my eyes. A wind had come up and the leaves rustled with it. I heard a branch crack somewhere and fall, hitting others as it went down. Or perhaps it was a deer wandering through the forest and what I heard was its hooves crackling branches underfoot. I pushed at the tent flaps and slipped on
my creek shoes before standing up in what was left of the moon’s light. The air was fresh but not cold. I could hear the river running past and the scent of the water reminded me of my grandmother’s house on the river so long ago that now it was truly only alive in my memory The house and the stone walls my grandfather had built to hold the water back were now long gone.

  That river was not so wide as this one, nor as deep. Not so cold. Dark brown under the shade of overhanging trees, with a particular scent of fresh water inside my grandmother’s house just yards from the river’s edge.

  Her wooden house was dark green with dark red shutters and inside, in the leaded kitchen cabinets, she stored dark blue, cut-glass drinking glasses. She always poured a glass of milk for me when I visited her house. She sat me at the kitchen table and pulled one shade open halfway and gave me two cookies. I dunked the cookies, I remember. And she told me about her mother and her childhood and her life. I didn’t want the flood to take away those glasses. But I knew things would never be the same after the flood. She wouldn’t want to come back here. Our days at the river were over.

  Before the big flood there were a series of smaller ones. The first flood only dampened the kitchen floor. The second one did in the bedroom rugs and the third annihilated the living room couch and armchairs. In a one story house there was nowhere to move things away from the water. And when your house sits not twenty feet from the river, well, it’s lovely in dry weather, but every time it rains you start looking at the water with a measuring stick in your hand. But there they were, in their one story wood house. An idyllic existence.

  To assure himself that he had control over the rise and fall of the water, my grandfather hired some men and brought in a cement truck and went to work. Well he didn’t do the work. He just forked over the money. It probably cost him no more than a thousand dollars in nineteen hundred and thirty-something. Now it would be well over a million, what he did. And he would have been tossed in jail. So the lawyers’ fees would be another million. That’s what you call inflation.

  First he built a stone wall on the house side of the river all along his property. He left an opening with steps down to the water opposite his back porch. And opposite the little house, as they called the cottage where my parents lived before I was born, he built a wide set of steps leading to a cement cube about fifteen feet wide by about ten feet long by six feet tall. Then he put in a lock. Then another cement platform, as wide but only about four feet long, then another lock, then a final platform a bit bigger than the first. From this he built wide stone and cement steps across the far corner of the river making a stairway into the water. Embedded vertically in the sides of the openings between the cement platforms he had the workmen place vertical channels for wooden panels with handles. These panels stacked one on top of the other, three high, thus allowing him to control the depth of the water on the upstream side of his dam. The floor between the channels was cement also, and the children used to climb down into these spaces and sit with our backs to the wood panels letting the waterfalls cascade over us. In times of heavy rain or runoff, he took out some panels to allow more water out of the river. In summer, he put them all in place, damming the water to a depth of six feet or so. When the water dammed up as high as the locks allowed, the excess would run over the locks and pour into the river below the dam.

  We fished for sunnys with small tackle, bobbers and sinkers. Not much of a challenge. After my grandfather started stocking the river, we practiced fly casting for trout. He caught a few every once in awhile but, since trees overhung the riverbanks it was always very dark and hard to see the trout. Sometimes he walked the rocks downstream to where the water below the dam ran into rapids where he would cast for long hours. Kids were not allowed on the downstream side of the dam. Snapping turtles they told us. This was a fearsome image. A snapping turtle, we were told, could grab a child’s leg and bite clear through it and never let go.

  One day my grandfather led me down the rocks and put a fly rod in my hands and taught me how to spot a trout wiggling in the current and cast for it. My first fishing lesson. We didn’t catch any that day, but I learned how to navigate the wet rocks and read the water. And whatever fear of snappers I’d had evaporated like a drop of water on a sun soaked stone.

  It was late in August. It had been the kind of Virginia summer heat that makes you feel like you’re inside the housing of a steam engine. You could barely breathe and your skin felt clammy all the time. When it got that hot, we always went over to my grandmother’s to swim at the river.

  The people who predict weather, the ones who were supposed to know what was coming and how long it would last, had thought we were over the worst of the hurricane that had hit five days earlier. It had come ashore north of the river where Grandma Cross lived. The next day the upstream rivers began to crest. The cresting pattern rolled southeastward reaching my grandmother’s house about ten that night.

  The night of that first storm, my father brought my widowed grandmother to our house to get her safely away from the rising river. She stayed in my room that night and, while the rain pounded our roof, my grandmother sat on my bed and read Heidi to me.

  Then a second hurricane whipped up the coast lashing the land in thirty hours of non stop deluge. Two days after that storm passed, the real trouble began. Inland flooding swelled rivers, rising coastal tides along with flood waters moved down the rivers toward the Bay and back up to the land at the same time salt water came inland pushing back at the fresh water flowing down toward the sea.

  The second hurricane had moved up the east coast. Everyone predicted it would be a bad one. First it was supposed to hit Florida. Then it turned toward Bermuda and everyone released their breath. But this hurricane decided to do a one eighty at the last minute and steamed back toward the coast, heading west northwest aimed at North Carolina. But it surprised everyone again, turned north and skirted the Outer Banks beaches kicking up waves and clawing out huge chunks of valuable oceanfront as it churned its way up the coast until it swerved in and hit Virginia. It thundered up and across the state, its eye bearing down on the river where my grandmother lived.

  With the hurricane, whose name I don’t remember all these years later, came torrents of rain. It seemed as if it had been raining forever once that monster storm made landfall. It rained up and down the coast and inland for miles and miles, swelling the streams to overflowing, breaking over their banks. Every hour was another report about when this or that river would crest, or what streams were now impassable, what car had been stranded, what motorist rescued, what house swept away in the torrent.

  After the second storm, my grandmother moved to the mountains for an extended stay with her sister. My father took me over to the river the day it was supposed to crest at flood stage. I didn’t know what to expect. My father told me it had rained fourteen inches during the storm. I tried to picture what that meant but it was lost on me until my father put me in the car and drove us to the river.

  The water was up to the roof of my grandmother’s house. There was a goat stuck up in the top of a tree, just hanging there with his feet dangling. As we stood there gaping at the flood, a car washed by swirling around and around in the water. Its doors were closed, windows shut, no one inside. A ghost car riding the wild surf. But the thing I remembered most clearly was the sound. It filled the space, roared all around you. You couldn’t hear wind or talking or a car horn. Anyway no one said anything. There was nothing to say.

  * * *

  The dawn chorus woke us early.

  “God what a racket.”

  Charlene crawled out of the tent she had shared with Erica. She had slept in a tank top and bikini panties. Now she stretched her arms as high as possible above her head, grasping one hand with the other and pulling from side to side.

  “Why do all the birds wake up and start calling at once?”

  The others emerged from their tents. Erica was the last to come out, wearing a flowing nightgown that had little flo
wers all over it.

  “Oh, look girls, grandma’s here,” said Charlene, pointing at her.”

  “If I could fit into a tank and panties, I’d be wearing that, just like you.”

  “That’s okay,” Hope came over to Erica, “you’ll get there. If that’s where you want to get. Personally I’ll take jammies anytime.”

  I started a fire. The women drifted off to the woods to take care of their morning business while I placed a big pot of water over the fire on an iron stand. We hadn’t brought a camping stove so it was good the night had been clear and the wood was crisp and dry. The fire crackled right up and soon the water was heating and Roz had placed a griddle over the fire and cut slabs of bacon to fry. The cooler food was still fresh and on this first morning out we would have eggs and bacon and butter and jam on some of Erica’s bread. There were cartons of juice and some fresh oranges to cut.

  “It’s amazing how much it requires for us to survive.”

  Hope motioned to all the gear and food as she helped Roz with the bacon. With each meal, the loads the canoes had to carry grew lighter. Erica had packed enough loaves for all the meals. Different types. Some were sweet breads we could eat as a dessert. She brought three loaves of chocolate pecan bread that always sold out at the market before all the others.

  “I know. Camping would be a lot different if we had to kill our own food or forage for it. Could you stay alive out here in the wilderness?” Hope asked me.

  “For a few days I think I could. In summer anyway. I don’t know about winter. I’d probably starve. Or die from cold.”

  “But if you walked far enough you’d get to a road or house or something.” Roz suggested. She sounded a little frightened.

  “As long as you walked in the right direction. But most people who get lost in the woods go around in a big circle and never get anywhere. As long as you marked the trees while you were walking, and watched the sun, you would eventually get somewhere I guess. But if you knew you had to find your way out of a forest it would be better to have brought a GPS with you. All we’d have to do is follow the river down stream.”