Rose's Garden

by Carrie Brown

  Now, the wind bearing down around him, he came forward on his hands and knees through the mud, toward the oak tree that sheltered the northern end of the garden, bathing the spinach and tender late lettuces in afternoon shade.

  And at last he got his hands around something, a stone or a root. He’d pulled, bent his shoulders, thrown his weight into it. But whatever it was did not yield to his hand. He cursed, rain cascading over his hat brim. And he swore—at it, at him, not a lopped root nor the thick knee of the oak tree but the long shin of what looked like an angel, the thing that said it was an angel, the thing with the voice that said, “Rise up.”

  For there it had stood among the trunks of the trees, soaring up from the earth into the flooding night sky like a magnificent statue, its mouth gaped to the rain, its feet turned briefly to clay, its wings shuddering.

  Yet this was not a heavenly angel, with a pure expression and an innocent brow, a harp borne at its hip. It did not look like an angel whose likeness might hang on a wall in the Vatican Museums. This was someone Conrad knew—an angel with a rutted, Abraham Lincoln face.

  It had not been what he might have expected, what he thought anyone, even a grieving widower, had a right to expect. If he’d ever imagined such a thing, it would have been along lines somewhat holier, more picturesque—the eyelid of heaven itself, lifted to issue forth a swirling cloud of steam. And in that widening eye of light, a heavenly cavalcade of angels might have streamed down from on high, ferocious expectation on their faces, their gowns billowing behind them like a white afterlife, holy and endless, smoke blown down from heaven’s fires.

  Conrad had raised his eyes and taken in the angel’s towering form. It held its head nobly, a carved figurehead against the rushing black clouds. Its wings had rippled, an expanse of sail cloth behind its back. The pinfeathers crackled; the flesh had seized.

  Oh, Jesus. Death becomes me now, Conrad thought, kneeling in the mud, his hands wrapped around the angel’s foot. Dust to dust, mud to mud. I’m fit. It’s over. And he’d lain there, had begun in relief to weep, thinking he would see his Rose again, thinking he had not been left alone to suffer so long after all, that he would take the wild Rose into his arms now, hold her gray head, her soft cheek, against his own. Here it was, in the devastated empire of her garden—the deep voice of his heavenly escort. So he had raised his face.

  And there had stood Lemuel, his father-in-law, dead fifteen years now, his bony hands dangling from the vaporous sleeves of his robe, his gentle manner and wandering eye regarding him.

  “Rise up,” Lemuel said, but Conrad could not. He cast his eyes down, looked into the dirt. “You’ve come for me,” he whispered. And it was not a question.

  But Lemuel didn’t answer, and Conrad was frightened then at the sensation in the air above him, streamers of wind and night wrapping themselves around the angel, around Lemuel.

  “You’ve come for me!” Conrad had cried, insisting, lifting up his arms. “I can’t stay here forever!”

  “You don’t have forever,” Lemuel had answered, and Conrad understood then that he was not leaving. Lemuel’s appearance that night was not a deliverance but a sentence. Not a route of escape but a path that would return him to where he began, back through old age, middle age, adolescence, childhood, birth, each stage a notch on a diving plumb line.

  “Please! Lemuel! Where is Rose?” he had cried, struggling to his feet. “Can’t you do something? Show her to me!”

  But Lemuel had turned aside and averted his eyes, casting them upward to the roiling sky, to the black-and-purple geysers of cloud. His voice was distant when he replied; his answer was not an answer. “Go home, Conrad,” Lemuel told him.

  Lemuel’s form had shivered, then contracted itself like a cloud.

  “Wait!” Conrad cried. “Go home? What do you mean? What else?”

  “Isn’t this enough?” Lemuel said, and he had extended his wings then. They were surprisingly large, and Conrad saw an impatience to the gesture, Lemuel’s strength boiling up inside of him, a flood ready to be unleashed. “Watch!” Lemuel cried.

  Conrad had ducked as an enormous, invisible mass hovered over him. The trees themselves bent down in the wind that lifted Lemuel. Conrad saw the lights of his house flicker, the hexagonal enclosure of Rose’s herb knots, the reflecting pool, the filigreed grape arbor encircling the house, the gilded trim of the eaves, the elaborate green framework of his garden falling into itself with a breath like a collapsing tent—all of it illuminated in a sudden burst of phosphorescent light. His world had grown small in that instant, a faraway place.

  “She loved you,” Lemuel called, his voice snatched and carried away. “Rose loves you, Conrad.”

  And then he was gone.

  Conrad had come to his knees, covered his face with his hands. The rain pelted against his back, hard, like gravel thrown at him, like some pain—or some awakening joy—meant to spur him on. All around him the garden’s vines were hauled in; the heads of the flowers were knocked from their stems and flung into the dark distance. The roosting crows left in a long train, one after another, flying through the rain. Seed cases held a moment, then exploded and were drowned. Leaves were stripped from branches, torn apart.

  And as Conrad lay there alone, a disheveling hand hesitated over Paradise Hill, taking down bowers and scaffolds, bearing away the anemone and achillea, the lamb’s ears and the leopard’s bane, the speedwell and Jacob’s ladder, ending the summer and beginning the fall.

  HE COULDN’T PUT all that in a letter to the editor, he knew, but he tried to be exact anyway; it seemed important to be accurate. He brushed at the page before him, scattering erasings. He tried to be humble, admitting that he did not know, did not understand why he had been given this vision, but that he was—grateful was the word he settled on, a word Rose would have liked. And because it seemed important to share not just the story but also the place itself, he finished his letter by saying he would welcome visitors. Anyone who wanted to see where it had happened. Between the hours of—four and six sounded convenient, he thought. Any day of the week.

  His letter completed, Conrad set down his pen, stared off into space, and allowed himself a few minutes of speculation: You gather what believers you can, he decided. You gather them for whatever they might make of what happened to you. You tell the story. You see what happens. You watch how everything stays the same, apparently the same.

  Except, except—now there was this; now it was not just the future that looked different, but the past, too.

  The memory of the angel in his garden, the vision that had overtaken him, worked away inside him. He had wanted one more moment, one more moment with Rose, one chance to say not what he had said—“How could you leave me here?”—but this: How will I ever find you now? He would have given anything for an answer. Sold his soul.

  And she’d said something, there at the end. What had it been? He rubbed his head, tried—unsuccessfully again—to bring her before him, to reel back the months. She’d said something, turning her eyes toward him.

  But now this, he thought—this apparition. This was not exactly what he’d asked for, was it? He’d wanted her, not Lemuel. And yet he had the feeling that she had been there, standing some distance away perhaps, invisible but present in the way the wind brings distant places near for a moment, a scent borne from far away.

  He sat quietly at his table, his letter under his hand. His whole life was reeling back to him, both known and unknown at once. Now the whole world quivered with suggestion, with a thousand rippling meanings and surprises, announcing itself not just for what it was but for what he, you, anybody, might make of it.

  AFTERWARD, THINKING IT over, Conrad thought he should have been prepared for it. For an angel, or something like it. For his father-in-law finally capable of real flight, not just its imagined ecstasy. Standing on his rooftop, his pigeons gripping his outstretched arms, their wings raised in expectation, Lemuel had believed in the rewards of concentration, of desire
, even of faith. And the spectacular behavior of the garden this summer, despite Conrad’s neglect—this heroic display, flowers larger than ever and more brilliant and numerous—all this, surely, had been the garden’s way of making itself ready to host a miracle.

  So he should have been prepared, Conrad thought, should have been ready. Another man might have been ready. But he had not.

  Since Rose’s death four months before, he had spent most mornings with his pigeons, many of them offspring from Lemuel’s original flock. He swept and scrubbed the loft, coddled his birds, brewed up herbal teas on the little camp stove, and dosed the pigeons, drop by drop, their warmth spreading over his lap as he held them. He felt among their feathers for boils and lumps, watching for the swollen beaks of birds suffering from mycoplasmosis, the inflamed eyes of those with ornithosis. He knew he had neglected his birds during Rose’s last weeks, and so he worked carefully now, afraid of overlooking something.

  He had walked to and fro, a pigeon on his shoulder, its throaty warbling in his ear. He remembered Lemuel pacing on the graveled rooftop of his own house in Brooklyn, conversing with his birds, nodding assent or disagreement.

  The summer afternoons he had spent dozing in his easy chair, the one Rose called Sleepy Hollow for its comforting, deep curves. From time to time he came upon articles of her clothing—a shoe, the pink blazer she’d worn when she’d been a volunteer at the hospital, a skirt with its elastic waistband—and took them on his lap. He sat, the minor weight of her cardigan resting over his shoulders, and attended to his own heartbeat. He took her purse down from the hook on the kitchen door and held it, his fingers resting over the clasp.

  He spent his evenings sitting in the arbor with a pigeon on his lap, or laid out on the grass on the middle terrace, feeling the earth tug at the center of his body.

  He could not cook at all—he had never learned and never imagined that he might have to—and so he’d been, in those early weeks after Rose’s death, still and watchful around food, as if he were a pool of water inhabited by a hungry, muscled carp. He would lunge, with a ferocity that surprised him, at the pears that dripped from the trees. But though he could feel the sweet nectar drain down his chin, he had lost all sense of taste. Late at night, unable to sleep for the hunger in his belly, he would pull the ribbed chain to the light in the pantry, stand before the jars of roseate pickled beets and spiced apples, pale cucumbers and marmalade with its shavings of ginger, all put up by Rose her last autumn. He would select one jar, unscrew the lid, and plunge his fingers in, withdrawing them and skimming them across his lips. Nothing. The fruits were as scentless and tasteless as river stones. It had made him weep.

  But one afternoon, two or three weeks after Rose’s death and months before the angel came, he was standing listlessly behind the lace curtains in the dining room, staring out the window. His eyes traveled up and down the empty street, up and down and back across his small lawn, and then stopped at the sight of a small basket resting on the top step of his front porch.

  The meditative sawing of grasshoppers’ wings ceased when he opened the door and stepped outside. Conrad saw an unfamiliar little terrier, white, with black, pointed ears like two cocked dunce caps, veer sharply across the deserted road before his house and disappear around the corner. He’d scanned the street again and then picked up the basket and brought it inside.

  He’d laid it on the kitchen table, where a long bar of sunlight fell across it. A residual heat rose from the woven lid, shimmering in the air; Conrad had been momentarily dizzy. Some scent, sweetly familiar yet belonging to a place so far back in his memory that he could not place it, rose to his nostrils. If a swarm of butterflies had risen when he opened the lid, if honeybees had built their wax paper combs inside, he would not have been surprised. The inside of his cheeks clenched; his eyes watered.

  It had been his first real meal since Rose’s death: a veal stew with tiny pearl onions and pink peppercorns; a half-dozen corn muffins, studded with a confetti of hot peppers in pink and green. There were sausages, brown and glistening, in an earthenware jar. A faceted glass bottle held wine. He ate two pieces of the chocolate cake, dense and rich and flavored with coffee, and then he pushed back from the table, his hands over his middle, tears running down his face.

  This was Rose’s cooking, yet with something slightly altered about it—some herb he did not recognize in the sausages, rum in the cake. But he had known, even as he raised the lid of the basket, that its contents would restore to him the flavor and essence of sustenance, the pleasure of Rose’s table, which had made him, throughout his marriage, nearly faint with gratitude. He had known that the meal to follow would be good—he could smell it, and if he could smell it, he knew, he could taste it. And it had been so delicious, so satisfying; it had reached in and placed a kind palm over the wound in his heart. Who, what kindly neighbor, could have done this?

  That night, the night of the veal stew, for the first time in weeks and weeks, he had slept for almost six hours straight, sunk down into the chair by the window where he had made his bed since Rose had died. From far away he heard the sound of a dog baying. The yellow moon had sailed past the window over the bowl of Paradise Hill like a child’s toy pulled on a string. Next door, May Brown, who was afraid of the dark, knelt under her orange porch light to clean her deep freeze, scraping bitter ice crystals into the ash bucket. Her radio, set on the windowsill and turned to face the evening so she could hear it out on the porch, had been tuned to a comedy show. Conrad fell asleep under the comforting tide of audience laughter rising and falling under his window.

  Two

  THOUGH LEMUEL CAME to be the man Conrad loved most in the world, their friendship did not begin auspiciously. It began, Conrad considered, as so many men’s friendships do—though he had been just a child at the time—with what those who raise pigeons call la guerra, with war, the battle waged for fun and profit among pigeon fanciers. Mumblers, they call themselves, to describe their vague and limited attention as boys in school, more interested in the wheeling flight of birds outside the window than in the crabbed and distant writing on the blackboard. The teacher would ask them a question and they’d mumble a reply, for they hadn’t, in truth, been paying any attention at all. They’d been looking out the window at the spokes of light thrown from a bird’s wing.

  Conrad was just a child, eleven years old. He first came to know Lemuel Sparks without ever meeting him, without ever laying eyes on the man, for Lemuel had been poaching Conrad’s pigeons—and quite successfully, too—for some months before Conrad finally met him face-to-face or even knew his name.

  All he knew was that someone was stealing his birds, though the thefts were executed fairly, according to the rules of the sport. Week after week his pigeons were hooked down one after the other into someone else’s flock, birds so expertly trained and organized that they rose together like a puff of smoke and then fell in unison, movie footage reversing itself in fast motion. It was an old trick: a perfectly synchronized flock would surround a lone bird, usually young and probably poorly fed, and draw it down in a captivating embrace to a foreign roost. Conrad had seen it happen, watching from his fire escape, his heart sinking. Whoever this poacher was, Conrad understood the man knew what he was doing.

  And as the rules required, Conrad paid up at the pigeon exchange on Marion Street, one quarter a bird. By the time he arrived at the exchange after school, his loss having festered in his heart all day, his opponent would already have brought in the band from his latest captive. It always seemed particularly cruel to Conrad that he could lose not only a pigeon but his dignity and a quarter, too. Soberly, Conrad would hand the money over to Frank Pittilio, Marion Street’s proprietor, who enjoyed the joke of keeping Lemuel’s identity a secret.

  “Lost another one, I see,” Mr. Pittilio would say when Conrad placed his coin in the man’s hand. “Your personal nemico has just been here. He’s knocking down your birds just as easy as taking candy from a baby. Aww, Conrad! Don’t
look so sad! You should be happy he takes only one at a time.” And then Mr. Pittilio would laugh, put Conrad’s change in an envelope, slide the envelope back into a drawer, pat it shut.

  “I want my birds back,” Conrad would demand, red faced. That was the rule; he paid the price of losing, and his pigeons would be returned to him.

  “All in good time, little man. All in good time,” Mr. Pittilio would reply, laughing, leaning closer. “He’s waiting for the good fight. A worthy opponent.”

  Conrad would leave then, defeated. He’d stand at the window of the pigeon exchange a moment, looking in at the birds, the homers in yellow, white, and isabella, that color of spun honey, the low light of the setting sun illuminating their feathers. And then he’d go home, back to his fire escape, back to his flock diminished by yet one more bird.

  Conrad knew that his experience with pigeons was limited by his youth and his wallet. He bought cheap birds, small racing homers Mr. Pittilio was willing to let go for a song, and kept them on the fire escape in orange crates.

  “Street filth,” his father would mutter. “Going to catch a disease from those.”

  But he had an ally in his mother. He’d find her sometimes, still in her housedress, leaning on the radiator with the broom in her hand, watching the pigeons in their crates, making little kissing noises at the glass. “It’s something, what he can do with them,” she’d say to her husband. “Let him be. It’s harmless.”

  At night, when she smoothed the child’s blankets, tucked them in, she’d stroke his head. “They won’t be too cold out there? We shouldn’t bring them in?” she’d ask.

  “No,” the boy would say, smiling. “They’re meant to be outside, Mama. They’re used to it.”

  “So cold,” she’d say softly, shivering a little, shaking her head. And then she’d kiss him good night. “Sleep well, little bird boy.”