Rose's Garden

by Carrie Brown

  “They’ll be all right,” he said, shaking his friend’s hand and returning his rough embrace. “You forget my birds. They’re aces. Never lost one yet.”

  Harry smiled, rolled his eyes. “My friend,” he said then, holding on briefly to Conrad’s arm. “I’m so very sorry. I wanted—I wish I could have come to the service.” He indicated his eyes with his fingers split, jabbing at them in annoyance. Both eyes were clouded with cataracts. “They’ve taken away my wheels. I couldn’t find anyone to bring me.”

  Conrad pressed his friend’s hand in return. “It’s all right,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Harry nodded, miserable, putting the backs of his hands briefly to his eyes. “Come on,” he said at last. “I’ll help you unload them.”

  Conrad nodded. But as he turned to head toward the back of the truck, he paused. “Harry,” he said tentatively, turning around. “Would you believe me if—” He stopped again, looked at the ground. “I think I’m seeing things, Harry. First, the other night, I saw—an angel. It was Lemuel. You remember him? Rose’s father?”

  Harry nodded, raised his eyebrows.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” Conrad said, and he moved then to lift down the first crate of pigeons. “I would have said you were crazy, if you’d told me this. But I saw it—this thing. Big wings and all. In the garden, Rose’s vegetable garden.” He stole another glance at Harry, whose face was serious. He sighed. “And then today, on the way here, I had an accident—or almost an accident.” He put his hand up to his forehead, felt the dry contour of his own skull. “I drove—I drove right through—a girl. Crossing the street in front of me. She was fine, but I swear it was like I drove literally right through her. I—” He lifted up his hands helplessly. “I don’t know. The angel, Lemuel, he told me Rose loved me. And now—” He bent down to peer in at his birds, touch a finger to the cage. “Now it’s like I’m being—watched.”

  He stood up again to face Harry, shrugged, lifted his palms. “I’d thought it was all over. My life, I mean. Without her. But now I think it’s not. I think there’s something left to happen.”

  Harry leaned over and knocked Conrad’s head with his knuckles. “You’re going to lose the rest of your marbles. That’s what.” But he put his hands up, defensive as a boxer. “It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t quarrel with anyone anymore. You’ve seen an angel, that’s fine with me. You’ve been running over people who don’t exist. So—all right. Of course, Rose,” he went on, winking, “she had it in her anyway. Probably was an angel all along herself.”

  Conrad smiled at the thought. Rose would have liked it. He took a deep breath. Harry was right. There wasn’t anything else to say. “Okay,” he agreed, taking Harry’s arm. “I still need food and drink, though, and I’m not getting enough of it. What do you have for an old man? Then I’ll go on home while the getting’s good. I’m not as sure a bet as my birds.”

  In his tiny, galleylike kitchen Harry poured them each a beer, then brought a round of salami, a wheel of cheese, and some crackers to the table outside. His own wife had died nearly a decade before of breast cancer. Conrad and Rose had been to the funeral, Rose clutching Conrad’s arm in desperation the whole time.

  Finally, looking up and considering the darkening sky, Conrad had risen to his feet. “I’ll check on them before I leave,” he said to Harry. “You’ll send them off this afternoon?”

  Harry raised his hand as Conrad walked toward his truck. “Watch out for falling rock,” Harry called, a joke between them, from the time Conrad’s car had been struck by a boulder as he was leaving Harry’s, skirting the edge of the mountains on his way home. People laughed about those road signs. Conrad was the only person he’d ever heard of who’d actually been struck. Now Conrad smiled as he walked away, raised his hand to Harry in a salute.

  On the grass beside his truck he crouched and looked in at his shuffling pigeons. And then, suddenly inspired, he opened the truck door, found a pen and a piece of paper—an old bank receipt—in the glove compartment. He collected the fiberglass tube and leg harness for the pigeon. Leaning on the hood of the truck, under the rushing clouds, he stopped, thought, then wrote: “Dear Rose. I love you, too. Thank you. Conrad.”

  Not enough, he thought. But still. He rolled the paper tight, fitted it into the tube, and attached the tube to the archangel’s leg.

  “For old time’s sake,” he whispered, stroking the bird. And though the tears ran down his face then, he placed the bird back in the cage, checked his watch, and headed for home.

  Seven

  THOUGH IT WAS still early in the afternoon, the sky was almost black with threatening clouds by the time Conrad pulled up in front of his house and backed the truck onto the pebbled driveway.

  Next door, May Brown had hung her wash on the line stretched between two old champion oaks, the splayed hands of their leaves turning wildly in the wind. The luminous sheets and white shirts wrenched against their clothespins.

  Staring through the windshield at the dark windows of his house, Conrad remembered why he hadn’t wanted to leave home for so many weeks after Rose’s death: it was shocking to come back without her there, like opening the door and discovering you’d been robbed. His eyes traveled over the path and up to the porch steps. No basket, either, so there would be no dinner, unless he wanted to cook it himself.

  He felt ashamed at the anger that overtook him then; he had no business being angry about the inconsistency of these deliveries. After all, that anybody should be looking out for him in this way was remarkable enough; he should just be grateful. But he felt disappointed all the same. She ought to have a schedule, something I can depend on, he thought. And almost in the same moment he realized once again that he didn’t know who she was. For that matter, why she? It might be anybody. If it were the Pleiades running this round-robin of meals for him, for instance, a notion that had occurred to him before, they’d be better organized than this.

  He rolled down the truck window, caught the mineral scent of the river. From far away, carried along the river’s gray, choppy waters and up the hill to his ears on a current of rising air, he caught the distant, bright ring of the chain knocked against the metal gatepost in Horace Fenton’s pastures downriver, heard his faint call to the cows as he rode the swinging gate to let them pass. “Come on home,” Horace called, low and mournful, an echo. “Come on home.”

  Next door, May’s kettle on the boil released a sudden, high-pitched scream; Conrad jumped in his seat at the sound, jumped again as one of the open casement windows to her kitchen knocked back against the house with a sharp report. Conrad felt his heart throb wildly in his chest. A branch snapped nearby. And then the air was drenched with a sudden, wet electricity, a swarm of insects rising on silver wings from the low marshlands bordering the river, over the airy, empty heads of the pale pampas grass flattened in the wind.

  He was worried about his pigeons now. They didn’t mind the rain, but an electrical storm could throw them off course, as if they depended on the topography of the earth’s electromagnetic fields to steer them home, a language of sensation, an invisible matrix as known to them as the chains of rock outcroppings and looping streams and rivers running in map lines through the green forest.

  He opened the door to the truck and swung his legs out. But as he did so, he heard a nearby whistling through air and a soft thud, the sound of a projectile landing in the dense earth nearby. Conrad looked down at the ground but didn’t see anything. Still, he wasn’t imagining it—he’d heard the sound. Something had fallen from the sky.

  Dropping to his hands and knees, he began combing warily through the tall grass that bordered the driveway, its rough margin blooming with the loose, creamy spikes of mugwort.

  He jerked back when the flowers were disturbed by an alarmed rustle, the frantic noises of a mute creature. As he leaned forward, a violent fluttering parted the leaves, and he saw the bird, light tan with iridescent feathers, a yellow band around one leg. One wing wa
s bent. Folded, it scraped the ground. Conrad could tell the injury was several weeks old, for the feathers were shorn away but cleaned of blood. As Conrad hovered there on his knees, the pigeon keeled over to one side, finally exhausted, and Conrad saw also that one eye had been plucked out, leaving a hole the size of a cherry stone, chalk white and vacant. Conrad slowly extended one hand, hesitated a moment, and then touched the pigeon’s back. A slight shudder ran through its body, then nothing.

  Slipping his hand under the pigeon’s breast, Conrad held his breath. It was there, a slow pulse separated by long intervals. And Conrad wished then, as he had wished once before at Rose’s bedside, that simply by wanting it, simply by some heroic act of concentration, he could change his whole life, everything that had come before—every moment of foolishness and stupidity, every instance of timidity and fear, every act of temerity and cruelty. Would that be enough, he thought, to earn a miracle? He pressed his fingers to the pigeon’s breast, squeezed.

  And then something struck the back of his head as he knelt there, a pinprick of pain that loosened in him a ganglion of fury. He lifted his eyes, felt the first random drops of rain like hail strike across his head and shoulders in a yoke, surprisingly heavy. Struggling angrily out of his jacket, he folded it awkwardly, lifted the bird, and placed it carefully on the cloth. He rose to his feet with the pigeon cradled near his chest and stood then to face down the accumulated threat of the afternoon, the gathering storm, the dark windows of his house. He turned toward the porch, the fierce heat of anger on his face running with the scattered rain. And then he stopped, for there on the top step of the porch, laid there in the timeless instant when he had knelt—was it in prayer?—over this lost bird, was a basket. A wreath of steam rose from the willow lid.

  He turned to catch the deliverer, to be a witness, to say what he saw, but there was nothing. Just his garden gate slowly closing and a pattering sound, light as snowfall, which might have been the rain.

  HE ATE EVERYTHING in the basket, sitting on the floor by the French doors, the repast spread out on newspaper, the wounded pigeon resting in a blanket by his knee. A beef stew, clover rolls dusted with flour, a tin of gingersnaps, a carafe of dark beer—it tasted as good as anything he’d ever eaten. It occurred to him fleetingly that he didn’t need to eat it all, that he might do well to save some, but he couldn’t seem to stop. Through some combination of the cook’s skill and his own bottomless hunger, he was given an endless appetite, a craving that felt, even as he enjoyed the meal, vaguely unconnected to food. It was odd how the contents of the basket, while always comforting him, also aroused in him a desire for more.

  Between mouthfuls, he forced a dropper into the bird’s beak, dripped herbal tea into its craw. And gradually the pigeon revived, rustling within the warm folds of the blanket, opening its one eye and fixing Conrad with a look that he took to be one of gratitude.

  At last, finished with his meal, Conrad licked his fingers for the last of the gingersnap crumbs, leaned back against the legs of the chair, gathered the bird onto his lap, and gently inspected its wing.

  “Now, what happened here?” he asked, gently extending the pigeon’s wing. He probed near the missing eye with a finger, but the pigeon retracted its head sharply into its breast. “I think you’re a homer who’s never going home again, my friend,” he told it. “At least not without a chauffeur.” He inspected the band on its leg. He didn’t recognize the code—no numbers, just a series of letters that spelled out hi roller.

  Conrad stood up, the pigeon in his arms, and walked to the open French doors leading out to the garden. The rain of an hour or so before had been a false start—just a fistful of cold drops and then no more.

  “Well, let’s get you a proper meal,” he said. “Introduce you around.”

  As he stepped outside, he felt how the temperature had dropped; the warm atmosphere of the sunstruck earth had turned dank, and the coolness palmed his cheek. He crossed the terrace, past the black circle of the reflecting pool, that bottomless well. Stepping up to the retaining wall, he looked down over the sloping terraces below.

  And then he froze at the shape he saw moving there, small and dark, a bowed head, something, someone standing there inside the vegetable garden. The stroking motion of his hand over the pigeon’s back ceased. Rose?

  No, no, too short, too squat, he saw; too thick at the waist. An angel? They come like this? In broad daylight? Short and square? He glanced behind him at the house. Had he missed someone there, an intruder who had shadowed him, evaded him, standing in a dark corner, behind the door, in the recess beneath the stairs? The basket, he thought. Was this who’d been feeding him?

  When he began to descend the steps, slow and tense as if he might have a fight on his hands, he saw the figure more clearly, though it did not move as he approached the garden. The face was obscured by a scarf tied over the head, the plane of the jaw averted. Conrad shifted the pigeon to one arm, walked to the gate, lifted the latch. At its warning click the figure turned, startled.

  “You said you’d welcome visitors in the afternoons,” Betty Barteleme said, her eyes wide. “But I didn’t think I should bother you.”

  Conrad took her in—her cheap black coat with the wide, twisted belt cinched around her middle, her good shoes filthy now and ribbed with mud, her face white beneath a faded paisley scarf. A brooch at her chin, a cameo, pinned the scarf there.

  “Miss Barteleme?” he said, amazed.

  “I came to see for myself,” she said. “But I’m not a snoop, I’ll have you know that.”

  “No, I—” Conrad began, confused, but she interrupted him.

  “I saw your letter,” she said. “When I was tidying up yesterday. It fell on the floor by Kenny’s desk. I picked it up to put it back and then I—I read it.” She stopped. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since.” She glanced at him quickly, then turned away again. “But I’m not a snoop,” she repeated, sniffing. She extracted a pale blue tissue from her sleeve, touched it to her nose.

  “No, I’m—”

  But she interrupted him again. “This is where?” she said. She looked around, nodded slowly. “I can see it. I can.” She put her hands out. “A big angel, with wings like—an angel’s.” She closed her eyes. “He puts his hand on your brow”—she reached and touched her own forehead, lightly, with one black-gloved finger—“and you’re—comforted, aren’t you?”

  She opened her eyes. “My mother saw an angel when I was born, you know,” she said quickly, though Conrad could barely hear her, did not know. How could he know?

  “It was in her sewing room. I was not a week old,” Betty went on quietly. “She said she turned around, feeling something there behind her, and saw him, saw him bending down and smiling at me, his hands on my cradle. She wasn’t afraid at all, she said. She knew he meant me no harm. ‘Oh, you’re special, Betty,’ she would say to me. ‘You’ve an angel’s breath on your face.’”

  Betty stopped, turned to Conrad. “But you don’t see it there, do you?”

  Conrad took in her face, the puffy eyes, the jowls, the violently black hair escaping from under her scarf. He did not know what to say.

  “I don’t either, though I’ve looked and looked,” she said, reaching into her sleeve again for the tissue. “It’s a plain face, I know. More than plain, even. I don’t know how that could be, how an angel’s breath could have done that.” She looked up at Conrad. “You don’t think it was—a joke?”

  “Oh, no, I—” But his voice failed him. Rose had been so beautiful.

  “And now—” Betty drew in a long breath. “Now I have to think, you see. Decide what to do. You don’t know him—Nolan—Mr. Peak,” she corrected herself. “He’s a man of honor, true honor.” She said this last fiercely; Conrad was surprised at her vehemence. “He would never do anything he thought wasn’t strictly—by the book. And I have never, in all our years, never gone against him.”

  She had drawn herself up now, stood facing Conrad fu
lly. “Of course, he’s never asked me, but I know he sees what I think about things. I catch him watching me sometimes. He wouldn’t let on about this, you see, because he has a man’s sort of pride, he’s—” She took a deep breath, held Conrad’s face in her eyes. “But this time—this time, he’s mistaken. He thinks there’s no such thing as angels.” She put her hands up to her face, covered it with her gloved fingers.

  Conrad took an anxious step toward her, but she waved him away, collected herself. “Your wife,” she said, taking a deep breath, looking out over the terraces beneath them, the waves of green interrupted here and there by patches of soft color, the roses and the lilies, the chrysanthemums, the fringed heads of the butter-colored dahlias. “She had a real green thumb on her, didn’t she?”

  Betty folded her gloved hands, knit her fingers together, sniffed. “Of course, she was lucky, she had the time for it. I just do my African violets. You can do those on a windowsill, you know. Perfect for a working girl like myself. But your wife—” She shook her head at the waste of death, as if it were a lack of judgment or a sin of excess. “She had a heart of gold, too, didn’t she? Green thumb and heart of gold.” She laughed a little. “I used to see her at the cemetery sometimes when I’d go to sit by Mother. She always had a big basket of flowers, arranged them for people’s stones. And that child—you know, the funny one who works out there now, Kate and Eddie’s girl—oh, she followed your wife all over the place. They had flowers in common, I suppose. But it was something else, too, wasn’t it? Sometimes I’d see them, walking around out there together, pointing at things, kneeling down on the ground together, looking and touching. Like a mother and daughter, I thought, or two sisters. I don’t know how your wife got her to talk. Won’t say anything to me when I try to wave hello. She’s done wonders with the gardens out there though, you know. Keeps them up very pretty.” Betty nodded slowly, as if Conrad had agreed with her.