The Green Man

by Michael Bedard

  “Yes,” said Emily. “Lovely.” She rearranged some of the sun-bleached books in the shallow bargain bins out front, flipped the sign in the door, and retreated back into the shop.

  Outside, the Green Man hung from his perch above the street. The carved leaves that curled from the vines spilling from his mouth shivered lightly in the breeze, and his ancient all-seeing eyes watched a boy with a bundle buggy turn hurriedly down a side street and disappear.

  Inside, Emily switched on the lights in the shop. She went to the desk, sat down, and took a small bottle of pills from her sweater pocket. Shaking one of the tiny pills into her palm, she tucked it under her tongue. The vice around her chest loosened slowly as the pill went to work.

  She glanced up at the calendar on the wall beside the desk and felt the dark wing of fear brush her cheek as it flew by.

  8

  When O came downstairs into the shop, she noticed the smell of cigarette smoke. Aunt Emily was sitting at the desk.

  “I was thinking I might do that shopping now,” she said. Her aunt looked up at her with wide, startled eyes.

  “Are you feeling all right?” said O. “You look a little – I don’t know – spooked.”

  “Just lost in thought,” said her aunt, with a weak attempt at a smile.

  “I was wondering if you had a bundle buggy – for the shopping?”

  “A bundle buggy? Yes, there’s a buggy out back.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. Did you find the money?”

  “Yes, I took some from the tin on the fridge.”

  “It’s probably easier to take the buggy out the back way rather than try to bring it through the shop.”

  “Fine. I shouldn’t be long.”

  “Be careful,” her aunt called after her.

  It was one of those things her father would automatically say when she was leaving the house, but coming from Aunt Emily, it took on a slightly different tone – as if there might actually be things to be careful about.

  Beyond the desk, a partition divided the shop in two – the larger room out front and, behind it, a second, smaller room. Here, too, the walls were lined with bookcases, and boxes were ranged along the floor at their base.

  The room was large enough to accommodate an old stuffed couch, a tattered armchair, and a small wooden table covered in coffee rings. A number of folding chairs were nestled together against the back wall, on a small raised platform covered in worn carpeting. O wondered what they could be for.

  The room seemed to be one of Psycho’s haunts. Cat hair clung to the dark fabric of the couch, and the upholstery along one side of the armchair had been raked by claws. Under the table were a bowl of water and a dish of dried food; a litter box was tucked between two boxes of books, just inside the doorway. There was no sign of Psycho.

  “I can’t seem to see that buggy,” called O after a quick look around the room.

  “It must be on the porch – through that red door in the corner,” called Aunt Emily.

  The ramshackle wooden porch had been added on to the original building. It was crammed with flattened cardboard boxes, some parceled together with string, but most apparently pitched in at random. The buggy hung from a nail on the wall alongside an ancient ladder. O waded through the sea of boxes and lifted it down.

  She wrestled open the bolt on an old wooden door and found herself in the small yard she had seen from the upstairs deck. The distance had done it favors.

  The yard showed signs of having been something once. It wasn’t much of anything anymore. The grass grew wild, and weeds sprang between the flat stones laid in a wavering line from the building to the tumbledown garage. The garden was a graveyard of dead flowers. Here and there, a perennial poked its head from the ground and unfurled a hopeful flag of color, despite the bleak surroundings.

  Against the back wall of the building stood a wooden stoop to reach the slack clothesline that ran between the building and the garage.

  O bumped the buggy down into the yard. To her left, a high wooden fence hid it from the street. To the right, an ancient fence was trying to maintain the property line between the Green Man and the bakery next door. A fan rattled in the back wall of the bakery and poured the enticing aroma of baking bread into the air.

  When O had looked down at the garden from her perch on the deck, what she’d taken for a large white stone proved to be a piece of sculpture – the face of a girl, lying in the earth, looking up at the sky. It was made of plaster and was, no doubt, meant to hang on a wall. From lying in the garden, the features had become weathered and worn. In time, she imagined, they would wear away altogether.

  As O bent over her, the girl in the garden seemed to stare back. For a moment, she felt that if she leaned close enough to those parted lips, the girl would whisper in her ear all the secrets spoken by the dead beneath the soil.

  O wheeled the buggy over to the gate in the high fence, lifted the latch, and went out. Instead of turning to the left toward the shops, she turned right and started down the dead-end street she had seen from the rooftop.

  The buggy creaked behind her as she walked. The street looked different than it had from her perch on the roof. Where she was sure there had been a row of bungalows, there was now a duplex. Where there had been a tall old tree, there was now a parking pad. By the time she reached the wall, she was no longer sure it was the same street at all.

  O turned and looked up at the rooftop deck of the Green Man. There was no doubt – this was the place she had seen the disturbingly familiar boy. But things had subtly changed.

  She wheeled the buggy back up the street and began her search for a supermarket. She passed the health-food store her aunt had talked about and, a couple of blocks further along, came across a nice family grocery business – two aisles, fresh fruits and vegetables. The woman on cash didn’t seem to mind being paid in small bills and change. She even helped O load the bundle buggy with her purchases.

  As she wheeled the buggy back to the shop, O got a sense of the neighborhood. It was a neighborhood in transition. There were businesses that had been there for a long time – a pool hall, a shoe repair, a hardware store, a clothing store with its ancient mannequins posed in its dowdy windows, and a small family restaurant frozen in time. Most of them could have used a fresh coat of paint, but they seemed to scrape by. The Green Man fell into this category.

  But alongside them were new businesses – antique shops, corner cafés, home-décor places, and tech shops. Old and new eyed one another suspiciously.

  O sensed that, if they could, they would wrench themselves up by the foundations and drag themselves over to where they wanted to be. All the old shops would huddle together for mutual support, and the new would band together for strength. Now they sat side by side, like strangers on a train.

  As she approached the Green Man, O looked with a different eye at the tall elegant windows and the ornamented woodwork. It was looking a little tired, but the Green Man was still a grand old shop.

  For the second time that day, she stood beneath the elaborately carved sign that overhung the street. The Green Man looked back at her, his forehead furrowed, his face encircled in leaves.

  He made his little creaking sounds as he rocked back and forth in the wind. Again it seemed that he was trying to talk. But all that came out were leaves and branches.

  The incident of the boy on the wall had all but passed from her mind. It might have stayed that way had it not been for something Aunt Emily said at dinner that night.

  9

  The cupboard was full of – imagine it – food! The fridge was full of – wonder of wonders – food! The buggy was back on its nail on the porch; the sauce was simmering on the stove; the water was boiling for pasta; and there was garlic bread in the oven. All was right with the world.

  O knew how to cook. It had been a simple matter of survival. Growing up with just Father and her at home, making dinner for the two of them had become her job as soo
n as she was old enough to be trusted not to burn the house down.

  It had taken her some time today to get used to the unfamiliar kitchen, to find where everything was, to figure out exactly how the gas stove worked.

  Twenty minutes ago, Aunt Emily had come to the bottom of the stairs in the shop and called up, “What on earth are you doing up there? It smells delicious.” Now she was tucking into her second plateful of spaghetti. “Your father said nothing about your being such a wonderful cook,” she said. “I haven’t eaten this well in ages. I used to be a pretty good cook myself, when I was younger. It’s hard to keep it up when you live alone.”

  A question formed in O’s mind. She wasn’t sure whether to ask it or not. “Why did you never get married, Aunt Emily?”

  Silence. Her aunt looked down at her plate.

  “I’m sorry,” said O, blushing. “It’s really none of my business.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s a very good question. I’m just not sure I have a good answer. When I was your age, I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined I wouldn’t marry. What can I say? Things happen – things you never expected. Life takes turns, and you go with them.

  “At about the time most people start thinking about getting married, I was beginning to write. I poured everything I had into that. Then I went away to school, and afterwards I traveled – by car, all over the country – with a suitcase crammed with clothes and a backseat full of poems. I just wrote them and pitched them back there. Lord knows how many poems I lost that way! It didn’t matter. I felt that as long as I hung on to the poet, the poetry would come.

  “Now and then, I’d gather the best of them together and send them off to a small press I knew that specialized in poetry. They liked my work, and a couple of those early collections were published. I took what jobs I could, where I could find them, but none of them were what I really wanted to do. I wanted to roam and write poems, like Kerouac and Corso and all the other vagabond poets I’d read about.

  “When you’re constantly on the move, it’s hard to get to know people well. The time just slipped by. I guess poetry was my guy. We’ve been together a long time – though we don’t talk much anymore.” She took a piece of garlic bread and mopped up the sauce on her plate.

  “Now don’t follow my example, you hear me? You don’t want to waste your culinary skills on yourself. But there’s little danger of that. I’m sure a pretty girl like you is beating off the boys.”

  “I wish. I’m not even allowed to date yet.”

  “Well, I’m sure your father’s just looking to do what’s best for you. He’s a good man. He’s certainly cared for me over the years. If it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have this place.”

  O gave her a puzzled look.

  “So he never told you about that. Well, it’s true. Twenty-eight years ago, after having been away for a long time, I came back to Caledon. There was something I had to take care of. Once that was done, I didn’t feel like moving around anymore. I wanted to set roots down in one place – this place.

  “One day I was out walking, wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and I found myself on this street. I looked up, saw that sign, and – well, now you’re going to think I’m a bit mad – it spoke to me somehow. I stood at the window awhile … and then I went in and looked around, and I discovered two of the little books I had loosed upon the wind sitting on the shelf in the poetry section. I plucked up the courage to introduce myself to the owner, and he recognized my name. I can’t tell you what a wonderful feeling that was!

  “I fell in love with the place. Pretty soon I was dropping by almost every day and got to know the owner quite well. He was a poet himself, a grand old creature from another era. He believed in poetry strongly enough that he shed his kindly influence on all who came near.

  “It was a quiet shop even then. So he was glad for the company, and I was eager to learn everything I could about the business. I knew I had found my home.

  “Well, things went on like that for a couple of years, and then, one day, he let it slip that he was thinking of retiring and was going to have to put the place up for sale. He asked if I might be interested. I jumped at the opportunity. I had already been working for some time in the shop by then and had learned quite a bit about the business. When I look back on it now, I see that he’d had his eye on me as his successor and had been quietly teaching me what I’d need to know for some time.

  “Unfortunately, I hadn’t any money to speak of. That hasn’t changed. I tried to get a bank loan, but they turned me down flat. Poets, it seems, are poor credit risks.

  “Your father had already moved out West by then. I talked to him on the phone and told him about the offer to buy the shop. He asked the name of the place, and, when I told him, he asked me if it was in the west end – a corner shop with a carved sign. When I said yes, without so much as a pause he offered to loan me the money for the down payment.

  “He said he thought it was my destiny to have this shop. Now ‘destiny’ is a mighty big word, and it struck me as a strange thing for him to say. But I guess he was right. It has been my destiny. Over the years, this shop and I have come to fit together like hand and glove. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. And I owe it all to your dear father. So that’s the story. Except –” She poured herself a cup of tea.

  “What?”

  “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “I saw him today.”

  “Who?”

  “Your father. I was opening the shop after lunch, and I saw him standing outside.”

  “That’s impossible. Dad’s in Italy.”

  “All the same, I saw him. Not as he is now, but as he was as a boy.”

  O felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise.

  “He was standing outside the shop, looking at me through the window. When I walked toward him, he turned away. And by the time I got outside, he’d gone.” She picked up her tea and wandered off into the living room.

  “You must be mistaken,” said O, feeling a sense of unreality wash over her.

  “No, it was him, all right. I’d know that boy anywhere.” She set her tea on the edge of the book-cluttered coffee table and sat down.

  “What was he wearing?” O heard herself ask.

  “Well, you know, that was very odd. It looked like a pajama top.”

  “Long sleeves, with blue cuffs and collar,” O heard herself say.

  Her aunt stared at her. “That’s right. How do you know?”

  “After you went down to the shop, I was out on the deck going through one of the boxes from my room. I noticed a boy sitting on the wall at the end of the dead-end street, looking back at me. That’s what he was wearing. There was something familiar about him. But it can’t have been Dad. It was just someone who looked like he did back then.”

  “I suppose,” said Aunt Emily, sipping her tea, letting the silence wash over them. “Of course, there is another possibility.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We live in the midst of mysteries, my dear. They surround us on all sides, and, for the most part, we take no notice of them. Take Time, for instance. What is it? Where does it come from? Where does it go?”

  She leaned forward and took a book from one of the piles on the table. “Imagine that this book is that very small piece of reality we call the present – you and I, here, now.” She stood it between two tall piles. “This moment stands between a future that is not yet real and a past that is no longer real.” She placed her hands on top of the piles to either side. “Before we know it, it too has slid into the past, and another moment has come to take its place.

  “But what if it is not as simple as that? What if all those past moments still exist, as real as the books on this pile, but hidden from the present moment by a thin fabric, like the painted backdrop in a play? Say that in certain places that fabric were to wear thin and tear, and what lay on the other side were to spill out?
Perhaps they would be places where the pressure of the past had grown so great that it could no longer be contained.

  “Maybe the Charles I saw at the window spilled over from the past. Maybe he did once stand at that window, walk down that street, sit on that wall as he did today. And if a boy with a buggy could slip through, perhaps other things could cross over in the same way.”

  It was clear she was no longer talking to O, but to herself. The words hung in the air, like the smoke in the closed car.

  Aunt Emily stood up. “I think I’ll go heat up this tea.”

  Nothing more was said of the matter, but for the rest of the evening O found her eye drifting repeatedly to the book propped between the two piles on the cluttered coffee table.

  Time was hard to keep track of at the Green Man. One day flowed seamlessly into the next. Before she knew it, they had turned the calendars to June, and the weather was heating up. Their lives had fallen swiftly into a pattern. They ate breakfast together, then went down and opened the shop a little after ten.

  Since her “incident,” Aunt Emily had taken to closing the shop for an hour at noon to eat and rest a little before reopening. But after O had been there two weeks and had begun to learn her way around the shop a little, she abandoned the practice. She started leaving O alone while she went upstairs, assuring her that, if anything came up, she was just a shout away.

  Most days, they closed a little before six. After dinner, they read and listened to Aunt Emily’s jazz collection and chatted the evening away.

  O noticed things about her aunt that reminded her of her father: the way she held her head to one side when she listened to you, the infectious laugh that bubbled up from somewhere deep inside her when something struck her funny.

  Despite their difference in age, she found she was quite comfortable with her aunt. But, then, Aunt Emily was not your normal adult. There was still a lot of the child about her. Maybe that was what made her a poet.