The Green Man

by Michael Bedard

  That evening, while O was up in her room reading A Treasury of Great Poems and doing her best not to think of her book thief, she stumbled on another mad poet.

  John Clare was born in England in 1793 to a poor farming family. One day, when he was five years old, he set out across the fields for the horizon, where he imagined the end of the world lay. There he hoped to look down from the edge and see into all the secrets of the world. He walked all day, but never seemed to come any closer, so he turned back. When he finally made his way home late that night, he found half the village out searching for him and his parents at their wits’ end.

  Though he had little formal education, in his late teens he began to write poetry. His first collection was a great success, and the “peasant poet” was the toast of London society for a short time. Within a few years, however, he was all but forgotten.

  He had married at the height of his fame. Now, with a large family to support and no money coming in, he went back to working the fields. He hawked his books from door to door, often dragging a large sack of them thirty miles a day.

  The strain of it proved too much. By the time he was forty, he began to experience fits of madness. He imagined he was married to a girl he had known as a boy and had several children by her. He saw visionary creatures and had conversations with Shakespeare’s spirit. He was finally admitted to an asylum as one “addicted to writing poetry.” He spent the last twenty-three years of his life there and continued writing to the end.

  O had just closed the book on John Clare, when Emily called up the stairs, asking if she could come down for a minute. She felt sure her aunt had noticed the missing book in the poetry section and was going to ask who had bought it.

  She found Emily at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of tea. Psycho was sitting on her lap. The cat took one look at O and sped off down the hall.

  “Would you like some tea, O?”

  “Sure. I’ll get a cup.” As she sat down at the table, she tried to read her aunt’s face. The tea was so strong that you could have stood a spoon in it. She reached for the milk.

  Then she saw the poem – her poem – there on the table in front of Emily. She realized she’d accidentally left it on the desk downstairs, and a sinking feeling hit her in the pit of her stomach.

  “I take it this is yours,” said Emily, picking up the sheet.

  O nodded. If she had been a crazy white cat, she would have disappeared down the hall.

  “Do you have more?” asked Emily.

  “Yes.”

  “May I see them?”

  “They’re not very good.”

  “Don’t worry. They never are. You write one so the next will come. And you hope, when it does, it will be a little better than the last.”

  “I’ll be right back.” O ran up to her room and returned with her folder of poems. She flipped through them and found a recent piece.

  “I’m a little afraid,” she confessed.

  “Me, too – all the time. There’s a lot to be afraid of.”

  O took a deep breath, fought back the panic, and read the poem:

  “Poems must be more

  Than just words dancing

  On the marble floor of the page

  To soft music

  In worn satin shoes.

  This bakery window,

  Its treasures tiered

  On stanzas of glass,

  Is a poem too …”

  As she read, her voice stopped quavering and she grew more at ease. When she finished, she looked over at Emily.

  “I see now why you were so vocal about the Tuesdays,” said her aunt. “It seems your father was right.”

  “About what?”

  “About you. He said you might have the makings of a poet.”

  But there was something odd in the way she said it, something unsettling in the look on her face as she stared down at her tea. Finally, she leaned forward across the table.

  “I need to warn you,” she whispered, as though someone might be listening. “Poetry is nothing to be dabbled in. It can be a dangerous thing. Before you go one step farther, I want you to ask yourself if you absolutely have to do it, if something inside you will die if you don’t. If the answer is no, then let it go.”

  O wasn’t sure what reaction she’d been expecting from her aunt. Perhaps a little encouragement or support. Certainly not this. She felt angry and hurt. If she stayed one minute longer, she would start to cry – and that was the last thing in the world she wanted Emily to see.

  Without a word, O scooped up her poems and ran upstairs to her room, closing the door behind her. She flung the folder down on the desk and threw herself on the bed. Why would Emily talk to her like that? Why would she try to warn her away from writing poetry, as if it were some private club only the truly mad could join? How could it be as dangerous as she made it seem?

  The room was suddenly too small to hold her. Her thoughts bounced off the low ceiling, banging against the windowpane like a trapped bird. She needed air and space. Grabbing her notebook and pen from the desk, she crawled out through the window onto the deck and plopped herself down in the plastic chair. She took a deep breath and tried to blow her anger away.

  The sun was low and the wind was up, whipping the treetops like a boy beating the bushes with a stick. Up here, with the wide sky spread before her and the dying light weaving its spell, her anger slowly ebbed away, and a calm came over her.

  Into that calm came a word, then a line. She reached for her book and wrote it down. Another came, and then another in its wake. She had no idea where they came from, where they led. She listened, she wrote. It was as simple as that. She kept her head down like a swimmer in deep water, reaching out stroke after stroke, buoyed up by blind faith alone.

  When inspiration passed, she had two pages of close scrawl. She looked down at the dim sheets. Never before had words flowed out of her like that.

  When she first crawled out onto the rooftop deck, O had felt shut up in herself, trapped in a dark well whose high sides she could not hope to scale. But now she was free. She was the wide sky scattered with stars, the wind tossing among the trees.

  Slowly she became herself again. She looked out the windows that were her eyes and said, I am here.

  It was then she heard the noise – a light rattling that seemed to be coming from behind the building. She wondered if it had been going on all the time she was writing. There it was again. She’d heard odd noises before, when she was sitting on the deck at night. The bakery next door put its garbage cans out back, behind the building, and Emily was constantly complaining about the vermin they attracted.

  But this didn’t sound like the scrabbling of rats. Perhaps a dog was nosing around the bins. She tried to catch her last thought before it drifted away. But she was too late – it was gone. The noise kept on.

  Now her curiosity was up. She quietly closed her notebook and put it on the table. Then she heard something that sounded remarkably like a cough. That was definitely no dog down there, but a larger creature of the two-legged variety. She eased herself from her chair and crept toward the edge of the deck.

  With each step, her feet crunched down in the loose gravel. She paused to see if she had alerted the intruder to her presence. But the quiet rattling continued.

  As she neared the edge of the deck, she went down on her hands and knees and crawled the last couple of feet, until she came to the low brick wall that enclosed the deck. Taking a deep breath, she leaned just far enough over the edge to see down below.

  The noise was definitely coming from behind the bakery. Someone was down there, rooting among the half a dozen large aluminum garbage cans ranged along the wall. The scavenger was working the lid off the last of them now. His back was to her, and she could make out nothing but the top of his head.

  He got the lid off and set it quietly on the ground. The can was full of buns and bread. He stuffed as much as he could into his sack. The bakery was famous in the neighborhood, not only for i
ts fancy French pastries, but for its bread and buns. At the end of the day, all the unsold baking was bagged as day-olds. But on Saturdays, whatever was left had to be thrown out. It went directly from the gleaming glass display windows out front to the battered containers out back.

  The scavenger seemed to know the schedule. It was Saturday night, and here he was. There was something familiar about him, but the thought had only half-formed in O’s mind when it was suddenly shattered by a noise behind her. She turned her head and saw Emily standing framed in the window of the attic room.

  “What on earth are you doing out there?” said her aunt.

  Her voice was loud enough to startle the scavenger at his work. He swung his head up in the direction of the deck. O jerked back quickly from the edge, hoping she hadn’t been seen. A clatter resounded below, followed by hurried footsteps.

  She looked down in time to see a dark figure with a backpack slung over one shoulder disappear down the lane.

  18

  Sunday the shop was closed. They slept in late, ate a hurried lunch, then headed for the car. It wouldn’t start. Emily got out and kicked it. It still didn’t start, but it seemed to make her feel better.

  “What do we do now?” asked O.

  “Walk, I guess. It’s not that far.”

  In a bid to economize, O had suggested they bring coffees from home. The idea was that they would drink them comfortably in the car and leave the cups there. Now they sipped while they walked, sloshing coffee all over the street and looking like a couple of total losers.

  Emily’s sense of distance left something to be desired. They walked for what felt like an hour. The neighborhoods grew increasingly upscale – wide, deep lots; large old houses set far back from the street; immaculate lawns; cars that would always start on the first try, parked two abreast in the driveways.

  O was almost glad Emily’s car hadn’t started. It would have looked painfully out of place alongside the Porches and BMWs that hung out here. It was easier to tuck a coffee cup out of sight than a car. She dumped the dregs onto the road and walked with her cup down at her side.

  The streets looped and twisted like Psycho’s knotted ball of wool. Emily had a puzzled look on her face, as if she wasn’t quite sure where they were.

  As they walked along, a man in a silk dressing gown opened his front door and plucked his paper from where it was wedged in the porch railing. He gave them a look that said you definitely are not from around here, and then retreated back into his house.

  “Could you please finish that coffee?” said O. “It must be stone-cold by now, and we look like a pair of freaks carrying these old cups.”

  “You worry too much about what people think. If you really want to be a poet, the first requirement is a tough skin.”

  O realized this was as close to an apology for last night as she was likely to get. They walked along quietly for a while.

  “I’ve been thinking about the Tuesdays,” said Emily. O’s ears perked up. “Do you know why we decided on Tuesday as the day?”

  O shook her head.

  “It was all because of Mallarmé.”

  Mallarmé was the ghost who sat midway on the stairs between the shop and the flat, the one they both sidestepped now on their way up and down.

  “Mallarmé was a French poet who lived at the end of the nineteenth century,” continued Emily. “He believed that the power of poetry lay in its suggestiveness, that the aim of poetry was to evoke the mystery at the heart of things. In his work, he aimed to depict not the object, but the effect it produced.

  “He worked slowly and published little. People found his work difficult, and he was attacked by the critics for his obscurity. He supported his family by working as an English teacher. He wasn’t much of a teacher, but he was a great poet.

  “Gradually, he attracted a following among the younger poets of the day. A group of them began meeting at Mallarmé’s house on Tuesday evenings to read and discuss poetry. In French, Tuesday is mardi. These meetings became known as the Mardis, and those who attended them, the Mardistes. So when we decided to start up a poetry-reading group, I thought about Mallarmé. I suggested we meet one Tuesday a month and call it Tuesdays at the Green Man.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said. You were right; the meetings were a good thing. I’ve been distracted lately, and I’ve let things slide. If you’re willing to lend a hand, I’d like to get the Tuesdays up and running again.”

  “Great!”

  “But promise me you won’t expect too much of them. These are not Mallarmé’s Mardis.”

  “I promise.” The street they were walking along now looked disturbingly familiar. “I think we’re going in circles,” she said.

  Emily looked back uncertainly over her shoulder.

  “You have no idea where we are, do you?” said O.

  “Nonsense,” said Emily. She had worn a tweed skirt and matching jacket for the occasion, but had long since shed the jacket in the heat. She walked with it hooked it over her arm.

  O had worn her Sunday best as well, including a new pair of leather flats, little suspecting they would have to hike for over an hour to get to the house. The shoes pinched her toes and had rubbed her heel raw.

  None of it did the least bit of good, anyway. They still looked like a pair of interlopers from the lower world. Finally, as they rounded yet another corner, O glanced up and saw the name of the street they’d been searching for. It was a short dead-end street. At the far end, a large old house sat peering over the top of a high hedge at them.

  “There it is,” said Emily exultantly. “I told you I wasn’t lost.”

  —

  There were only two other houses on the street, one on either side of the narrow road leading up to the Linton house. Both appeared deserted – their lawns gone wild, their windows boarded over. As they started down the street, O saw a large wrecking machine nestled in the shade at the side of one of the houses. It had fed on the side wall of the house, exposing the interior. She caught a glimpse of flowered wallpaper, a ceiling fixture dangling from a wire. She felt as if she’d come upon some fantastic beast in the midst of consuming its prey.

  So far the Linton house had been spared the fate of its neighbors, but it hunched down behind the hedge and gave them a wary look through its windows as they turned up the walk.

  In its day, the house would have been a Gothic dream, with its fanciful turret, high-pitched roof, pointed arches, and elaborately carved stonework. But time had taken its toll. The figures tooled in the soft limestone had weathered, and much of the detail had worn away, so that they seemed now like strange creatures in the midst of forming. Thick branches of ivy gripped the walls in a grim embrace.

  “We can’t go in there with these,” said O, holding up her coffee cup. Rosebushes flanked the walk on either side. She took a quick look around, then reached in and wedged her cup in the crook of a branch. Emily followed suit, but thorns raked the back of her hand as she pulled it out.

  “Ow!” she cried, clutching it with her other hand.

  As they started up the steps of the covered porch, O noticed the stonework within it had been protected from the weather. The twin faces that peered down at them from their perch atop the sidelights were startlingly realistic. One of them wore glasses and bore a striking resemblance to the photo of Lawrence Linton she had seen. She wondered whether he had set his face here as a sort of signature. The other figure was a Green Man.

  Emily rang the bell. The sound echoed inside the house. Blood trickled from the scratches on the back of her hand. She searched her pockets in vain for something to wipe it with.

  “Do you have a hankie or something?” she asked. “I’ve cut myself.”

  “Oh, yes you have.” O found a tissue in her pocket and handed it to her aunt as footsteps sounded from the far side of the door. An old woman opened it just wide enough to peer out at them.

  “Miss Linton?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Em
ily Endicott, and this is my niece, Ophelia. I’ve come to see the collection.”

  “Oh, yes, Miss Endicott. Please come in.” And she opened the door wide. “You must forgive me for being overly cautious, but I live alone here. And with this being the only house still inhabited on the street, I’m inclined to be a little nervous.”

  “I completely understand.”

  They stood in a long, high-ceilinged hall. O had never been in such a grand house. It was like something from another place and time.

  “May I take your jacket?” Miss Linton said.

  “Yes, thank you,” said Emily. “My, what a lovely house.”

  Miss Linton hung her coat on a wooden rack, mounted below a mirror on the wall.

  A wide staircase swept off to the upper floors. The stained-glass window on the landing spilled puddles of colored light on the polished stairs. A dark wooden rail curled down to a newel post carved in the shape of a sleeping dragon.

  “Thank you. I’m afraid it’s all a little much for me now. I had a housekeeper until about a year ago, but she had to leave. A death in the family. Please come this way, Miss Endicott, Ophelia.” And she led them through a door that opened off the hall on the left.

  “I’m afraid I’m a little late,” said Emily. “My car wouldn’t start.”

  “Don’t fret about it, my dear. At my age, I’ve got nothing but time.”

  They entered a large circular room. In its day, it would have been a showpiece, a grand room for entertaining. Now, it seemed far too large for the few pieces of furniture it contained.

  The walls were papered in a repeating pattern of flowers. Above a polished sideboard hung a large portrait in oil of a dignified middle-aged man seated on a chair, his hands folded in his lap. He looked vaguely troubled to be there, as though more pressing duties awaited him. He wore the same small round glasses as the sculpted figure on the front porch.