by Tom La Farge
“Now I must leave,” said ’Nna, rising from her heels, and Lhool straightened and twisted, hands on the small of her back, and her smile echoed her daughter’s. Her gaze locked him into the story. ’Nna took his arm and kissed his cheek.
“Comrades in arms?” she asked, and he had to laugh and repeat.
“I will come now and then, to visit the little ones and to tend to my herbs. But we will see each other in the City, at the theater.” Then with great swiftness the women wrapped their faces, gathered sacks, and vanished out the upper gate. Drytung saw a donkey’s ears twitch above the rough thorn fence, then move off at a trot.
19.
The Battle in the Garden
In the morning Drytung, brisk, sat at the long table and unpacked his satchel. Behind him, doors hung open through which, in the day, grainsacks had been hoisted or heaved. It pleased him to renew this custom, he had always thrown wide the doors before sitting down to write; something might fly in. The doors opened a little south of east, and sun just risen lit the papers now deployed before him, DRYTUNGS BOOK, battered and nearly filled with notes, some sketches done on campaign, and an ordnance map. He blew the dust off a quire of foolscap and unlaced it. Then got excited.
Hadu. This was to be the battle he’d witnessed on the V’Detsiny estate. There it was on the map, framed by careful lines in ink. It must have been he who drew them. What had he been plotting? Then he knew. Property lines. Shandimus, dickering with Annag, had needed to prove that the V’Detsinoy did not in fact have title to a certain village. In the face of overwhelming documentation that he had assembled, Annag had fallen back on water rights. Drytung must now rework the map to turn it from a sordid business record to the trace of a field of forces, innate and mobile, native and strange, showing lines of movement, flow, resistance; showing real and illusory objects, interlinkages, and passages. He took up his pen and stared at the map’s flatness.
The light from behind him reached, thinning, as far down the table as the objects mounded in the center. Root had collected them. Root was a great scavenger, always picking things off trashheaps and sticking them all dirty in his pocket. Then, when he wrote, he first pulled objects from the pile and arranged them before him, his way, he said, of keeping track of characters, events, and images. Sometimes he raised a whole scene in glass eyes, sauceboats, lobster claws, and corks.
Drytung put his pen down and went to see what was there. He stood awhile selecting till he’d filled both hands. Then one by one he set them on the map — repositioned them — rejected some — went back and fetched new ones, what was called for. And as his dispositions enacted it, he began to conceive Hadu’s dilemma.
It began with love: Hadu was in love not so much with what he could not have as with an image of what he hoped would have him. A love with a purpose, how dangerous, when the purpose is to realize the lover. Drytung placed a figure on the map, a dancer crudely cast in pottery, a household god under the Misprision. One leg bent, foot broken off, the other held him up, he spread his arms and danced on the innermost of twenty-five concentric contour lines showing an elevation of 125 meters above and behind the V’Detsiny house. His head, with its cap that had once been blue, with its wide eyes, large smile, huge wedge of terracotta nose thrust out beyond his beard, rose higher still and looked west to where the enemy would appear.
Then Hadu disposed his troops upon the map. They were all animals from the mound. A wooden tortoise, a wooden frog, a cast-iron bear, two brass deer, one missing an ear, once weights on an apothecary’s scale. An owl, its cloisonné plumage a pattern of raised feather-shapes, some yet filled with grubby enamel. An elephant on wheels. A bear who once had sharpened pencils and a leopard who once had lighted cigarettes.
Drytung thought of the men and women they represented — Shandimus’ Force, the fighters of the Long Fall Back (as it was being called). There were few enough left of the original Expeditionary Force. Most of Walls had come back to the City, to work for the electrification. Some officers had remained to serve as staff, coming and going as he himself had done. Some engineers had stayed on, a few medics, drivers and mechanics, ballooners, and the campfollowers. Then the Stables contingent still roared and slank around, raiding and scouting, keeping a line open to the City and the court.
But the fighting force by now was all Parishioners and Economics, the irregulars — farmers, tailors, merchants, herders, fisherfolk, boatbuilders, blacksmiths, cooks and waiters, gravediggers. Peasants. And, more irregular still, men and women from the tribes. Along the spine of hills that twisted down the Hook, green here and arid there, rising almost to mountains or worn down like old men’s teeth, there were any number of clay villages where everyone’s name was the same. Each gens traced descent from an ancestor in the days before the Hook families claimed the peninsula, and they supplied Shandimus with sharpshooters, guides, and assassins. They danced wildly to their own skirling music, they were infinitely patient in adversity, carrying bread and dried figs in the hoods of their robes. Avid to be paid (in gold), jealous of all other tribes, they were courteous and refined as only those can be who are merciless as a mantis. Drytung had gone with them on more than one sortie, had followed them through the thornbrakes choking narrow ravines or along ledges rarely wider than his shoe. He had sat with them in caves and listened to them discourse on prosody, the meters suitable for so many kinds of verse! Each demonstrated on the small but resonant tambours also used to launch intelligence and orders over the enemy’s heads. The animal figures well represented their patience, their cunning.
He moved them, he moved them again, it was no good. They did not want to be there. He tried turning the map, but the scene remained inert. Then he rose and, with the word scene in mind, walked to the other end of the table—Root’s end. The light, as he proceeded, faded, as saturated with motes of shadow as it was at his end with dust. You can never get all the dust out of a granary; you can never get all the shadow out of a playwright. So he thought, first pleased and then disturbed by the balance of this phrase, when imbalance, war! was what he needed to capture, ride, write.
Root’s chair, like Root’s backside, was larger than his. Drytung sat, feeling small, and looked down the table. The midden of objects rose into the square of light from the doors and blocked his view of his own work. Bits and scraps of porcelain, glass, wood, rusted iron, tarnished copper, printed or woven fabric all emerged, all blended. How did Root choose his figures? He’d never used the same set twice, always spent a half an hour stirring through the heap before he wrote. How did he choose? For Drytung it was just a heap.
As such, though, it started a train of thought. A heaping of broken things once whole, once ranged on shelves, once handled and used, evoked the broken house that had held them, before war smashed it open. He felt again the dizzy nausea of his approach to the Wildlife Refuge, the path carpeted with shards. He needed his maps, more light.
But when he walked back to his end of the table, something was stirring on the table, between the map and the pile. It walked, and as he drew near it whistled and raised two fat furry legs. A spider, hunting. He moved back; he’d seen, when it reared and hissed, two polished black hooks curving down beneath its head.
Something else stirred, this time on the pile itself, on the peak of it, something with a tail that caught the light. It raised claws like a lobster’s: a scorpion. The spider was showing interest. The scorpion climbed down, looked for a way to evade, but the spider drawing closer, it too reared, tail bent quivering forward.
They met on the map. The spider jumped, reaching. The scorpion caught the hairy forelegs in its claws and fought to hold the spider off. The spider pushed the scorpion this way and that across the map, circling. Now the scorpion had slid into the area marked as garden, and the spider reared and came down on it. Drytung could not tell if the fangs had hit. The scorpion’s tail wavered and sank. The spider came down again, the tail drooped further, but the barb, in its last swing, found the spider�
�s head. For a moment both held still, then released each other, crawled twitching away.
Who had prevailed? Drytung found a shovel in the corner and killed them both, regretfully, but there were babies in the house. He wrapped them in the map and carried them to the wastepaper basket, then sat, lost in the bleak fancy of battle taking his garden as its terrain. How far would Shandimus’ Force fall back? To the City? Would the Rhemots, if they invested the City, take up a position on this shoulder overlooking it? Artillery emplacements, car parks, trenches, bivouacs, fires. Drytung shuddered, picked up his pen, let it hover trembling over the foolscap, wrote.
20.
Time in the Garden
Three weeks later the heat drove Drytung from the garden. He’d seen no more of ’Nna or Lhool; one of them had come every week to tend the plot and cull what grew there, but she had been and gone by the figtree gate, and he had not seen her.
Now he was sitting at the kitchen table, drawing Umm’ as he had first seen her. Drytung’s crayon followed the fall of fine hair around her ears. Till now his drawings had been all botanical (not counting military maps and sketches). The folio was filling with precise pen-and-ink renderings of plants seen from nearer than the gardener’s eye normally advances. They had moved from stiff chartings to a tracing of thrust, turn, and balance, as his eye gained confidence and his hand forgot itself. The plants became more creaturely.
There was a page, the verso of this he was drawing on now, that he’d filled the evening before leaving for the Hook. ’Nna had led him into her plot to a rusty conical cluster upright on a hairy stem. Its long leaves spread like wings, curled, spiraled at the tips. He’d drawn it quickly and caught it, never wanted to see it again; even now his hand was holding the page flat while his charcoal traced tendrils of hair and his eye kept flicking to Piptiyya’s hands.
He knew now how they worked: quick, sure, knowing. He and she had been together in the garden every day the last three weeks, racing the season. She had set flags and iris in the long pool, to draw up dragonflies from the valley. Together they had dug pits for the line of young yews, a windscreen for the roses and a shield from eyes in the lane. He had watched her hands deadheading roses, trimming myrtle, clipping, pruning, watering, weeding, feeding. ’Nna was right, he’d had little enough to show Umm’ Piptiyya about gardens.
Her taste, more than his, was for flowers, ones not obtainable locally; ones that grow in sandy soil near the sea. So Drytung had written, listing the kinds, adding quick drawings, and enclosed money; he’d left the envelope in the thorny hedge by the figtree gate and ten days later found a basket packed with well-grown plants and the coin returned. They’d put them in quickly. Piptiyya’s hands had worked at speed, probing along the rows, pushing in seed, patting down the dirt. Outside the garden, along the path to the gully stair, she had scattered wildflower mix abundantly across the sward that rose through the orchard to lap the bare rock of the spur’s broad back, while Drytung struggled to set up a pole topped by a figure twirling in the wind, to scare off birds.
On walks down the lane and into the Nahloon, Piptiyya, with the babies slung fore and aft, would suddenly dart aside, hand on the pommel of her trowel, to dig up something flowering by the way, wrap it in sacking, and lay it in her basket. Farmer’s wives were always pressing cuttings on her, whole plants sometimes, almost unbidden; for Umm’s address was modest, monosyllabic, yet she would point, and then the women hurried. He knew she paid them back, was not sure how; their children showed no kind of shyness but ran to kiss her and took the twins off to dandle.
Or in the kitchen, sharpening a knife or kneading dough: quick, sure hands, yet so fine, elegant, nervous-fingered like a musician’s. He’d bought her a set of pipes at weekly market, and she had quickly mastered the breath and fingering. She played the tunes that farmers’ children taught her, but softer, more lingering than their shrill peeps and wails.
The babies had fallen asleep. The kitchen lay in shadow, lemon light overspread the windows. Drytung made a last snatch with the charcoal and then looked to see what it caught. On the sheet an errant wisp snaked down in front of Piptiyya’s ear, then, lifted on some breeze, twisted toward the window, spiraling at the tip, in counterpoint to the stillness of her lids, lips, steady hands.
He closed the folio. While she settled the babies in their cradle, Drytung poured out two tumblers of wine. It had become their custom to sit out at twilight, to watch swifts scour the upper air before the bats came out to take their turn. They would talk about the garden, other daily matters. But this evening something unsettled in him addressed itself to something unsettled in her—that twist of hair. He talked, the first time he had done so, about his writing. About The Answer, but also about Hadu, the new Letter from the Field that he was “nursing into life” upstairs.
She smiled at his phrase. Piptiyya knew him now. This driving, earnest man, happy for the moment, had been the officer quartered in her family’s house; the historiographer who’d gazed at her sister with sad-dog longing. They’d given him the Long Gallery to put him out of the way; he hadn’t been much in the gardens, where she’d spent all her time. Twice he had come through where she was working, by and in the carp pond; once she’d had to pull a shirt on in a hurry. If he’d seen her, he gave no sign but examined the garden, which he had sketched. Now she saw some of her ideas in his arrangement of iris, flags, and lilies. He had, thanks to her, thought of cresses.
As Drytung unwound his mind in talk, with swallows of wine to release the checks, Piptiyya listened and thought about their garden. He’d been generous to make her a sharer in it. Their knowledges complemented each other; their tastes as well. He was an architect of light, air, and mass. He could make any space proportion itself around a use, a mood, a thought; then the space invented an eye to see it and led it to where it could find a hundred different images and ideas, near, far, and in between. To move from one of his rooms to another was a turn so strong it stopped her, to search for the implied occupant. Once she’d caught herself adjusting her clothes, as if the alteration had started her coming undone. Volumes, textures, lusters; uprights, reachings, festoons and coils, framings and intrusions, placements that claimed the eye or sent it further, all of these and the succession of them showed an instinct refined past refinement.
Her own designs, his garden made her see, had often been a little staid. What she brought was a freedom with the palette that kept his rooms, walls, beds in motion as the seasons changed. It was a musical sense, her grasp of quickenings and retardations, picked up when she had been learning her instrument and the tempi of dance, song and conversation. And of writing: the passage of a nib across a sheet was a coordination of rhythms so subtle that often a melody hovered between the muscles of the hand and the inked sentence.
Music was no less precious to her now for her having discovered its mortality. She heard it clearer and attended with an ear better prepared for interruption. Drytung too had helped her see, by his shrewd impulses and impatiences, that one must not become mired in a practice. She no longer tolerated avoidance. She refused any inert form or color that did not somehow occupy the eye.
They were careful about different things. When plants were going in, she was meticulous, to a degree that he at first found laughable, about the preparation of the bed, the spacing, and the light. She made a meditation, while she set the bulb or root-ball or seed, on the plant’s known habit, tracing its future in imaginal music; because she knew what might cut off that music. Drought, drench, blight, beetles, or trampling by goat or boots. The flowers she planted were of the varieties that tires had rolled over in her garden on the Hook. It was a morbid pleasure to watch them flourish here; but seaside plants are hardy. Drytung left most of this sort of work to her and studied how she did it. He himself darted in with clippers only when the garden was well underway. Then he went at it like a sculptor. The lines and masses he freed, though plants might die, clarified the sort-of-music she heard: the articulation of g
rowing time.
Time was what Drytung was talking about now. He had summed up Hadu, and she had pretended that she didn’t know where the battle was set, while he pretended, she thought, that he didn’t know who she was. Now he moved into The Answer, eloquent, while Piptiyya sipped her wine and rested, sore around the nipples. A farmer’s wife had given her a crock of goosefat she looked forward to applying, but what the poet was saying held her attention, for she saw he was wrong.
Drytung saw a garden as time and weather brought within bounds, as pain transformed to pleasure, as the taming of the field of the world, on which so many bodies lay dead. His claim was that garden time flowered. He called it a prosody that leads to climax not as drama does at the doleful stroke, but repeatingly, varyingly, in a measure and with a result nourishing to man and animal. “It is a following out of natural lines of growth not interrupted by accident,” he said, and she saw that his writing must be going well. The flowers were the particular beauties, the beauty of the particular; not, like tropes, a device to catch the eye, but rather a reminder of timelessness within time, breaking the line of the urgent shoot with its unfurling of color. As a good metaphor does more than amplify a concept, creates an object in the phantasy, “the vision of flowers is what stays,” he said. “They’re what we really see. All the rest in the poem and garden is felt in time as work. Our phantasy is the garden that the poem works. It molds us in its own time, without violence. We are eased of mortality, caught up in a rhythm not exactly natural, since nature can be cruel, but a rhythm redeemed from nature—a time suited to animal man.” Yesterday she’d had to stop him shooting a goat that had climbed into a young almond tree. Then he’d helped her get it down and had handled it gently. Her gaze played on his face and behind it on moonglow filtering through the spiky cypresses. She watched his features relax as his eyes met hers.