Bee-Loud Glade (18 page)

“Fine,” she said. “Have it your way. I'll make it all up, then. I'll tell myself all about you, and I'll get it so wrong you can't stand it and you have to speak up to correct me. Sound good?”

She didn't wait for me to tell her whether I liked the idea, which was smart enough, I suppose, because if I had spoken up to answer it would have made moot her whole plan. Or made mute—for once that linguistic error made sense, and I struggled more than I had in a long time not to talk, not to share the joke I'd made in my head, and not to laugh (which had been, over my time in the garden, harder to avoid than actual speech; I wasn't even certain that laughter was covered by my vow of silence, but it was too late for me to ask, and I'd been stifling my smiles and laughter for as long as I'd been in the cave). I remembered those types of misheard words were called eggcorns, and I was thinking about moot and mute and eggcorns and the acorns that were growing and dangling all around me in that tree (so I suppose it was an oak), and as my mind wandered off and away into all of those topics so rich for reflection, Mrs. Crane painted quietly for a while.

But when she started talking again she spoke about me, about the me she imagined in place of the me who wouldn't speak to satisfy her curiosity about himself. About myself, I mean.

She started right at the beginning. Not
my
beginning, but the beginning of somebody's story. “So,” she began, “you were born in the shadow of a shipyard... no, wait, you were born in a coal-mining town. Your father was a steel-drivin' man, and every morning he hoisted his enormous black lunchbox and swung his hammer as large as the hammers of two normal-sized men up onto his shoulder, and stepped into the stream of his co-workers flowing along the town's single road uphill toward the mine.”

Where was she getting this stuff? It was exciting, it made a good story, but it wasn't mine.

“You were the quiet kid in school, of course. Not much to say, but watching it all—taking it in from the corner where you might be overlooked, and you knew more about what was going on in the lives of everyone around you than they could have ever imagined. The gossip, the secrets, the shared glances... no, wait. Hang on.” She lifted her paintbrush away from the canvas and looked up at me in the tree with her head tilted and one eye closed.

“No, that's not it,” she said. “You weren't quiet. Your mother always told people you were born talking because you had so much to say. Blabbing away as soon as you could, even before you could use any words. You were making up stories and rattling on about whatever it was you were saying. You talked to... to the plastic fish on the mobile over your crib, you talked to your stuffed animals and the, oh, what were they, the
cowboys
on your wallpaper. Talk talk talk, on and on and on.”

She looked up at me, over her canvas. “That's more like it,” she said. “That's more like you.”

I listened for a while to the bristles of her brush splashing against the canvas, and it sounded like leaves falling from the trees above the river and landing on the skin of the water—the way they sound right up close, I mean, when they land beside your ear. Her paintbrush must have been louder than leaves, though, because I could hear it up in my tree.

She didn't say anything else for a while, just painted and smiled, and I couldn't tell if she was smiling at how the painting was going or at the story she'd told about me or at something else altogether. Whatever the reason, she wore a smile that would make clear to anyone looking that she, this woman, this actress who had been pretty famous and had given it up because her husband asked her to—so she'd said, on one of our berry-picking excursions— knew exactly who she was and what she was doing. That she was satisfied.

She had the kind of smile that would have made her a good hermit.

“And then all of a sudden,” she said, “one day in, oh, maybe high school? Or was it later, in college? One day you were all talked out. You'd said what you had to say and didn't say anything else. Not a vow of silence like you've got now. It wasn't as dramatic as that. You still ordered food and answered questions, you still pleased and thanked when it was polite, but you stopped making conversation and you stopped telling stories and you stopped speaking for all but the most practical or pressing reasons.”

She punctuated that with a broad, upswept stroke of her brush, from the bottom of the canvas to the uppermost corner with a snap of her wrist, the boldest, sharpest, most decisive gesture I'd seen her make all that morning. And I'd been paying attention, at least for some of the time.

“Your mother worried, of course. What mother wouldn't? Your father did, too, but not as much. He understood. He'd spent long years in the dark of the mines, don't forget.” (I had, in fact, forgotten.) “He was used to days and nights without speaking because the mine was already so loud with all that clanging and clanking and the blasting of stone, and because he was so often tired—as tired as ten tired men, because that's how hard your father worked, remember. He deserved to be tired.

“He understood not needing to speak, and not having something to say all the time. So when your mother insisted you see a doctor about your new quiet, your father told her to wait, and he put his spoon down beside his bowl of soup—remember how big his bowl was!—and he looked you in the eyes and he asked if you needed a doctor. You didn't say anything, you didn't nod or shake your head, so your father told your mother no doctor was needed. And that was the end of that, wasn't it?”

And that was also the end of her work for the day, because Mrs. Crane set the canvas against a tree trunk while she folded her easel and packed up her case. I climbed down from my branch and tried to look at the painting, but she turned it away from me and said, “What do you need to see that for? I've already told you your story.”

25

I
t occurs to me sometimes that there must be goings-on going on in the world, current events more current than the ones I remember. The last news I knew of was Mr. Crane's downfall, if downfall is the right word. And even that, though it happened right here around me, I don't know much about, not much at all. Only that he was here and then he was gone. The whole story must have been larger, more lurid, played out across TV and papers and blogs. None of which reached me up here, and I can't say I mind. I can't say I've ever thought about it before, because my life went on more or less as it was; I had to provide my own food, set my own schedule, but I stayed in the garden and, if anything, my life became simpler once I was alone. I wondered, of course, where he'd gone, but only in the most general way—I never concerned myself with the specifics.

I might have felt a bit lonely, at first, in such a vast space without even Mr. Crane and his mansion, but lonely for what? Not for the life I'd left behind, a life no less solitary but far less satisfying than the one I live now. Lonely, perhaps, for some idea of what I had once expected my life would be like, or what I'd thought other people's might be. A useless, distracting loneliness, in other words, a longing for things that didn't exist. And what I had gained for giving up all of that, what had been granted to me in its place... I would have given up so much more had so much more been demanded of me. If all this hadn't come as a gift.

I lay in bed last night in the dark—the real dark, not the dark of my eyes—and asked the scribe if we knew anything more of Mr. Crane's fate, if there were clues I hadn't considered, but no, there was nothing. We only know what we know, the known knowns. Whatever happened to my employer, I knew as little of what happened right here at his home as I did of what was to come, the courts of law and of public opinion that must have held session, and for all I know he deserved what he got—I don't know what he was accused of, or if he'd done it, so perhaps it was something awful. Or not. I'd like to think that it wasn't, and that Mr. Crane is free somewhere else, away from these acres he left behind, perhaps living in his own cave in some other forest.

Should I have wondered? Should I have taken an interest when he was still here, an interest in him, in his wife? In Smithee? I wasn't being paid to take an interest in them—I was being paid for the opposite, even—but now whatever questions I may come to wonder about are never going to be answered whether I want them to be or not. What did I owe Mr. Crane, a job well done or more than that? Now that he's gone, now that he's given me this, I owe him a life well-lived, so that's what I've tried to accomplish in the years since his departure. I've thought, at times, that I knew just what that meant: a life of desperate quiet and sharp attention, of solitude and self-sufficiency, secure from the ups and downs of the world that are always, always the same however they change, and because of that are never worth knowing.

There was a war underway when I entered this garden, economic collapse on the horizon and the prospect of worse years to come. Maybe they have come, and maybe they haven't; the world for me is like that cat in a box that might be alive but might be dead, and until the box opens is somehow neither and both.

I don't want to know what's become of the world, but some days I wonder. I wonder in the safety of knowing I'll never find out, like playing a game. In the morning, most often, as I sit on my cave and watch the sun rise I imagine it glancing off clean cars and black top and tanning pale skin at the beach. I prefer to think it's all gone on the same without me, that my absence was swallowed like some lost explorer in quicksand—visible one moment, vanished the next, and the surface settled back into order as if it was never disturbed.

I suppose I imagine the world as a river in which I've settled onto the bottom, the Old Man's reach flowing from one pole to the other and around the equator and washing across everything in between. He taught me another way to be in the world, to be still and small and quiet in ways I never had been. Not that I'd ever been noisy or taken up very much space, but my insignificance had come from being anxious, being nervous or distracted or worried about looking busy, looking important, looking like somebody other than who I was. The Old Man, the days I spent afloat on the river, eyes open or closed, anchored by fallen trees or my toes in the sand, showed me that insignificance could be intended. That I was already dwarfed by the clouds and the trees and, most of all, by the river, so why pretend not to be? Why trouble myself to be something larger than I could possibly be?

I had the river, or the river had me; there was quiet and calm and there was the cave. There was the house on the hill and the appearance of food in the niche in my wall twice a day, and most of all there was time. Time enough, at last, for nothing at all. Time to think. And then the house and the meals and the Cranes were all gone, but I still had all that time. Maybe even more of it.

And it went on that way until the hikers arrived, but I know now—or I can admit what I've known all along—that it would have changed with or without them. Without my eyes, once they're really gone and not just slowly going, I will be swallowed up by quicksand, too. I will get lost some day or the next, and wander in circles with nothing to eat until I give up and lie down and die. Or go the wrong way and find myself out in that world beyond mine, which would be just about the same thing.

This morning I went to my garden as always, after my breakfast and after my swim. I crept past their tent quietly on my comfortable, much-improved crutch, thinking they were asleep—they seem to be recovered from their mushroom ordeal, but still sleeping more than usual, still healing perhaps. But when I passed the bright bulb of their tent and went behind the barrier of blackberry brambles—every year they grow thicker and creep closer up to my garden, and every year I spend more time breaking and trimming and burning them back from the edge of my field—when I moved past the bushes and past the strange, clean-scraped circle on the ground by their camp (something I hadn't spotted before, and noticed first with my bare feet), I heard them at work in my garden. One blur—him, I think—in the carrots, hunched over and weeding. And her with my watering can—I could tell because it was made from a dried and hollowed-out almost neon green gourd, and even its blur stood out against everything else—dowsing the thirsty young corn.

No one else has worked in my garden, no other hands have planted or weeded or watered my crops. No one else has even been in it, not since it was truly mine. Inside I raged despite myself, despite knowing in some smaller part of my mind that I need other hands if I'm going to survive. My hands balled into fists, then relaxed, then they tightened again, as confused as the rest of me was—it was clear they were helping, or thought they were. It was clear they were sharing the burden of work, but it was
my
work, in my garden, and not a task I wanted to share.

But maybe, I thought, as that quieter voice spoke up for itself, maybe the sharing, the intrusion, the arrival of these hikers into my garden, is what the Old Man has directed, and their work this morning is his loudest message to me. I won't know without more reflection, until I've spent more time on the river in thought, but in the meantime what could I do but go on with routine, do what I do every day? Go on, at least, with what I think I do every day—lately, with all these disruptions, it's been hard to tell and I often worry I'm getting things wrong, changing my routine from one day to the next because I'm unable to keep it all straight.

So I stepped into the rows of the garden and I firmed up the stakes for my beans and tomatoes. I guided the pumpkins on their prickled vines back into their corner and out of the peas they were chasing again. Always. Every year they roll into the neighboring patch, and every year I roll them out. And though my hands can work without eyes after doing this work for so long, I did everything slowly, as I always have. I savored each turned scoop of soil and each seed tucked into it and every pumpkin rolled out of the peas. And though I didn't ask the hikers to pay attention, I willed them to notice, to see what I was doing and how, and to learn how to care for this garden. I can't say if they were watching, or went on doing things their own way. But whatever they did, and however they did it, it dawned on me that the hikers weren't speaking any more than I was, and that I hadn't heard them speak at all, in fact, for a few days—not since their laughter while picking the poisonous mushrooms and complaining while they were sick. Did it mean something, I wondered, or had they just run out of words for a while?

And like that we worked through the morning, the three of us side by side in the field, each bent toward the ground and getting on with what had to be done for life to go on in this garden.