The Box Garden (22 page)

Beside the mail box a sign in heavy lettering announces : Green onions, Rhubarb, Homemade Bread, Fresh Eggs, Nursery Plants. And at the bottom in larger letters: Absolutely No Chemical Fertilizers. Louis and I sit, thoughtful for a moment, reading the sign and thinking our thoughts.

The house itself is set well back from the road. It is a top-heavy house, late Victorian in old-girlish brick, and its porch skirt of turned, white spindles gives it a blithe knees-up-Mother-Brown gaiety. Red and yellow tulips, not quite open, stand cheerful in a curved bed. The sloping front lawn is exceptionally beautiful with its twilled, gabardine richness and its fine finish of new growth.

There is no one in sight.

“They sell nursery plants,” I remark to Louis.

“Yes,” he says, “they do.”

“I wonder what kind of things they have at this time of year.”

“Hmmm.”

“Actually,” I take a deep breath, “actually I’d thought of buying some nursery plants.”

No response from Louis.

I try again. “For you, Louis, the two of you. Something for the backyard. I thought it might make a good wedding gift.”

More silence, and then Louis says cheerfully, “The perfect thing.”

“We could just see what they have in stock.”

“Are you ... that is ... are you sure?”

I pause. Then lunge. “Yes. I’m sure.”

We leave the car—Louis checks both doors to make sure they are locked—and walks up the loose-gravelled drive toward the house. He stumbles slightly, then catches himself, but I don’t even turn my head. I can feel excitement leaking in through my skin and for an instant I feel I might faint.

Up close the house looks slightly less picturesque. There is an old wringer washing machine on the porch, a pair of men’s work gloves hanging on a nail (Watson’s gloves?), two rain-sodden cartons of empty pop bottles. The screen door, rather rusty, has been inexpertly patched.

I knock.

“Hang on a minute,” a woman’s low voice calls from the shadows behind the screen, “I’m coming.”

From inside the house we hear a young baby wailing. Baby! It takes my brain an instant to decode the message: a baby, oh God. Then plunging grief—Watson’s baby. And in another instant I will be seeing Watson. He will come striding through that screen door and see me standing here with my old, grotesque vulnerability hanging around me like a hand-me-down raincoat. What am I doing here?

A young woman, plumply tranquil, wearing granny glasses, pushes open the door. She wears a dirty, pink shirt over her jeans and on her hip rides a screaming, naked baby of about fifteen months. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she says in a flat but friendly southern Ontario voice. “I had the baby on the pot.”

“That’s all right,” Louis says wheezing.

“What a lovely baby,” I half moan. “Is it—” I peer closely, “Oh, it’s a little girl.”

“Faith,” the woman says.

“Pardon?”

“Faith. That’s her name.”

Louis receives this information silently. He is searching his pockets for a handkerchief. Automatically, never missing a beat, my kindness act uncoils itself. “What an interesting name.”

“My husband calls her Mustard Seed.”

“Oh!” The word husband pierces me. “Oh?”

“Just a joke. Faith of a mustard seed. From the Bible.”

“Oh, yes,” my head bobs.

“Well,” she says smiling and shifting the still wailing baby to her other hip, “is there anything I can help you with?”

“We saw your sign,” Louis says indistinctly. His asthma is threatening; he is alarmingly tired. I should never have dragged him here; we should never have come.

“Nursery plants,” I say, clearing my throat. “We were interested in nursery plants.”

“Terrific,” the young mother beams. (Young! she can’t be older than twenty-five. I am shaken by a shower of dizzy shame for Watson, this is too much.)

“I wanted to buy something for a wedding gift,” I say. “A shrub, I thought, something like that.”

“Just a sec,” the woman says. She peers over her shoulder into the kitchen. “My husband can show you what we’ve got. Of course, it’s early, there’s not much, but he can at least show you what we’ve got.”

“Look,” I say, taking a step backwards, “we’ll come back another time. When you’ve got more in.”

She won’t stop smiling at me; her yeasty good cheer glints off her glasses, making creamy Orphan Annie coins of her eyes. “You might as well have a look,” she says. “He’s right here. He’ll be glad to show you what we’ve got.”

Footsteps across the kitchen floor, a man’s footsteps, a man’s muffled pleasant voice saying, “I’m coming.”
Watson.

But the face which appears in the doorway isn’t Watson ; it is younger, leaner; it has blue eyes. And this man is taller. Not only that but he has straight, straw-coloured hair hanging to his shoulders and a muscular chest moving under his T-shirt. “How do you do,” he says, stepping onto the porch.

“How do you do,” Louis and I chorus. Louis gives me a quick, quizzing look, and I manage to flash him the smallest of smiles.

“Hey,” the young man says, squinting at me, “hey, aren’t you Charleen Forrest?”

Run, I cry, bolt. Now. Make for the road. Leap in the car, run.
“Yes,” I say, “I am.”

“Well, for Pete’s sake,” the smiling girl says, showing a place in her lower jaw where a tooth is missing.

“Can you beat that,” her husband mutters with awe-some gentleness. The baby stops whimpering and holds herself suddenly rigid. Then she wets herself; a surprisingly wide stream of pale baby pee creams off her mother’s hip and splashes to the porch floor.

“Oh hell,” the girl says with equanimity, stepping sideways out of the puddle.

“Charleen Forrest,” her husband murmurs again. He sends me a warm, slow smile.

“How do you know who I am?” I ask, thinking: Watson, he must keep a picture of me, imagine that, who would have thought it of Watson?

“I’ve got all your books,” he says. “And your picture’s on the back. I would have recognized you anywhere.”

“Oh,” I say, disappointed.

“And then, of course, knowing Watson—” he shrugs and smiles, “not that that matters. We really dig your stuff. Cheryl and I.”

“That’s for sure,” Cheryl says.

“Thank you,” I say absurdly. Sweetly?

“Don’t suppose you’ve seen Watson lately?” he asks me.

I stare.

“We sure miss him,” Cheryl says in tones soft with regret. “It’s just not the same here without Watson. Is it, Rob?”

“He was a beautiful guy,” Rob says mournfully. “One real beautiful guy, that’s all I can say.”

“But look,” I say to the two of them in a sharply raised voice, “he still lives here? Doesn’t he?”

“Gosh, no,” the gap-toothed Cheryl says. “Gee, it’s been—what Rob?—two years now?”

“Yeah. More than two years. He split—let’s see—it was round the end of March, wasn’t it, Cheryl? Two years ago March. We haven’t had a postcard from him even.”

“But that’s impossible,” I tell them firmly. “It can’t be true.”

A look of concern passes between them, a look which firmly shuts me out, and I feel a nudge of suspicion. Are they trying to protect Watson, pretending he isn’t here, trying to fool me like this?

“You see,” Rob says, taking the baby from his wife, “Watson sort of, well, I guess you could say he got disenchanted. You know, with the whole scene, the whole group thing, what we were trying to do here.”

“And the others,” Cheryl prompts him.

He nods. “That was part of it too, I guess. There were about eight of us, Cheryl and me and the others. All of them younger than Watson. Mostly kids who’d dropped out of the whole city thing. Younger kids. Watson kept saying they were getting younger and younger all the time. He finally got to thinking, I guess, that it was time to move on to another scene.”

“He was forty,” I tell them abruptly. “Two years ago he had his fortieth birthday. In March.”

“Gee,” Cheryl says, “Forty!”

“But he must be here,” I insist, “because every month he sends me a cheque from here. The child support money. For our son. He sends it every month. Always right on the fifteenth and it comes from here. Weedham. I know because I always check the postmark.”

They laugh softly as if I’d said something outlandishly amusing. “That’s Rob,” Cheryl explains grinning. “Rob’s the one who sends off the cheque.”

“You mail me the cheque?” I ask dazed.

“It was the one thing Watson wanted me to do. He left, Christ, I don’t know how many postdated cheques. Enough ‘til the boy’s eighteen, I think, isn’t it Cheryl?”

“And enough money in the bank to cover them. That’s what’s important, I guess, eh?”

Rob continues, “He wrote a note, left it on the back-door, this door here. All about the cheques, like where to send them and all. And I haven’t forgotten one, not so far anyways.”

“That’s very kind of you,” I say, feeling my mouth freeze with etiquette and sorrow.

“But you know,” Rob rambles on, “I might forget sometime. Memory’s not my strong point, ask Cheryl here. What I should do, since you’re standing right here, is just give you the whole bunch of cheques. Right now. That way you’d have them right with you and you could just cash them as the dates roll round.”

Cheryl nods enthusiastically at this piece of logic, and I feel suddenly flattened by confusion. Something inside me twists, something sour, something sharp, but I manage to smile and say, “Sure. Why not? While I’m here I might as well take them with me.”

Cheryl goes into the house and comes back in a minute with a large brown envelope. “They’re in here. You can count them if you want.”

“That’s okay,” I say. “I don’t have to count them. And thank you.”

“No need to thank us,” Rob says. And then he adds wistfully, “We sure miss Watson. It’s not the same.”

Should I ask them? I have to. “Where’s Watson living now?”

“East,” Rob says. “He went east.”

“You mean the Maritimes?”

He laughs again. “No, not geographical east. Philosophical east. He was into the mysticism thing. Hindu mainly.

“Buddha too,” Cheryl offers.

“You don’t know where he went?” I can hear a shameful pleat in my voice. “Geographically, I mean?”

“No. Like I said, we haven’t heard anything from Watson. Not in two years. Just that note stuck on the door. He didn’t say where he was going, just that he was going East. With a capital E. East.”

“And that’s all?”

“That’s all. The others, they kind of drifted off one by one too. After the baby was born. Some of them couldn’t really ride with the baby thing. So now there’s just Cheryl and me. And Mustard Seed here.” He blows a noisy kiss into the baby’s fat neck. “We’re just kind of a family now, you might say. We still do some farming but not like when Watson was here. But our bread baking operation is going along pretty well.”

“And the nursery plants,” Cheryl adds.

“Oh, yeah, the nursery plants. That’s what you folks were looking for, wasn’t it?”

Behind the greenhouse in the spilled, late afternoon sunlight, Louis and I pick out some good healthy shrubs: six mock orange with their roots bound in sacking. And a flat of petunias, white and pink mixed. I pay Rob with a twenty-dollar bill, and he helps Louis put them in the trunk of the car. Then we shake hands all around and head for home.

I sit beside Louis with the brown envelope on my lap and it occurs to me that I will never again receive a message from Watson, Watson my lapsed-bastard, first-love, phantom husband. The last link—a smudged, trea sonous postmark—has just been taken away from me. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. The arrival of Watson’s cheques—the regularity, the suppressed silence—offered me something: not hope, certainly not hope, I am not such a fool as that, but a pencil line of connecting sense in the poor tatter I’d made of my life. A portion of renewal. And a means by which the worth of other things might be tested. Damn you, Watson.

“There, there,” Louis is saying. “There, there now.” The curving kindness of his voice—what a good man he is—makes me conscious of the tears falling out of my eyes.

It takes us a long time to get back to Scarborough. For twenty minutes we’re stalled in traffic. An accident maybe; it could be anything. So many people in this city. Louis’s cautious driving style, so reassuring earlier in the day, is an irritant now that it’s five-thirty, five-forty-five, six o‘clock. A heavy rug of sky pushes down on the streaked sunlight; my head aches. At exactly six-thirty my mother will be placing her Pyrex casserole on the blue, crocheted hotpad in the middle of the kitchen table. I twitch with nerves. Doesn’t Louis know how punctual my mother is about meals? Well, he’ll soon learn.

Louis tries to cheer me up by talking about his favourite poet, Robert Service. I wish he wouldn’t.
Please, Louis, don’t.
His voice cracks with strain and it’s disappointing to hear he hasn’t read Hopkins. But his lips smack with pleasure over a stanza of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” and I chide myself for expecting more than I deserve.

At last Scarborough, the shopping centre, the school where I went to kindergarten (I was the one whose socks were always sliding down), the grid of streets so minutely familiar but whose separate names now seem cunningly elusive. At seven o‘clock Louis pulls up in front of the house, and from the living room window a face (whose?) registers our return.

“Aren’t you coming in, Louis?” I ask. “Aren’t you staying for supper?”

“I’m a little tired,” he says weakly. “This chest of mine.”

“Are you sure you won’t come in? Just for a minute?”

“I think I’ll have an early night,” he says. “You’ll explain to your mother, won’t you?”

“Sure.”

“I’ll bring over the shrubs in the morning. Put them in first thing in the morning.”