The Naked Gardener (17 page)

“You the lawyer?”

“Not me,” Roz was not about to back off.

“Men,” was all Mrs. Ward said.

“What about men?” Hope’s quiet voice defused the moment and Mrs. Ward turned from bellicose to thoughtful.

“They’re not like us,” she said. “They need to think they’re winning something. I never thought those men would stick it out for the sake of Trout River Falls. Wasn’t surprised at all when they quit. Was surprised, however, by you women taking over. Now my husband, Mr. Ward, he never quit on anything. And neither did my father nor my grandfather nor my great nor my great great grandfather who founded this town. Think they didn’t see all kinds of hard times? Of course they did. Winters like to froze them to death. Bad crops. Rocky soil. Floods and wars and changing times. Babies dying. Sons killed in battle. Stock market crashes and all manner of terrible things, including damned lying politicians. When our boy got killed in Vietnam my husband nearly lost all hope. Poor man. But he never gave up completely. No, not completely. But something in him died the day we got the news and it was never the same. Yes, men need to feel they’re winning something. It’s the battle of life keeps them going. Now he’s gone, too. And what’s left? Trout River Falls. This house, the mill, the town, such as it is. Not much anymore. Only what the men fought so hard for.”

“That is exactly the point,” offered Erica. “We want to make it into something again.”

“You want to show up the men, then? Is that why you’re out to save the town?”

“We all got talked into it by Erica. Showing men we can do what they gave up on is a pretty good reason. I don’t see anything wrong with it,” said Charlene. “We all have different reasons.”

“What’s yours then?” Mrs. Ward turned to her.

“I like a fight,” she said quickly and then added, “and I like to win, too.”

“Oh, you’re like the men then. Got no children. Nothing to hold you.”

Charlene looked away. Like a confused child, I thought. But she added nothing more and we all remained silent.

Mrs. Ward turned to me. When she said, “You’re the odd one. Not on the town council,” I had no idea what to say to her. I thought about the rose-scented parlors in the old houses along Washington Street back in Virginia, and about the ladies who sat in their straight backed cushioned chairs sipping tea and nodding as you answered their cordial questions about your mother and your grandmother and your aunts and uncles, as if they were tallying a genealogy chart. And you sat on a loveseat covered in some flowered print and answered “She’s just fine, Ma’am” and “He passed last August.” It was a carefully choreographed script, a slow dance of culture, a way to anchor yourselves in past and present as one. But, as it turned out it wasn’t necessary to say anything to Mrs. Ward because she didn’t wait for an answer and turned to Hope.

“And you? What do you get out of this?”

Hope lowered her head.

“I know about you, too. Reverend Amiss calls on me once a month. You work for the church. So you’re out to do good I expect.”

“I always try to,” said Hope quietly. “I may not always succeed but we should all try.”

“Oh you think God wants us to do good?”

“I believe that, yes.”

“How about you?” she turned to Erica. “You believe that, too, that God wants you to save Trout River Falls? You think you’re playing like in some old black and white movie?”

“No,” she told the old woman. “That’s not why I want to do it.”

“Then why? Most people would just let it fade away.”

“If everyone felt like that and gave into it, we might as well let the whole country fade away to the developers and the land rapers for their own personal gain.”

“Erica’s right,” Valerie suddenly broke in, which surprised me and I think the others, also. “It’s like that woman who saved the Everglades. You know? In Florida? Everyone just thought of it as a big swamp with no purpose and she figured out that it was really important and then fought for decades to save it.”

“Marjory Stoneman Douglas” Mrs. Ward said quietly. She thumped her cane softly on the floor and stood up with a deep sigh.

I don’t know what set me off, but my mind wandered. Away from the table, the house, the whole day, as if I had wandered into my own dreamscape and gotten lost there. Thoughts scattered across my mind like marbles.

Sometimes, you’re just going along with your life, not thinking about what’s next or where you are, or maybe you are thinking about what step to take next and where you’ve been. Anyway you’re all jumbled up inside and you can’t seem to see clearly. That’s the way life is. It’s a big puzzle where the pieces never seem to fit together and you keep sorting through it and trying one piece here and another piece there and sometimes you fit a few together and a picture starts to form. But then you can’t quite manage the edges and the picture stays half formed. And the puzzle pieces may be lying all over the table of your life in front of you but there are other extraneous puzzle pieces that don’t seem to go anywhere.

You examine them and think, well where did that one come from and what does it mean and how does it fit into the others? Then you see a bright colored one over on the corner of the tableso you try to fit all the brightly colored ones together. Some of them fit and others don’t and you get even more confused because someone once told you that the brightly colored ones should go together. But then you see that they don’t always. So you try a different way to fit them together. And just when you think you’re so confused you should just run your arm across the table and push the whole thing off, you find a piece that fits into another piece and all at once you have a picture that makes sense. And that’s what happened when I met Erica. She spoke about saving the town. And it was like a revelation. A way to focus on one thing in the morass of life. One simple thing to do. That everyone could put their energy behind. And sometimes that happens in life. You meet a moment where everything seems clear.

In that moment, sitting in the old woman’s kitchen, with everything going on around me, I had a moment of total clarity.

I stood up abruptly – it must have been right after Mrs. Ward stood – and walked out of the kitchen and onto the porch. I stared at the river. All I could think about was how much I wanted to get into one of the canoes and paddle hard over the falls. I wanted to hear the crash of water, feel the buoyancy of the falls under me, let the spray splash my face and just go until I had ridden the wave all the way to the river below where it would flatten out and carry me to shore.

Erica was by my side. She hugged me with one arm and squeezed my shoulder with her strong fingers.

“I feel like we didn’t finish,” I said to her.

“The falls?”

“Yes. Is it crazy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

I wanted to rest my head on her shoulder and have her tell me what to do. She seemed so sensible. So determined. At the same time, I knew she was hanging on the same way I was. Waiting for her son to come home the same way I was waiting for Maze to get over his dead wife and turn to me just because it was me and not because it was a way to put a lid on his grief. But now that seemed a poor excuse and one that was no longer valid.

“Is it wrong to want everything to be just right?”

“You mean about you and Maze?” Erica pulled her arm off my shoulder and moved toward the lawn. She took one step down from the porch. Hard gray clouds were rolling by now, showing wide spaces of blue sky. “You know it seems to me our lives are made up of our complaints. Mostly about our men.”

“Do you love Will?”

“Of course I do. There’s an old German expression my great grandmother used to recite. “Wer Schimpft, der Kauft. “Loosely translated it means ‘The one who complains buys.’ I know Will is terrified that our son won’t come home. Or he’ll come home in pieces. Bruised, scattered pieces and his life will be one long hell of mending never to be whole again. Twice a month I go to the VA hospital down in White River Junction. I bring small gifts to the injured boys. There are some women too. I read to them. And you know what they want me to read?”

I shook my head. Patches of late afternoon sun glinted on the rushing water and I could see it was already receding, that the worst of the flooding was over. Tomorrow it would be calmer, calm enough to paddle it again.

“War stories. The gorier the better. Can you imagine? At first I thought, ‘God this is awful. How can these boys want to hear more of this horror?’ And then I realized, it’s about their complaints. They love what they hate. Mrs. Ward in there lost her son in Vietnam. That war was on TV all the time every day for years. The whole country watched its horror. The wars we’re fighting now are silent, removed from our lives like some video game someone else is playing. I hate that. I want everyone to see what hell it is. For these young people, coming back, it’s not a game. It’s the big complaint of their lives and they’ll live it until their lives are over. Will is like that for me. The big complaint – the one that keeps me buying in.”

She stopped talking and we both watched the river.

“Let’s do it,” I said. “Tomorrow, when the power’s back on and we’ve called the men to pick us up in town at the public landing below the falls. Let’s all go over the falls together.”

I looked at her. She saw I was not teasing. She nodded agreement.

“How did you know I was thinking about that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I just knew it that’s all. We’ll do it together. All of us.”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” she nodded. “Now let’s go in and talk that old woman into leaving her money and house and mill and whatever else she still owns here to The Trout River Falls Trust for Historic Preservation. Charlene’s already explaining to her how it would work.”

* * *

That evening, after Mrs. Ward cooked us dinner and we did the dishes, we sat around the kitchen table drinking an old bottle of cognac she had pulled out from somewhere in that mausoleum of a house. It was good stuff. There was no telling what she had stored in all those rooms.

After dark, she lit candles and old oil lamps that looked like they dated back to her great grandfather’s days. She told us stories about growing up, how she met her husband, when they moved to Trout River Falls and took over the mill. She told us about the night her son was born during a blizzard, how they couldn’t get to town and the doctor couldn’t get to them, how she almost bled to death after her husband delivered the baby. At dawn the snow stopped and a farmer brought the doctor in on a sled pulled by mules.

She softened up as the evening progressed. Maybe it was the cognac. Maybe it was talking about Trout River Falls. She did love the old town. You could tell by the way she dismissed it the way you bad mouth a husband you’ve been married to for thirty years, the way you trash your mother or your sister, but you’d defend them to anyone who dared say anything against them. There was nothing neutral about that old woman. The way she stomped her cane for emphasis and shot us direct questions. And the more Erica and Charlene and Roz talked about their ideas for reviving Trout River Falls, the more Mrs. Ward taunted and teased them, until Erica suggested she record an oral history. At that moment we all saw a shift in her attitude. She said somewhere in the house she had old photographs of the town dating back to the mid eighteen hundreds, before there was a bridge, only the dam and the falls. When the only way across the river was a pull ferry attached to a rope. She asked us to return when things settled down and we had time to sort through her old things.

We went to bed weary and worn out but satisfied that thanks to the storm, we had accomplished what we set out to do. There was only one item left on my list.

Early the next morning when we were all assembled in the kitchen, the lights that had gone dark when the storm hit suddenly came on and a radio announcer blared out local news about storm damage and power outages and river and stream flooding. It startled us and Hope rushed to shut off the radio.

“No,” I told her. “Just turn it down some so we can hear what happened.”

“Must have fixed the main line at last,” Mrs. Ward stomped into the kitchen, her cane heavy on the wood floor. “Just in time for breakfast, too.”

“Does that mean the phone is working?” asked Valerie.

“Go ahead over and try it.”

Valerie was closest to it.

“Yep,” she said. “It’s working. I guess that means we have to start making calls.”

The minute she said it, we all looked at each other and realized, at the same time, that we didn’t want this to end. After a few moments I offered to call Maze first and as I walked over to the old wall phone Erica told the others she had something to discuss with them.

“She’s going to tell Maze to meet her below the falls at the town dock,” I heard her say as I picked up the receiver.

“And I’m going to ask Will to me there, too.”

“What are you saying?”

“Yes, Hope’s right. Are you suggesting what I think you are?” Charlene asked.

“Katelyn and I are going. If you four want to go over the falls, we can all go together. Same canoe teams as yesterday. One last hurrah.”

“Last is right,” said Valerie.

I waited to hear what they would decide. My hand was shaking a little. From excitement I think because I wasn’t scared of going over the falls. And whatever Maze said about it, I was going over anyway.