The Naked Gardener (4 page)

“What happened to the button factory? I mean the building?” I asked

“It’s still back there, behind the hardware store. On Water Street next to the old shoe factory building. It’s been empty for years. Just a big empty place with those old skylights they used to put in the roof for light,” Hope explained.

“I’ll bet it’s a great space.” I looked at Erica. “And your idea?”

“The old lady has no children. And no family left. She’s a recluse as far as I can tell. No one’s seen her for years except the man who worked for her husband tending the grounds and taking care of the house. He buys her food and every once in a while someone sees him outside by the mailbox. He even comes to the market to buy bread from me every other week. Not today though. So my idea is to try to get her to leave the house and the mill and her money to the town in a trust. And we do something with all that to draw people here to Trout River Falls.”

I watched the water cascading over the falls to the left of the mill pond dam. Funny about all that rock. Some of it is immovable, like the rock that creates the waterfall. And some of it just won’t stop moving, like the rocks in my garden, always showing up where I didn’t want them. I thought about all the stone walls I drove past everywhere. In Virginia a stone wall is a sign of gentry, the moneyed class. Here they were as common as trailer parks. You could barely walk a hundred paces without hitting a stone wall. Stone foundations, stone houses, stone barns, stone walls.

I watched the way the water flowed and dropped, terrace by terrace, into pools and rushes. The good run on the west side had what I estimated was about a forty foot drop at a thirty degree angle. Not too hard the way the water was flowing now. After a good rain, it would be a bit trickier, more turbulent. The rocks would be hidden under water.

“I guess you’d have to come up with a way to get to the old lady. Old people get pretty fixed in their ways. They don’t like being asked to do things. Especially for someone else. Does anyone know her or know anyone who knows her?”

“I used to know some women at the club who knew her,” said Valerie. “But they’re all long gone.”

“Then we’d better hurry up and get to her,” Hope said.

I was surprised at Hope’s practical approach. She had seemed mousy when I first met her last summer. Maybe it was being at the church that day. Maybe she was like me, also in transition.

People had stopped driving up to the farmers’ market. Only a few trucks and vans remained parked outside the hardware store. The last of the farmers had packed up and gone for the day.

We collapsed Erica’s table and moved to our cars. She gave me her new phone number. Now that she was head of the town council, she had gotten her own line.

Maybe you’ll come over and see how we’ve fixed up the farm,” I told them. “Maze and I will be doing some chores Monday.”

“I’d like to see that. Anyone who could fix up that old Reichelm wreck just might be able to bring Trout River Falls back to life.”

“I suppose you think I don’t really fit in up here.”

“No,” she shook her head. “I think you fit in just fine. But I always wondered how you got here. It’s not like it’s on the main route to or from anywhere.”

Tiny droplets of water from the falls pricked at my face. I looked up at the sky and wondered if Maze was at that moment floating on hot air currents, gliding over some farmer’s fields, maybe even watching the Trout River from way off in the distance. How does anybody end up anywhere?

* * *

Sunday morning and a light breeze. Warm air currents ruffled the edges of the leaves. Sun blazing in an azure sky. Puffy white clouds moved lazily eastward, casting shadows over the fields and garden. The pond glittered with feathery patterns like a harpist’s fingertips were rippling a broken cadence across the water.

I left the barn naked, the warm sun on my shoulders. Past Queen Anne’s lace. Down the path. Then, just as the garden came into full view, a rabbit hopped into the middle of the path, munching on some tender shoots of wild violet. His ears pointed forward away from me. Tail tucked, haunches relaxed. I stopped. Watched as he chewed the flower and then the leaves, taking his time. Unaware of my presence, not frightened. It was good Maze had walled my garden off from the creatures.

When I was seven, my father tilled up a large rectangle in a wide grassy field behind our house. He must have borrowed the tiller from our neighbors who had a small farm. I was friends with their daughter. She and I used to collect eggs from the chicken roosts in their barn. In there it always seemed like dusk; it smelled like fresh hay and cow hides and milking pails. Even the manure smelled fresh and clean, a natural part of life. Her brothers mucked the stalls, refreshed the hay for the cows. There was a big old horse named Red. A gentle soul with large eyes and heavy legs. We’d climb up onto his back and ride him around the farm, never going faster than a slow, ambling walk. I don’t know how Red felt about these jaunts but we loved them.

Once my father had plowed up the field for his garden, he laid out rows with wooden stakes at the end of each row and lines of white cotton string between the stakes. Every row was evenly spaced with the next and each string ran true from stake to stake. After he sowed the seeds, he popped the corresponding seed packet over its stake to show what was planted in each row. On one side, the whole length of the garden was reserved for corn, four rows neatly spread out with more space between them than the other rows. Next to the corn, he planted vegetables. Once he reached the middle of the garden he planted flowers. A riot of flowers, as it turned out. But in the beginning, there were just the furrows with my father’s footprints running up and down in the earth.

On days there was no rain, he stood out there moistening the earth with a fine mist from a garden hose. Meticulous and patient about his garden, I had no idea at the time that he was really in a kind of mourning. My mother had been hospitalized and no one knew when she would be coming home.

Soon tiny green sprouts popped up through the dirt. They were so small and looked so tender it was hard to imagine how they would survive, as if one brisk wind could smash them back into the earth. But they were tougher than they looked. I went out with him every morning to check on their progress. I didn’t question why he didn’t go to work that year. Whatever happens in the life of a child seems normal at the time. It’s what you know. And only that.

When the green sprouts were about two inches tall, my father told me we had to weed them out. We bent over the rows and carefully pulled the smaller ones out of the dirt. Their tiny white roots dangled from my fingers and I thought how cruel it was to stop them from growing. But my father explained that if we didn’t weed them out, they would crowd each other and none of them would grow. He said we were doing nature’s work for her.

Up and down the rows we worked until we had pulled out most of the little seedlings. Over the next week I was amazed to see how fast the ones we had left grew. It was almost as if you could see them reach up right in front of your eyes. I sometimes stood at the edge of the garden and watched closely. As if I might witness them growing.

In mid June, the garden was tall and green and robust with life. The vegetable plants bloomed and I was about to discover the cycle that plants went through to produce food. These little flowers were only the beginning. Soon they would fade and in their place I would find small round green tomatoes, silk tassels with corn ears inside, round melons on vines crawling over the dirt mounds, beans hanging from poles and carrot greens with their orange spears hidden beneath the soil. But that was not all of it.

By July the first flowers had begun to bloom and the garden became like a Bonnard painting. Every color in every hue represented. The snap dragons were my favorites. The flowers looked like little faces wearing a curly bonnet. And when you pinched them in one spot between your thumb and index finger, their little mouths opened and they smiled at you.

I moved one foot and the rabbit’s ears flickered for a second before he bolted away through the field, allowing me to proceed on the path to my garden. I pulled the gate open and stepped aside to let it hang away from the fence. Once inside, I knelt down almost as if to pray. Methodically I pulled at small weeds that had sprouted under the pole beans. Down the row I went on hands and knees and all the while I could almost taste the fresh green beans, the tomatoes, the melons, zucchini, snap peas and all the other vegetables and fruit that would soon be ripe for picking. This was no small thing. A garden. To plant a garden is a sign of certainty that tomorrow will come and a sign of hope that the earth has the power to revive. I tried to think of Maze and me in the same way. Perhaps, I thought, as I moved toward the end of the row and my knees were now brown with earth and the dirt was embedded under my nails, I needed some distance on our situation. I needed something like hang gliding to get some perspective on my world.

CHAPTER THREE

THE ORCHARD

Monday Maze stayed at the farm to help prune the fruit trees. I had found an old upside down V tripod ladder, the kind I had seen in one of Van Gogh’s paintings of the orchard in Arles. It had been like finding an old friend, that ladder. I thought maybe one day our orchard would look like Van Gogh’s. At least the apple trees. Maybe, one day. Or did you have to see the trees through his eyes? See them as twisted and tortured, struck with a light that seems to vibrate with life. Poor old Vincent. How he struggled to get his drawing right. Nothing was easy for that man. So sick. And yet so determined. And then to be remembered by the general public as that guy who cut off his ear. They romanticize that act as if it was something to be admired. What he did for love. No one talks about what was really behind what he did. That he was demented at the time. Depressed? Yes, but he must have been schizophrenic, too. It was the act of a very troubled mind.

The public wants its artists to be more than their art. What Vincent left was so much more than one gruesome moment. I remember studying how he taught himself to draw. How he sketched things over and over until he felt he could really see them. Drawing is a way of seeing. Of focusing vision on a particular object in a particular moment with the mind of the artist as interpreter. And then color brings drawing alive. I’ve seen Starry Night. I’ve seen the sunflowers and the orchard paintings and the interior of his room. I’ve also seen the paintings of his boots. Those boots that speak of miles trod and the person who lived in them. His paintings had the quality of perpetual motion. Or maybe perpetual emotion, never resting, always becoming something else, alive on the canvas, disturbed below the surface, roiling like a confused sea yet with an overall pattern to its instability.

I waited on the ground, held a rope attached to the branch, looking up at Maze on the ladder.

Maze was good at stuff like this. He could concentrate on a task to the exclusion of everything else. I suppose he was like Vincent that way, that deep concentration. But Maze was not ill. And not creative in the ways that an artist is creative. He was content to study and explain how others lived.

“Be careful,” I called up.

“You just hold that rope and pull when I tell you,” he answered.

He grabbed the ends of the pruner and dug the blades into the branch then snapped them together. At the same time he yelled out, “Now!”

I yanked at the rope. The branch cracked and fell at my feet.

Maze positioned the pruner again on another branch and around each tree we went. He snapped the branches off; I tugged the rope until a circle of branches surrounded each tree trunk and the tree was cut nice and low, better for harvesting fruit next year.

We heard a car pull into the gravel drive at the same moment as Maze pushed together hard on the pruning shears and the last branch toppled. I gave it a mighty yank and it landed with a whump at my feet, clearing Maze’s knees by inches.

“Someone’s here,” Maze looked out, squinting against the sun. “Two women.”

Erica raised her hand in a wide wave. Hope followed close behind her. When they got about thirty feet from the ladder, they stopped.

“We’re not intruding, are we? Hope was helping me deliver a big order of loaves to a restaurant nearby and we thought we’d just stop in to see what you’ve done to the place.”

Nearby up here could have meant anything up to forty miles away. I was still a bit culture shocked. The way people got right to the point up north. No meandering talk, no stories about the weather or what Aunt Betty Lou did last week after she saw the chiropractor. The rhythm of life was totally different from the south. Perhaps I just didn’t understand Vermont or Maze yet. I introduced them to Maze as he climbed down from the ladder.

Erica looked around. “You really have brought this place back from the dead.”

She examined the tree with its newly pruned limbs scattered on the ground at our feet.

“If we can get this old orchard to produce, Katelyn promises to make stewed pears and put them up in jars,” Maze smiled at Erica. “And apple butter.” His eyes crinkled at the corners and I remembered how those doleful eyes had drawn me in when we first met. “You girls go on ahead and chat. I’ll clean up here.”

I nodded. I stood between Hope and Erica as we walked across the old orchard between the rows of gnarled trees. Maze began to collect the pruned limbs and stack them to one side of the path.

“You’ll be needing a bee hive soon. If you want these fruit trees to produce,” said Erica.

“I know a bee keeper who can get you started,” Hope offered. “He brings the hives and tends them.”

“Don’t they just do their own thing?” I asked.

“Oh, no. They have to be watched. The honey has to be harvested. The new queen has to be moved so the beekeeper can start a new colony. And if you let the beekeeper bring his hives out here, he’ll share some of the honey with you. There’s a lot to do.”

“I guess that would be good for my garden, too. Come on, let me show it to you.” I led them away from the orchard and we wandered up past the chicken coop.

“Wait a second,” Erica pointed to the coop. “Are you actually living in that?”

I laughed and described our summer living, cooking, eating, and bathing arrangements. We walked then along the path bordered by fields of Queen Anne’s Lace and the women were quiet. At the garden, I gave them time to absorb the scene, from the strung wire gate to the high fence covered in blooming vines, to the stone walls, loosely and randomly stacked with no regard to size or engineering. I unhinged the latch and pulled the gate back and there in front of us, as if I was seeing it for the first time, was my private garden.

We passed by the bottle tree I had started the first summer. It was on old pear tree that had died and left spikes of dead limbs sticking up in the air. Every time Maze and I finished a bottle of wine, or juice or anything else that came in a glass bottle, I slid the empty onto the pointy end of a dead limb. The bottle tree now bloomed with about thirty bottles – red ones, dark green ones, clear ones, blue ones, brown, and even a purple bottle. Friends who knew about the tree would drop their bottles off – especially if they had a particularly interesting one. We would come home to find a bottle by the mail box, or lying on the stone wall by the road, or resting in the crotch of a tree by the dirt driveway.

“Oh, this is just beautiful,” said Hope. She stepped inside and began to wander among the rows. “I’ve never seen a garden like this. Where did you get all the pottery and how do you attach it to the fences? Oh, look at the hollyhocks. And the rambling rose over there.” She couldn’t stop pointing. Butterflies flitted among the flowers and birds sang cheerily from the trees.

“Katelyn, what a wonderful world you’ve created. I never would have guessed this was here,” said Erica. She followed Hope and soon they parted, taking different paths to see the entire garden from vegetables to herbs to flowers and vines. “Oh, look. You do have some honeybees.” She pointed to a trumpet flower. “I wonder where they’re coming from.”

“If this were my garden I’d never want to leave it,” said Hope.

“Yes but we have to get going,” Erica reminded her. “The delivery, you know.”

We left the garden. I latched the gate and we walked again among the Queen Anne’s Lace up toward the barn where they had parked. When we passed by the open barn Erica spotted our canoe stored upside down on a rack at the north side.

“Whose canoe?”

“Mine mainly. Maze is not so comfortable on the water yet. He prefers being airborne. I do a lot of canoeing and kayaking on the tidal creeks in Virginia. We brought this canoe up here last summer. So far we’ve only gone down the Trout River a little ways below the falls.”

I led them through the Queen Anne’s lace path until we stood at the garden gate. I had an urge to talk about my naked gardening but Erica rattled on about this and that and finally said, “Well I’m glad we stopped by but we don’t want to keep you from your chores.”

Hope had been watching me. At that moment I caught her eye. She was such a quiet person. She seemed so shy yet there was something intent about her also. I had the sense that there was a lot brewing beneath the surface with her. A lot she didn’t say out loud.

“Is something troubling you?” she asked me and at the same time rested her fingers on Erica’s forearm as if to say “Wait a minute.”

I bent over and picked up a rock that had wormed its way up through the soil and now sat balanced on top of a frost heave the spring thaw had left behind. I tossed it outside the garden and noticed a few more stones just starting to show through fissures where the ground had frozen, expanded and pushed upward.

“There is something,” Hope prodded gently but before I could say anything, Erica spoke.

“I used to canoe all the time. With Will and Matthew when he was little. We used to go to a camp on weekends on Lake Champlain.”

“You never mentioned that,” Hope said. “Why did you stop?”

“Matthew grew up. Will took up golf. I had nobody to go with I guess.” She looked at me as if to ask if I wanted to go canoeing with her. As if she was itching to do something that would take her away from her life, even if only for a day.

Hope turned back to me but the moment had faded and I only ground my boot toe into the soft earth. The garden was coming along nicely. All my work would pay off soon in a bounty of vegetables and flowers. I noticed the wisteria vines had wound around and entwined themselves with the trumpet vines in a kind of strangling dance, each holding the other so tightly that it was now impossible to tell which you were looking at or where one started and the other stopped. The wisteria had long since bloomed but the trumpet flowers were budding out and some had already opened, their red orange flutes reaching upward toward the sun. A hummingbird flitted among them, buzzing, buzzing and then darting away in an impossible acrobatic motion so swift it was impossible to follow with your eyes.

We wandered from the garden up the lacy path toward where they had parked. I almost asked if Erica had a loaf of bread to spare and then she offered me one as we walked and I thought how incredible to be so in synch and then buried the thought as Hope prattled about the chicken coop and the barn and the garden and how lovely everything was.

“At the rectory no one’s paid much attention to the flowers and shrubs in years,” she said. “You should come over and tell the gardeners what to do. The minister hired a new landscaper to fix things up. This past winter was really harsh and a lot of plants didn’t survive. Deer ate every twig off the azaleas and rhododendron. They only left the stalks right at the ground. It’s pitiful.”

We stood at the van door Erica had slid open. She handed me a loaf of wheat bread.

“Listen” I began hesitantly, the idea just forming in my own mind and not completely at that. “What would you guys think of a canoe trip on the Trout River?”

“You mean the three of us?” Erica asked. She looked at Hope and then at me.

“I’d like to,” said Hope. “But it would have to be on short notice because I have a break in classes all next week and that’s the only one I have for the rest of the summer.”

“It would be more fun if we got a group of women together,” I said.

“Well, then,” said Erica. “How about if the whole council goes?”

“Would they?” I asked.

“I can ask them. And with you that would make six. Three canoes, two women each. With Katelyn as trip leader. Okay?” she turned to Hope.

“A retreat,” said Hope. “To brainstorm ideas for saving Trout River Falls?”

“How about it?” Erica asked.

I thought for a minute. I’d gone on canoe trips before. In Virginia. On the wide flat tidal creeks. Camped on islands in the middle of a river. Fought the mosquitoes. Listened to the ducks and geese. Caught catfish and pike. How different could this be?

“What river?” Hope asked.

“The Trout River of course,” I said without hesitating. And then repeated it. “The Trout River. Way above the falls. Where it’s absolutely wild. We’ll start up there and wind our way down to the put in above the falls. It’ll be a breeze.”

“I’ll call the other members,” Erica said.

“One thing. Do the others have any experience on the water?” I asked

“I would not call any of us expert. That’s why you should be the leader.”

“Okay. I’ll make a list of what we need and assign who should bring what.”

We looked past the barn as if perhaps the river was just beyond and we could catch a glimpse of it. “You can stern paddle with me,” said Erica. “And don’t worry. We’ll carry enough extra gear in our canoe, you know, to balance the weight. I mean
my
weight.” She patted my arm and let out a gruff little chuckle and then asked. “By the way, have you been canoeing long?”

* * *

The summer I turned nine, my mother dispatched me off to a two month camp in West Virginia. We were supposed to learn how to take care of ourselves in the woods and on the water, a lake and a river. On the first day we were informed that we had to learn the basics. Since many of the girls came to Camp Minnehooha from cities, swimming was a really important part of the first month’s camp experience. I was already one of the best swimmers at Camp Minnehooha. Although no one knew it yet, except me.