The Night Garden (8 page)

Touch Wood

When the Woodstock music festival charged like gangbusters to the vicinity of Green Valley in 1969, many things changed, but no individual person had changed more than Arthur Pennywort. All these many years later, there were still folks in Bethel who could talk about the Arthur everyone knew before the Concert and the Arthur everyone knew after. As for the man himself, he’d expected the Concert to be a nuisance; he had not expected it to be the seminal event of his life.

He was thirty-eight when he first caught wind of the grumbles about some music festival that got booted out of one distant town only to set a trajectory for his little corner of the world. Before the Concert, Arthur had been what most people in Green Valley had considered a “lost cause,” which was to say he had been a solitary, know-it-all bachelor for so long that it would be impossible for him to be anything but a solitary know-it-all bachelor going on.

But he hadn’t set out in life to be that way. When he was a young boy, working the Pennywort lands with his father at his side, he’d forged a vision of himself as a gentleman farmer, the kind of lost-breed, American renaissance man who mixed his own ink for his pens, who had a library full of dog-eared books
of the Western canon, who felt deep affection for his quietly brilliant and unfailingly supportive wife, who drank the best wines, who broke new ground regarding natural digestion aids, who wrote lengthy and elegant essays on husbandry, who was invited to speak at lecture halls about his innovations, and who did all these elegant things with cow manure under his nails.

But by the time the Concert came around in his late thirties, his parents were dead and he’d fully given up on his dreams. Nobody cared for gentleman farmers. His produce was acceptable, but not great. His essays didn’t get published. The only place he’d ever lectured was the local library, and the only reason he had an audience was that a high school ag teacher had forced students to attend. He was terribly constipated no matter how much bran he suffered through—no miracle discoveries of digestion health for him. And, worst of all, he’d lost his sense of wonder. The brilliant and supportive wife he dreamed of might as well have come out of a magic lamp.

Then, the Concert happened—which was to say, the
people
attending the concert happened. For most of the long history of Green Valley, the land had known more cattle than humans, and at any given moment during the growing season there was more food attached to root systems than was in all the local supermarkets combined. While other Bethel hamlets regularly courted the summer rusticators who came in their station wagons and RVs to soak up the fading glory of the Borscht Belt, Green Valley was merely a rolling collection of sleepy hills that people passed through on their way to somewhere else. Arthur and his neighbors liked it that way.

Like everyone during the summer of ’69, Arthur had known what was coming. And he’d known it was going to be trouble. He’d stopped buying Yasgur’s milk to demonstrate his disapproval—and sense of betrayal—that one of his own would be willing to violate the sanctity of the land by inviting so many longhairs in
to party. He’d never liked hippies, with their goofy, progressive ideas, and their slurred ideologies, and their lyrics that got up in a person’s face and tried to tell him how to live. And he’d never liked loud music, either. Or drugs. Or people who couldn’t see that peace—the ubiquitous, doe-eyed, goobery kind of peace that everybody was going on about—could only be achieved with force sometimes.

But more than that, he found that everything he’d hated about his life—his parents’ deaths from working their bodies as hard as they’d worked their land, his failed dreams of scholarship, his loneliness over the woman who was supposed to have shown up in his life but never had—all of his angry disappointment had found its voice when he became the elected leader of the Green Valley League for Common Sense, which had formed to try to keep the Concert out of the area. It was only when he began organizing petitions and marches, talking to lawyers and giving rousing speeches held in his front yard, that all his book smarts and bitterness gelled and he finally made sense to himself. It wasn’t until many years later that he understood it was far more difficult for a man to understand what he stood
for
than what he stood against.

By the time he and his neighbors realized that they would not be able to stop the hippies from descending on their farmland like a plague of locusts, Arthur had solidified his place as one of the most respected men of his generation, and the last of a dying breed. The Van Winkle policemen and firemen and nurses leaned on his porch rails in the evenings to vent their frustrations, and they talked with him as if he had the wisdom of Solomon in his bones.

As the Concert grew close, Arthur prepared. He loaded his shotgun with fine corn kernels—because of course he didn’t want to kill anybody, but he wouldn’t accept trespassers ruining his beds of lettuce and mucking up his potatoes. He blocked off
his driveway with fifty-five-gallon drums and battened down the hatches of his farm stand.

When the kids arrived—he called them
kids
because he felt so very ancient then himself—it was as bad as he’d thought it would be. They sped through Green Valley, music blaring, hanging out the windows of their psychedelic vans and howling like demons. Little groups or individuals in all kinds of bizarre dress and undress would walk their slow, backward walk down the road with their thumbs raised. When the traffic backed up to a standstill, the hoodlums just left their cars in the middle of the road and made an indecent parade of themselves in their moccasins and macramé, their feathers and fringe, singing at the top of their lungs. Once, he’d had to warn a handful of sky-high kids in camo not to eat the flowers on the side of the road—and though they didn’t know it, he’d saved them from ingesting deadly poison hemlock. The kids had thanked him as if he’d done no more than point out a pretty flower. For five nights, Arthur kept vigil sitting on the fence beside his fields, his shotgun balanced on his thighs and his fingers itching as the throngs walked by.

Sometimes, in those lonely hours, he struggled with the ache of his own curiosity. The kids seemed so at ease in their bodies, so … content. He did not hide his contempt for them as they flowed past his house like a throng of refugees—and yet, instead of calling him names they flashed him peace signs. They walked with their arms around one another, laughing or singing or both. To join them would have been as easy as throwing himself bodily into the current of a river and allowing himself to be swept along. But of course, his buttoned-up personal dignity wouldn’t hear of it. He sat on his fence all those long nights, eyeing the revelers, smoldering inside his skin.

After the festival ended, quiet had returned to the valley, but
it was an eerie quiet—the kind of scrubbed-clean silence that comes after a violent storm. Arthur expected life to return to normal. But on the third morning after the Concert, a cicada fell from a tree branch and landed on his shoulder with a quick, short tap that made him turn to see if someone was standing behind him.

And someone was. One of his workers alerted him that a person was sleeping in the barn. He was instantly, blazingly angry, so angry that he’d retied one of his shoes so tight it cut off the circulation. But what he found was not the drugged-up draft dodger he’d expected; it was Alice. Sleeping in some roughed-up hay. She looked like a cross between a young street orphan and an angel. Her short dress was like it had been sewn of patched-together handkerchiefs, and it dropped so low in the back that it showed the sweet, catlike curve of her spine. Her hair, teased into an impressive dark corona of an Afro, was clumped with sticks and mud.

She opened her eyes and blinked up at him, languid as a jungle cat. He’d waited for her to say something like
Oh, I’m sorry I know I’m trespassing.
Or
I swear I was just leaving.
But instead, she smiled a little, stretched her arms, and said,
Hey, Daddy-o, you got anything to drink?
And he knew he was a goner.

That evening, she’d asked if she might stay in his barn for a few days, because she’d lost track of the friends who had brought her from California, and she thought his barn was
groovy
and
kind of hip
in a way. Arthur had told the girl he was a scientist, and she believed him. Nobody had ever believed him, because of course there had never been even a kilogram of proof that Arthur had a scientist’s brain or training. But Alice had always been a skeptic when it came to proof. She only stayed one more night in the barn. And the rest of her nights, until the day she died, she’d spent with him.

Gradually, Green Valley began to put itself back together after the Concert—people carting truckloads of garbage that littered the roadsides, and birds cautiously considering whether to return to their nests. But Arthur could see that his home would never be the same again. Something had happened. Something was fundamentally changed.

After the Concert, the night was brighter in Green Valley than it was anywhere else in the Catskills, so that a person could read a book by the moon when it was only the barest crescent. The birds in the valley began to sing such intricate and virtuosic songs that scientists with recorders and binoculars started to come from miles around, enraptured by avian talent. The soil, too, changed: The inexhaustible rain that had drenched so many concertgoers and coated them in suits of mud had lent the earth new fertility, and the valley quickly became renowned for its vegetables and fruits.

The Concert had worked its magic on Green Valley, and Alice had worked her magic on him. He began to see the world as more than just a collection of facts; he forgave his parents for so doggedly instilling in him the idea that life was about work, and that work was drudgery, and that happiness was not an acceptable life goal. He resigned from the League for Common Sense, for he no longer saw anything particularly admirable in too much levelheadedness. He fell in love with his life, as if a faded curtain had been drawn back and revealed Green Valley in all its magnificent colors, and the hopes of his boyhood returned.

As for his wife, she’d seemed to be broken in some way when he first met her, but every day on the farm seemed to make her stronger. She called herself a gypsy; Arthur had never been fully sure if this meant she was of gypsy blood or merely gypsy mentality. She mentioned an abusive father who was a descendant of freed slaves and a mother who read palms and talked wearily
of suicide at least once a day. She had always wanted a maze garden, and for their first wedding anniversary, Arthur had staked out an acre of land in the front of the farm and said:
For you.
Within a year, the maze had started taking shape. Each day she watered and planted, and each night she worked with an artist’s coiled energy to design new garden rooms. Rumors began to circulate that the maze was clarifying, that it helped a person make up her mind, and the garden rooms themselves seemed to harbor their own subtle enchantments. Eventually the work got to be more than Alice could handle on her own. And so, one summer when she found a woman crying in the Supplicant’s Garden, she told the woman she could stay in the old barn that Arthur was about to tear down—the barn that she had such fond memories of sleeping in—and for payment, all the woman needed to do was work a little with Alice on the maze. The woman agreed. By the next summer, the barn was teeming with visitors and the maze was a thing people came to see from miles around. The gardens grew wilder and wilder, as if they had intentions of their own.

The Green Valley farm became the Pennyworts’ joint project, tucked low in the folds of the hills. Arthur and Alice were building their own world with their own rules and whimsies, a place where they had complete and perfect mastery and did not have to adhere to other people’s ideas for their lives. If people had ever scoffed at them or condemned them for their vision, or if they shunned them because his family had been white and Jewish and hers was neither of those things, they were too in love to notice or care. Arthur reapplied himself to working his fields, to pushing himself to create the best growing conditions that he could, and the soil rewarded him bounteously. Many years passed and it seemed they would not be able to have a child, but then, finally, Olivia arrived pink-faced and wriggling on the farm, and their family was complete.

When Arthur thought back to the man he’d been before, he saw a pessimist who’d proclaimed that the Concert would ruin life in Green Valley as he knew it. And he’d turned out to be right. The Concert had obliterated everything he thought he knew about the world in the best way possible. Alice had opened his eyes. She told him:
It’s not where you’re born that defines you; it’s where you’re reborn.

Now, from outside his shack in Solomon’s Ravine, Arthur had a sense that Green Valley was changing again, in some way that was unseen and immeasurable and not good. Even the animals of Solomon’s Ravine could feel it. His sparrows—which he’d been attempting to train as homing pigeons to prove that all animals had a sixth sense—had stopped singing abruptly, their throats parched by drought. For three days now he’d got a coppery taste on his tongue each time the wind blew from the east. And then there was the goat. It wasn’t a pet, exactly, because it had shown up in Solomon’s Ravine two years ago and attached itself to Arthur’s side, so that Arthur sometimes thought that the goat considered him a pet, not the other way around. But at any rate, the goat could feel it, too—the strangeness. He kept staring at Arthur with an eerie look in his yellow eyes, as if to say,
Are you going to do something about this, or am I?

He needed to warn Olivia, to point out the signs. All morning he listened for his daughter, since there was nothing else to listen to apart from the chatter of chipmunks and the wheezy gray squirrels in the trees. He knew the moment she’d started to make her way down the fern-spotted slope by the sound of rocks tumbling to the ravine floor.