What I Came to Tell You (29 page)

“Most certainly,” the mayor said. “It is an extraordinary act of generosity and kindness. Clearly, Commissioner Lunsford puts the children of Asheville first.”

“Commissioner, do you have anything to say?” The woman held out the microphone.

Grover’d noticed that the commissioner had been smiling bigger and bigger since Jessie had said that about a Christmas
gift to the city, as if he was already reading tomorrow’s headlines in the
Asheville Citizen-Times
: C
OMMISSIONER
D
ONATES
C
HRISTMAS
G
IFT TO
A
SHEVILLE
’
S
C
HILDREN
.

He leaned into the microphone. “I remember when I was a little fella we kids ran around in the woods all day. We didn’t need toys. We didn’t need video games. We didn’t need a thing but our imaginations. Well, there aren’t all that many woods left to run around in anymore. So I figured what better way to make use of this land, this valuable land, I might add, than to donate it to Asheville’s most treasured resource.” He paused and patted the head of a little girl who happened to be standing beside him. “Our children.”

“Commissioner,” the newswoman asked, “do you envision this as a playground with swings and slides and other playground equipment?”

Mr. Lunsford opened his mouth as if to speak but Jessie stepped up. “The commissioner thought it would be best to leave the land as it is. Kids need some left-alone places. A childlife refuge, you might say.”

The commissioner eyed Jessie.

“A childlife refuge?” the newswoman asked, tilting the microphone toward Mr. Lunsford, but Jessie leaned in.

“The commissioner is too humble to admit it but he came up with the idea himself,” Jessie said. “In fact, he’s going to propose to the commissioners in their next meeting that the city sponsor a Childlife Refuge Program through which landowners can donate undeveloped land to set aside for children to play in and receive a tax write-off.”

“What a fascinating concept,” the newswoman said. “How on earth did you come up with such an idea, Commissioner?”

Mr. Lunsford looked at Jessie as if he was too stunned to talk. But then he turned to the microphone and said, “It just came to me.”

The mayor said a few more things and then the interview was over. As soon as the camera lights went off, the commissioner sort of collapsed like a balloon losing air. He glared at Jessie and seemed about to say something, but then all the people who’d been watching the interview came up to shake the commissioner’s hand and pat him on the back and more than one of them said,
You have my vote next year
.

Grover watched as the men with the orange vests loaded their chain saws and Weed Eaters and sling blades back onto their trucks. Grover felt a hand on his shoulder. Mr. Sluder leaned over and said under his breath, “Between you and me, this is one job I don’t mind leaving unfinished.” He climbed into his pickup truck and pulled away, and the rest of the big trucks followed him.

As Grover watched them drive off, it finally hit him. The Bamboo Forest wasn’t going to be cut down. He felt a rush of air and light, like a door had been flung open somewhere inside him, a door that had been closed so tight for so long that he’d forgotten it was there.

Sudie grabbed Grover’s hands and was jumping up and down. “I can’t believe it!”

Grover couldn’t help laughing.

“I’d like to show y’all something,” Jessie said to the
newswoman and the cameraman. “Do you have a minute?” Jessie motioned for Sudie and Grover to follow them. Sudie started after them but Grover stayed where he was. It was all he could do to try and comprehend what had just happened. The Bamboo Forest was about to be cut down, then it wasn’t. Something was about to be dead, then it wasn’t. How could that be? That’s when he noticed that Jessie was leading the newswoman in the direction of his weavings.

“Why’s he showing her my work?” Grover asked Mira, who happened to be standing beside him.

“Grover,” Mira said, “your weavings aren’t a secret anymore.” She nodded toward the Bamboo Forest, where a long line of children and adults waited to walk through the hallway of tapestries. “Hey, where are you going?”

Feeling too much, Grover walked out of the Bamboo Forest and headed up the street. He passed by the parked school buses and the news van and all the cars lining both sides of the street. Even as he got farther up the street, he could still hear the crowd. It sounded like a huge party being held in the Bamboo Forest. Grover never felt comfortable at parties.

He turned in at the Riverside gates and walked along a path, his hands stuck deep in his coat pockets. What had just happened? Jessie had saved the Bamboo Forest. That was pretty clear. Grover couldn’t have been more relieved. But what was the uneasy feel underneath it all?

Instead of heading for his mother’s grave, Grover stopped in front of Thomas Wolfe’s headstone.

“Feels so strange,” Grover said to the writer’s headstone. “All this attention.”

Grover sat down on the little wall that enclosed the Wolfe family plot. He needed to think. He was of course glad that the men hadn’t cut down the Bamboo Forest. Still, something gnawed at him. He didn’t mind family and friends looking at his weavings or even his teachers really, but having half of Asheville walk around in the Bamboo Forest looking at his work was unnerving, even kind of painful. Something private that had been between him and the bamboo was not his anymore. His weavings and the world he’d created them in had gotten away from him.

Crows cawed from a nearby hemlock, and a breeze swayed its shaggy limbs. Grover sat there for he wasn’t sure how long. After a while, the murmur of the crowd softened. Car doors banged shut out in the street and then the ground shook as buses headed back to Claxton. People were leaving but they were taking something with them. He realized now what Jessie must have known for some time: The only way to save the Bamboo Forest had been to lose it.

That night, Grover had trouble sleeping. He kept going over all that had happened in the Bamboo Forest. It was too much, so he slipped out of bed, dressed, grabbed his flashlights and his toolbox, tiptoed through the dark house, opened the door very quietly and headed out to the Bamboo Forest. But as he walked
toward it, he noticed light flitting through the bamboo, and for a moment his heart stopped. A fire! He ran, but as he neared the bamboo he realized it wasn’t a fire but a flashlight. He slowed and, moving as quietly as he could, stepped into the hallway of tapestries. Light glowed from around the curved hallway. For a moment he didn’t recognize the man in a coat, shining a flashlight on a tapestry, was his own father. His father studied the tapestry, then walked up to it and gently ran his hand over it.

His father saw him. He looked almost embarrassed, as if Grover had caught him at something. “What are you doing out here?” his father asked.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Grover said, walking up beside him. “Thought I might do a little work.” He set down his toolbox.

“An eventful day,” his father said. He shined the flashlight on the next tapestry. “These weavings of yours are really quite remarkable.” His father sounded as if he was seeing them for the first time, and in all the years Grover had been making things, never had he seen his father pay this kind of attention to anything he’d made.

“So much to notice,” his father said as they walked along the hallway, looking at each one by his father’s flashlight. There was something about seeing them in the dark out here with his father that gave Grover a whole new appreciation of his weavings. Already, they felt like they’d been done by someone else.

“So intricate,” his father said, stopping in front of another one. “The more you look, the more you see.”

As they came to the end of the hall Grover sighed and looked
around him. “I can’t believe Jessie was able to save this place.”

His father frowned. “Jessie didn’t save it. You did.”

“Me?” Grover said.

His father pointed the flashlight beam along the hallway of tapestries. “If it wasn’t for your artwork, no one would’ve ever understood the importance of the Bamboo Forest. No one would’ve understood what can grow out of a place like this.”

It hadn’t occurred to Grover that he’d played any part in saving the Bamboo Forest. Earlier today, as all the students and teachers and neighbors and friends had filed through this hallway, he’d felt like a bystander, a helpless bystander at that. The idea that his weavings might’ve helped save this place cast a new light on all the years he’d been coming out here, driven by nothing more than the urge to put things together. Without Grover understanding quite how, his work had taken on a life of its own.

A siren started up in the distance, a dog barked somewhere and the bamboo rustled with the breeze. Standing there with his father, Grover felt he’d moved to the center of something. His mind, which had been racing in so many directions all day, was suddenly still.

His father yawned. “I better hit the hay. You staying out here to work a little?” Grover couldn’t help yawning himself and as he did, a welcome wave of exhaustion came over him. “I’ll come with you,” he said. After all, he reminded himself, the Bamboo Forest will be here tomorrow.

The next day, Grover rolled the wheelbarrow to the cemetery to clear off the remnants of the tapestries he’d carried over to their mother’s grave these many months. Mostly what was left were the bamboo frames, which seemed to be pretty much intact. He had the idea that he could recycle them and weave in new green leaves in the spring. He’d loaded up the wheelbarrow and was on his way out of the cemetery. But when he passed by the Wolfe plot, he noticed a letter propped against Thomas Wolfe’s headstone. Seeing no one around, he picked up the note. It was addressed to
Mr. Thomas Wolfe
and it was sealed. He paused. The notes weren’t usually sealed, which made him think it was private and he started to set it back down. But before he knew what he was doing, he tore open the letter. Written in blocked and shaky print, it said,

“Reading someone else’s mail?”

Grover whirled around and found Matthew standing there.

“I’d say you have a pretty high startle response,” Matthew said, pushing his wire-rim glasses up on his nose.

“I thought you were gone.” Grover’s heart pounded as he stuck the letter back in the envelope and leaned it against Wolfe’s headstone. He felt irritated, even angry. He picked up the wheelbarrow and started walking quickly toward the entrance.

“I came by to tell you something,” Matthew said, walking along beside him.

Grover didn’t slow down. He didn’t want to hear whatever Matthew had to tell him. Every time this guy opened his mouth Grover’s world was turned upside down.

“You aren’t to blame for what happened to your mother,” Matthew said.

Grover stopped the wheelbarrow. “Because you are?”

“No,” Matthew said.

“Then who’s to blame?”

“I was in the middle of a history exam last week,” he said. “One essay question was ‘Who was responsible for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?’ At first I thought how could that be an essay question? It was a two-word answer—Harry Truman. But then I got to thinking that the pilots and crew of the
Enola Gay
actually dropped the bomb. Or you could blame Einstein for writing Roosevelt about the possibility of such a bomb in the first place. Or you could blame Oppenheimer or the guys at Oak Ridge. Or you could blame the American people, who didn’t
want more GIs dying on foreign soil. Or you could even argue that the Japanese brought it on themselves. You could argue that all of humanity dropped that bomb. You could say everybody was to blame. Or …” He looked at Grover with his eyebrows raised. “… you could say that nobody was to blame.”