You've Got to Read This (108 page)

She took the flower from me and started crying. "You know what this is, William?"

"A paper flower?"

"No," between sobs, "this is beauty. Painful beauty. You're just like me.

You can look right through pain and see the beauty of it. This is painful beauty. Thank you, William."

I was ready to go home. I tried to throw a hint by moving closer to the door and shuffling my feet like I suddenly heard someone calling my name.

"Sit down, William," she said, handing me the roll of paper. She refilled her glass, then leaned back on the couch. "You got it, William."

"Got what, Miss Marion?" I asked, steady making the paper flowers.

"It! You got that third eye right here"—she tapped her forehead—"and you can see right down that narrow line. I can't see that line as clearly as I want to. I never seen anybody read Shakespeare like you can. How do you do it? You ain't got to answer that. Most folks who are good at something usually don't know how they do it."

Since it wasn't a big roll, I had quickly made about twenty flowers and they were on the floor around my feet.

Miss Marion dropped to her knees and ran her fingers through the flowers like they were gold coins. "These are beautiful." Then, like a sudden afterthought: "I'll be back. I got to go check on Mama."

She disappeared down the dark hallway, leaving me alone in the parlor.

I was trying to decide whether to leave, figuring that she was too drunk to remember whether I was here or not, but that wouldn't be a proper thing to do. By the time I had made up my mind to make a break for the door, Miss Marion came back with a flashlight and two new rolls of toilet paper.

"Mama's doing just fine. Let's go."

"Where we going?"

Miss Marion looked at me like I had a hole in my head. "Outside. We're going to plant these beautiful flowers in the garden. You don't actually think that I'm going to let all these flowers just multiply inside my house, do you?"

Though it was late, about eight or nine, it was still hot. Miss Marion started digging small holes in the empty garden with her fingers. She placed a flower in the hole and then she mashed the soft dirt around the paper stem.

JEROME WILSON • 613

She was quiet, working quickly, stopping every once in a while to take a sip from the bottle that she had brought out here, or to grab some more paper flowers from me, or to tell me where to shine the flashlight. This went on for about an hour until we had the whole flower bed in the front yard covered in paper flowers.

Miss Marion started crying again. "This is just damn lovely!"

We stood there in the night looking at the paper garden. It really did look nice.

"You know, William, some things are just too good for this world." Then she looked up at me like she was expecting me to add to what she had just said. But I kept my eyes on the garden.

Fortunately, I heard Papa calling me and I told Miss Marion that I had to go. I started running down the street, pushing what she had said off to the side somewhere.

She yelled, "Goodbye, William! Come back in the morning and we can see how beautiful this garden looks in the daylight!"

"Okay," I yelled, running wildly in the middle of the street like I had just been set free out of a cage, looking back only once just in time to see her wave at me and take another sip.

But the next day it rained, a thunderstorm so terrible that even Mama said, "Maybe you shouldn't go to class today, Sonny Buck. Miss Marion will understand." I sat in the house all day until the rain stopped about early evening.

Later I walked down to Miss Marion's house and stood in front of the paper garden. The rain had melted the flowers and the only thing that was left was soggy toilet paper all over the yard. I stared at the garden for a long time.

I knocked on the door, but there wasn't an answer. I peeped through the windows into the parlor, but I didn't see anything. Once, I thought I saw Miss Marion ducking down the dark hallway, but I wasn't sure. I knocked on the door and yelled her name, but there was no answer. I went home.

Suddenly, everything changed. Not a change back, not a change forward, but a change like the closing scene of a play when the curtain comes down and you wonder were you really there. Like the melting of the paper garden was an omen of what was to happen next: Miss Mamie Jamison died toward the end of the summer. She was buried the next day, then the next day after that Miss Marion packed up everything in the middle of the night and left, and not too long after that the house was boarded up. Just like that.

Then slowly Harper went back to the way it was: boring. Like a rubberband, Harper had stretched to accommodate one of its own, then quickly snapped back into place—nothing different, but the same. My mother went back to her meadoaf on Mondays, spaghetti on Tuesdays, and pork chops, chicken, roast, noodles, and stew on the other days. I went back to my football practices, and Papa slipped back behind his paper.

Once, I wondered if Miss Marion was a real person, or if she was one of
614 • PAPER GARDEN

those fallen angels who comes to earth to earn her wings. You would wonder about anybody who steps into your life and charms and dazzles you, forces your imagination to soar higher than the heavens, then for no reason, quietly disappears, never realizing that someone has been left behind whose love for life is now running on an uncontrollable high. Though it didn't last long, but for one brief moment in my life, I wasn't William "Sonny Buck"

Jackson, the junior varsity football player. Instead, I was William "Sonny Buck" Jackson, the Broadway star, the Hollywood actor—the whole town not the town, but a stage; the townspeople not the townspeople, but the audience. Maybe Miss Marion knew what she was doing and was just giving me a taste of what could be, letting me know that there's a different world outside the four walls of Harper.

I wondered what had become of Miss Marion. I imagined myself traveling from town to town, city to city, looking for a Miss Marion. Stories would spring up about me, about some kid looking for a friend that he met one summer. Toothless old men with guitars will be moaning some sad song about lost friendship and loneliness and how cruel the world can get without a good friend or a faithful dog. I will become a legend. Of course, some folks will say I never existed, but just somebody's crazy imagination gone wild. But that wouldn't get me down, since worrying about that kind of stuff doesn't bother me none anyway.

A b o u t the A u t h o r s

James Agee
was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1909- Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College, he published a book of poems,
Permit Me Voyage,
and worked for
Fortune
magazine in the 1930s, investigat-ing the plight of tenant farmers in Alabama, a five-year project that became
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Later a film critic for
Time
and
The Nation,
Mr. Agee also wrote the screenplays for
The African Queen,
The Night of the Hunter,
and
Noa Noa.
His sole novel,
A Death in the Family,
appeared after his death in New York City in 1955 and was awarded the 1958 Pulitzer Prize. Married three times, he was the father of four children.

Julia Alvarez
was born in the Dominican Republic and came to the United States when she was ten years old. Her writings include the poetry collection
Homecoming
and
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,
a novel-in-stories.
In the Time of the Butterflies,
a novel, is her latest work. She was educated at Middlebury College, where she now teaches. She lives with her husband in Vermont.

Isaac Babel
was born in 1894 to Jewish merchants in Odessa. He served on the Romanian Front in World War I and worked as a press correspondent attached to the Soviet cavalry, the Cossacks. The anomaly of a Jew serving with a Cossack regiment formed a tension at the heart of perhaps his greatest work,
Red Cavalry.
The previous year he published
The Story of
My Dove-Cote,
another collection. Though he published stories in magazines for the next thirteen years, only one more book,
Tales of Odessa,
appeared. First hailed in his native country as a master stylist, he was by the time of Stalin's purges in the 1930s attacked for his ideological ambiguity. In 1937 he was arrested, for reasons that were never made clear. He died in a concentration camp in either 1939 or 1940.

James Baldwin
was born in 1924 and grew up in Harlem, the eldest of nine children. The son of an evangelical minister and an after-school preacher himself, he wrote of his religious experience in his first novel,
Go Tell It on
the Mountain,
and in his play,
The Amen Corner.
His other published works include the novels
Giovanni's Room, Another Country, Tell Me How
Long the Train's Been Gone,
and
If Beale Street Could Talk;
another play,
Blues for Mister Charlie;
and three books of essays,
Notes of a Native Son,
Nobody Knows My Name,
and
The Fire Next Time.
His short stories were collected in
Going to Meet the Man.
On December 1, 1987, he died in St.

Paul de Vence in southern France.

615

616 • ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Russell Banks
was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1940. He attended Col-gate University for eight weeks in 1958 before dropping out with the intention, never carried out, of visiting Cuba in support of Castro. He got his B.A. nearly ten years later from the University of North Carolina. He published his first collection of stories,
Trailerpark,
in 1981. His works since include
Continental Drift
and
Affliction,
both novels. He lives in New Hampshire.

Donald Barthelme
was born in 1931 in Philadelphia and raised in Houston.

As a young man he wrote film criticism for the
Houston Post
and at thirty became director of the Contemporary Arts Museum. In 1962 he began spending half his year in New York City. He became a frequent and long-term contributor to
The New Yorker.
He published three novels, including
The Dead Father,
and eight collections of short fiction, including
Come
Back, Dr. Caligari
and
Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts.
He died in 1989 from cancer.

Charles Baxter
was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1947. He attended Macalester College and received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He worked as a high school teacher in Pinconning, Michigan, before teaching at Wayne State University and then at the University of Michigan. His first published book was a collection of poetry,
Chameleon,
in 1970. He published his first book of fiction,
Harmony of
the World,
in 1984. Since then he has published five more books, including
Through the Safety Net,
a collection of stories, and
Shadow Play,
a novel. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Jorge Luis Borges
was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires and educated in Europe.

He returned to Argentina as a young man and worked in the National Library, rising to direct it before being forced out by dictator Juan Peron.

He was active for sixty years as an essayist, critic, and editor, and published four collections of fiction, including
Labyrinths
and
The Aleph and
Other Stories.
In his later years, a progressive blindness increasingly cir-cumscribed his activities until his death in 1986.

Jane Bowles
was born in New York City in 1917. Educated at Stoneleigh and by French tutors in Switzerland, where she was hospitalized for tuberculosis, she married the composer Paul Bowles in 1938 and traveled widely with him in Europe and Africa before settling in Tangier in 1952. Collected in
My Sister's Hand in Mine
are her sole novel,
Two Serious Ladies,
her play,
In the Summer House,
and her book of stories,
Plain Pleasures.
She died in a Spanish convent near Tangier in 1973-Paul Bowles was born in New York City in 1910. He studied musical composition under Aaron Copland and Virgil Thompson, was a music critic for the
New York Herald-Tribune,
and wrote the scores for Broadway shows in the thirties and forties. Gertrude Stein met him in Paris in 1931 and urged him to go to Morocco, where she thought his composing skills would flourish, and he explored all of North Africa before finally settling in Tangier. Inspired to take fiction writing seriously by the example of his wife, Mr. Bowles published his first novel,
The Sheltering Sky,
to great criti-ABOUT THE AUTHORS - 617

cal acclaim and followed it with
Let It Come Down, The Spider's House,
and
Up Above the World.
His
Collected Stories
appeared in 1976. He is also the translator of the Moroccan storyteller Mohammed Mrabet.

T. Coraghessan Boyle
was born in 1948 and raised in New York's Hudson Valley. After undergraduate studies and high school teaching, he was educated at the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, where he earned both an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. His first book of stories,
Descent of Man,
was published in 1979 and was followed by
Greasy Lake
and
If the River Was
Whiskey
and by the novels
Water Music, Budding Prospects, East Is East,
and
The Road to Wellville.
His novel
World's End
was given the 1988

PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He is currently a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Mary Caponegro
was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1956. She studied writing at Bard College and Brown University. Her first collection of stories,
The Star Cafe,
was published in 1990. She teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and lives in Geneva, New York.

Angela Carter
was born in London in 1940. She studied English literature at the University of Bristol and worked as a journalist, editor, and teacher.