Rose's Garden (2 page)

If you don't have many friends, he reasoned, you have to start with strangers. You never know who a stranger really is anyway, Rose always said. Anyone might be Jesus Christ, or an angel in disguise, testing the content of souls.

And so after some consideration—May Brown's skepticism
firmly in his mind—Conrad got up, found paper and a pen in the clutter of Rose's kitchen desk, and then sat down again at the dining room table to write a careful letter to the editor of the local newspaper, the Laurel Aegis.

He shook out his sleeve and bent low to the page, tongue exploring his lower lip. It would be a testimony and an invitation, he thought: Here is what I saw.

THE PREVIOUS AFTERNOON
had been one of the worst he could remember, his most intense spell of unrelieved grief since the night Rose's body had been carried away to the funeral home. The needle of the barometer had twitched uncertainly. All day he had paced inside the house, sometimes bursting into fits of weeping that would overtake him from his knees up, doubling him over. Afterward he drew a shaky breath, stared around him as though he had been away on a long voyage. He thought he sensed a vibration in the air outside, a subtle intercession. Something was eddying down the garden's paths, winding through the leaves, unfurling. Coming closer.

That night, he'd pulled his easy chair in front of the French doors facing the garden, held them ajar against the hot wind with a sack of sugar. He'd fallen asleep by degrees, sinking into it. In the night sky, advancing clouds pared away the moon above him. The garden filled with pools of ink. Shadows tall as trees stepped forward.

He'd woken to the sound of rain and a sensation of terrible haste. His heart was racing. He sat for a moment, listening to the rain, and then turned to the cabinet at the other end of the room. He put the Schumann record on the phonograph, his beloved folk songs, and leaned over to blow dust from the needle.

And then he'd heard that owl. He'd returned to the French
doors and looked out through the streaked glass. The garden had become a sea of dark crests and lime-colored breakers, the wind lashing at the white flags of the leaves.

Rose would have called this his Summer of Neglect. He'd left the vegetables to rot on the vine; he'd allowed the flowers to fall, unstaked; he'd watched, hardly even noticing, as the leaves of the roses were eaten away by black spot. He thought he knew that if he had been the one to die, Rose would have looked after the garden anyway. It might have been her most beautiful garden, in fact, just as now, despite her absence, the flowers themselves seemed to be responding to some distant urging from her, some expectation. And now, he thought, an owl would take one of his pigeons, a storm would ruin the garden. Don't let it go to waste, Connie—that's what Rose would have said.

So he had moved then like an obedient child, relieved to be of use, happy to be busy, pleased at what they had wrought by day's end in their garden—a border weeded, the lilies staked, rocks piled for a wall and studded with sea pinks and sempervivums, beardtongue and sunrose. She would have taken her finger and touched it to his brow, polishing the shining leaves of the bay tree with his sweat, filling her apron with branches of rosemary and lavender, with figs and persimmons.

Get your hat, he told himself now, and he did, pulling it down over his eyes against the sheets of rain.

The pigeons were safe, no owl in sight. Conrad adjusted the louvers that Lemuel had built for him along the north side of the loft, which protected the birds from slanting rains while still allowing fresh air into the roost. “Oh, you'll ride it out,” he told Pearl, touching her crest with a finger. “Think of your ancestors on the ark.”

In the vegetable garden, though he could hardly see, he'd
knelt among the furrows running with water, tried to heel the soft, resisting pumpkin toward the basket, failed, and left it to see to the beans instead, huge and wormy now and pocked with ash rot but yielding easily to his grasp. A tomato caved apart in his hand. The tent for the yellow squash swayed and collapsed in the darkness of the night storm. Conrad had been frightened. Heads of cabbage dissolved at their root; the leaves turned swampy and slick. Above him, branches had broken with sharp cracks and sailed toward the earth, denting the soft, black ground. Leaves like bats' wings had flown toward him and plastered themselves to his back.

Crawling down the rows, inching his way through the darkness and the rain, Conrad had tried to find something he could take inside, something he could keep. All summer, wandering the house, he had suffered spells of inchoate rage, his house full of fragile surfaces, things poised at the lip of ruin—Rose's porcelains and her Swiss figurines, plates lined up on the mantel, tiny glass animals threading a path to a spun glass ark on the sideboard, chips of soft sea glass on the kitchen windowsill—all of it acquiring a thin garment of dust. He had looked around for something to throw but had seen nothing that wouldn't do some damage, wouldn't cause Rose, even in her death, some pain to see shattered.

Now, the wind bearing down around him, he came forward on his hands and knees through the mud, toward the oak tree that sheltered the northern end of the garden, bathing the spinach and tender late lettuces in afternoon shade.

And at last he got his hands around something, a stone or a root. He'd pulled, bent his shoulders, thrown his weight into it. But whatever it was did not yield to his hand. He cursed, rain cascading over his hat brim. And he swore—at it, at him, not a lopped root nor the thick knee of the oak tree but the long shin of what
looked like an angel, the thing that said it was an angel, the thing with the voice that said, “Rise up.”

For there it had stood among the trunks of the trees, soaring up from the earth into the flooding night sky like a magnificent statue, its mouth gaped to the rain, its feet turned briefly to clay, its wings shuddering.

Yet this was not a heavenly angel, with a pure expression and an innocent brow, a harp borne at its hip. It did not look like an angel whose likeness might hang on a wall in the Vatican Museums. This was someone Conrad knew—an angel with a rutted, Abraham Lincoln face.

It had not been what he might have expected, what he thought anyone, even a grieving widower, had a right to expect. If he'd ever imagined such a thing, it would have been along lines somewhat holier, more picturesque—the eyelid of heaven itself, lifted to issue forth a swirling cloud of steam. And in that widening eye of light, a heavenly cavalcade of angels might have streamed down from on high, ferocious expectation on their faces, their gowns billowing behind them like a white afterlife, holy and endless, smoke blown down from heaven's fires.

Conrad had raised his eyes and taken in the angel's towering form. It held its head nobly, a carved figurehead against the rushing black clouds. Its wings had rippled, an expanse of sail cloth behind its back. The pinfeathers crackled; the flesh had seized.

Oh, Jesus. Death becomes me now, Conrad thought, kneeling in the mud, his hands wrapped around the angel's foot. Dust to dust, mud to mud. I'm fit. It's over. And he'd lain there, had begun in relief to weep, thinking he would see his Rose again, thinking he had not been left alone to suffer so long after all, that he would take the wild Rose into his arms now, hold her gray head, her soft cheek, against his own. Here it was, in the devastated empire of
her garden—the deep voice of his heavenly escort. So he had raised his face.

And there had stood Lemuel, his father-in-law, dead fifteen years now, his bony hands dangling from the vaporous sleeves of his robe, his gentle manner and wandering eye regarding him.

“Rise up,” Lemuel said, but Conrad could not. He cast his eyes down, looked into the dirt. “You've come for me,” he whispered. And it was not a question.

But Lemuel didn't answer, and Conrad was frightened then at the sensation in the air above him, streamers of wind and night wrapping themselves around the angel, around Lemuel.

“You've come for me!” Conrad had cried, insisting, lifting up his arms. “I can't stay here forever!”

“You don't have forever,” Lemuel had answered, and Conrad understood then that he was not leaving. Lemuel's appearance that night was not a deliverance but a sentence. Not a route of escape but a path that would return him to where he began, back through old age, middle age, adolescence, childhood, birth, each stage a notch on a diving plumb line.

“Please! Lemuel! Where is Rose?” he had cried, struggling to his feet. “Can't you do something? Show her to me!”

But Lemuel had turned aside and averted his eyes, casting them upward to the roiling sky, to the black-and-purple geysers of cloud. His voice was distant when he replied; his answer was not an answer. “Go home, Conrad,” Lemuel told him.

Lemuel's form had shivered, then contracted itself like a cloud.

“Wait!” Conrad cried. “Go home? What do you mean? What else?”

“Isn't this enough?” Lemuel said, and he had extended his wings then. They were surprisingly large, and Conrad saw an impatience to the gesture, Lemuel's strength boiling up inside of him, a flood ready to be unleashed. “Watch!” Lemuel cried.

Conrad had ducked as an enormous, invisible mass hovered over him. The trees themselves bent down in the wind that lifted Lemuel. Conrad saw the lights of his house flicker, the hexagonal enclosure of Rose's herb knots, the reflecting pool, the filigreed grape arbor encircling the house, the gilded trim of the eaves, the elaborate green framework of his garden falling into itself with a breath like a collapsing tent—all of it illuminated in a sudden burst of phosphorescent light. His world had grown small in that instant, a faraway place.

“She loved you,” Lemuel called, his voice snatched and carried away. “Rose loves you, Conrad.”

And then he was gone.

Conrad had come to his knees, covered his face with his hands. The rain pelted against his back, hard, like gravel thrown at him, like some pain—or some awakening joy—meant to spur him on. All around him the garden's vines were hauled in; the heads of the flowers were knocked from their stems and flung into the dark distance. The roosting crows left in a long train, one after another, flying through the rain. Seed cases held a moment, then exploded and were drowned. Leaves were stripped from branches, torn apart.

And as Conrad lay there alone, a disheveling hand hesitated over Paradise Hill, taking down bowers and scaffolds, bearing away the anemone and achillea, the lamb's ears and the leopard's bane, the speedwell and Jacob's ladder, ending the summer and beginning the fall.

HE COULDN'T PUT
all that in a letter to the editor, he knew, but he tried to be exact anyway; it seemed important to be accurate. He brushed at the page before him, scattering erasings. He tried to be humble, admitting that he did not know, did not understand why he had been given this vision, but that he was—grateful was the word he settled on, a word Rose would have liked. And because it
seemed important to share not just the story but also the place itself, he finished his letter by saying he would welcome visitors. Anyone who wanted to see where it had happened. Between the hours of—four and six sounded convenient, he thought. Any day of the week.

His letter completed, Conrad set down his pen, stared off into space, and allowed himself a few minutes of speculation: You gather what believers you can, he decided. You gather them for whatever they might make of what happened to you. You tell the story. You see what happens. You watch how everything stays the same, apparently the same.

Except, except—now there was this; now it was not just the future that looked different, but the past, too.

The memory of the angel in his garden, the vision that had overtaken him, worked away inside him. He had wanted one more moment, one more moment with Rose, one chance to say not what he had said—“How could you leave me here?”—but this: How will I ever find you now? He would have given anything for an answer. Sold his soul.

And she'd said something, there at the end. What had it been? He rubbed his head, tried—unsuccessfully again—to bring her before him, to reel back the months. She'd said something, turning her eyes toward him.

But now this, he thought—this apparition. This was not exactly what he'd asked for, was it? He'd wanted her, not Lemuel. And yet he had the feeling that she had been there, standing some distance away perhaps, invisible but present in the way the wind brings distant places near for a moment, a scent borne from far away.

He sat quietly at his table, his letter under his hand. His whole life was reeling back to him, both known and unknown at once. Now the whole world quivered with suggestion, with a thousand
rippling meanings and surprises, announcing itself not just for what it was but for what he, you, anybody, might make of it.

AFTERWARD, THINKING IT
over, Conrad thought he should have been prepared for it. For an angel, or something like it. For his father-in-law finally capable of real flight, not just its imagined ecstasy. Standing on his rooftop, his pigeons gripping his outstretched arms, their wings raised in expectation, Lemuel had believed in the rewards of concentration, of desire, even of faith. And the spectacular behavior of the garden this summer, despite Conrad's neglect—this heroic display, flowers larger than ever and more brilliant and numerous—all this, surely, had been the garden's way of making itself ready to host a miracle.

So he should have been prepared, Conrad thought, should have been ready. Another man might have been ready. But he had not.

Since Rose's death four months before, he had spent most mornings with his pigeons, many of them offspring from Lemuel's original flock. He swept and scrubbed the loft, coddled his birds, brewed up herbal teas on the little camp stove, and dosed the pigeons, drop by drop, their warmth spreading over his lap as he held them. He felt among their feathers for boils and lumps, watching for the swollen beaks of birds suffering from mycoplasmosis, the inflamed eyes of those with ornithosis. He knew he had neglected his birds during Rose's last weeks, and so he worked carefully now, afraid of overlooking something.