A Single Eye (7 page)

Leo didn't move, not his body, not his expression. He looked neither chastened nor surprised. Whatever his reaction he was not reflecting it back on me. He stood there in the failing light of the November evening; he could, I realized, have been Yamana-roshi. At this moment he wasn't Leo, he was the roshi.

Then he turned back to the wheelbarrow. “Time's short. If you're going to take that bag of beans up the hill and get into the zendo by seven, you're going to have to make some tough-broad moves with that wheelbarrow.”

“Leo—”

He seemed to draw into himself and become not exactly larger but majestic in a way Rob had not. He said, “You don't contradict the teacher.” Then he grinned, as if switching back from roshi to Leo, as if nothing had happened. “Since you're Yamana's student, I'm giving Rob a new job assignment. You'll be my jisha.”

“Your assistant! How could you—?”

“You don't contradict the teacher. If Yamana trusts you, so do I.”

I started to speak and realized I couldn't get words out. And shouldn't, for that matter. This, too, was not all that surprising, at least not in the context of Zen. Masters can be inexplicable. Ours not to wonder why . . .

“Darcy, when you dump that bag of cacao beans, see if you can get the cook to make me a cup of his fine cocoa. I'll just have time for it before we get to the zendo.”

My head was spinning. I was glad to have something as concrete as pushing a load up a hill to anchor me to reality.

“And Darcy?”

“Yes?”

“Have him make you a cup, too.”

Leo, Garson-roshi, slumped back against the truck bed. It was the New York student's trust that got to him. She should be able to trust him, it was the least she should expect, to trust that her teacher wouldn't put her in danger. But had he done just that?

He had given the wheel of dharma a big turn when he set up this sesshin—his last sesshin. His students each had an opinion as to why he was suddenly leaving Redwood Canyon Monastery with no future plans for either it or himself. The skeptical, he was sure, assumed he was back on the bottle, the hopeful hoped that, after his long exile in the woods, he'd been offered a city post he couldn't mention yet; the wiser focused on Aeneas and figured after six years things had finally caught up with their teacher.

A man is being chased by a tiger. He runs as fast as he can, as long as he can
. He comes to a cliff. He skids to a stop. The tiger is bounding at him. What ca
n he do? He spots a vine dangling over the cliff. He lowers himself over the edge
and lets out a sigh of relief.

The sound echoes back at him, louder, angrier. He looks down. At the bottom of the cliff is another tiger. The man clasps the vine tighter and looks up. Sure enough, the first tiger is still there. But now that tiger is gnawing his vine
.

Leo, Garson-roshi, sighed. He knew the story well; he'd used it as the basis of lectures many times. But not till this instant had he seen the parallel to this sesshin he had set up. What happened to Aeneas had loomed over Redwood Canyon Monastery's opening ceremony. It had stood beneath every event at the monastery, created an unnamed anxiety in each one of his students whether or not they realized the source. As for himself, it had thrust him into a life of self-deception, at first blatant, then ever more subtle. He had spent the last six years avoiding looking at the vine.

The man eyes the tiger above, the tiger below. He hears the vine cracking apart. At that moment he looks a bit to the right and spots a ripe red strawberry. He plucks it and plops it in his mouth. How sweet it tastes
.

Leo pushed himself away from the support of the truck and straightened up. He had to be every bit as aware as the berry eater if he was going to lead his students though this sesshin. It was the last thing he would do for them. Darcy, Yamana's student from New York, was the final piece of the plan, the outsider he could trust.

The sentence with which he had ended all those lectures echoed in his head. After describing the tiger below, the tiger above gnawing at the vine, and the man tasting the strawberry, Leo had paused, grinned, and added, “Of course, then the tiger ate him.”

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

I
t had been all I could do not to leap forward and throw my arms around Leo. Leo's being the roshi was beyond my greatest hope. Leo, the roshi who would provide a great chance for me. He wasn't only deep, like Yamana-roshi said, but he was also, well . . . just Leo, the goofy-looking guy in the truck. How bad could problems be in this place with a sweet, thoughtful guy like him in charge?

With a burst of happy energy I gave the wheelbarrow a great shove and headed it uphill, for Leo. It was admittedly strange, this surge of affection and devotion for a man I'd met only an hour ago. But I really felt as if I'd known him—or had he known me?—forever. I pushed that barrow with all my strength, for both my old teacher and my new one.

I'm in good shape—I can get called on a day's notice for a wall-climb gag that's all arm strength, so I don't dare slack off at the gym. But this loaded barrow weighed more than I did. It was all I could do to get traction on the slick path, find a safe moment to shift my grip, and keep the thing moving so it didn't come banging down the hill and run me over in the process. I hit a rock or something. The barrow lurched; the cacao bean bag pitched; and I had to flatten myself across the load to keep it from thumping to the ground. My hands slipped on the handles: my shoes slipped on the path. I didn't dare stop: I'd have had to call a tow truck to start up again. I almost missed the kitchen door and had to do a classy five-point turn with the barrow to head it in the right direction.

Inside the kitchen, three people were lifting, lugging, shoving, trying not to smack into each other in the tiny space and succeeding none too well. Feeding twenty-six people for two weeks is a big job. At the beginning, with all the raw food assembled, sesshin kitchens tend to look like warehouses. A tall, wispy-thin blond woman was jamming about thirty heads of lettuce into a restaurant-sized refrigerator. A short, serious guy in his late twenties, head shaven, was stashing apples under a table. A girl, a few years younger, honey-haired, plump in a way that looked sweet to probably everyone but her, was carrying cauliflowers to a bin one head at a time. The cartons of cauliflowers stood on the counter and I was surprised no one pointed out the disadvantage of her method. She kept stopping, touching the apple-stasher's arm, murmuring things I couldn't hear. He nodded brusquely as if the dictum of silence were already in place.

I've been in my share of sesshin kitchens before sesshins. It's always as if everyone's hopes, plus their unnamed fears, have materialized in the lettuce and apples, the lines of milk cartons, the cauliflowers. Workers are scurrying to compress all the perishables into one refrigerator; they're talking about their inbound flights, bemoaning the loose ends at home, throwing anchors to their normal lives. Paradox reigns: those are the lives they've come to sesshin to see through but suddenly are terrified of losing.

I didn't know any of these people, and yet I knew these circumstances intimately. The setting, here in the woods, was the last that would have comforted me, but the underpinnings of sesshin were so familiar they gave me a feeling of “home.” I was an old hand at sesshin preparation, and as such I wanted to put an arm around the girl's shoulder and give her a hug of encouragement. It would be a hard two weeks physically and mentally. We'd all come here to cut loose from our moorings. I watched as she touched the boy's arm again and he gave another curt nod with his monk-shaven head. There was no way to assure her that she was not the mooring he would be cutting.

“You here to help?” the tall blond woman called out as she stacked boxes of green-tea bags. At sesshin, it doesn't matter if you're a waiter or a CEO, groceries need putting away and toilets need cleaning.

I glanced at the wheelbarrow and said to the woman, “I just brought up the cacao beans for the roshi. He would like a cup of cocoa. He figured I might get a cup, too.”

“Take them up to the next door. You're in the peasant half of the kitchen here; you want the next door, the regal chocolate preparation parlor.” She laughed. “Barry!”

“Huh?” a man called from the better half of the kitchen. I executed another classy turn and shoved the barrow up five yards and into the next door in time to hear the blond woman call to him, “You're supposed to give this woman some cocoa.”

“What, Maureen? Who says so? I don't have time to be making cocoa now.”

“Roshi says so.” She winked at me. “The woman hauled your beans up. It's the least you can do.”

“I said I don't have time. The way it's been raining the last few weeks I'll be lucky if the road holds out till Thursday and I can get out to . . .” His voice trailed in the fashion of one who's walled himself in with his own worries and is startled to find someone else's words actually breaching that wall. He looked from Maureen to me, then his eyes lighted on the barrow as if it was Santa's sleigh. “My beans are here! My
criollos
!”

I couldn't keep from smiling at the big guy's kid-like glee. He was in his midforties, and twice my size, with bare muscled arms I would have killed for on those wall-climb gags. His black monk's robe had sleeves hooked back at the shoulder for work, and those big arms were already hoisting the hundred-and-thirty-pound bag up onto a metal table that looked uncomfortably like one on which I'd once seen an autopsy. His face was round, his head shaved so close I couldn't have guessed the color of his hair. His eyes I couldn't make out at all. They were only for the beans. He stood planted like a huge solid Buddha in the center of the altar. And, from what I could tell, that altar was his chocolate kitchen. I breathed in the wonderful aroma of dark winy chocolate.

“Oh my God, I must've died and gone to Hershey.”

“Hardly,” Barry muttered contemptuously. “I do not create
milk
chocolate.”

I, who owed many happy moments to Hershey's with Almonds, was silenced.

“Standard American chocolate!” he huffed, as he poured the beans out onto the table. “These are
criollos
, the most prized cacao beans in the world. What I create will be seventy-two percent cacao.”

Sounded good to me. Any percent chocolate was more percent than the usual sesshin fare. Surely he wouldn't be shipping off for sale all of that fine chocolate. Surely there would be the occasional short-weighted bar, the tainted truffle. While he made the roshi's cocoa, I leaned back against a counter and took in this decidedly unusual kitchen, really two kitchens in one. Not exactly before-and-after. More like for-richer-for-poorer. Here in the richer half the windows were high up and even with white walls there was something dark and cozy about this room with the giant man and his hulking, old-fashioned machines. I could just imagine hauling them out here nine miles on the rutted road from the highway!

And when I took a sip of the half-cup he offered me, I just sighed. It was like Irish coffee but a million times better—thick, dark, with a touch of sweetness, a bit of liquor flavor.

“Oh, I really have gone to heaven. Barry, can I just stay in here for the whole sesshin? I'll cart
you
up and down the hill.”

He turned to me and smiled as if I'd cooed over his first-born. “I make it special for Roshi. And that cocoa is from the old powder, only half
Criollo
beans. But this new batch—”