Bee-Loud Glade (11 page)

But it wasn't about his wife, or the bushes, or even about me spotting his camera and pretending I didn't know it was there. At least, he didn't mention any of those as we walked right past the tangly brambles where the camera was hidden and down toward the thick band of trees at the base of the hill.

I hadn't spent much time in that part of the garden, especially not since the bees had arrived, though those trees stood only a few minutes' walk from my cave. Most of my walks ended at the top of the hill where the berry patch was. This time, though, we stopped inside the tree line.

I stood behind Mr. Crane as he said, “I was in China recently, Finch. Toured a dam as big as anything you might imagine. A few of my companies did some work on it, so I had to make an appearance for the local officials. You know how these things are. And there I was up on top of the thing, high over the tiny villages on the banks and hundreds of rickety boats and barges and homemade rafts down below, listening to a couple of engineers fight with an economist about how the thing should be built, about unsafe materials and cost-benefit, and that's when I realized what we should do.”

He stopped, and the skin around the edges of his dark sunglasses tightened as if he was squinting at something or had in fact closed his eyes, but behind those black lenses, who knows. So I waited, picking grass blades with my toes and lifting twigs, and I plucked a big, bushy spider from my big, bushy beard; after all that time it had become quite a thing, a pale corona around my whole head, thick enough to hold a decent-sized stick or even a small stone, if I wove it in right, and all kinds of other things I had tested it with.

It was so long before Mr. Crane spoke again that I forgot we were talking and was busy scratching myself as if I was alone by the time he went on.

“The river, Finch. The river's the thing. All the life on that water, my God! Those fishermen, their boats, the same families of fishermen catching the same families of fish with the same nets and boats since so long before either one of us was born. Think of it!”

I thought of it because he'd told me to, and thinking of what he told me to was my job. I imagined what the things he'd described might look like based on the little I knew about China, most of it from TV and pictures on the walls of take-out restaurants in the city below his estate. But more than I thought about China I thought that all this preamble seemed a funny way to build up to firing me, so I gained hope something else was afoot.

“Magnificent. They'll have all kinds of new opportunities now, with the dam and the freighters and large-scale fishing coming into the region. Lots of tourism—
lots
of tourism. All kinds of modern convenience, up and down that river.” He adjusted his sunglasses. “There's been protest about all the towns being removed for the rising water, of course. There always is. That can't be helped. But one of the engineers said—I really liked this—he said that time is a river, too, and that it's rising over those towns the way it is meant to, so the future can flow in where the past has hung on for too long.”

I didn't know what I might say in response to that, so I was glad I didn't need to respond. I stood beside Mr. Crane, unsure where his eyes were behind his lenses, and I tried to look thoughtful in case he was looking at me instead of the trees.

“We should have a river, too, Finch.” He reached out an arm and swept it before us from one side of the view to the other, palm down. “Here,” he said, “flowing along the base of the hill and down into the valley.”

I thought he was just telling me it would be nice to have a river on his property, but then he said, “My people will start tomorrow, early. You may hear them, but I've instructed them to be discreet and to leave you alone. It shouldn't take long. Your work shouldn't be too badly disrupted. There's already an underground lake to tap into. Simple enough. When it's done I'd like to see you in it, of course. Swimming. Floating. Maybe we'll stock some fish for you to catch. Are you much of an angler?”

I shrugged and meant it to say,
I've done some fishing, but I'm no expert, and that was a long time ago,
but I'm not sure Mr. Crane noticed before he kept talking.

“Fishing,” he said. “I'll enjoy that.”

Then he turned away from me, back toward the hill and back toward the big house that stood hidden over its rise, and he walked away without another glance or word spoken to me. I hurried after him, assuming I was meant to, but he seemed so engrossed in talking to himself about rivers and fishing that I doubt he knew I was still there. So as we passed close to my cave, I went home and watched him head away up the hill, hands clasped behind his back and head bent like a monk or a minister in meditation.

13

S
omething I've learned about seagulls: they make seven distinct sounds by adjusting the length of a throat or an angle of beak, by expanding their lungs and their chest. I spent today watching gulls gull until I had their whole range worked out. I've been at it for years, taking a crack whenever a gull shows up in the garden. But it's often a long time between visits, and sometimes I forget what I learned before the next gull arrives and allows me to continue observing; sometimes I get so excited about what I'm doing that my poor scribe can't keep up. So I've always had to start over with every gull, until today, until three chatty gulls spent their day with me, squawking and sputtering and providing the concert I needed to finally work out their range. And I silently thanked them for letting me sit close enough—closer and closer through the years of my watching, as my eyes have grown weaker and weaker—to see the shapes of what they were doing. Bird-watching was easier for me when I could still see the birds and not just a red blur or brown spot, a cluster of gray smudges gliding against a gray sky.

In my excitement I needed to let someone know what I'd learned. I wanted to find those hikers and drag them down to the bank where the seagulls were talking so they, too, would learn what I had.

I ran up from the river, past the hum of the hives and along the long wall of blackberry brambles. Overgrown, untended for years by Mr. Crane's invisible landscaping crew, now those bushes tumble downhill all the way to the river. They've driven out flowers and choked out young trees and doubled and tripled in every direction. And they climb past my cave and my crops, all the way up the hill to where the house used to be, and that's where the brambles and berries are thickest. There was nothing else there once the walls were torn down and the helicopter's pavement torn up, not even grass for competition, and the brambles rambled uphill like a backwards avalanche in slow motion, until the long slope I walked down my first day, the slope Mr. and Mrs. Crane walked down to reach me—though never together—became the almost intraversible blackberry maze it is now.

I've managed between my shovel and hoe to cut back the bushes closer to home, but I gave up on the hillside a long time ago; it was never part of my part of the garden, so I didn't lose anything when the bushes took it over. And down below, between my cave and crops and the banks of the river, the berries make a map I can follow by keeping their tangles to one side as I walk. They're a line leading me through the parts of the world I still use.

So I was off up the slope to seek out the hikers, almost to the top I could tell because the hill flattened under my feet, when suddenly my feet tangled in branches and I pitched down into a pile of limbs and leaves, tumbled and twisted and scratched all over my skin. And my right knee, the one already scarred from dragging it over a left behind freezer coil under the river—another of Mr. Crane's abandoned ideas—twisted and popped and sent lightning bolts of pain up my leg sharply enough to churn my stomach and make me groan. Not a word, not a break in my silence, but sound, so much more than I'd made in such a long time. Perhaps since the last time I'd hurt myself badly, which was probably cutting that very same knee underwater.

Cuts and scrapes are an ongoing hazard of living nude, and it has only grown worse since my sight began going. I've broken fingers while stacking stones—my left pinky hasn't been straight for years—and one of my toes is as round as a bulb and throbs on the rare rainy day ever since I dropped a log on it long ago. But the pain in my knee was beyond the pale of those everyday aches. My eyes teared up and my stomach knotted like a towel about to be torn, and I retched on the ground beside me.

That tree limb hadn't been there before. I know this hill, I know this garden. It's my visual memory of familiar spaces that lets me still move through the world, and when something moves but is not moved by me, it knocks my whole world askew. I could already feel my knee swelling, and my whole body throbbed along with it. I was bleeding and sticky with scrapes and small stabs from sharp sticks, a hot ball of fire behind my kneecap, but as I lay there entangled, waiting for my stomach to settle enough to extract myself from the branch, waiting to test my weight on that knee, I came to my senses.

I couldn't tell the hikers about those birds and their sounds, I realized, because it wouldn't make sense. I might have dragged them to the gulls, convinced them to watch and to listen to all seven sounds, but they wouldn't know of my long attempts to learn the range of each creature who comes to this garden—the high and low hums of a beehive, the rolled
r
of a hummingbird's wings, the shriek of a rabbit in those awful seconds when a fox is upon it.

I could have dragged them down to the river, I could have pointed to the gulls vocalizing, but what would that have meant to the hikers who haven't been listening for years? They'll have to work out the world for themselves if it is going to make any sense, and I hope they won't be here long enough to do that. Handing it to them decoded wouldn't mean anything, and it might disrupt the Old Man's plan for them by substituting my own flawed and selfish designs. What do I know about what they need, and about what he wants them to know?

Maybe that branch was blown down by the wind, though I didn't hear much of it blowing last night, and I'm almost certain that limb wasn't lying there when I passed by on my way to the river. Or maybe the hikers dragged it out for some reason, but why would they leave a limb in my trail? However it was actually moved there doesn't much matter, because I know that branch was the Old Man's own doing: it stopped me from sharing more than I should about seagulls and secrets that aren't mine to give.

Falling on that fallen limb made me bite my tongue by scratching up the rest of my body. If they need to know about seagulls, they'll work it out on their own, and the Old Man—not me—will know when it's time. And I'll describe what I've learned to the scribe in my head, in hopes it won't be forgotten. He's good about that, he does his best to keep me from repeating my errors day after day after year, and it's not my scribe's fault when I make the same stupid missteps on slippery, wobbling stones in the river and cast a line into the same empty spots every time I go fish. It's not his fault when I make mistakes I've been making since the river arrived.

After I'd spent some time tangled up in those branches, my stomach calmed down and my knee seemed to plateau at a level of hot, shrieking pain from which it couldn't get worse, so I snapped twigs off around my body and slid my legs gently out of the snarl. I found one strong, straight branch and managed to snap it off against the ground by leaning my full weight upon it, and used it to hoist myself up off the ground. Then I leaned upon it instead of leaning upon my hurt leg. And like that I limped back to my cave, throbbing and bleeding and blind, betrayed by the branches of my own garden and wondering how I would hurt myself next, because it was only a matter of time and of my eyes getting worse, ever worse.

14

T
he day after Mr. Crane walked me down to the trees, the morning after I wasn't fired and instead heard him wonder aloud about fishing and streams, I climbed as always up onto my cave to wait for the sun. Now that I knew he was home, that he might be watching, I planned to make sure my contemplations were clear and convincing; I wanted him to look out the window at me and know right away how hard I was working. But no sooner had the sun risen than a rumble came through the trees, thunderous sounds from just out of sight past the brambling berries and down the hill where we'd talked about rivers. I heard engines and axes and the voices of men in between those other loud sounds, so I scrambled down from my seat and, holding my cup, I walked through the wet grass to the top of the hill. And those trees were nearly all gone! Bulldozers and diggers and some bright orange truck with an iron overbite and another with a long chainsaw nose were felling trunks left and right while other trucks dragged the downed logs away to wherever.

And where trees had been, where they no longer were, the long necks and shovels of diggers—I'm sure there are other words for the trucks I was watching, but those particular words aren't any of mine—dug a trench through the forest of stumps, deeper and deeper, as wide as that patch of forest had been. Whether they saw me or not, all those men in hard hats and big boots and bright orange vests with reflective silver rectangles on them, they ignored me up above with my breakfast and beard and the great bush of my hair standing up from my head and swaying side to side in the wind—I could see my own shadow—like smoke from a factory roof. Or like steam from the tea I stood sipping as I watched the appearance of what I very soon knew was a river, a river where no river had been the morning before.

What I'd first taken for wishful thinking, for Mr. Crane's wistfulness about rivers when he'd waved his hand out before the two of us in those trees, had erupted into his garden like all the forces of nature assembled at once, bent on the bidding of his desire. He was able to alter the landscape itself—and why did that surprise me, given the garden in which I already lived?—to bring it in line with what he thought it should be. It had never occurred to me that such a thing might be possible, to such a degree, beyond planting trees and landscaping a yard, beyond pruning hedges, but Mr. Crane was building a river, shaping its path and controlling its flow.

I saw Smithee there, too, watching the waterway under construction. He stood in the trees near the trench where the water now flows, writing things down in his notebook and taking pictures of the work in progress with a slim silver camera he pulled from his jacket pocket. What else did he have in there, I wondered? What other tools did Mr. Crane equip his butler with for the tasks of the garden and the estate? His gray suit jacket was starting to seem like a superhero's utility belt.

Then, after a few noisy weeks or maybe a month of rumbling disruption—a time during which I avoided the scene, sticking close to my cave and other parts of the garden—one morning all the diggers were gone and the river had been filled with sparkling blue water. If I had pictured a river, the most perfect example I could imagine, that's the way this river looked its first day: glistening and gleaming in all the right ways and rolling along as if its current had flowed through those trees for all time. It wasn't the Nile or the Amazon, it wasn't so broad that I couldn't cross it or so fast that I couldn't swim. But it was a river that could never be mistaken for anything else.

And that was the first time I watched Mr. Crane work or, to be fair, watched him set other people to work. I'd been set to work by him myself for a few months already by then—based on counting moons, though I may have missed one or two—but I wasn't as impressed by myself as I was by the river. He didn't make me from scratch. He found me as I already was, but the river was his vision writ large on the ground.

The river was so perfect that at first I couldn't convince myself to swim in it. Mr. Crane had told me to before it was made, but flowing before me it seemed too good for my filthy, rash-ridden, foul-smelling form. So for days I sat on its banks from morning to night, after watching the sun rise and until it went down. The bulldozers had piled up perfect banks, too, so I was able to sit with a long view of the water off to both sides, but not too far across the other side of the river, where another high bank kept my gaze low.

I knew rivers had names once they'd been discovered, but I wasn't sure what to call it, and the name hardly mattered considering I wouldn't speak it aloud. Still, I thought about naming it during those first few days on its bank. At first I thought its name should be Mr. Crane's because he'd put it there, and other rivers had been named for less, for people who simply stumbled upon them and weren't even the first to do that. But Crane River didn't seem right. Calling it that reminded me too much of the house and the gates and the fact that the garden where I was meant to forget all the rest of the world was really just someone's backyard. It might be hard for me to meditate well on a river named after a man, not a man I'd read of in history books but a man I actually knew. I indulged myself briefly and considered calling it the River Finch, but that was selfish and silly, and even at the time I don't think I meant it for real.

Of course it revealed itself it to me later, once I was alone in this garden, and now it's hard to imagine pinning someone else's name on something so vast and untethered as the Old Man. But at the time, after thinking about it, I decided there wasn't a need for a name, not from me. Not because I knew yet that a mere name can't encompass a river, but because Mr. Crane had made the river and it was his right to name it if he wanted to.

A few mornings after the river first flowed, I sat on the bank watching sleek black diving birds dart into the water and come up with fish. What kind of bird I don't know. They're sleek and they're black and they fish here most mornings; “divers,” I call them, because it's as useful as any word. The fish are just fish pretty much like all others, and they were shipped in and stocked by Mr. Crane while I slept.

I'd become used to how much happened around me without my knowing, even right under my nose. Mr. Crane's garden was like that.

So I sat on the new riverbank watching birds watching fish from the branches, listening to the lapping of water. Then all of a sudden a great booming voice rent the air. It was loud.
LOUD
. So loud the air thickened and the leaves rippled and dark streams of scared birds poured into the sky and...

I may be making a bit much of it. But it was a big, booming voice, coming from speakers I couldn't see somewhere up in the trees, and living in as much quiet as I did, any voice more than a whisper seemed loud to me.

“Finch,” the voice said. “Can you hear me, Finch?” As if anything could have
not
heard.

For a second I thought it was God, but of course it was Mr. Crane—the garden was his and so was the river, and so were the loudspeakers over my head.

“I'd like you to swim in the river today,” boomed out of bushes and trees.

It was jarring to receive private instructions in such a loud, public way, but I don't suppose anyone else was in earshot except Mr. Crane and his wife and others working for them as I was.

“Swim for a few hours at least. Or perhaps float, instead of swimming. Yes, just float, please, and think about whatever you'd like to.”

His words were followed by a few seconds of crackle and hum before the speakers fell quiet again, as quiet as if they weren't hanging overhead in the branches at all and, unable to see them myself, unable to find them even after I'd shimmied and skinned my way up a narrow white birch like an islander after his coconut, the speakers may as well not have been there at all. Except that I knew they were, and so did the birds and the foxes and even the river, whether or not any of them knew what to call the loud noises they'd heard.

But I followed my orders, and why wouldn't I? Why not spend the day floating in a perfect blue river, when I'd been given the chance?

I drifted first on my back, sliding along at the base of the hill in the shadow of piled-earth banks, bouncing from one to the other then paddling back to where I'd begun against a current that looked, somehow, so much swifter than it actually was. If I tossed a stick or a leaf or a raft of bark in the water it sped off right away, but when I settled myself onto the surface it took a long time to start moving and ages to float to the end of the river where it crawled underground and ran away to wherever it ran (who knows where brand-new rivers flow?). And it was as easy to swim against the current as it was to swim with, like the flow was with me even when I could see that it wasn't. It didn't behave like I thought rivers did, but I'd never swum in a river that I'd watched made in a place where no river had been, and they must have ways of being a river that are all their own.

Floating became my routine. I woke in the morning, had porridge and tea, and sat on my cave top until the sun rose and the mist burned away. I watched birds for a while, beaks dipping in and out of their plumage to pick nits and unruffle ruffles, then it was down to the river for me. There's a smooth, sandy spot where the bank slopes into the water, and in the days when I still wore my tunic, that's where I left it behind. It was great to be nude, to be out of that fabric so scratchy and warm, and the water was always just frigid enough to give me a shock but not so cold I couldn't settle into it as I stroked away from the bank and out into the current.

A large tree had fallen from the far bank almost as soon as the river was carved through the estate and began flowing; I say it fell, but to be honest I don't remember it standing, so I'm not sure quite where it fell from. But wherever it came from that tree stretched—and still stretches—out into the stream, making a safe, steady harbor on the days I didn't feel much like drifting or swimming or paying attention to where my body was. I'd paddle across, perhaps pause in the middle to tumble ass-up and dive for the deep, sandy bottom before swimming on toward the tree and resting the soles of my feet against its smooth trunk, like I was standing up into the current, water sliding along both sides of my body while I was held fast with sunlight warming my skin. Some parts of my body had never spent time in the sun, and in those first days on the river they blistered and burned, but even those parts were happy enough to be floating and swimming and sunlit and out of that torturous tunic.

I'd been asked to spend my time thinking but not told about what, so I tried to decide what Mr. Crane might like me to think about on the river but that didn't go anywhere. I wondered sometimes about him, what he did for a living, where all this money for digging rivers and building caves had come from: something to do with construction in China, travels to the Far East and to Europe and who knows where else. It wasn't my business what Mr. Crane did—I worked for him, not the other way round—yet because he'd been the one to tell me to think about something, the man himself seemed as good a topic as anything else, at least to get myself started. But I didn't know enough about Mr. Crane to consider him for more than a moment, and I found that thinking of money, of Mr. Crane's money and how it was made, distracted me from the contemplations he was paying me for. So I didn't think about him very often.

It takes more effort than people realize to let your thoughts drift, really drift. It's not as simple as starting to think, to daydream, because there need to be both space and time for a daydream to become what it's going to be. With no interruptions, no external pressures, I let my mind lead me wherever it would and the river was a perfect inducement.

I thought about all the birds overhead, whether flying or sitting on branches, and I watched which species were jerks to the others. Blue jays, which I could recognize, seemed among the worst, driving smaller birds off of branches and away from pinecones and bunches of berries. I thought about the itches still itching my tenderest bits and the scabs and sores I'd put there by scratching, though the cold but not too cold water was soothing and sweet on those spots.

Sometimes I hung in the current, suspended, dragging my toes on the sand at the bottom like ten tiny anchors, holding my body upright at an angle with my chin on the lip of the river and my eyes closed and mind calm while hours slipped by without any motion or effort or thoughts passing through. There were sounds and I heard them, and my nose noticed smells and my skin felt cold and warmth and wind passing, of course, all of that, but it was nothing to do with me, any of it. I was just there, in the water, floating, submerged, and the world could do as it liked because I was right where I needed to be. There was nothing I had to accomplish except what I'd already done by being there, nothing expected of me beyond being placid, being Mr. Crane's garden hermit, and nothing I was meant to change from one day to the next or the next unless he asked me to change it. I might spend the year, two years, seven years, floating on the same river in the same pose every day. My body might change, my beard and my hair would grow longer—and already they rippled around me, fanned on the river like a tangled logjam—but those changes would happen with or without any mind paid to them. I was becoming as gentle on the river, on the world, as the dragonfly who stood on the riverine island of my exposed nose with delicate dragonfly feet, unfurling its wisp of a tongue for sips of water so small that their absence would never be noticed.