Bee-Loud Glade (12 page)

I made sense in the river and the river made its own sense in me. How else can I say it but that?

15

O
nce the river became part of my practice and part of my day, Mr. Crane had other ideas. The river remained, and I kept swimming, but he made additions to the garden one after another. There were peacocks who didn't last long, screeching and squawking in harsh voices at odds with their beauty, and I was glad to see them go a few days after they came (though I can't say whether they wandered off on their own or were rounded up and removed by unseen wranglers).

A tree house was built, a square platform, really, and I was asked to move my sunrise meditations from the roof of my cave to the tree. I made the shift though I didn't enjoy it: the angle from the tree to the horizon was wrong, and the branches were too thick with green leaves and blocked the best part of the view. Then another note asked me to do tai chi moves in the tree instead of just sit. I'd tried tai chi soon after settling into the garden, with no idea how it was done, and I'd been glad when I was asked to end the charade. Now I was back to faking tai chi but this time a good twenty feet in the air, on a platform without any railings or sides, and surrounded by branches that swayed in the wind and were thick enough to sweep me right over the edge.

So my treetop tai chi, such as it was, wouldn't have been too impressive if anyone had been able to see it behind all those leaves so high in the air. I was satisfied with not falling off, never mind faking the moves in a convincing way, and was relieved when the platform was removed overnight and I went back to watching the sunrise from my cave as I had been doing before.

Every so often a new animal wandered into my cave, sometimes at night, leaving only strange tracks, and sometimes in daylight so I saw who it was. I met porcupines, ferrets, and foxes in several colors, and deer and rabbits too many to count. I didn't know if they'd come to the garden by nature, wandering in from the surrounding mountains or up from the city below, or if they'd been introduced like the peacocks. It didn't much matter to me; they were there, so was I, and I liked watching them go about their foxish or owlish or rabbitish work. In reality, I discovered, animals didn't do as much as they did on TV—I had to wait days, sometimes, to see as much activity as I'd seen in five minutes of a good nature show—but they were still pretty exciting. They smelled worse in real life, but I was in no position to hold that against somebody else.

I met several skunks including the one who'd wandered into the cave my first night in the garden, the first I'd ever encountered who wasn't a cartoon. They were good neighbors, for the most part, and the one time I got sprayed it was my own fault: I tripped over a fat, waddling skunk in the dark, not looking where I was going. If somebody stepped on my back, I might even spray them myself. The smell was horrible, of course, but worse was the burning in my ears and throat, and after a long, painful night of wheezing and retching a large kettle of tomato juice appeared in my cave with a note that said what it was for (I wouldn't have known otherwise). I scrubbed and I scoured myself and it made me smell better but didn't do much for my tunic, its tangled, tough threads holding onto the scent for as long as I wore it thereafter. Not all the time, not every second, but when a wind blew the right way or a day became hot, sharp tangs of skunk wafted up from my clothes and made my eyes water all over again and burned the back of my throat. Another reason I'm glad to be rid of that garment.

But I couldn't blame the skunks for being themselves. And watching them waddle, watching them snort and root in the ground, more than made up for the stink they had only once laid upon me. And, to be fair, I never saw one of those skunks spray again. They struck the pose sometimes, when I got too close; they raised tail and shook bum and went through the motions of spraying, but they never cast anything out. They always looked as surprised as I was that they weren't spraying, but I guess we grew used to each other. Once I knew they weren't going to spray, I could walk right up to pet them, and could scratch behind their twitching ears. Sometimes they were too vigorous returning the favor and tore into my wrists with their claws, but I think skunks mostly get a bad rap.

And the skunks and foxes were small potatoes—or small animals who later learned to eat my potatoes—compared to who arrived next. I woke one morning like I would any other, turned to my nook where breakfast sat steaming, and unrolled the note curled beside it. “A lion has been released into the garden,” it read. “It has been trained to befriend you.”

A lion! In the garden.
My
garden, with me and my beat-skipping heart.

And it had been trained to befriend me. What did that mean? How did a lion make friends and, more importantly, I thought, why would it
want
to with me? The only training I could imagine was rewards of meat when a lion was friendly, one fleshy treat after another as it learned to behave, and that method seemed plausible enough in my head except for one flaw: I happened to be made of meat, tender meat, without very much clothing to get in the way. A lion could almost be excused if it mistook me for a snack, for an oddly shaped training morsel.

Had I known of some other method, had I known
something
about how lions are trained, I might not have been so afraid that I crawled back under my blankets, pulled them up to my nose—missing sunrise for the first time since I'd come to the garden—and waited for the lion to walk in and eat me.

But the lion didn't show up, and later that day, itching to swim, itching from too long spent under my blankets, I decided to emerge and face my fears like a man, or at least like a mouse (which I remembered lions were supposed to be scared of, so letting my inner mouse out might for once serve me well).

On hesitant toes I crept to the mouth of the cave, to scan the garden for lions before I committed to going outside. But I stuck my face into the sunlight and there he was, sitting beside my fire ring like he'd been waiting all morning for me to wake up. The lion turned his massive head toward me, and with his broad brown face and rippling corona of mane, he looked an awful lot like the sun. A big, brown, furry sun right outside the mouth of my cave.

I jumped back inside but didn't land well, turning my ankle and collapsing onto the cold ground. The lion rose from his haunches, shook his head so a cloud of fur erupted around him like a blown dandelion, then took three steps forward straight into my home. My heart raced, and I kicked backward across the ground until my shoulders were against the pallet and I had nowhere else to go.

And the lion took three more steps before hanging his muzzle right in front of mine, so close I could feel his hot breath drying out my nostrils and eyes, and he yawned. Right in my face, a long, creaking yawn, then he laid down on the floor at my side and he went to sleep. At least, I think he was sleeping. His eyes were closed and he wasn't eating me, that much I can say for certain.

I was glad to survive, but as lions go I was pretty let down. I thought he would be ferocious, I thought he'd be loud, roaring and rumbling and chasing me with his teeth bared for fun before tearing me down and chewing me up. I thought he would act like the lions I'd seen on TV, but he didn't, not really. I hadn't looked forward to being eaten, but I had been excited for seeing a lion. But this one acted more like one of my former neighbors' cat—I never knew which neighbor, not that it mattered—who used to sleep on the
Welcome
mat in front of my door and make me step over to get home after work.

I had a better chance of eating this lion than he had of eating me. Still, it was exciting to sit so close to an animal I'd never expected to meet, to see how much longer his body was than I'd imagined, stretched out across the floor of my cave, and to see his long tongue loll out the side of his mouth and drip a pool onto the stone. I'd learned that lions aren't vicious and wild, but models of patience and peace. He could teach me something about meditation, this lion, I thought, so I left him sleeping on the floor by my bed, on top of the woolly blankets I'd flung to the floor getting up, and I went down to the river to float and to think of how I might be as quiet and calm as a lion.

He was gone from the cave when I walked back for lunch, though it still smelled of his hot body and breath—not an unpleasant smell, either; it made the cave cozy and warm and made me wonder if anyone sold scented candles with the aroma of lion (not that I needed candles, because I had the real thing in my garden).

And I decided that evening, while sitting over tea by my fire, that I would call the lion “Jerome.” It seemed like a nice, gentle name for a nice, gentle lion. I didn't expect to speak it aloud, but it gave me something to call him in my meditation, and it was easier to aspire to emulate something if I knew its name.

And in this case its name—his name—was Jerome.

I didn't see him again for a couple of days, and that time I was down by the water washing some rust- and blood-colored stones I had found. I thought they'd look nice along the edge of a niche in my cave. Crouched over the river, dunking my stones, I didn't notice Jerome approaching until his reflection fell over mine on the water. I stood, and started to turn so I could scratch his head or give him a pat, but before I could reach out he leapt toward me, claws extended, teeth bared, and a rumble tumbling out of his mouth like an earthquake rising up through the ground.

I don't know how I survived and wasn't eaten, but somehow I did. Somehow I fell backward into the water at just the right second or fraction of one for his claws to swipe the air where I'd been but no longer was. And somehow the current—that mysterious current—pushed me away before Jerome landed with a wet thump on the spot where I'd crouched in the sand. I swam, I paddled, I panicked as hard as I could to the log at midriver where I liked to float and I climbed up onto it before turning toward shore. I didn't know if lions could swim, or if Jerome would, but he seemed to have lost interest in me and was viciously attacking his own reflection, slashing and biting the water, pouncing and rolling with only himself in his grip, and casting a cloud of sand, dust, and spray up into the air.

And then, quick as quick, his whole body froze, his ears perked up straight, and his head cocked toward a sound he'd heard but I hadn't. Then he not so much roared as growled deep inside, without his mouth even moving, and ran away into the trees.

Heart pounding, whole body shaking, I stayed on the log with my knees pulled up to my chest. I sat until I was too hungry to sit any longer, by which time the sun was already low, then I quietly, carefully swam back to shore and crept as softly as I could, with as much mousiness as I could muster, up to my cave for some food and in hopes Jerome wouldn't be waiting for me in my bed.

I knew wolves did that sort of thing, but I wasn't sure about lions.

He wasn't there, though. He wasn't anywhere. Instead I found a note on the floor of my cave where it must have fallen unnoticed from my breakfast tray. It told me—not in time!—that Jerome's “pacification” had been adjusted after problems the previous day, and that I might notice differences in his behavior.

And I supposed that I had, as the note promised. There was another note the next day, telling me—as if I didn't know—that there had been some problems with the adjustment, and that they would be sorted out. But I didn't see Jerome that day to test his new dosage (I assumed his pacification was drugs) or for a while after that. Perhaps he'd been taken into the house for his treatment, until he could act more like a lion should act, however that might turn out to be. Or perhaps his correctly dosed medication had made him curl up in some quiet part of the garden for a long nap. Either way, I felt like I'd helped him a little, like the extra dosage had been a thorn in his paw and I'd been the one to pull it out, and I hoped he'd remember that favor the next time we met.

16

T
his part of the world isn't known for its seasons, but one afternoon not long after Jerome's arrival, as I walked back to my cave from the river, there was as much a suggestion of autumn as I'd ever seen. It was nothing as grand or as grounding as leaves going orange or falling from trees into piles, or frosted pumpkins marching through yellow-grassed fields, none of what catalogs sell as the autumnal mystique of New England. But the air changed that day. It was a little bit sharper drawn into my lungs, a coarse touch in the back of my throat. Maybe those hills were so high even the climate was different, with those down below accepting a world without seasons, one endless summer in which some days were slightly cooler than others and never knowing that up in the hills seasons came and went in ways unimagined. Maybe, like sunsets, the seasons were buried under pollution. The only leaves I'd ever seen change in the valley had been those on rare tree-lined stretches of highway, where exhaust fumes painted brown stripes every fall.

The air in the garden was crisp, and the apples in Mr. Crane's orchard to the east of my glade were red and ripe and pulling their branches so close to the ground that whether I was meant to or not I reached up and plucked one to taste. The apple was dull, even drab, without the shine I'd come to expect, and it took me a moment to realize this was the first apple my mouth ever met without the mask of wax and chemicals, the first apple I'd eaten that was only and wholly an apple. That apple started my apple-eating life over, and I silently thanked Johnny Appleseed for his scattershot planting, for founding a nation on forbidden fruit.

Second Nature had experimented with an indoor orchard once; it was expensive, but the price included a service in which Orch-ease crop technicians (Orch-ease was a word I'd invented myself, though I'd never intended for it to be used; it was a daydreaming doodle seen by the wrong eyes) would come to the client's chosen location throughout the seasons to hang plastic leaves and then blossoms, returning to replace them with plastic apples in advancing stages of color, then to pick the whole yield and haul them to storage along with the leaves until the next year's cycle of seasons began.

Orch-ease hadn't taken off, and no wonder. Who wants to stare at apples all day knowing they can't be eaten, or to be reminded that the apples they
are
eating, the waxy, too-shiny supermarket produce they've purchased, is as far from the real thing as those plastic imposters? And Orch-ease had been costly, requiring all those site visits, so while only a man like Mr. Crane could afford a fake orchard, he could also afford the real thing.

As I walked home from the river, crunching my apple, I spotted a crew of men in orange vests and hard hats. They may have been the same crew that installed the river, or not, but they stood near my cave beside something that looked like a cement mixer with a long black hose running from it. As I drew closer I heard the whir and whine of motors and blowers inside the truck, and as I watched the men hoisted that hose and sprayed wet, sticky snow all over the top and sides of my cave, all over the ground by my door, and made a small pile—a drift, I suppose—in its mouth.

They were close to my cave, too close for me to pass unnoticed, not that they'd be surprised someone lived there. They must have noticed my pallet and possessions and home. I hid behind snow-blanketed blackberry bushes to watch them at work and to wait until I could slip past. My feet were freezing, and my fingers were too; I wasn't dressed for winter in my short, sleeveless tunic.

The snowblower shuddered and shook while it spewed white foam into the air in thick streams that broke up and drifted back to the ground in soft flakes, softer and whiter than seemed possible from the horrible sound of that machine's engine and its stink of burned oil and gas.

When the snow finally stopped blowing and the snowblower sputtered to a rattling stop, rattling almost as loud as my own cold bones, the workers wound up their hose and levered levers on the sides of the truck. I hoped the snow would prevent that truck's tracks from taking too hard, and that I wouldn't be left with a reminder of its intrusion for long.

The men lit cigarettes and stood smoking outside my home, talking and laughing. I couldn't hear most of what they were saying, but it was something about Mr. Crane, something about how he'd demanded they not disrupt his estate, work out of sight, and where—as one worker put it—“that rich shit” could stick it. Then the other took off his hard hat and rubbed his bald head, and said something about Mr. Crane being in the newspaper that morning. He didn't explain about what, he didn't have to, because the other worker said yes, he'd seen it, too, and they both laughed.

The bald man holding his hat said more, but I caught just “only paper in town he doesn't own.” Then they flicked their spent cigarettes into my fire ring (at least I could thank them for that), climbed into the truck, and were gone to other parts of the garden from which I could still hear the rumbling of men and machines. At last I could return on numb feet to my cave.

I'd never seen snow before, not in real life, and I was amazed it could come from machines. With the men working elsewhere, I took that chance to lay in the snow by my doorway, tumbling and rolling and slipping about, trying to make an angel the way I'd seen children do on TV, but I didn't get it quite right: my snow angel looked more like the pedestrian figure on crosswalk signs.

I was bothered by the men blowing snow on my world, not by the snow but by the presence of the people who'd made it. I was always thrown off when Mr. Crane's projects involved a disruption, a presence apart from my own. I liked that my meals came anonymously, I liked that I never saw who was maintaining the blackberry bushes and trees. So to see a whole crew of workers in orange vests, to hear the rumble and roar of snow machines and truck engines—or to have seen the crew making the river with bulldozers and diggers and dynamite—it always took a few days to recover, to put the intrusion out of my mind and for the garden to feel like my garden again.

Though for the moment, it wasn't my garden. Not the way I usually knew it. The snow wasn't any colder, really, than the river in the morning, but it was cold in a new way: the waters of the river are always moving, so the cold is like a cloud passing over. The chill of that snow hung on my body like some backwards blanket, but for all that was cozy in its cold way. I thought I could give myself up to that kind of cold, drift to sleep and forget to wake up, though maybe I thought so because it was numbing my nerves and my brain and everything else while I tried to create my first angel. Even my rash, which had flared on the short walk from river to home as my fiery thighs brushed together, had been cooled in the snow. There had been a bit of a sting and a shock in my balls as wet snow splashed up my tunic, but after those first startling seconds everything down there went quiet and calm, and I felt wonderfully still both in body and mind.

I thought of a painting I'd seen, or a photograph, maybe—or was it a scene from a movie?—of an old man in a dark coat and hat standing alone in a snow-covered field, hands in his pockets, the sky above him the same deep shade of white as the ground, and framed by a few skeletal trees filled with crows. I remembered wondering, as I'd looked at that image, whether birds hibernate in their trees. In the snow-covered garden, lying on the cold, thickened ground, I imagined myself in the man's place, out standing in my field like a shadow cast on the white world.

But my fingers turned blue and my toes went numb—no wonder people wear socks and gloves in colder climates—so I went into the cave to warm up. I lit a bit of a fire in the smaller ring of stones I'd laid just inside the cave after getting rained on while cooking outside a few times. It was early for dinner, though the bucket containing my stew was already in its nook, leftover from lunch, with a ragged, hand-torn hunk of bread at its side. I set my feet against the outside of the stone ring, and as the rocks became warm a tingle went through my toes and soles, then that tingle grew painful, and I realized I'd let my body grow colder and more numb than I'd thought and now had burnt my bare feet. I've wondered, since then, how close I came to getting real frostbite from that fake snow, and losing some of my toes.

It was cold that night in my cave. Whether it was meant to happen that way or not, whether the truck and its crew spent those hours of darkness right outside my door with their fans and their hoses and vests, all night long while I tried to sleep puffs and spurts of snow blew into my face and under my blankets and wedged tiny ice cubes between my toes (they'd melted away when I reached down to pluck them out, though the skin was still cold where they'd been).

The next morning I crawled from my pallet with stiff joints and sore bones and, I was sure (though apparently wrong), a touch of frostbite on my burn-blistered feet. I'd had enough of winter already. I set my small fire, ate my porridge, and boiled my tea, but when I tried to climb to the cave top I couldn't get purchase on the ice-coated walls, and spilled hot tea all over myself. It was too cold to sit on the ground and too cold to tumble in snow, and there wasn't any dew-dripping grass to roll in, so I ate my breakfast indoors for the first time since arriving in Mr. Crane's garden. I tried to have my morning meditation in the cave, too, but couldn't get anywhere with it because there was nothing to watch but my own flickering shadow cast by the small fire onto the gray wall, no birds and no foxes and no clouds on the ceiling, no swaying green trees or flowing blue river to catch my attention and lead it away.

The second time I emerged from my cave that day, the snowblowing crew had returned and was piling more snow on spots that had grown bare as the sun warmed them up, and making tall drifts even taller where shadows kept the ground cool. Near the mouth of my cave, buried halfway underground, I found a vent I was sure hadn't been there the morning before, blowing icy, cold air into my home, which explained why I'd struggled to sleep. There was even a camouflaged speaker beside it with a loop of howling winds and what I took to be clattering icicles, playing again and again like a call from the deep heart of winter.

I walked to the river, hoping the movement might warm me up, and on the way I noticed more speakers and vents at the bases of trees and in what I'd previously taken for rocks, so it was cold everywhere in my garden and the howling of wind could not be escaped.

I should have expected it after all that, but I was surprised to find the river stilled by a thick skin of ice, the first frozen water I'd ever seen that wasn't in a kitchen or rink. The ice held the orange shadows of workers toiling downstream, doing something at the edge of the water with long pipes that ran under the ice. In its way—in any way, really—the frozen river was beautiful; though the ice itself wasn't moving, I could still see the current flow underneath, rippling and churning as it always did, and I felt warmer already just watching the river refuse to give in to the winter thickening its water. I realized, thanks to the river and its wise example, I needed to keep my own waters flowing whatever the surface became. It was cold, I was disoriented, but I had a purpose that had to be met: I was meant to swim in the river, and whatever men in whatever vests were there and whatever sounds swelled from speakers suspended in iced-over trees, I was going to swim because that's what I did every day.

From the riverbank I spotted Jerome poking his way along the shore, sniffing and snorting and swishing his tail, scratching one lean yellow side against a tree bent by the snow. Mr. Crane's workers eyed him nervously from the edge of the ice, though they were a good distance downstream. They must have been told he was harmless, they must have been told he was trained, but he was still a lion if not such a leonine one. I couldn't blame them for worrying, because against all that snow, in that blank world of white, their safety vests made them stand out like peppers on ice cream and perhaps like snacks for a lion.

Jerome started across the frozen river but only made it a couple of steps before all four of his paws slipped in different directions and he fell to his belly, spinning like animals do in cartoons when walking on ice. He tried to get up a couple of times with no more success, then he gave a sad groan—the opposite of a roar, if there is one—and retreated to the bank, then wandered out of my view up the hill toward the house.

I found a large gray rock, silver-specked and the size of my head with one pointed end, and I scuttled over the ice on hands and knees, pushing the stone ahead of me until I'd reached the deep center. At first I tapped gently, trying to chip at the ice, but it was thicker than I'd imagined (much later I discovered the reason for this was freezer coils installed in the river itself, something I'd missed while watching it under construction). So I swung the rock harder, with both hands and from over my head, but that knocked me off balance each time I brought my arms down and pushed me around on the ice. Those blows made a tight web of fine cracks, but I still couldn't get to the water. I tried standing up and dropping my rock, first from knee height and then from my chest, and at last from overhead, which worked out too well because the surface of the river suddenly splintered and split, and the rock and I plunged through together into the arctic waters below.