Bee-Loud Glade (16 page)

I rolled over onto my back in the grass to think about it, to wait for my stomach to settle, but silvery clouds were sliding over a thin slice of moon and putting on too good a show for me to withhold my attention, and when it was over—when the clouds were too thick for the moon to show through—I was tired and made my way back to my cave and to bed, where sleep was fitful all night.

22

T
hey're feeling those mushrooms this morning, clambering in and out of their tent in a tangle every few minutes, stumbling over each other in a rush to contain themselves until they've reached open ground. Or my unfortunate potato patch, which seems to have been designated a vomitorium for the moment—and that may be just desserts for my not warning them about the mushrooms; perhaps I was meant to, perhaps it was an opportunity for discovery by me, not by them, arranged by the Old Man as a test I've now failed.

I'll have to think about that.

I heard them even before I left my cave this morning, before sunrise when they're usually quiet—quiet in the way of the world, which is snoring and belching and rustling around in their sleep, so not really quiet at all. They weren't quiet today, they were churning and hurling and moaning aloud to each other. Their runs back and forth from the tent to the bushes made a racket like bulldozers plowing the garden, and I was torn loose from the last strands of sleep to the melodious tones of their retching and splashing and the explosive charge of their bowels.

And for a moment, still deep in my half-sleeping stupor, I thought it was me, my own body. I'm still so unused to the bodies of others being nearby where my own senses can sense them.

I came to the cave mouth to stretch and to scratch, and watched the woman hiker—I could tell by her hair—burst through the tent's flap and crawl for the bushes. While I took my tea on the roof, while the sun climbed over the garden, she made three trips and he made two, but his purges sounded more comprehensive. I waited until they were both in the tent before making my way to the river; that was a change in routine, a disruption, but it seemed the right thing to do not to hobble on by while they suffered. And if they had been out of the tent as I passed, if I hadn't been able to see them... that could have been a sloppy collision.

I set off toward the water, but for once—the first time, I suspected, and my scribe informs me I'm right—I turned off the path halfway there, on a whim that may or may not have been mine, through the gap in the trees where I once tried and failed to erect a conical oven with dried clay and mud from the river. What I would do for a loaf of bread, or a slice, or even a handful of flour that hasn't been ground up from acorns or sun-dried potatoes! I veered into the brush on the slopes of the hill, and using the hum of the just-waking hives as a guide, I felt my way to a cluster of wild-growing herbs: dark velvet leaves like sage but not sage, curled like parsley, but not that, either. Not any parsley I know, anyway, which is only what the supermarket labels called parsley when I was a shopper; perhaps there are other kinds. I uprooted a fistful of mist-moistened stalks, then carried them back to my cave and stoked my fire and boiled those herbs to make tea. Then, following the sounds of uncomfortable bodies, I carried my cauldron and its verdant contents toward the bright blaze of the tent where those two hikers were, for the moment, contained, and I poured my concoction into their own pot where it hung over an idle but already blackened fire pit—when had they replaced their gas stove with a fire, I wondered?

They must have heard me, they must have known I was outside their tent, for I clattered not only to make myself noticed (and keep them away) but also because in that unfamiliar realm, on that expanding island of theirs, I was asea without sight. So they must have heard, but in the time it took me to return to my cave and replace my own cauldron, then walk past the tent once more toward the river and this time for real, I didn't see hide, hair, nor hurl of those hikers.

That tea I left them won't taste very good, not much better than what's coming out. But it will put them to sleep for a long stretch of hours, a deep sleep that will come as a mercy after how they spent last night and this morning, and they'll wake drained and diminished but well down the road to becoming themselves once again. Both their bodies and my potatoes will rest unmolested, and my garden will go back to its usual calm, back to as calm as it's been since they came.

23

A
s I sat by the river one afternoon soon after Jerome's arrival, digging with a stick in the sand just to find out how deep I could go, I heard something large approaching behind me. I turned to see him lumbering my way through the brush, tongue hanging from his mouth like a dog and dandelions and broken-off blackberry brambles tangled in the fur of his mane. He lumbered over and sat down beside me, like he was waiting for me to do something, so I thought maybe I should.

I decided to teach Jerome how to be more like a lion, to get him over his moping and loping and tumbling about, to get him to roar and to stalk and to act like the king of the jungle. He couldn't quite be the king of that forest while Mr. Crane was, but he could still stand to be more like he was meant to be and more like himself, more regal and roaring and rough. And I figured I knew as much about lions as anyone else in the garden—there didn't seem to be any lion tamers or zookeepers or biology majors around—so it might as well be me who showed him. If I got it a little bit wrong, who would know except us? He'd be as much a lion as my hand-sculpted cave is a cave.

I got onto my hands and my knees in a pose like a lion would strike, like I'd seen lions strike on TV, and I pulled air down into my lungs and let out the loudest, most leonine roar I could find. But it came out as more of a howl, too high-pitched, too keening and whining and wrong. I tried again with the same result, maybe just a little bit lower. Jerome, meanwhile, sat staring at me with his enormous head cocked to one side. He listened to my pathetic, weak roars, then leaned his own head back and—I swear it—tried to howl; not to roar, not to sound like the lion I'd hoped he'd become, but he tried to imitate me in my attempts to imitate him. And his howl was pretty convincing, not as a roar but as something else, the sound an overgrown house cat might make when his supper is late.

I tried again and so did he, and between the two of us we moved farther and farther from lionish sounds and instead began singing a song of a sort. I tried to harmonize, but every time I changed my note so did Jerome. I couldn't believe it, at first—a musical lion!—and, thinking back, I have to wonder if it really happened that way, but my scribe assures me it did.

Teaching him to roar was getting us nowhere, so I shifted gears and stalked around on all fours, trying to be my most fearsome and fierce, and Jerome fell right in step beside me as we stomped through the garden like lions. Well, not so much like lions as like two people pretending that they were lions, despite one of us being a lion.

My lioning lessons didn't go quite as I wanted them to, but expectations are overrated. Maybe I was meant to be teaching Jerome to be
less
like a lion, rather than more. Perhaps that was the Old Man's design—though I hadn't yet realized how much of a hand he had in these things—or perhaps I was screwing things up altogether. It's hard to tell, sometimes, in such a wild and tangled part of the world, whether I've left the path or am still walking on it. So I try to worry about only one step at a time, not where those steps are leading in accumulation.

Anticipation of what's to come, of what can be done, of what a life is bound to or meant to be worth—what's the use of all that? It's ego and it's self-deception to think we can plan our next steps and to think we might actually take the steps we have planned. Living a life without plans had rewarded me well, delivering me to the job I was meant for. I'd left plans behind with my voice and my pants and my shoes and my stifling apartment and ties. I'd left them behind with other people and their demands on my time—Mr. Crane made demands, of course, but those were different: those were demands I might have made of myself, they felt more like my own desires and dreams being pointed out by someone else. And I was getting paid for it, and I would be for the next several years, though those years began to look shorter and shorter the more full moons came and went, the more months I felt passing and the closer I came to my inevitable expulsion at the end of the term I had been contracted for.

So I tried not to think about that. I put it off, knowing the unwelcome moment would come but focusing instead on the moment at hand; I wasn't being paid to worry about what would happen in several years' time, or what I would do in the world when I went back to it. Like Jerome becoming the best lion he could, I tried to be my best hermit, as veiled from the concerns of the outside world and its pending problems as I could be. I became, bit by bit, day by day, self-sufficient and much more myself, the self I'd always wanted to be without knowing he might exist.

Instead of worrying about future or past, I floated day after day on the river, sensation streaming across parts of my body I'd never noticed before, every follicle and cilium tuned to temperature shifts in the water, each pore and inch of my skin fully conscious of fine grit and sand drifting in clouds underwater. Water striders skimming around me and dragonflies hovering an inch from my nose and, sometimes, some lucky mornings, landing on my face for a perch from which they could drink.

I'd say I was happier than I had been, but calling it happiness misses the point: it was more than that, so much more. To say I was happy, to use that hollow word, suggests I considered for even a moment whether or not I was, that I compared my new situation to how I'd lived and felt in the past, and I didn't have to do that: I'd moved beyond wondering whether I was happy, beyond comparing one day to the last or the next or to how I'd imagined my life might turn out. My experience had outstripped my dreams in degrees and directions I'd never realized were open to me.

Jerome, worn out by his lioning lessons, had curled up to sleep on the shore, his sides rippling and rising and falling as he snuffled and snored. So I left him behind on the sand and swam out into deeper water, toward the downed tree, but was barely halfway across the river when the quiet of the garden was broken.

“Finch,” echoed through the air from the speakers, “come up to your cave. I'll be coming down.”

At the first syllable of Mr. Crane's voice, Jerome had leapt up and run off, leaving me to climb alone from the water and shake like a dog—or as close to a dog as I could be without fur—to wick and whip water away. Then I pulled on my tunic—oh, how I loved every morning when I let that harsh cloth fall away on the bank before taking my plunge, and how I loathed pulling it on again in the evening for the walk to my glade, and the hours between drying and dreaming and sleep!—and set off up the hill toward my home.

When I got to the cave, Mr. Crane was halfway down the slope from the house, so I stood by my fire ring waiting, unsure if it would be rude to sit, so I didn't. I hadn't seen him since we'd spoken about painting—if that's what we had really been talking about; the paints showed up afterward, anyway—however long before that had been, and the only signs of his presence had been the sparkling of lenses up in his window and in his cameras down here on the ground. Had he traveled, I wondered, had he been away? But it wasn't my place to ask, it was my place to stand by the cave mouth and wait for him to arrive.

Mr. Crane approached slowly, hands in his pockets, in a blue shirt that fit him so well it may have been skin grown for him by a tailor. His hands were in his pockets, and though he looked ahead, toward me, toward my glade, I could tell at a distance that his thoughts were elsewhere. His stare reached past me and through the trees toward the river and the valley below, and perhaps to the ocean beyond.

When he'd drawn close to the cave he said, “Good morning, Finch,” and I nodded, half-smiling (too big a grin, too much outward emotion, seemed at odds with why I was there; a wide smile didn't seem like a sign of serious contemplation to me in those days, though I've since changed my mind about that).

“The river's nice,” he said. “I'm enjoying it.” To hear him speak you'd think Mr. Crane had been swimming himself, as if I were the one responsible for discovering the river; it sounded like he was thanking me for pointing him toward some great secret I'd shared—that river I'd seen him stand beside several times, that river that had run through his estate for a long time by then. Like it was something he'd only just noticed. “Should be more fish, though. Bigger fish, enough to catch.”

We stood side by side near my fire ring for a long time. I imagined the river filled with big, biting fish, filled with fish biting me, and wondered how I could talk Mr. Crane out of that without opening my mouth.

“I was talking to a contact in... well, that doesn't matter. The important thing is this contact of mine mentioned that he plays the cello. It relaxes him at the end of a day. Brings it along on trips, actually, and he practices in his hotel rooms, even in parts of the world that have never seen a cello before, I would imagine. Astounding.”

He genuinely did look astounded, perhaps that this acquaintance of his brought a cello along on business trips, but he seemed most amazed that someone played the cello at all. As if it hadn't occurred to him before hearing it that this was something a person might do. I got a sense of where the conversation was headed and it turned out I was right: it was music, again, and me playing some, as if he'd forgotten about my wooden flute coming and going.

“I expect a cello would look a bit out of sorts here. A string quartet in a cave!” He laughed. “What else... what else... what are those things, like a harp, only sideways, or laying down, or... what are those called?”

A hammered dulcimer, I grasped, was what he had in mind, so I mimed playing one as if the twin mallets were in my hands, and I gestured with my fingertips the length of the instrument's invisible strings so he'd know it wasn't a xylophone or glockenspiel or—what's the other one like that?—marimba.

“Yes, yes, that's the one,” Mr. Crane said. “Seems a little formal, though, doesn't it? A bit complicated. What else, though...” He turned on his heel, slowly, thoughtfully, and started back up the hill as smoothly and quietly as he'd arrived, but even from behind I could tell he was thinking still about dulcimers and cellos and who knew what else. I only hoped it wasn't tubas.

So it was no surprise the next morning when, along with my porridge and tea, my flute returned to the nook in my wall. Already my miserable music had gotten rusty in the time spent with no instrument, so it was like starting over—the first notes left me lightheaded, and I had to stop. But it came back to me quickly, to the extent that I'd ever had it, and floating on my back, feet propped against the tree, I spent the rest of the morning bobbing up and down on the water, drifting a bit to this side and a bit to that side but always anchored against the current by the log at my feet and the flute at my lips.

As afternoon shadows grew longer, as kingfishers fished for fish that seemed bigger than they'd been the evening before, as hummingbirds dipped and drank and even a bright orange fox crept down to the bank and dunked his snout for a sip, one wary eye kept on me as I tried not to be too insulted that he'd taken me for a threat (me, with no reason to hunt or to fish or to worry my shy vulpine neighbor at all). As all that was happening, rush hour in my garden, I huffed and I puffed, and my weak squeaks and squawks soon got me back to where I had been, noises assembled into tuneful order as if the flute had never been taken away. That felt like progress enough for one day, so I set the flute safely on the bank with my clothes and let my mind drift unfettered the way my body had been doing all day, savoring the last sunlit seconds of one more day like all others.