Bee-Loud Glade (20 page)

I was still wrapped up in my blankets, awake but yet to move or to moan, wondering if Mr. Crane knew I was awake when he said, “It's difficult, Finch. It's difficult to rely on other people, however well paid they are. To count on them to do what you haven't time to take care of yourself. Can we be everywhere, Finch? Can we do everything? Of course, no, you're right. We must delegate. Share the load, yes. Rely on other people who are never, ever ourselves or even quite who we want them to be.” He paused and leaned closer to the painting, then straightened up, turned to me in my bedding nest and said, “It's the nature of the thing, Finch. There's little we can do about it, as you and I know very well. We've been at this for such a long time, we know by now how the game works.”

I felt like I was still sleeping, or at least like my mind was, because Mr. Crane made no more sense than most of my dreams. I thought about closing my eyes, seeing if I could wake up again, but the burning itch in my crotch and my bubbling stomach let me know that I was, indeed, wide awake.

“Self-sufficiency, Finch. That's the goal, isn't it? To avoid relying on other people, to avoid making them part of our plans. That's how we face things head-on. That's how we turn risk into advantage, of course.” He stopped talking and looked in my direction, then scanned all sides of my cave. I think he said, “That's what you'll do,” but he didn't say what “that” was. Then as abruptly as he'd started talking, as unexpectedly as he'd arrived—though who knows how long he'd been waiting before I woke up—Mr. Crane spun on his heel and walked out of the cave, hands still clasped behind him, fingers woven around one another, and he walked away into the morning. And a few minutes later I had stretched and had scratched and was full of my morning porridge, and was up on the cave with my tea just in time for another day's sun to arrive. For another day like all days to begin.

27

T
ime in Mr. Crane's garden usually passed in a seasonless stasis, one day and the next and the following month all blending into one another. I've asked my scribe if that makes it dull to record and retell, but he tells me no, that it's fine. Time here has no shape until something's changed, so I can only remember my life if I focus on disruptive moments, on events that stick out because they came as a break in routine. Of course there were many more days, days upon days, passing without variation except a chill or a warmth in the air and different thoughts crossing my mind as different shapes of cloud crossed the sky. But those kinds of days—the usual ones—are hard to pin down. It's easier on the exceptional days, on mornings like the one when Mr. Crane was in my cave when I woke up. Days like that were the boundaries around my routine, and the mileposts along which I marked time.

So after I woke to him considering the painting left behind by his wife, it was no great surprise that a day or two later a note appeared with my breakfast, another change to my routine, another strange season come into my world. It asked me to take up gardening, not of flowers but food, and said there were seeds and tools on the way and that I should begin by choosing a spot for my crops. It said, too, that my meals would still be delivered, as always, but I should make every effort to produce an amount of food that could sustain me, to make the endeavor more real.

Apart from a couple of abandoned window boxes and an apartment cactus that thirsted to death, I'd never done any gardening and didn't know where to begin. I had no idea what to look for in my garden plot, whether more or less sunlight was better, whether high ground or low, close to or far from the river, and on and on with questions I couldn't answer. I'd never stopped to consider—I'd never had a need—how many variables there might be in planting a garden, and how complicated it could be to get started. It was more work, though less painful, than gathering honey from the beehives on my hill, and I hadn't even planted anything yet. Part of me hoped Mr. Crane's interest in gardening would wane as quickly as some of his others, that this request would go the way of the morning I'd spent learning wood carving and gouged my hand open with an inexpert chisel, or the headstand morning meditations he'd requested between my periods of tai chi and of the lotus position, before the river was built and my reflections moved onto its water. And there had been other whims he had mentioned that never came to fruition, so perhaps the tools would never arrive and whatever spot I chose for my garden would remain moot.

But in the meantime I'd been asked to choose it, so I started with my own convenience: it should be close to my cave, as close as could be, so I wouldn't have to walk far to reach it. The closer it was, I figured, the faster I could be finished with what was required of me in the garden each day and the sooner I could get to the river. The stakes seemed low, I admit it: I'd already been told the garden wouldn't be feeding me, that my meals would still come from the kitchen, and not knowing how long I would have to maintain it—would I put in months of work, only to abandon it later?—may have sapped the earnestness of my effort.

Before wandering the estate, before walking from one possible plot to another, I sat on my cave with my tea even after the sun reached the sky, and I surveyed the ground around me. The open space near my cave, to the left as I sat on its roof—which must be north, if I consider the rise of the sun—had sunlight through most of the day, but part of it was in light shade. It was a flat patch of ground, and nearby to my cave, and that seemed to cover the bases. So I climbed down from my perch and walked the few steps to that open space where, to my quickly passing surprise, I found a selection of tools already waiting. A shovel, a hoe, and a rake, all of them superficially but not detrimentally rusted, all of them on worn wooden handles stained and patinaed and shaped by years of use—by whose use, I wondered, reminded of Mrs. Crane's blackberry pail: an actual gardener or a specialist in aging wooden handles and garden tools, an expert hired by Mr. Crane for the purpose?—and all of those tools were exactly my size, as I'd gotten used to things being, and honed to fit in my hands.

What else could I do but pick up the tools and start gardening, start going through the motions of gardening, at least, which were all I had at the time? I thought I might learn what to do by acting like I already knew what I was doing, by imitating what I'd seen farmers and gardeners do on TV. So I hoed and I raked and I shoveled throughout the hot day, my tunic scratching and scraping and dirt sliding down to collect in its wrinkles and folds and form extra blisters. My hands blistered, too, oozing all over the handles of my wooden tools, and I wondered if that was the source of their smoothness and shine—buckets and buckets of bloody and blistery pus—and then I tried to push that image out of my mind by working harder, by causing more pain to my hands and my back and my knees and other parts that hurt so much I couldn't tell them apart from one another. I was no longer a body but just ache and pain and just push and pull, up and down, back and forth, scoop and spread.

The soil, at least, was soft. It seemed soft to me. There weren't any of the roots and stones I'd been expecting because in movies when a fresh field is made, the farmers stack stones into walls around their edges and complain about all the rocks in the ground. My garden plot already had that much going for it.

And in time I'd turned all the soil. In time my green square had turned brown and I'd exposed the underground to the air. I'd known, of course, that there were worms and bugs in the ground, but I was amazed, astounded—aghast!—at how much had been happening beneath me; and it had been happening there all my life, I could only assume. Millions of pink squirming worms turned up to the surface, twisting and writhing and leaving soft wakes of soil as they stretched from one place to another, one body length at a time. I thought of the hyperefficient plants I'd been selling before all of this, how much time and money we'd spent making them look realistic, convincing the world they were real. We'd gone so far as introducing fake bees and apples and changing leaves, but all of that over the surface—so far as I knew, Second Nature had never, not once, introduced anything under the ground. And why would they have? Who looked in the cedar chips of an indoor garden bed? Who went digging for worms in the lobby of an office building downtown? The money and research would have been wasted, but now that I'd noticed, now that I knew, those plants seemed nothing but plastic. It wasn't the trees and the bushes themselves, they would still look real enough, they still did in my memory of catalog pages and websites and test installations, but they were all surface, no substrate. That word, “substrate,” leapt into my mind, and I realized we'd used it in our catalog copy, not to describe the worms and the soil laid under our plants but instead as a name for the layer of netting and foam (made from recycled plastic, mostly our own flawed productions broken up and ground down) that we spread beneath all our plants to hold their woodchip surroundings in place.

By the end of the day my whole body hurt in ways it hadn't before. But my own substrate, the surface beneath my surface that held me together, felt strong and felt solid, felt alive and filthy with earth. My garden was ready, my earth was turned, and I hoped Mr. Crane's whim would survive—that his interest in gardening,
my
interest in gardening, wouldn't prove as fleeting as the hot spring I still hoped for, mentioned in my interview but never materialized.

I ate two bowls of beef stew with huge chunks of potato, and an entire loaf of bread in great bites, and fell asleep after only one cup of tea by my fire; I was so tired I hardly felt the itch of my blankets while drifting away, whistled off to sleep by Jerome's loud breath somewhere close to the cave.

And I woke the next morning with the usual creaks, cracks, and groans in my body—the usual but more of them and fiercer—though they felt better-earned than they had any morning before.

In my cave when I woke, along with my breakfast, was a basket filled with seeds wrapped in brown paper packets and labeled with only the name of what they would grow: pumpkins, beans, potatoes, carrots, and so on. No instructions, no pictures, nothing else. Just one abstract, empty word meant to tell me all I needed to know about growing that crop. I rushed through the sunrise, I wolfed down my porridge and tea, and carried my basket of seeds to the ground I had cleared.

What did I know about planting? I'd seen on TV that I should drag a hoe down the rows of the field, then scatter seeds into the trough, so that's what I did. A row of tomatoes, a row of potatoes, a row of carrots and one of corn; asparagus, parsnips, and something called kohlrabi I'd never heard of before. I planted cucumbers and cabbage and beans, and when all the packets were empty I planted a mixed row of all the spilled seeds left behind in my basket. The hollowed gourd watering can had appeared in the field overnight so I used it, filling it from the wooden pump that had sprouted from the ground while I slept; I supposed it drew water right from the river, as I had been doing, but I appreciated the ease and convenience of not hauling each bucket back and forth by myself. And it was easier to pump than to scoop errant fish from my bucket—they seemed to be breeding like the garden's rabbits, filling the river with fins and the shimmering motion of swimming more than I'd ever noticed before.

And when the whole garden was planted, when each row had been sealed by a long scar of turned soil, and each planted row had been watered, I went back to my cave. The whole day had passed, and I carried the basket of food delivered in my absence, containing that day's bread and stew, to the field where I ate it cold, in too much hurry to wait by the fire while it warmed. I watched my rows, anxious as if they might grow right away, and I chased off birds already pecking the ground after seeds—perhaps I had spilled some between rows, but in case they got into the habit of eating my crops I chased them away with my arms raised like a scarecrow.

After dinner, while the evening sky bruised as if its body, too, had worked a long day, I walked down to the river for a rare sunset swim. I wasn't in the habit of swimming at night, not for any reason except that I wasn't, but I hadn't been into the water since starting my garden had given me so much else to think about. As I floated the knots in my muscles untied, my back and arms and legs loosened as if they were water themselves, and my blistered palms soaked and soothed in the cool balm of the current. Fish glided past underneath, leaves and seedpods sped by on the surface and a rustling wind up above, and I lay between those three layers and thought about nothing at all.

28

I
was afloat on the river this morning when the cracking and banging of stones struck together came to me on the air. It was the unmistakable sound of industry—its rhythm, its pace—if not quite the mechanized power of Mr. Crane's crews. And when I climbed from the water and onto my crutch, and began the climb back to my cave, I found my feet following a wide, flattened track of grass crushed on the slope by something heavy and flat with squared edges.

I hobbled uphill, wondering what the hikers were doing, but before reaching them something stuck to my foot and I sat down to see what it was. A sheet of white paper, crumpled and torn, but a sheet of actual paper like I'd never expected I might encounter again. I crumpled it in my hands, to feel its resistance and hear its soft crunch, then straightened and smoothed it against my knee, its wrinkles as fine and frequent as my own. Despite myself, I almost wept—not because I coveted paper, not because I even missed it, but there was something about feeling those textures I'd long ago forgotten that made the surprise overwhelming. There were words on the page, and a few pictures, so I held it up close to my eyes, but the text was still too small to read, or my eyes were too weak to focus enough to make sense of the letters.

I'd hate to think my eyes have forgotten how reading is done, even if they won't need to do it.

But I could see the pictures—a logo at the top of the page, and I recognized it as the mark of the same free email provider I'd used during those long ago lonely nights in my dark apartment. A bit updated, the logo a little bit different, but I could tell that this page was a printed-out email. An article, in fact, because at the top of the text was the logo of a movie industry magazine, or maybe its website; someone had emailed a clipping from that magazine to someone else, and someone had printed it out. And beneath those logos, the biggest surprise, was a photograph of a face I knew: there was Smithee, older now, out of his butler's suit, but the same strange man I'd once known with his notebook and camera and sneering eyes, creeping through the garden on quiet, professional feet. He must have had something to do with some film, something important enough to have his face there alongside the words.

I scanned the page, puzzled, amazed, wondering what it all meant. I held the paper so close to my face that I could feel the cool of the sheet on my warmer eyeball. But the letters all swam in a fog, or a soup. I nearly cried out, I nearly ran up the hill despite my knee, to beg the hikers for help, but I overcame those emotions and settled them down, I listened to the reassuring voice of the Old Man, lapping the banks with his calming and constant rhythm. And for a brief, fleeting moment—a couple of seconds—I somehow, by chance, perhaps not, held the sheet out at just the right angle, the light was just so, and I was able to read a headline, the largest text on the page:

“Anticipation for Hermit Film”

And I knew then what Smithee had done, what he'd been doing in all of his creeping and jotting and photography, and I knew how the hikers had come to be here. Unable to actually read it, I couldn't tell how old the email might be and how much older the article was. I didn't know if the film had come and gone or might still be coming. But I knew that one way or the other, in all this quiet time, some version of me, some part of my story, had made its way out of the garden and into the world.

I sat on the slope, on broken grass crushed by whatever the hikers had done, and for a moment I thought about nothing, and then my mind flooded with thoughts. What did I have left? What was my own? What did all this mean for me?

All those years ago at Second Nature, I'd sent out my emails and written my blogs and made my small impact on something much larger, just as here in my garden I grow my crops and harvest my honey and change the landscape around me in modest ways. But in the end it's all as fleeting as the bubbles I stir in the river—those websites will vanish if they haven't already, and when I'm gone the brambles will creep in to claim all the changes I've made. Someday, in time, they'll creep in to conquer my cave if I'm not still here to shear them. For so long I've thought of myself as self-sufficient, but I'm nagged by a new question now.

I pretend my solitude is isolation, that I've erased myself from the world, but I'm more in it than I've ever been. Which is to say, not very much, no more and no less than anyone else—we may have a more lasting impact on the world when we break down into nutrients and raw material that nourish a whole chain of life, insects and earthworms and grass, than we ever have when we're alive. Perhaps that's the closest any one of us comes to knowing how things fit together. But even before they arrived here, before I knew they existed at all, I was part of what those hikers were doing; however they learned about me, from a film or an email or an article, it made some difference for them like so many things made a difference for me, in bringing them here to this garden as I, too, in my time, was delivered. How could I keep that from them, and how could I know that I'm meant to?

I've been so busy wondering what I will give up by engaging these hikers, by making a gesture that invites them to stay. And I've worried, too, about what I might gain, so caught up in profit and loss that I only now realize both of those are the wrong questions. That the questions aren't mine to be asked—my life here, my life anywhere and like anyone's, is a sandcastle built on the edge of the sea. In my case a sea of blackberry brambles, waiting to rush in and wash what I've built here away. And that's a good thing. It's the way of the world. But to think of my life here as solitude, as self-sufficient, is my ego ignoring how much I depend on everything else: the river, the garden, the ground where my vegetables grow. Mr. Crane, whose presence is still here as much as my own, and these hikers, now, without whom I wouldn't last long in my present condition, a present that will be my future. Without whose mysterious intentions and unexplained willingness to help me, or so it seems, I would be lost in the dark sooner rather than later, I think.

Maybe self-reliance was never what I was meant to look for, and sustainability was: can I build something and have it continue without me, can my good works outlast my good life? That's what I should have been asking. What good comes of all I've done here if it rots and withers and vanishes with me, turning to dust along with my anonymous bones on some ever-still edge of the garden? What good is a story that doesn't get told, at least told in actions if never in words? Oh, it would be told by the worms, told in their devouring and digesting and divesting of me, but it's been told, too, by that movie in which Smithee played some major role, a movie that must have been seen by the hikers. Some movie somewhere has been telling my story for me while I've gone on thinking my story was no longer out in the world. And all the while that world was bringing the hikers right here to my doorless doorstep, the hikers and how many others to come, I now have to wonder—was the film a success, or will it be? Does anyone care? Part of me, I admit, wants my story to matter, and the rest of me knows that it would be disaster for this garden and the life I have built.

Does the Old Man have his hand in this, too? Is it just one more piece in the puzzle he's always assembling around me, or do these events far beyond the edge of the garden fall outside even his gaze?

Later on, back at my cave, while dinner bubbled away on the fire, I slipped that white sheet of paper, stained with grass and soil but bright as a supernova in the palm of my hand, into the flames. I heard it crackle and hiss, and I watched it flare in the fire, but before it was gone altogether a breeze blew and lifted charred feathers of paper out of the flames, brushing them hot against my cheeks and onto my legs and scattering them all over the garden in scraps too small to be gathered, or perhaps even burnt to ash in the air before landing.