The Wonder Garden (18 page)

Lying in bed, Cheryl listens to the sounds of the house. There is an admonishing echo of history, of company, in each ghostly creak of the floorboards, each groan of the rafters. Scurrying in the walls, a mouse family keeps warm, as mice families have done in these walls for two centuries. Outside the bedroom window dwells the pale silhouette of the Slater house, grievously empty.

In the morning—Christmas morning—the sun is bright and cleansing. They exchange gifts. From Roger, Cheryl receives sheet music: “The Holly and the Ivy” and “My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free.” She sits at the keyboard and attempts to sing while sight-reading, but stumbles over the words and bursts out laughing. Roger and the children laugh with her, and the hearth fire glows warm in the kitchen.

Roger hollers over the zinc flask Cheryl presents to him and proceeds to fill it with rum. Amos hands a sloppily wrapped bundle to each of his parents, containing baseball hats and sweatshirts printed with the name of his college. From Rebekah, they receive a basket of flavored coffee and a book entitled
An Alternative History of the United States.

“It's really eye-opening,” Rebekah says. “It's history as experienced from the perspective of the disenfranchised. Slaves, Native Americans, Mexicans.” She looks at her mother with the mischievous glint of a child throwing oatmeal on the floor.

“I look forward to reading it,” Cheryl responds equably.

The children open their gifts. Rebekah smiles at the chemise.

“It's not exactly sexy,” she says, “but it does look comfortable.”

Amos stares at the pocket watch in his palm for a long moment with undisguised admiration.

“It's battery operated so you don't have to remember to wind it all the time,” Roger pipes in. “Other than that, it's the same kind of watch the soldiers carried in the war.”

As Amos turns the watch over and runs a finger over the smooth casing, Cheryl feels a tug of sadness for him. Any true curiosity he may harbor will stand no chance against the brute crush of today's culture, the pressure to plasticize, to comply. He would have made a handsome soldier, tall and straight in his tricorn hat, rifle strapped slantwise, the image of all that was new and good in this land.

Her son slides the watch into his jeans pocket and says, “Thanks.”

Later, Cheryl sits at the virginals and gets the new music right. She sings:

My days have been so wondrous free,

the little birds that fly

with careless ease from tree to tree,

were but as blest as I.

The harmonizing chords reverberate in the walls and ceiling beams. Cheryl closes her eyes. It is a love song to the house, to the people in it—then and now—and to everything that has been lost to make this moment real. How can we deign to know the pride of mothers whose sons' lives were welded into the iron scaffold of liberty? How can we approach the glory of those who did the great work, the first work, that enabled the people of this nation to fly like little birds?

As she plays, she feels the strong presence of the Cook family in the room. She sends a silent prayer of thanks for the beauty of this day, this Christmastide—for the fortune of living in this house, in this way.

Amos and Rebekah are all but ghosts over the next two weeks. They haunt the kitchen for food, argue over the use of Roger's car, then spirit away again. Cheryl sits with her buttons at the window, glancing periodically at the Slater house as at the face of a friend. In her mind, she converses with Edward Drayton, argues for swift intervention, hears his dull, bullfrog response. “How do you know they're not home?” he croaks. “Have you even knocked on the door?”

She finishes threading a set of buttons, then puts on her cloak, awaits a break in traffic and goes across the street. She stands, as she imagines Comfort Cook once stood at the home of her friend Abigail Slater, and knocks. After she has waited ten full beats, she walks around to the back of the house, to the battered remains of Harriet's garden.

When Lars died, a new desperation had come into Harriet's hugs and shoulder touches. She and Harriet had begun to see each other every day. Harriet taught her to stitch by hand, weaning her from the machine. Sewing had once been an act of patriotic rebellion, Harriet told her, during the years that colonists shunned British imports, when the boldest women gathered in public with needles and thread and stitched clothing for their families.

“You look beautiful,” Harriet had told Cheryl when she stopped by in her first hand-sewn bedgown.

As Cheryl went deeper into the past, she brought back gifts for her friend, taught her to make candles, churn butter. She showed Harriet how to bake bread in the beehive oven of her hearth. Comfort and Abigail, she liked to think, might have baked together like this.

Now, Cheryl looks at the rear of Harriet's house. The panes are still there, the wavy vintage glass that Lars had located somewhere upstate. Cheryl peers into a window, but the reflection is too strong in the winter light, and she can't see anything in the dark kitchen.

It's easier to let Christmas slide, knowing that a real holiday is on the horizon. The Second Regiment Light Dragoons hosts its annual Twelveth Night celebration at a tavern in Sheffield the second week of January. This is an occasion the colonists would have acknowledged; this is the night they would have costumed themselves and danced and flirted. So Cheryl lays out her blue brocade Jesuit gown and silver-embroidered stomacher. Roger presses his best white shirt with pleated ruffles and his burgundy frock coat with matching silk death's heads. Cheryl pins and re-pins the stomacher to her corset. Roger slides his new flask into a trouser pocket.

The forecast is for snow. This, at least, is what Rebekah tells her parents, waving a glowing device.

“There's a severe weather warning,” she says. “Heavy snow all night, accumulations up to twelve inches.”

“It's winter in New England.” Roger grins.

“Seriously, I don't think we should go,” Rebekah says. “The roads will get worse while we're out.”

“That's why we have four-wheel drive, isn't it?” Cheryl says.

Remember the colonists,
she wants to add.
They would have had to ride horses
.

They discuss it no further. Cheryl and Roger are united in the opinion that today's world is governed by fear, that full-grown adults have become paralyzed by a terror of Nature, that capable citizens have allowed themselves to become infantilized by alarmist authorities. They will be warm in their woolen stockings and outerwear. The kids zip parkas over their sweatshirts. Cheryl wishes that Rebekah might have at least put on a skirt or brushed her hair. Young people had once met matrimonial prospects at dances like this one. Why couldn't the same happen for her daughter? Would it be so unlikely that Rebekah might meet someone suitable tonight, one of the sons of the regiment commander?

The drive is an hour on back roads. When they arrive at the tavern—a pub with neon beer signs in the window—the snow is drifting down beautifully, patterning Roger's great coat with fleeting constellations. Inside, they are heartened to see that everyone has come. Cheryl shrugs off her cloak, does a twirl to show off her skirts. “Huzzah!” call the men, flush-faced and rowdy. She loves these people. What outstanding luck to have found this community, like a portal through time. When they are all together, there is a thrilling sense of covert celebration, something of a speakeasy in the way they drink and dance out of the view of the others, the “regulars,” those who would judge and mock. Here, they are the real winners. They are the ones with ardent friendships, in the oldest sense. They are the ones guided by true principle.

Some are operating in first-person mode, the men speaking with loud round vowels, colonial gusto. Roger takes a tankard of porter. Cheryl accepts a mug of cider. The children recede to a corner table and drink soda.

When the contra dancing begins, Cheryl tries to pull Rebekah onto the floor to introduce her to a boy named Caleb, someone's visiting nephew, skinny but elegant in a pair of striped silk breeches. Rebekah shrinks away when her mother tries to grasp her hand. Finally, perhaps in sympathy for poor Caleb, Rebekah rises to her feet. The beginning of their dance is halting, embarrassing, but then it seems to return to Rebekah, the memory of dancing this way as a girl. Her face loses its wrenched smirk and relaxes into the anticipatory gaze of a woman. Her movements, even in sweatshirt and jeans, are graceful and fluid, and by the end of the dance, she is smiling. Caleb delivers a deep bow.

“Did he ask for your phone number?” Cheryl asks in the car.

“No. Well, yes,” Rebekah murmurs from the backseat.

“Well then,” Cheryl says.

“It doesn't mean anything.”

“How do you know?”

Roger drives the Jeep slowly over the unplowed road. The snowflakes streak through the night, large and wet, splattering against the windshield. On the country road between towns, they notice that the houses are dark.

“Power's out,” Roger says plainly.

No one speaks again for the rest of the ride. The Jeep grinds through the snow, the windshield wipers creating a blurred porthole. There are no other cars on the road. It is, indeed, like passing through an eighteenth-century night.

At last they are on Cannonfield Road, steering its familiar bends. When they reach the Slater house, Roger touches the brake.

“Do you think their water's turned off?” he asks.

“I don't know,” Cheryl says. “I suppose it's none of our business.” As she says this, a thought shoots through her, sly and precise, like a silver fish beneath a frozen lake.

Roger looks at her, then drives on.

As the rest of the family prepares for bed, Cheryl sits at the virginals for a few moments. She plays the first bars of “Greensleeves” quietly, intentionally. She plays the notes as a kind of invocation, tuning her ear to the spiritual guidance of the Cook family. She repeats the phrases, closes her eyes, and after a moment feels her spine straighten and her lungs expand, as if Comfort has joined her. Her hands stop playing and rest on the keys. She breathes deeply, gathering her courage like a minuteman before battle.

In the small hours of the night, she wakes her husband. She has been unable to sleep, she tells him, for fear that the water pipes will burst in the Slater house. She still has the key that Harriet gave her, she whispers. It's unlikely that they've changed the locks.

Without pause or complaint, he draws back the bed hangings. How she loves this man. Together, they walk downstairs in their stocking feet, avoiding the worst-creaking floorboards. There is a sense of completeness in the house tonight—their children asleep, the family sheltered together, safe from the snow. These nights, she understands, will become ever fewer with the years.

They slip outside in their boots and go silently through the snow. The road has not been plowed, and there is a hallowed quality in it. There is no sound other than the rasping of the trees, a cracking branch, the soft drop of snow.

They cross the road and walk along the edge of the woods where their footprints will be obscured. They go over the lumpy span behind the house, Harriet's dead garden, and let themselves in through the back door. Stepping over the threshold, Cheryl holds her breath in anticipation of what she might find, what disorder or disfigurement.

Inside, they are able to see dimly by the incandescence of the snow. The house is dusty, but otherwise unchanged. Cheryl tamps down the stubborn sensation that Harriet is present nearby, that she is about to emerge from the bathroom. The chunky pine butcher block, constructed by Lars, remains in the kitchen like an orphaned child. There are few indications of foreign influence—some unfamiliar pots and pans, hardcover books, months-old magazines. In the dining room, a Windsor chair dwells in the corner like a silent friend, built and bestowed by Roger himself.

Roger goes directly to the basement door, but Cheryl steps onto the stairs and turns to him.

“While we're here . . .”

He joins her, and together they ascend. The second floor is sliced low by the slanted ceiling. Harriet's horseshoe still hangs over the bedroom door, its lintel so low that Roger has to duck his head. Upon entering the room, Cheryl is enveloped by the musty kerosene smell that delivers her instantly back to Harriet's side, toward the end, reading to her from historical romance novels. The old lover's knot quilt is still on the bed. Cheryl is unsure how to feel about the new owners using it.

She goes to the window and peers through the grid of glass. There is her own home across the street, nestled and safe in the snow. Safe. She lays her hands on the window's lower muntin and, bending her knees, heaves it open. A cold gust enters the room, and a few snowflakes drift in.

“What are you doing?” Roger asks.

Cheryl steps to the next window, yanks it open wide.

She turns to her husband, raises her eyebrows. “Don't you know?”

“Cheryl,” he begins, but does not continue. He follows her into the adjacent bedchamber and watches her open the windows there.

She leans out under one of the sashes, reaching her arm around, and calls, “Where's the downspout?”

“Cheryl, no.”

She draws herself back in and faces her husband squarely. “It has to happen,” she says. “There has to be exterior proof.”

“But this isn't proof, this is sabotage.”

“What's the alternative? Wait until the house decays from the inside? That's what they're hoping. There won't be any proof until it's too late. Just like the Spaulding house. There was nothing to see on the outside until the walls started to rot.”

Roger doesn't answer. Cheryl thrusts her head and torso back through the window.

“I found it,” she gasps, extending her arm to its limit. “Come here.”

He goes out of the room. A moment later, he returns with a fireplace poker in hand. He moves Cheryl aside and leans out the window, straining. He grunts, and Cheryl flinches at the sound of metal popping loose. He pulls back into the room with a strange look on his face. She peers out the window, sees the drainpipe dangling like a broken limb, knocking against the siding. A wave of nausea comes through her, as if she has dismembered someone dear to her. She retreats into the bedroom and sits on Harriet's quilt. Through the nausea, she sends a message of apology to the house. Her intentions are noble. Only noble.