Bee-Loud Glade (5 page)

At the end of the hallway, my butling guide knocked on then opened a door. “Mr. Crane,” he called into the room, “your guest has arrived.”

He was answered not by the sinister, ominous, archvillainous voice that might make sense at the end of a mysterious journey like mine, but only an ordinary man's voice like any other that said, “Send him in, Smithee,” and the butler's hand on my shoulder steered me right through the door.

7

T
here are days when all this can become a bit lonely, when the Old Man falls quiet or the rain falls too hard or some ill-chosen berry or leaf makes me sick and I'm stuck on my pallet in unnoticed pain, wishing for someone to boil my tea or make me some soup or recognize, for God's sake, that I'm suffering. Those are the days when I picture my scribe, the hunched-over monk who writes everything down, scribbling away with a fluttery quill as he follows me through the day in his hooded brown robe. Making note of my meditations, and charting the course of my thoughts. In those slow, stupid hours of self-pity I imagine he exists for my suffering; I imagine the scrolls he produces and that someone, somewhere, awaits his account of my life.

My blogs may have been fake, they may have been forced and financed by Second Nature and only aimed, in the end, at marketing plants. But they spoke to someone. They had an audience reading their words. My stories about plastic plants and, at the same time, about children and parents and illness and health, and jobs kept and jobs lost and jobs found, may have made a difference in somebody's life. Now I only tell stories to the scribe in my head, and I imagine he writes them down and files them away, and that's better than nothing on my rare dour nights, when even a listener who isn't quite real is enough, and a fantasy about my life being recorded carries me across the brief gaps in my satisfied solitude.

Modest, isn't it, imagining my own life to be worth preserving? And conjuring someone with nothing better to do than record it? Here's me in the shadow of the blackberry bushes, squatting to squeeze something awful from my angry bowels—don't miss a grunt or a groan of my genius! And there's me in the crook of the towering tree where I once perched as my portrait was painted. Be sure to capture each of my silent musings about seed helicopters and the sweetness of syrup and the slow, sticky passage of time! Sharpen your quill; grind up blackberries with those red ferrous rocks from the river for ink—that's how I've imagined I'd do it, if I ever needed to write, but I haven't, not yet—and make sure you get every word.

I know my scribe is an invention, a crutch for my stumbling moments, though sometimes I get carried away with the fantasy of being recorded and spend days adrift in my memories. I ask him questions and imagine him finding the answers, combing through his old scrolls to recall what I ate on the day the bird's nest fell on my head, or how many potatoes I dug on the morning I found the dead fox in my field. Little things, long-ago minor moments, but they give us both something to do, so why not? And who's going to tell me to stop, who's here to rein me in but my scribe, and he only tells me what I already know—even if I've forgotten—and nothing I don't want to hear.

On my longer nights, his loyal presence helps wait out the far shore of sunrise, and I don't see the harm in that. There's no one to know it but me. Me, and the Old Man, of course. And my kind chronicler helps me keep myself straight, helps me make sense of my memories so long since I've shared them with anyone else. I've been surprised how easily time's track is lost, and how disordered my own past becomes when there's no one to remember it with. Imagining that someone recorded my past makes it easier for me to recall. I picture him at my ear, reading back old events I can't quite lay my memory on, like a librarian or a search engine. He may not be real, but he gets the job done. He helps me remember how I came to be here, and when I need to hear it he reminds me why I've stayed so long. Who else could I ask?

The Old Man remembers, but he isn't saying. The Old Man knows the back of my mind because everything drifts through his view. Like the strange new fish I've seen lately, shimmering pink beneath his blue surface, picking with puckered lips at his sandy bed for the insects and eggs piled there. “Fingerpinks,” I've called them in my head, because there's no one to tell me their name and there's no one who needs it but me. I'd never seen them in the river until a few weeks ago when I was roused from my meditation with a shocking sharp nip on the cheek of my ass, so perhaps they swam up from the valley or even all the way from the ocean. Or perhaps not the ocean, if I think of it clearly, unless enough time has passed for saltwater swimmers to adapt to these fresh waters, and I don't think this river is old enough yet to have spurred evolution already. But those fish must have come here from somewhere.

Perhaps they crawled up from the mud, the same mud that soothed the oozing rash on my body this morning, all over my legs and forearms where I fell into that bush yesterday—it must have grown in the wake of our recent rainstorms, rough buds and raw briars and branches. Relying on memory to move through the world as I do, picking my way through the garden as I know it once was instead of as it is now, these things happen sometimes: something moves, something grows, something isn't where I expect it to be and I can't make out the difference seeing it only in blurs and vague shapes. But I found the mud and it calmed my clamoring blisters and scrapes. Was it there all along and I never noticed, or did that mud of all muds emerge at the moment it could do the most good? Modest me, thinking the Old Man takes a personal interest in the itch of my thin, broken skin!

Those hikers came from somewhere, too. They're tan and they're healthy, well-fed and young, and all they seem to do so far is sleep, and sometimes kneel with their eyes on the ground so intensely they must see something there that I don't. My eyes were improved a bit yesterday, and I got what counts as a good view of them outside their tent, on their knees muttering and humming together as I slipped by. Up close I could see that those two are as ragged as I was when I arrived here, but in much better shape than I ever have been, like they've been hiking and camping for months, like their bodies have been working as bodies and have never once been in an office.

Because they were kneeling I couldn't see much but their backs and their heads and the filthy, bare soles of their feet, and even that much was blurry—until I got close, until they fit within the dark frames that have formed in my eyes, they were nothing but soft shapes and colors. His beard is patchy and sticks out to one side, and his blonde hair is tangled in dreadlocks woven through with colored bands. Her hair is the same orange shade as my carrots and shines as brightly as their tent, though it still smells like a shampoo factory exploded when they're nearby.

After my swim this morning, I walked back toward my cave for a lunch of stewed carrots. I still call them carrots, but they're really not, they're a combination of carrots and potatoes, one of the more successful hybrids I've grown over time at the Old Man's instruction, in the garden Mr. Crane left me. Briefly, I tried calling them “carratoes” in my head, but I realized it didn't make any difference so I stuck with “carrots” because the word was already familiar. Who's to know that what the word means to me, in this garden, isn't the same as what it means to everyone else? I could hand one of my hybrids to the hikers, and whether I called it a carrot or a carrato or an overcoat, they still wouldn't know what it was. It might look a little familiar, but not enough for them to know it by name. There's really no need for me to call my vegetables by name at all, or to call them anything other than lunch when I serve them up to myself with a cup of birch brew.

Today's lunch was a high point after a shallow, disturbed meditation this morning. I was unable to hear what the Old Man was saying, too consumed by this intrusion into my garden and trying too hard to undo my ungenerous feelings. As I was welcomed here I should welcome them, but that's easier said than done; I don't want them to stay, I confess, and for now I have taken the tack of ignoring their presence with my body if not my mind. Until they approach me, until they ask me for something or the Old Man asks on their behalf, I'll leave them to find their own way as I did and continue to do. But in case more is expected of me, I'll work to keep my mind idle until fog clears away from the answer.

I wouldn't have approached the hikers and their campsite if I hadn't needed some carrots for lunch, and if they weren't camped between my cave and my crops. Not just close to the garden, as it turned out, but actually blocking the gap in the blackberry bushes where I enter my field. The gap I've been entering through for almost as long as I've had the garden, since the brambles were allowed to grow up around it. Back then I could see it from a long distance, and now some days I have to feel my way along the bush for the gap. Their tent filled the space like a dam on a river, and I stood outside its rustling, rippling fabric walls, frozen by the surprise. There are other gaps where I might have entered the garden, at least there were when I could still see well enough to look for them, but this was the one I'm used to, part of my routine. To find another way into the garden would have been too big a disruption, it would have been allowing the hikers too much impact on my life. I might as well have begun talking to them, if I let their tent unchart my usual path.

So I laid the palm of my hand on the curve of the tent, shocked by how smooth and slick it felt, almost an electrical shock, and I felt my way around it toward the brambles in hopes of a space to squeeze through.

And I found one, a few inches wide but large enough for my thin body—thank goodness I'm all skin and bones! As I moved around the tent, I heard the hikers whispering to one another inside it, apparently just waking up. Apparently woken by me.

“He's outside,” she whispered, a sentence, a phrase, and I was trapped by those two words with one hand still splayed on the tent and one foot inside my garden. Her voice was like... how can I even describe it? I'll leave it to my faithful scribe to come up with some useful description and just say for myself that it was a shock.

“What's he doing?” the male hiker asked, the first time I'd heard him up close, and his was a voice that sounded like muscles, like strength. Like a man who knows what he's doing; a bit like Mr. Crane's voice, I suppose, though rougher. And that second voice, the man's voice, shook me out of my stupor, and I stepped all the way into the garden and slipped my hand from their house with the rustle and wheeze of its factory fabrics.

As I moved away, I heard the woman say what sounded like, “the way it was in the movie,” and I could have sworn the man's answer included “Smithee.” But my ears, I suppose, are no more reliable than my eyes after so many years getting untuned to speech, filling in gaps in what I know of the world with the few names and voices I've heard most recently though long ago. So the man sounded like Mr. Crane, and they mentioned someone I knew; my ears filled in empty spaces from memory, like my optimistic eyes sometimes tell me a shape up ahead is my cave but it turns out to be only a shadow.

In my vegetable patch, with the blur of their tent out of sight from most angles, I could pretend I was almost as alone as I wanted to be. My carrots, at least, were right where I'd left them, minus a few given over to rabbits and whoever else had come by. So I pulled up a bunch, brushed them clean of dirt on some grass, and turned back toward the bright orange dam.

But this time, squeezing through the same way I'd come in, I stepped on something so sharp it penetrated the ironclad sole of my foot, an unfamiliar sensation because nothing in this garden has been jagged enough to do that in years. I walk over rocks, over sharp sticks and stingers, without feeling more than slight pressure. No more than I'd feel through a shoe. But this I felt, and it was all I could do not to shout out in pain.

I dropped my carrots and reached for my foot, but stumbled over some piece of the hikers' campsite—something hard and round, a canister, maybe, because it rolled underfoot and threw me backward into the billowing wall of their tent. The fabric swallowed me like a pebble thrown into the water, and all I could see was a great orange expanse, all ripples and shimmers and shadow and light. I panicked, and thrashed, and I was almost glad, for once, that my eyes were bad so I didn't have to see myself in that moment of shame.

The hikers, still in their tent, grunted beneath me. I may not weigh much, but I weigh enough to be a surprise when I fall through your wall. I felt them scrambling and squirming. He yelled, something guttural, not a word, and she groaned, then the two of them pushed their way out of the tent, winding me tighter in their wall as they went, and my own thrashing and wriggling probably wasn't much help.

Then they were outside, standing before me, and she told me to wait, to hold on, and he said, “Settle down, man, settle down.” They grabbed my arms where they reached out of the fabric cloud and pulled me onto my feet. “It's okay,” she said. “You're okay.” Then he said, “There's something in your foot, let me get that,” and the blur of him crouched and reached out for my throbbing foot, still stuck with whatever I'd stepped on. I twisted my body out of his grip and hers, and I almost fell down all over again but somehow I stayed on my feet to hobble away to my cave, led in my blinded confusion by muscle memory or the adrenaline of wounded pride. One of them rushed up from behind and pushed my dropped carrots into my hand, then I felt their pitying eyes on my back with every step.