The Naked Gardener (11 page)

With the hurricane, whose name I don’t remember all these years later, came torrents of rain. It seemed as if it had been raining forever once that monster storm made landfall. It rained up and down the coast and inland for miles and miles, swelling the streams to overflowing, breaking over their banks. Every hour was another report about when this or that river would crest, or what streams were now impassable, what car had been stranded, what motorist rescued, what house swept away in the torrent.

After the second storm, my grandmother moved to the mountains for an extended stay with her sister. My father took me over to the river the day it was supposed to crest at flood stage. I didn’t know what to expect. My father told me it had rained fourteen inches during the storm. I tried to picture what that meant but it was lost on me until my father put me in the car and drove us to the river.

The water was up to the roof of my grandmother’s house. There was a goat stuck up in the top of a tree, just hanging there with his feet dangling. As we stood there gaping at the flood, a car washed by swirling around and around in the water. Its doors were closed, windows shut, no one inside. A ghost car riding the wild surf. But the thing I remembered most clearly was the sound. It filled the space, roared all around you. You couldn’t hear wind or talking or a car horn. Anyway no one said anything. There was nothing to say.

* * *

The dawn chorus woke us early.

“God what a racket.”

Charlene crawled out of the tent she had shared with Erica. She had slept in a tank top and bikini panties. Now she stretched her arms as high as possible above her head, grasping one hand with the other and pulling from side to side.

“Why do all the birds wake up and start calling at once?”

The others emerged from their tents. Erica was the last to come out, wearing a flowing nightgown that had little flowers all over it.

“Oh, look girls, grandma’s here,” said Charlene, pointing at her.”

“If I could fit into a tank and panties, I’d be wearing that, just like you.”

“That’s okay,” Hope came over to Erica, “you’ll get there. If that’s where you want to get. Personally I’ll take jammies anytime.”

I started a fire. The women drifted off to the woods to take care of their morning business while I placed a big pot of water over the fire on an iron stand. We hadn’t brought a camping stove so it was good the night had been clear and the wood was crisp and dry. The fire crackled right up and soon the water was heating and Roz had placed a griddle over the fire and cut slabs of bacon to fry. The cooler food was still fresh and on this first morning out we would have eggs and bacon and butter and jam on some of Erica’s bread. There were cartons of juice and some fresh oranges to cut.

“It’s amazing how much it requires for us to survive.”

Hope motioned to all the gear and food as she helped Roz with the bacon. With each meal, the loads the canoes had to carry grew lighter. Erica had packed enough loaves for all the meals. Different types. Some were sweet breads we could eat as a dessert. She brought three loaves of chocolate pecan bread that always sold out at the market before all the others.

“I know. Camping would be a lot different if we had to kill our own food or forage for it. Could you stay alive out here in the wilderness?” Hope asked me.

“For a few days I think I could. In summer anyway. I don’t know about winter. I’d probably starve. Or die from cold.”

“But if you walked far enough you’d get to a road or house or something.” Roz suggested. She sounded a little frightened.

“As long as you walked in the right direction. But most people who get lost in the woods go around in a big circle and never get anywhere. As long as you marked the trees while you were walking, and watched the sun, you would eventually get somewhere I guess. But if you knew you had to find your way out of a forest it would be better to have brought a GPS with you. All we’d have to do is follow the river down stream.”

“So what if, say, one of us got stuck out here alone?” Hope asked. She looked around at the trees and down the river. “I mean how would we get out?”

“Don’t you worry, little bird,” Charlene nodded toward me. “Fish girl will pull us through.”

We moved to the fire where Valerie had placed the clean mess kits on a large blanket so we could all sit to eat. As she broke eggs and dropped them into the skillet, they made a searing sound and then crackled at the edges. She and Erica bustled around the fire as if they were at home in a kitchen.

We sat around for awhile to enjoy the morning air and let our food settle. The forest had come alive and it would be a fine day for canoeing.

“So,” Erica said, “Anyone have any concrete ideas for saving Trout River Falls?”

“Let’s bring this meeting to order,” Roz joked.

“What about – I mean if we could get the old woman – and what’s her name again?” I asked.

“Mrs. Ward,” Erica said.

“Well if we can get her to agree, how about restoring the mill to operational shape and creating a whole grain, organic milling operation? And then if we could get that old button factory to use as a bakery and warehouse, we could – I mean you could,” I pointed to Erica, “bake bread. How do you make these breads anyway? I mean do you have a really big oven or what?”

“No. I use my kitchen oven. I can make ten loaves at a time. The regular sized ones like these,” Erica pointed to the heel of the loaf we had just eaten. “Why?”

“And how many different kinds do you make?”

“I have no idea. I come up with new ones all the time. I have about five that are the most popular so I make those every week.”

“How often is the farmers market open?”

“What are you getting at?” asked Charlene.

“I’m just thinking about how big the bakery would have to be and how many loaves you could make a day. There would be a lot of figuring to do.”

“You mean like on a commercial level?” Charlene asked.

“Of course I love that idea,” Erica said. “It would get me out of the kitchen.”

“All organic,” mused Charlene. “Milled at the Trout River Mill.”

“Does anyone know anything about milling flour?” Roz asked.

“We can learn,” Hope said. “I used to watch the villagers grinding wheat into flour. We could do it.”

“I can design the packaging,” I offered. “And help with the restoration of the buildings and the mill.”

I had only restored the chicken coop. Whatever gave me the idea I could do anything more than that? Still, I wanted to try. And isn’t that the first step to actually doing anything?

“Charlene and I could find suppliers and do the ordering,” Roz said.

“I can take care of the accounting and bookkeeping,” Hope added.

“Which leaves me,” said Valerie.

“You can run the retail operation,” I said. “For starters. And how about coordinating with other farmers markets?”

“What about money?” Roz asked. “We can’t do this on credit cards.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Erica said. “I know a reliable source of capital.”

She meant Will, of course.

“All this is fine,” Erica cautioned. “But we don’t own the mill or the warehouse. How are we supposed to make this happen if we don’t have a place to work and a place to mill the flour? We can’t very well sell organic baked goods if we can’t control the whole process.”

“She’s right,” said Roz. “For a destination, we’d need the whole town to buy into the idea.”

“There are always a lot of obstacles to starting something from nothing,” I said. “We’ll just have to cross them as we come to them. But if everyone agrees it’s a good idea, we can start to lay the groundwork.”

“Yes,” Erica said. “And we can do that at the next council meeting.”

“We’ll have to approach the old lady who lives in the big stone house and ask if we can lease the mill and get it going again,” Roz said.

“One thing, though,” Valerie said. “What about Katelyn only being here for the summer?”

“Maybe she could be kind of bi coastal. Like come up from Virginia on a regular basis,” Hope suggested.

“I couldn’t live in the chicken coop in winter,” I said and then realized Maze had a sabbatical year coming up. And what about that letter? It was just possible Maze and I might combine my fellowship with his sabbatical and spend a year in Denmark. But Maze had talked about going back to Mexico. Another bridge for us to cross, another change to work out, another negotiated passage.

“So that’s one of those bridges we’ll have to cross,” said Charlene.

“Seems like we have a lot of those,” Roz echoed.

“Life is full of them,” I said. “Here’s another one. I brought a surprise for today’s paddling.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE PAINTED LADIES

I sometimes wonder why women’s bodies are not all the same. They have the same components but it’s as if a variety of parts was shipped to a body plant that lost the assembly instructions and stuck a long torso on short legs, large breasts on a small chest, a long neck on narrow shoulders and altogether ignored any sort of standardization. Not like tigers or robins or Luna moths, which are all interchangeably alike. Artists understand that women’s bodies are uniquely separate one from the other. Museums are crammed with images of women from Greek ideal to Cubist distortion. Lucille Clifton calls herself “a Cadillac of a woman” and mourns the end of her menstrual cycles. Mary Cassatt paints women caring for, cuddling, bathing, holding little children close. Picasso’s patterned Girl Before A Mirror, gazes at her reflection which is not wholly her, cut into a geometry that’s partly herself and partly a patchwork quilt of her own image. DeKooning’s tortured women, ghastly, grimacing, wildly painted, reflect the painter’s ambivalence, anger, fear of women. And what imagery would I bring back to the studio after this trip on the river?

We took off our night clothes and ran naked for the river. I had brought vegetable soaps and natural shampoo for washing. We used our bailing buckets as showers and tossed water at each other, soaped up, rinsed, and floated in the cool water. Even this early the sun was warm. It was going to be a hot day.

When we emerged, our nipples were taut and our skin tingly. A run for towels, a quick dry, we wrapped up like mummies and stood together by the river’s edge.

“Um, before you put on your clothes, I have something that might be fun for today’s leg of the trip.”

“The famed surprise,” said Charlene. “Wait, don’t tell me. It must be tequila. But so early in the morning? Oh I couldn’t. But if you force me … ”

“Actually I did bring a bottle of tequila along but that’s for tonight. For today I brought this.” I held up a canvas bag.

“Oh goody. A bag,” Charlene joked.

“Stop,” said Hope. “What’s in it?”

“I’ll show you.”

“Let’s put our clothes on first,” Erica said.

“No. Don’t get dressed. Look.”

I placed the bag on the ground and pulled the top open revealing many jars and brushes, lotions, and painting sponges on sticks.

“What’s all that?” Roz asked.

“Oh my God. It’s body paint. I once did a photo shoot in body paint. It was the coolest thing.” Valerie leaned over the bag and poked around inside it.

I handed out jars and brushes and showed them how to apply lotion first so the paint would come off easily later. After they did that, they wrapped their towels around their bodies again and stood waiting.

“I don’t know how to paint anything much less a body. Law school didn’t have an arts and crafts class,” Charlene said.

“Start by thinking about your body. About what’s going on with it. Maybe about what you like or don’t like about it. About how you think about your body.”

“Mine’s done something it wasn’t supposed to,” Charlene said. She frowned and then looked down at her stomach. She unwrapped the towel slowly. Her body was tanned and athletic, her legs tight, the muscles in her upper arms defined from playing tennis. She had small round breasts. Her stomach and trunk were paler where they had been covered. She laid her hand over her stomach and looked around at the other women. “I’ve never felt like this. I don’t know what to make of it,” she said in a voice that had none of the direct, tight edge it usually did. In her eyes I could see confusion but also a kind of bewildered awe.

I opened one of the jars. A bright yellow. I dipped a sponge in it and moved closer to Charlene. Carefully, and with a tender touch, I drew a circle around Charlene’s belly button. From this circle I drew a pattern of interlocking half circles connected to one another radiating them over her stomach and then around her hips. Soon the drawing took on the look of a sunflower. I opened a jar of dark orange and drew a stem from Charlene’s right ankle up her calf and thigh to her right hip just under one of the yellow petals. Valerie opened a jar of green. She drew a series of slender leaves growing from the stem. Erica took a sponge brush and dipped it into the green paint and drew leaves on Charlene’s other leg.

“Something’s growing on you and in you,” said Roz. “Give me one of those brushes.”

With yellow paint she began to draw smaller sunflowers on Charlene’s left thigh. She moved to her left butt cheek and drew a smaller version of the one I had painted on Charlene’s stomach. The others clustered around her. They painted small buds and green leaves and an interlocking grid of branches. In the spaces between the branches they filled in with pale blue as if the sky was peeking through Charlene’s sunflower body.

Charlene turned this way and that on command as each woman filled in the spaces on her skin up to her hands and feet. We even painted her neck with horizontal concentric circles to look like the neck rings called dzilla worn by married Ndebele women in Zimbabwe and South Africa. On her cheeks we made small sunflowers and twined the extra stems along her jaw and up to and then around her ears. Soon there was less and less of Charlene and more and more of a kind of exotic nymph, a walking, moving flower with patches of sky and bright yellow blossoms on her butt and stomach. In the transformation, her body became not that of a woman anymore, but a mural of life and with this change came a new attitude, a different tone in her voice, a softening in her demeanor.

She picked up a paint brush and turned to Erica.

“You have to experience this,” she said. “You have no idea how different you’re going to feel about yourself. About your body,” she whispered.

“Okay ladies,” Erica said. “I’ll be next. I am sick of feeling like a fattened hunk of beef. I want to look …” She had trouble finding the right word. She gazed out at the river and up at the trees. “I want to feel as free as that bird,” she said pointing up as a richly hued indigo bunting flew by overhead. “And I love those colors.”

She let her towel fall. She closed her eyes and let the other women begin. It was like some tribal wedding night ritual where the women of the village prepare the bride, where the community of women support each other.

We painted her with purple, blue and a deep mauve. Beginning at her ankles, we drew ribbons of color around her legs and wound them between her thighs and across her ample hips. When these ribbons reached the tops of her hips we came around to the front with our lines and crisscrossed them over her belly and around from the front of her hips to the back. Instead of making a separate drawing over her breasts, which for a large woman were decidedly full yet buoyant, we drew the ribbons from the back of her hips up her back, over her shoulders and down onto her breasts from above. We covered her breasts, including the nipples, with concentric circles of alternating blue and mauve. I painted a long feather on each arm, with the widest part covering Erica’s upper arm and the stems of the feathers pointing down her wrist onto the backs of her hands. On her face we painted stripes across her cheeks and feathers around her eyes.

“You are a bird woman now,” Hope said.

She stood back to take in the whole effect. Erica had all but disappeared. In her place, a tall exotic bird emerged.

“What does it look like?” Erica asked.

“You’re beautiful,” said Charlene. “Like one of those South American parrots with the long blue tail feathers. You look like you should be in a jungle somewhere. It’s just amazing.”

Charlene turned to Roz.

“You next?”

Roz still had her towel fastened across her chest.

“Hey Roz,” I said as I opened a new jar, “you know there’s edible body paint.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Roz grinned.

I dipped a brush in black and drew a line from her chin down to her breast bone. Roz unwrapped her towel and stepped back.

“Where’s the lump?” I asked.

Roz raised her arm slightly and pointed to the outside of her right breast.

I selected a different jar and a new brush, dipped it in and it came out bright red. I painted a heart over the lump. The others went to work. We covered Roz’s body in bright red hearts. All different sizes. Roz had wide hips and thighs. We drew the biggest hearts on either thigh. Around her slender waist we made a belt of small hearts. We drew black lines from heart to heart until her entire body was a maze of hearts and intersecting lines with parallelograms and triangles of skin showing all over. Then I opened a jar of white and we filled in the geometry of Roz’s skin with white until she looked like a harlequin of hearts.

“When I was a little girl in Africa, I used to imagine what it would be like if I could fly through the night sky,” Hope said shyly, like a child.

“Stars. You want stars.”

I opened a fresh jar of dark blue.

“Yes,” Hope said and shed her towel.

We started with her small, flat breasts, like fried eggs on her chest. We covered each breast with a five pointed star in a variety of colors. Over the wide, flat nipples they used a pale yellow to show the star’s glow. We painted stars down each arm and on each cheek of her face, stars on her butt cheeks and on the outside of her thighs. Up and down her slender legs we added more stars on all sides and a pattern of bright colors around each star so that when we had done she looked like she was enrobed in a patchwork of Lone Star quilts our great grandmothers might have sewn together.

The four women who now looked like living paintings, applied paint to Valerie and me in long swaths.

Valerie’s tall, slender model’s body became a series of moths taking flight. The largest was a green and white Luna moth that covered her trunk from her neck, across her breasts, down over her stomach and around her hips. The long points at the bottom of the moth wings extended over her thighs and below these, smaller moths fluttered around and around her legs, wingtip to wingtip. As if they were circling her while taking flight.

“Paint tropical fish on Katelyn,” Valerie suggested.

And they did. Angel fish and clown fish and parrot fish and fish that they created with every color they could possibly use until I was a cacophony of colors, stripes, dots, circles, bands, and zig zags all over my body. They spun me around to admire their work and then they all stood back and looked at each other for the first time as a whole group.

“We’re like aliens from another planet,” said Erica. “Look at us.”

“We’re beautiful. All of us,” said Valerie. “Especially you.” She pointed to Erica, the exotic blue orchid mauve bird.

“I am aren’t I?” Erica asked. “I really am.”

We took off with different canoe partners this time and moved out down the river. After an hour or so of quiet paddling, we rafted our canoes again and let the current take us along. A few puffy white clouds hovered high in the sky. Between scattered patches of green leaves, bright blue sky in irregular shapes floated like mismatched puzzle pieces overhead. Here and there a bird whizzed past, a robin carrying a long piece of dried grass, a swift swooping down to the water, picking up some small bug, a woodpecker sailing jerkily through the air from one tree to the next, then landing and hammering away with a fury. The river hummed and gurgled. The water was deeper on this stretch than it had been the previous day. We couldn’t see through to the riverbed anymore. Here and there large rocks poked through the surface, not along the banks but in the middle of the river. I showed them how to paddle around rocks and other impediments. At times we broke apart from each other’s canoes, and at other times, when the way was clear, we grabbed each other’s paddles again and moved downriver as one group.

We chattered like birds and at times sang songs we could all remember. When we had been out for a couple of hours, the river widened, the current seemed to slow. We glided through the water, without needing to paddle much to keep up our momentum.