The Gardener: Chapter 1

Chapter One

 

The gardener came with the house.

When I first heard that, I told them it was crazy.  I mean, appliances maybe come with a house.  Or furniture.  It’s been a long time since people were passed along as part of a deed.

But they didn’t listen to me.  They were too in love with the house, too intoxicated with the idea of moving.  And too used to me, coming up with reasons why they should forget the whole thing.

My father is a software designer.  My mother is a quilt artist.  It finally struck them one day that it didn’t matter where they lived, as long as they could connect electronically with the rest of the world.  That’s when wanderlust hit them.  “Anywhere,” they said to each other, and then they started it—poring over maps, trying to pin point the Seat of Romance and Adventure.

They settled on New England, and—after talking to people and doing a lot of research—a specific little area of New England.  Then they left my brother and me with my grandmother—left our little tract house and our street and our lives—to go house hunting.  And that’s when this whole thing began.

The first night they called, they’d fallen in love with a village.  “We’ve made a lot of progress already,” which means, they’d made the rounds of the two real estate offices, picking up flyers and booklets and great hopes for the future.  “Chris called this afternoon,” I told them.  “She needs to know if I’m going to be on year book staff this year—,” just reminding them that I was still in love with the past.

The second night, my mother was crying.

It was because of The House.

They’d found it on a flyer—not even one they’d picked up at a realtor’s.  Just a flyer that had blown up against my father’s legs on their way through the village that evening—showing a big old two story bungalow with a good sized lot on a beach road.  “We’ll go right out there first thing in the morning,” the agent then said, eager as my folks were—which should have told them something.

The flyer hadn’t done the place justice.  First of all, it wasn’t just a “good-sized lot.”  The house came with an acre of woods.  It had a huge yard—sloping gently up to the front from the road, wide on the sides, Olympic sized in the back.  Mom told me carefully how the whole property was surrounded by a low stone wall, broken on the road side by two gates, a little person one at the end of the front walk—down beside the mail box—and wide wooden ones across the driveway.  And she ached over the deep front porch which, of course, had a two person swing at one end, and posts that were twined with climbing roses and wisteria.

Then there was the house itself.  “It was covered with weathered shingles, Renny,” my mother said.  “But the windows were framed with white.  And the plumbing was perfect.  And each of us would’ve had a room—bedrooms and work rooms—and it came furnished, and you can’t believe the furniture . . . .

“You’d have loved it.  Seriously.”

Seriously.

“The Barraclaughs asked us over for dinner Sunday,” I told her.  “They said it was their turn.”

“And there were fruit trees, and this huge garage that looked like a barn—and flowers, Renny, all around the house.  Bleeding heart and lobelia and vinca and sweet William . . ., ” which would appeal to my mother, who loves those Dutch bulb catalogues you get in the spring, but who never gets around to planting anything more than about three or four petunia starts a year, “. . . and vegetables in the back.”

“It’d all be totally dead in a month if we lived there,” I reminded her.

That’s when she told me about the gardener.

“Too weird,” I warned.  And I got a little chill up my arms.

“We met him,” she went on.  It was after they’d found out the truth about the price.  There had been a misprint on the flyer; they’d gone to see the house in the first place because it sounded like such an incredible deal.   “At that price, we thought it had to be a fixer-upper,” mother said to me, sadly.  “But then it was so great.  We said to the realtor, ‘Wow.  What a deal  for all of this.’”

The realtor had been real excited till he made the mistake of mentioning the actual price of the place—the true, not misprinted, huge, unbelievably expensive price.  It was very disappointing for all of them—the realtor because he’d just wasted his morning, my parents because they’d just lost the American Dream.

“We met him on the way out,” my mother told me, meaning the gardener.  “I was so embarrassed because I was actually crying, and we met him and I just kind of ended up telling him everything . . .”

About Timothy.  About me and Bandit and Mr. Torquelson  and her childhood porch swing.  Embarrassing, yes.

They’d spent the rest of the day looking at other places.  “Anti-climax, all of them,” she sighed.  “We couldn’t find anything.”

I can’t say that I was over sympathetic.   My parents might not have appreciated our little house smack in the middle of urban blight, but it was home to me.   I slept very well that night, actually hoping they would just give up and come back.

But no.

Now, I have to say this: I was brought up by careful, sensible people.  We wear seatbelts.  We wear bike helmets.  We don’t open the front door without first looking out the peep hole thing.  My parents never give out their credit card number to anybody on the phone except maybe Lands’ End or L.L. Bean.

I was taught to look in the horse’s mouth, okay?  All my life.

So what happened to my parents?  They called me the next morning, all in a glow; the realtor had called them: the estate that owned The House had dropped the price—dropped it by nearly half—by a fortune—if we wanted it—only if we wanted it—so why did it never occur to my parents to question the luck?  Because they didn’t. They paid the down payment and signed the papers—there wasn’t even an escrow or a bank to deal with because the estate held the deed and the mortgage.

The only hitch was the gardener.  He was built right into the deed—his monthly salary covered by the estate.  He had a little house of his own on the edge of the property.  We couldn’t ever fire him, no matter what happened.  The only way we could get rid of him was to sell the house—and the way the contract was written, the only way we could sell the house was to sell it back to the estate.

I thought it was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard of, and I told them so.

But as far as my mother was concerned, there was nothing weird about it at all.

 

After that came weeks of cleaning and sorting and packing and saying good-by to our old life, which hurt me, even if nobody else seemed to care.  Well, once in a while my mom would give me this sympathetic pat, but it was obvious she’d never been happier.  She even managed to make it through most of the work without getting mad at my dad, who was on a big project that had to be finished by Fall and couldn’t help us much.  I was like a drowning person, desperately memorizing our old house, grabbing time with my friends, like I could hold onto these things for comfort later on.

Then the movers came.  That night, I stood in the doorway of my empty room and cried.  The next morning, we dumped Mr. Torquelson into his cat carrier and Bandit into the back of the car and drove away.  Just drove away.

I was looking out the back window, watching everything that had been my life getting smaller and smaller till I couldn’t see it anymore.  I think if my heart could have come out of me and run back, it would have left me at that moment.

“I know!” And there was my mother was saying brightly, “Let’s play the alphabet game!”

 

We rolled into this village of theirs late afternoon the next day, when the shadows were just getting long.  And, I have to admit, it was as beautiful as my folks had said.  Prince Edward Island, Old Boston, Mystic—that kind of beauty.  Gingerbread porches, sparkling windows, flower beds.  Bicycles darted between Mercedes and Plymouths in the quiet streets.  It was like driving through a museum, or a set from some quirky TV series.

That’s when Timothy and I got our first sight of the sea.  I’d never seen anything so big; I’d never been able to see to the end of the world like that before.  We rolled down the windows, tasting the sea in the air and hearing the tremendous sound of the surf and the screaming of gulls.

The ancient roads we drove after that were narrow, winding through the trees, bordered by low, stone, fern laced walls.  “Dogwood,” my mother pointed out. “ In spring, they’ll be white as mist.” The trees hung over the walls in green clouds.  “Weeping birch,” she added, sounding excited.

There was a whole street of really magnificent old houses on the crest of the east side, overlooking the ocean and the private beaches—stained glass windows and American flags, bay windows and neat green lawns. We could see newer houses further up on the hills to the northwest—money peeking through the trees.   On the other side of town, we passed small, kind of scrubby looking places on little lots—kids and dogs and not-so-late-model cars.  But none of it was really ugly.  “Quaint,” my mother called it.  Which has evidently got something to do with old trees and older curb and gutter.

The Piper Road—the one we were looking for—ran out south of the village along a spit of coast, through the skirts of an actual wood.  There was no curb and gutter here; the asphalt just sort of petered out into wild flowers.  The low stone wall ran the whole length of the inland side of the road—where the trees crowded close, leaning over the wall, and it was hard to tell where the houses were buried.  You’d see a drive just curving away into the trees, a gate with a mailbox, and you’d have to take it on faith that, back there in the leaves, there must be a house.  Sometimes we’d catch a glimpse of something through the trees, a bit of porch, the glint of a window.

On the beach side, there were just a few trees, all close by the road.  Closer to the water, you could see tall, sharp looking grasses, and behind them, big sandy hills.   “Sand dunes.  Kind of a breakwater,” my dad explained, “in case of storms.”  The huge sea lay beyond those, low and grayish green all the way to the horizon.  We couldn’t see waves because that part of the beach was lower than the dunes.  There weren’t any houses built on that side of the road.   “Just the one down from us there,” Dad said, pointing out a huge shell pink modern-looking place which did not strike me as being at all quaint.

Dad pulled off onto the sandy shoulder, against a pair of wide driveway gates which Mom got out to open.  I got a prickling sense that we were starting something, like this was the first time of a million times to come.  Almost like we’d been here before.  I peered out of my car window, searching through the trees for a glimpse of the new house while Timothy bounced on the seat next to me, crazy to get out.

Dad drove through the gates, leaving Mom behind to close them, and cruised slowly up the brick drive past the trees.  Then we were in the open.  And there was the house, tucked behind its ranks of trees, comfortable in the middle of the famous wide lawns and flower beds, everything lacy with summer leaves.

Timothy was out of the car before it stopped, leaping and running and throwing himself onto the grass.

“You see?” my mother said, sweeping out a hand to take in the entire vista.  “Linnia Wren.  Timothy David.  Bandit.  Mr. Torquelson.  We introduce you to this home.  May you thrive within.”

The place surely was wonderful on the eye.  Not beautiful, but solid and calm, like an old lady who’d lived a good life.  I couldn’t hate it.  Not even then.

We hauled our luggage out of the back of the van, studying the house over our shoulders.  As Mom sent Timothy and me into the house to choose our rooms, the movers pulled over in front of the driveway gates.  “Another miracle,” my mother sighed. Timothy and I raced off for the front porch.

My old room hadn’t been anything much—a tiny old square space, pin-holed walls, hardly room for my books and stuff—and since the other kid-sized bedroom had been sucked up by the family businesses, I’d had to share my room with Timothy .

We’d had just the one narrow window—aluminum frame—not the kind of window a highwayman would think to climb through in the dark of the moon.

My first impression, as I passed through our new front door, was of space.  There was a big entry, then the broad stairway, dead ahead.  To the left, glass doors opened into a small sitting room and there were more doors further down on that side.  I didn’t bother to check out the den to the right, or my parents’ bedroom or even to wonder about the kitchen.  I have to admit, getting upstairs before Timothy did was my first priority; if this house was going to be my fate, I had to choose the right room.

I shouldn’t have worried about it—I knew which room wanted to be mine the moment I stepped into it.  I don’t know why I say it like that; all the rooms were good, all tucked under the eves with big windows on two sides.  My windows happened to overlook the Great Vegetable Garden out in back and the woods and the yard on the side.  The screens were old and heavy, white paint cloying the web here and there just along the frames, and they were hinged so that you could push out the bottoms if you needed to, oh- say, let in a cat at night.  Or a highwayman, should the need ever arise.

Maybe it was the bed that caught my imagination.  It was a wide one made of some dark, smooth wood, patterned with leaves that were carved into both the head and the foot.  The dresser matched it, with wide drawers that pulled out smoothly, all the corners dovetailed.  Timothy’s bed was good, too, the headboard made out of a twisting of greenish iron branches and leaves.  At the middle, on the crown, was a little nest of tangled wires, with a tiny iron bird sitting in it.  And he had a wide, low dresser with a big mirror over it, and a rocking chair painted dark green.

That night, when I was all alone in my room with the windows open to the night, I could hear the ocean.  My dad had promised me it would put me to sleep—I guess he thought that would be a selling point—the pounding, the rush—a sound like reeds bending in wind—and then the quiet before the next wave hit the beach.  It was much louder at night than it had seemed in the day time.  Honestly, I thought I’d never be able to sleep through that, but sure enough, it lulled me into a slow half-dream—till I found myself sitting bolt upright in bed.  The surf had come up all around the house—I could hear the rush of it just outside.  I tore off the covers and flew to the window, pressing my face against the screen, peering down through the moonlight.

It wasn’t the surf.  It was rain.  Rain coming down through leaves in a great rustling rush.  But it wasn’t even rain.  When I listened more carefully, I could tell it was just the wind, wind moving masses of leaves in the acres of woods around our house; I could see the tops of the trees tossing against the starry dark of the sky.  I leaned against the window frame and willed my heart quiet.  Only the wind—obvious to me now.  Just a lively, green sound—that and the arpeggiated surf—the sound of the planet shifting.

I took myself back to bed.  After that, I had no problem falling asleep.

All night long, I dreamed in waves.