by Mark Jacobs
Chapter I
The boy was named Pence because he was made from a potato grown close to the fence, or so he gathered.
“Pence,” he would say to himself, “a small boy from a quiet garden,” and he would nod his approval of this good and simple lot in life. “Pence,” he would say to himself, frequently, “Pence, Pence, Pence. Yes sir, as good a name as any.”
When he called himself a small boy this was not an understatement. The aforementioned fence, rough-hewn and root-white, circled the garden and it was from here that one none-in-particular potato was pulled, the last of the back row, and cut from its root. Indeed, Pence was a superlatively small boy, as you would have to be to come from a potato, unless it was the grotesquely large fare that your garden-variety giant or troll will grow, but Pence’s was not. It was ordinary-sized and had been hollowed out as if someone hungry for all but the skin had scooped the innards out with a blunt spoon.
He was not exceptionally well-sculpted. His feet and his fingers were blocky and his middle was lumpy and his head a mite out of scale on the fat side. But then, the old man who crafted him was a gardener, not a whittler, and he had done the best he could.
The gardener had only the use of his right hand; his left was awvish and indisposed, paralyzed in a tight fist since he himself was a boy. Of course, being one hand shy does not make life as a gardener or a now-and-then whittler any easier, but the old man was as patient as a stump awaiting a bird and there had never been a task in the garden that he shied from on account of his handicap.
His hand aside, the garden all but tended itself. There grew no unwanted weeds, there came no pests, nor vermin, nor cotton-tailed thieves. The flowers, fruit-blossoms, and vegetable patches never overgrew to clamor for trimming back. The soil was richer than an old king, yet never lost its fertility.
All the plants had ever begged of the old man was water, for rain was each season come scarcer, the heavens above staid as the earth below. Occasional tides of wet fog swept over the land but this did little for the deep roots. It was not lost on the old man how fortunate it was that his garden contained a well of clean water tucked away among the flowers. Neither was it lost on him how strange a thing it was that the sparkling water in the deep abyss should never dry out, and never mind the endless arid spell that taxed the rest of the kingdom dry.
In the dawn of his days in the garden, the old man had braided stalks and wiry roots into rope and constructed a bucket from the white wood of a felled tree, the stump of which–as wide across as a man stands tall–designated the center of the garden and so the axis of the old man’s plot in life. Each morning he drew water from the well and catered to the thirst of every growing thing in his reach, and with the flow of seasons he reaped in return what little sustenance he preferred.
The old man spent his hours pacing to and fro the meandering dirt paths, talking to the plants as his mind absconded to the remote past, to the day when there was shade in the garden and he was not the only one there to feel it. His days and nights, his years and years he spent in this manner, acting at the behest of the time-at-hand only to draw water from the well.
Needless to say, it was the gardener to preside over the growth of this none-in-particular potato and he who hollowed it out in turn to whittle away the whitish-yellow chunks that were not fated to become a small boy. On this day, unlike all the rest gone by, the old man’s thoughts were not on what he had lost or what he had let go, but on what he now held in his hands: his last hope, the small boy. He grimaced as he worked, envisioning what the future held in store. He grinned too, time to time, until at last the whittling was finished.
Still, the boy was far from complete. He was a boy in form alone, as anyone would predict–simply a doll or a puppet, no more or less animate than the potato had been. The old man closed his eyes to wait. What ancient thoughts swirled through his head then, what lessons of long-forgotten history, no one can say. Such is the mystery of old men.
When the gardener finally opened his eyes he glared down at the atrophy of his paralyzed left hand. His brow shifted and contorted as if burrowing worms slept restlessly underneath his skin. Slowly, wretchedly slowly, his balled-up fingers uncurled, trembling uncontrollably. Where the back of his hand had turned brown after long years in the sun, the skin inside was root-white. The old man studied his palm, where he bore a viridescent scar shaped in the outline of a heart. The scar tissue was not red or any human hue–it was grass-green and still as bright as it had been the first morning he awoke to find it emblazoned on his flesh, now a lifetime ago. Sunk into his sallow skin in the middle of the green heart was a smooth white seed, smaller than the pupil of his eye.
The seed pulsed rhythmically, a walking tempo. Unable to break away, the gardener stared at his hand with glazed eyes and might never have looked away but for the furtive quickening of the seed’s rhythm; already it was struggling in the open air, desperate to be buried again in folds of earth or flesh.
The old man snarled. He plucked the seed up with his right thumb and forefinger and then brusquely pressed it into Pence’s chest. He betrayed no doubt in this unorthodox transplantation and uttered no prayer. He but held his breath as he molded the boy’s opulent flesh back over the newly buried heartseed.
Immediately Pence’s chest began throbbing. It swelled and depressed, swelled and depressed, each beat up and down no more than the depth of a penny.
In the same instant, a chill seized the gardener. With the seed clutched in his fist he had witnessed time beyond score fall away like brittle leaves, but he had never felt the rust of those years in his bones. Now his left hand recoiled into a fist. He drew his arms in as from a cold wind.
Shaky with sudden fatigue, he took a staggered step forward to keep from losing his balance but collapsed to one knee, planting his right hand firmly in the dirt and clay as a pillar of support. His eyes watered as he stared at the earth, puzzled to be pulled down so abruptly.
“By the White Tree, Pence, I feel alive,” he sputtered, eyes brimming. “Finally, death has found a path to our garden.”
