by Alan Russell
Reverend Sawyer didn’t argue any further. I wondered what had happened to his renowned head of steam.
“Where does the Third Day get most of its funding?”
“Friends.”
It was common knowledge who those friends were. “Lumber interests, I understand.”
He shrugged.
“Does the dog wag the tail, or vice versa?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do they call your editorial shots?”
“The Lord is my master.”
“Have you gotten the word to attack the Green Goddess?”
“She presumes much with her blasphemous title.”
“It wasn’t a title she selected.”
“But one she aspires to, that or the Great Whore of Babylon.”
I had come to make him angry, but he was doing a better job of that on me. “The tough thing about making enemies is that they don’t always stay that way,” I said. “But I suppose you know that. Did you get the word to stop putting the heat on the Green Man? Did they tell you right before he died that he was really a friend? Is that why after his death you offered the plot and the headstone? Or were there other reasons?”
“I might consider making the same offer for you,” he said.
“Is that a threat? Or just wishful thinking?”
“I’m a busy man, Mr. Winter, and I don’t enjoy word games nearly as much as you do.”
“Did it confuse you when they changed the Green Man’s status from bad guy to good guy? And in your heart were you able to go along with that decision?”
“I’ll leave you to your idle speculating, Mr. Winter.”
I let myself out and walked along the sidewalk. I was deep in what Sawyer had more accurately than not called idle speculating when I heard the sound of clippers at work. Ruth Sawyer was doing some pruning in the middle of her rose garden. She was wearing a panama hat and had on a white dress. In the garden setting she almost looked comfortable, less nervous and harried.
She handled the garden shears expertly, didn’t hack uncertainly like most weekend gardeners I know. Acknowledging my presence with a little smile, she continued her work. I watched her prune for a minute, and that didn’t seem to bother her. “Another vanity?” I asked.
She remembered her reference and blushed a little. “I suppose,” she said, wistfully touching one of the remaining flowers. “You should have seen these roses a month ago. They were in full bloom then. They were bright and vibrant and full of life. Now there’s not much life to them.”
I leaned over and smelled the wilted blossom. There was still a sweet reminder of life. “They say a rose forgives better than all things,” I said, “offering a fragrant scent even to the heel that steps on it.”
“I hope you can be as forgiving for my outburst yesterday.”
“As forgiving as a rose.”
She smiled a little, then started cutting into another branch. White petals dropped to the ground. I picked up a few of the tears and said frivolously, “She loves me, she loves me not.”
Ruth moved on to another rosebush. I knew she wasn’t through talking, but I wanted her to speak in her own way and time. When she was finally satisfied with the cut, she did her own examination of the fallen petals. This bush was shedding pink. She picked up some petals and held them outstretched in one hand. She didn’t talk of love, as I had. “He died in a strange and terrible way, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
She let the petals drop from her hand. “I think that was proof of God’s judgment.”
“That presumes much.”
“My husband thinks God’s hand is in everything.”
“He didn’t think it was in Shepard’s death.”
She nodded uncertainly, as if that didn’t make sense, as if there should be no exception to his rules. Then, as if seeking an escape from thinking, she picked up the shears again and started on another bush, began to cut into it vigorously. Her target was more overgrown than the others, and she attacked it with a ferocity she hadn’t shown before. Branches, and petals, and leaves fell. Then, unexpectedly, the shears themselves dropped.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
I looked to see what was the matter. At first I thought she had cut herself badly. She was mewling in pain and misery, hugging herself while shivering violently. Then I saw what had upset her. A mouse was impaled upon a large thorn.
“Oh,” she said, her hurt sounding very deep. “Oh.”
Her trimming had opened a window she didn’t want to look through. I reached out and held her, and tried to explain about shrikes, told her how I had seen one in the field just the day before. I talked through her despair, and, when I ran short of words, I made soothing sounds.
The mouse was a couple of days removed from being cute. It was hooked from its neck. Shrikes hang their prey that way. They like to feed from the head down. I suppose shrikes think they’ve found a better mousetrap, but it’s not one the world is going to beat a path to buy.
Gradually Ruth’s cries became less frequent, and her sobs more hiccups than anything else. Her shivering lessened, and I released her from my arms. She didn’t say anything, just walked away from me toward the parsonage.
I pulled the mouse from the thorn, then tossed it into some shrubbery. I hoped that shrike would forgive me for getting between him and his larder. In some ways I felt as if I had stolen his meal. I owed him for the food for thought, if nothing else.
20
THE SWEETWATER CAMP looked almost deserted, with only a few of the campers moving languidly about. I intercepted a young man on his way down to the river and asked him where everyone was.
“Siesta time for some,” he said, scratching his unshaven chin and stretching, “berry time for most.”
“Berry time?”
“Blackberries, man. Harvest time.”
He started to walk away when I stopped him again. “Is Sasha here?” I asked.
“Think so,” he said. “Look for the tent with flowers.”
I walked around the campground. On my nightly visits I hadn’t noticed that some of the tents were decorated. There was an abundance of artistic efforts, most suggesting there is something to be said for not having too much spare time.
The tents were painted with trees, and slogans, and peace symbols. There were a lot of vibrant colors and flowers. There were so many artistic bouquets that I despaired of finding Sasha’s quarters. Then I saw what had to be her tent. The flowers were planted, not painted. She had beds of geraniums and mums. The cheery plantings created a homey atmosphere. There was even a welcome mat in front of her tent.
“Hello,” I said. “Anybody home?”
There was a rustling from inside. I could hear Sasha’s bracelets clanging. The tent flap rose; then she gave me a big smile. “Hello, Stuart!” she said. My pasta server looked glad to see me. She held out her hand, just as she had at my first Circle, and welcomed me inside. “Come on in.”
Her tent wasn’t exactly spacious, but it was protection from the wind that had picked up outside. Sasha sat down easily, planted her legs under her tail, and immediately looked comfortable. It took me about a minute to get considerably less than comfortable.
“Want a drink?” she asked.
I raised an eyebrow.
“Powder drink mixes,” she explained. “I’ve got cherry, grape, or orange.”
I passed. Sasha decided on grape. She poured the contents into a pint container filled with water, then shook it up.
“You decided to pass on the blackberry expedition?” I asked.
She nodded, took a swig of her grape drink and puckered her lips appreciatively. “A couple of people have already asked me about making cobbler,” she said. “I told them that with the solar oven we’d just have to see. The thing’s not exactly a convection oven.”
“Are you the cook?”
“Someone’s got to be,” she said, “otherwise we wouldn’t eat. Amazing how everyone’s willing to eat the
food, and complain about it, but no one’s willing to help with the work.”
“Must be tough cooking for so many.”
“Not really. It’s not like there’s much variety to the menu. We don’t have the money, so we’re big into the starches.”
She patted her thighs dubiously. “You’d think I would have lost a few pounds while being up here, but no way.”
“Where’s home?”
“Pasadena.”
“What do your folks think about your being here?”
“They’re not crazy about it. They see those snippets on TV, the ones where Humboldt looks like an armed camp, and the movement seems like it’s advocating revolution, and they think I’m involved with a bunch of dangerous kooks and that all sorts of things are going on. What they don’t understand is that most days are like this: quiet and no marching.”
“But not all days?”
She considered that for a moment. “No, not all days.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since June the third.”
Four months. “What do your friends say?”
Sasha shrugged. “I’m only in touch with a few of them. Their emails are mostly about what’s going on with school and stories about their boyfriends. I don’t think they understand why I’m up here.”
“Why did you stay when most of the others left? Camp was supposed to close on Labor Day. Certainly no one could have blamed you for leaving.”
She shook her head. “It’s not that,” she said. “I just couldn’t leave. It wouldn’t have seemed right just sitting in some class at my JC. After what happened, I wasn’t ready to leave.”
“What did you think of the Green Man?”
“I thought he was a great man.”
“Did everybody?”
She rubbed her hand along her plump cheek. “No.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t please all of the people all of the time,” she said.
“That’s an answer I’d expect from someone sitting in some class at a JC,” I said, “not from a savvy member of the movement.”
My teasing got Sasha to blush a little but didn’t gain me a better answer.
“I noticed your name on the tree-sitting list,” I said.
Sasha shrugged. “Everybody gets Methuselah duty.”
“How does that work?”
“You just sign up.”
“You tree-sat on September second.”
“So what?”
“Does anything about that day stand out in your mind?”
“Should it?”
I could feel Sasha being evasive again. But that didn’t bring me any closer to figuring out what had happened that day.
“You relieved someone named Barry. He had the seven-to-three shift. You got the three-to-eleven watch. It must have been windy.”
“It wasn’t bad to begin with,” she said. “But toward the end it was really beginning to blow.”
“When did it pick up?”
“Eight o’clock. Maybe nine o’clock.”
“Odd,” I said.
“What?”
“There wasn’t any Circle that night. Everyone said it was too windy. If the wind picked up that late, it shouldn’t have affected Circle.”
Sasha spoke too quickly. “It probably started earlier.”
“Was Teller on time that night?”
She didn’t immediately answer, looked as if she was stuck for what to say.
“Teller had the graveyard shift,” I said, “didn’t he?”
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“Teller didn’t feel well that night. Doc replaced him.”
“Doc? Had he ever tree-sat before?”
Sasha smiled. The thought seemed to amuse her. “No. He was just doing Teller a favor.”
“What’s so funny?”
“The idea of Doc tree-sitting. He’s always trying to be so scientific.”
“Does he hang around camp much?”
“Only during mealtimes.” Then Sasha smiled again. “And when Jane was here.”
I feigned ignorance. “Who was Jane?”
“His summer romance. Everybody around here seems to have had one.” She looked at me, perhaps a bit hopefully. “Maybe I’ll luck out in the fall.”
“Did Jane leave around Labor Day?”
Sasha thought for a few seconds. “Before that. End of July, I think.”
“Why?”
“Who can figure it? Maybe some people just don’t take to no running water, outhouses, mosquitoes, and a lot of baked beans.”
“Was that it?”
Sasha avoided my gaze. “It wasn’t like I knew her that well,” she said.
“You’re not your sister’s keeper?”
“Exactly.”
“Come on, Sasha,” I said. “Give.”
“It doesn’t sound right,” she said. “You’re an outsider. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“Jane wasn’t—hip,” Sasha said, not sure how to begin her story, or end it.
How had Doc described her? He said she liked to go around reciting Joyce Kilmer poetry. Definitely not hip.
“And she got pretty upset at some of the things that were going on.”
“Things?”
“I can’t explain.”
I could feel Sasha’s dilemma, wanting to tell me, yet not wanting to betray those around her. But why her embarrassment? Then I remembered.
“Did she go to one of the Green Man’s ceremonies?”
Sasha looked relieved. She didn’t know I had known. “Yes,” she said. “She was disgusted.”
“Disgusted that the Green Man was walking around without clothes, and invoking the spirits of the woods, and conducting rituals?”
“Disgusted with everything. She freaked out. We told her it was all in fun, that it was just a way of remembering the forests, and how they were once holy, but she didn’t want to hear that. She thought it was perverted and decided to leave. Jane was twenty going on twelve. It’s usually the other way around.”
“Did you ever attend any of the ceremonies?” I asked.
Sasha shook her head. “I was curious,” she said, “but I didn’t. I guess I like my clothes on.” Then in a little voice she added, “Most of the time.”
I couldn’t tell whether she was making a pass at me or not, so I did as I had been taught in the woods: I offered her my hand.
We held hands for a few minutes, listened to the wind whistling against her tent. It wasn’t a summer romance, but it felt good anyway.
21
I GOT INTO the pickup, and started to drive. I didn’t have any preconceived notion of where I was traveling. When the road signs started popping up showing the mileage to San Francisco, I should have been surprised. Part of me thought it was a big mistake to be leaving Humboldt County, but I knew I needed a day or two to think. I had to get away from the redwoods or I’d never be able to see the forest for the trees.
The puzzles played over and over in my mind. There was plenty to piece out, considerations that left room for collusion and conspiracies. I thought about the gaps, and who the Green Man’s death would have benefited most, and why he had had to die.
I don’t think I noticed the WELCOME TO SAN FRANCISCO sign, and I would swear that I didn’t have any conscious thoughts about visiting Golden Gate Park, but somehow I found myself there. Bewildered, I looked around. This wasn’t any time to be traipsing around a park. But maybe that’s what I need, I thought. A day away. I got out and started walking. My legs knew where to go.
The Golden Gate Park is situated on over a thousand acres and features museums, cultural exhibits, and open space. There is a Japanese tea garden, an aquarium, a planetarium, and an arboretum. I didn’t go to any of those places. I went to the John McLaren Rhododendron Dell.
McLaren had moved from Scotland to California in 1870. When he saw the redwoods, he fell in love. He said he wanted to plant trees, es
pecially redwoods. McLaren didn’t think small. He announced that during his lifetime he hoped to plant one million trees. By the time he died in 1943, at age ninety-seven, he had planted his one million and then some.
In many ways the Golden Gate Park is McLaren’s legacy. When he became the park’s chief gardener in 1887, its area consisted mostly of sand dunes. Through his ingenuity in building walls and pumping water and creating landscapes, McLaren sculpted one of the great parks of the world.
San Francisco’s own Green Man was not without his quirks. He was fanatical about some things. McLaren hated statues, thought the true monuments should be his trees and plants. Whenever the City put statues in his park (“stookies,” he called them), the dour Scotsman tried to hide them with his plantings.
McLaren would not have approved of the stookie erected to him at the rhododendron dell, but he would have loved the twenty acres and over 140 varieties of rhododendrons his statue overlooked. In his lifetime he had seen to the planting of over five thousand species in the park, had created life out of dust.
And what of youthful vows? McLaren had never forgotten his intention to grow redwoods. I went to admire the grove he had raised from seed. His father had often told McLaren that, if he had nothing to do, he should always go out and plant a tree, because it would grow even while he slept. McLaren had put his redwood seeds in the Golden Gate’s ground when he was eighty years old. When he died seventeen years later, his redwoods stood thirty feet high. In his long sleep since, they have grown much higher.
I sat in the park for a few hours and thought about McLaren and the redwoods. McLaren hadn’t wanted his park to be merely a showpiece, a place that people couldn’t enjoy. One of his demands when he took the job was that there were to be no KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs in his park. Around me Frisbees were flying, and babies were crawling, and people were reading, and lovers were kissing. No one was keeping off the grass.
With the sun setting, I decided to go home. There are about fifty hills in San Francisco, give or take a couple. The figure is contested, because residents of the city like to make mountains out of their molehills. In the early days of San Francisco, no one wanted to live on a hill. A slope that you had to trudge up wasn’t anybody’s idea of a prime location. The poor were relegated to the nosebleed seats until mechanization made the ascents easier and the nabobs discovered the views, and realized how nice it was to look down on the world from their castles in the sky. Like Jack and Jill, the poor were eventually sent tumbling down the hills. Or at least most of them.
