The Beggar's Garden

by Michael Christie

  “You’re growing a beard,” Dennis said.

  “It’s growing,” Sam said. “How much I have to do with it is debatable.”

  Dennis checked each of the car’s three mirrors, even though they were alone on open highway. “Look, Sam, I don’t hold it against you. Hell, I’ve always liked you, and God knows Gretchen and I have had our spats, but I’ve got to tell you that you have my daughter all twisted around.”

  “She’s the one who’s still on vacation.”

  “Son, I know you haven’t had it easy. I lost my parents early on so I know the feeling, like there is no home left in the world, but you’ve got to give Anna a chance to think things through.”

  “Thanks, but I’m not really in the market for fatherly wisdom, Dennis. And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t offer my wife any, either. She’s already got enough wisdom of her own to deal with.”

  Dennis shook his head. “I just hope you are happy with yourself,” he said as he clicked a tiny box hung from his sun visor that retracted a wrought-iron gate from the mouth of his two-mile gravel driveway. When they reached the house Sam informed Dennis flatly that he was indeed quite happy with himself and levered open his door.

  Anna jogged out to meet him in a jean dress he failed to recognize. She’d cut her hair—how exactly, Sam couldn’t say, but it was angular and ill-suited to her easily flushed, curvy cheeks. These details dispelled any of the confidence he’d been able to scavenge during his flight; they spoke either of a dress rehearsal for a new life or of a regression to an old one.

  “I like this,” she said tugging on his beard, enough for him to wince.

  “It’s not a joke,” Sam said.

  “Didn’t say it was. It’s cute,” she said, nearly giggling. Her apparent glee also unnerved him. She had a way of becoming giddy as she approached the summit of an anxiety. Though he’d visited the house before, she commenced a jolly tour.

  At dinner, Cricket viewed him from beneath her party hat with a mixture of pity and skepticism, as if he were a thoroughbred limping to its trailer after a race. Earlier, she’d looked up from a book and called to him but then went rigid when he lifted her warm frame to his chest. While Sam ate, Anna’s mother, Gretchen, moved about the kitchen and scooped various salads of grilled vegetables onto the plates of Anna’s three sisters and their athletic husbands. Dennis leaned back in his chair at the head of the table with a self-satisfied look. Perhaps it was that he’d grown up in a house of silent, brooding suppers eaten with a book, or in one’s own room, but Sam had always felt interrogated and judged by the expectations of festivity.

  After dinner, they all sat in Dennis’s basement home theatre for a viewing of Cricket’s favourite animated movie. When it was over, Cricket tore into her presents with a feral tenacity. Dennis had given her a hand-tooled child-sized saddle that was wrapped in pink butcher paper tied with twine, and he insisted on strapping it to his back to go galloping her around the room, whinnying. Sam had been so consumed with getting Isaac settled that he’d neglected to buy his daughter a present, so he’d stopped at a cash machine in the airport and withdrawn one thousand dollars, which he stuffed into a deposit envelope procured from the same machine.

  “Good work, Sam,” Anna said, as Cricket fanned the bills with a somewhat horrified expression. “Thoughtful.”

  After the gift-giving, he and Anna slipped out for a walk on her father’s ranchland. Sam kicked at dense tufts of bristly grass and nearly began a series of doomed, potentially spiteful sentences that he thought better of. They ascended a long rise of dusty ground that banked east in its climb up the ridge before halting at a post-and-rail cattle fence that ran for miles in each direction. Past the fence was a steep grade that fell into a splayed valley of verdant grass where a few hulks of cattle stood chewing, inert as mailboxes. The spring sun was weak, but Sam was winded and Anna had produced a dark spade shape on the upper back of her T-shirt. When they reached the fence she stepped ahead and put her back to it in the way Sam had seen her lean on numerous bars in college.

  “I’ve enrolled Cricket at my old school—she’ll be starting in September.” This she said as if it were something they would both have to endure, like bombings, or a depression. This private school was, from what Sam had heard, a place where uniformed girls learned to beekeep and Nobel-laureate political science professors came to describe to the girls the workings of the Canadian parliament.

  “She likes her school,” Sam said.

  “A school is a school last I checked.”

  “What about her old friends?”

  “She’s already made a few new ones at equestrian camp.”

  “She’s been taking riding lessons? She’s terrified of animals!”

  “Dogs. She’s scared of dogs. And you’d have known about this if you’d returned some of our calls,” she said.

  “I’ve been busy with something, I’ve been doing some advising.”

  “Well, a guy named Alphonse called from your office. He said you haven’t been there in weeks. They were wondering if you were okay. Christ, Sam, if you are that busy advising someone else, you could just—”

  “It’s a business relationship, Anna. Nothing more. It’s about the only thing I can handle right now. And neither of you is exactly eager to talk to me anyway.”

  She gasped and appeared to consider saying something biting, then released a long breath and turned to face the valley.

  “I’ve made a decision,” she said. “I can’t live in Vancouver, but I might be able to live with you, on my terms.”

  Sam could hear her father’s authority behind her words and it riled him. “On whose ‘terms’ do you think I’ve been living for the past five years? Vancouver was your idea. You’re just too selfish to appreciate the sacrifices I have made.”

  “Why must the root of every problem exist entirely outside of you?” she said. “It seems a little suspicious, don’t you think? Seeing how you’re here too?”

  This was the kind of misdirection from the real topic of discussion that Anna had honed in law school. “You just can’t take criticism,” Sam said.

  “What you do is not criticism,” she said. “It’s vivisection.”

  Exhaustedly, she turned and started back down the hill. Sam followed some paces behind, his eyes cinching up from the low sun now dipping into the far-off hills.

  Back at the house they had more cake and Dennis popped some champagne. Anna spent the rest of the evening in a determined sulk, and Sam suffered the chattering inquiries of her sisters with a brittle smile.

  That night, he woke to blue spindles of light twisting on his ceiling, cast by the swimming pool that lay beyond the sliding door of his guest room. He rose and ascended the stairs to his daughter’s room and stood by her canopied bed. He hooked a whip of hair behind her neat ear, recalling that the only effective way to soothe her as a baby was to clamp her to his chest and jiggle her with the vigorous, nearly imperceptible speed of a paint mixer. Forgetting his beard, he kissed her and she batted groggily at her cheek with a wrist.

  Sam knew his marriage was in a condition way past hope. His terror he now reserved for the life in store for Cricket. If they separated, she would be unscrewed from him, every minute of every day not spent with her a counter-clockwise crank. She was a happy, adventuresome kid who would adapt, and as there were simply more of them here, she’d be helpless to the magnetism of Anna’s familial cabal. Sam set himself down on the carpet at the foot of Cricket’s bed, inhaling a dusty puff that rose from the thick, white pile. He considered for a moment relocating to Calgary— he could implant himself on the periphery of their lives, perhaps retain possession of at least a pittance of their affections—and admitted this to be his only recourse if Anna decided to stay.

  Sam left early the next morning and checked into a motel beside the airport. He spent almost a week there, stacking greasy room-service plates outside his door and taking shrivelling hour-long showers where, in the dizzying steam and torrential fu
ry of the motel’s Herculean water pressure, he held tight to the grippy stainless-steel bar affixed there for the disabled. Emerging pink and flagellated, Sam would crawl into the tightly made bed in search of refuge from the polar climate visited upon the room by an inadjustable air conditioner. He’d kick the sheets out from the corners and behold channels that advertised pay-for-view movies in short, entertaining nuggets, all he could stand to watch.

  On the plane, Sam offered himself the sad consolation that he hadn’t told Anna about Isaac. He could only imagine her lawyerly unpacking of the ethics of what he was doing. He was using him. He was enacting a dubiously selfish plot in order to convince himself, and her and Cricket and everyone else, that he was actually a good person—a point that Sam couldn’t say wasn’t entirely true.

  When Sam returned home and opened the gate into his wife’s garden, he couldn’t believe what was there. Hoses were spritzing a fine mist skyward, sending shimmering sails of rainbow light to unfurl across the yard. Each of the beds was meticulously weeded, the earth black and freshly turned with ruby worms straining for air. New tomato plants were carefully staked in beds that had previously been empty. A few lavender bushes had exploded in a purple froth and there was a walkway that Sam didn’t remember, made of flat polished stones that meandered from the peeling side door of the shed all the way to the rear of the house. Even the grass bore a lush, perky resilience. “Wow,” Sam said.

  “I think you might have a nitrogen problem,” said Isaac, appearing behind him in a dirty undershirt and cut-off trousers. “Too little, I mean, and too much potash. I got you a compost going over there. But if you want, you could piss on the beds. It might help. That’s what I been doing.”

  Isaac pointed a trowel over Sam’s shoulder. “That there parsley’s gone to seed, don’t blame me, nothing I could do, you should eat it up soon as you can. Oh, and you wanna wrap that elm in foil this year or the army worms will strip it clean come winter.”

  That evening, they pulled two wicker garden chairs from the rafters of the shed and sat out in the sweet night breeze drinking lemonade that Isaac had squeezed fresh.

  “You been gone a while. Which I guess could mean it went good or bad depending,” Isaac said.

  “Not the best,” Sam said, taking a long slug of lemonade.

  “She’ll come around.”

  “No,” Sam said. “Not if she’s smart she won’t.”

  They sat for a bit, watching tiny grey birds flit and dogfight amid Isaac’s handiwork. After a while, Isaac went and relieved himself into the kale bed at the side of the house.

  “I think I might have got the taste for sleeping indoors again,” he said, sitting back down. “And my hips feel a hell of a lot more spry not parked on the pavement all day.”

  “You know, I don’t mind having you around, really,” said Sam. “You could stay a while, keep up the garden, just until you find something else.”

  Isaac drew a slow breath. “Sam, what’s my balance running?” he asked.

  Sam crinkled his nose, then extracted his pocket notebook and descended the column of his neat script with a finger. “With this month’s interest, it looks like twenty-two hundred and some change.”

  “I been thinking I may go out to that crazy institution and try to drum up my brother. I never found nothing but trouble in this city besides, and with that much cash in my hand it might help if I had someone else to take care of. I never done so well fending on my own.”

  Sam drove to a twenty-four-hour teller. He had to call some tech guys at the bank to lift his thousand-dollar withdrawal limit so he could empty Isaac’s account. Before he left, Sam slipped a thousand from his own account into the wad.

  “Sometimes I didn’t even believe you’d actually give it to me,” Isaac said when Sam returned, clacking the edges of the bills on the garden table like a deck of cards.

  That night, Sam woke to a figure standing over his bed holding a garden spade.

  “Someone’s trying to get in,” Isaac said.

  Sam stopped his breath and strained his ears. He heard only Isaac’s wheezy inhalations. “In here?” Sam said, sleepily. “Why?” He rose to follow Isaac to the door, who slid the bolt lock back and nudged it open with the tip of the spade.

  Outside they discovered a group of raccoons rummaging a torn-open orange bag of yard clippings. They’d surprised them, and the largest one reared and bared its teeth but made no sound. Sam stood with the cool air licking him between the buttons of his pyjamas.

  Isaac drew the shovel over his shoulder like an axe. “Say the word,” he said.

  Sam raised his fist in a halting gesture he’d seen in Vietnam movies and took a step toward the hackled raccoon. Tiny stones bit into his naked heels. When Cricket was four she didn’t speak to him for nearly three weeks after he refused to let her try to pet some raccoons they saw in Stanley Park. It was common knowledge that raccoons were dangerous things, especially vicious when cornered or defending their young. In minutes they could cut a man to ribbons with their sharp furtive claws. But looking down into the face of this particular beast, Sam wasn’t so sure. It seemed to him more like a gentle, nomadic creature. A lonely thing. Something that would rather live at night off table scraps and garbage than face the roaring bustle and endless conflict of the day. And this was its little family, he supposed, judging by the way the smaller ones skulked at its haunches. Really, it looked more weary than anything as it completed its appraisal of them and settled back on all fours. Then it swung its white snout toward the garage of Sam’s neighbour, mustering a final glance over its shoulder, holding Sam and Isaac in the hollows of its eyes before ushering its family beneath a camper van.

  “Whew,” Isaac said when they were back in bed, and Sam heard the slosh of his jam jar.

  In the morning Sam woke and Isaac was gone, just a gamey smell on the bedroll that he’d folded up and tied neatly with a shoestring. Sam sat out in the garden awhile. A few frigates of white cloud inched west toward the ocean. Fragrant wafts tore through the lanes between the houses and rustled the leaves of his garden with a pleasing hush that reminded Sam of rough hands passing over soft skin. After some time, he stood and clicked open the side gate and walked around to the front of his house. He climbed the three steps, took a little jump, and drove his brown loafer into the centre of his front door.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to:

  Linda Svendsen, Rhea Tregebov, Maureen Medved, Jen Farrell, Conan Tobias, Bryce Firman, Arnie Bell, Jackie Bowers, Leslie Remund, Sheryda Warrener, Claire Tacon, Michael John Wheeler, Sheila Wilkes, Dennis LeDoux, Lee Henderson, Iris Tupholme, Jennifer Lambert, Stephanie Fysh, and my agent, Anne McDermid, for their invaluable contributions;

  Alex Schultz for his incisive editorial ministrations;

  Benji Wagner, Dylan Doubt, and Rick McCrank for their friendship;

  my brother, Jason Christie, for his expertise and encouragement, and my father, David Christie, for his love, support, and the unlimited use of his library;

  my dearest, Cedar and August.

  Copyright

  The Beggar’s Garden

  Copyright © 2011 by Michael Christie.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

  EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40543-0

  Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  FIRST EDITION

  The following stories have been previously published in slightly different form: “Goodbye Porkpie Hat,” in subTerrain Magazine and The Journey Prize
Stories (vol. 20); “The Quiet,” in Taddle Creek; and “The Extra,” in Vancouver Review.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

  2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M4W 1A8

  www.harpercollins.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information is available upon request

  ISBN 978-1-55468-829-6

  HC 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  About the Publisher

  Australia

  HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

  25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)

  Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

  Canada

  HarperCollins Canada

  2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor

  Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

  New Zealand

  HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

  P.O. Box 1 Auckland,

  New Zealand

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz

  United Kingdom

  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road

  London, W6 8JB, UK

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

  United States

  HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

  10 East 53rd Street

  New York, NY 10022

  http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com