Living at the End of Time

by John Hanson Mitchell

  There was another scyther in the neighborhood who had a curious style—my friend Megan Lewis, the woman who had the reputation of causing plants to flourish just by staring at them. She lived in an old house on the western slope of the ridge, and she also mowed her grounds with a scythe.

  Early on a Saturday morning not long after I had talked to Sven, I went over to her place for a visit. On the southwest side of the ridge about twenty years ago timber operators had cut over a section of the slope, and the area had grown up into an impassable thicket. Megan lived on a direct line on the other side of the tangle, but to get there I always had to skirt the thicket, cut through one of the little hollows, and then take the old carriage road through a hall of dark pines to her property. She owned about forty acres, including two hay fields which she rented out to local farmers. I would come upon these first, beautiful little clearings surrounded on four sides by woodlands. Beyond, on the west side, there was a thin woods of larger trees, and beyond that were Megan’s gardens, all of them in varying degrees of cultivation—tangled berry patches, a small nursery and seed bed for shrubs and young trees, a lonely little fountain overgrown with English ivy. Here and there stood a mossy garden statue. Beds of untended flowers were interspersed with newer plots and patches of mowed ground. In one of these plots I found Megan herself, leaning on a rake. She was in some ways a human version of her gardens—half-tended, her hands dirty with good soil, strands of gray hair falling from under a straw hat, and bits of grass and seeds clinging to her. She was dressed in her customary shirtwaist dress, which she seemed to wear whenever she was out working in her garden, as if the sacred act of gardening required proper attire. Sometimes, in fact, she seemed dressed for church whenever she gardened, but she was a considered pantheist, having long before rejected formal religion.

  I told her I had seen Sven and he had shown me how in Sweden they had cut fields in a circle.

  “Is he that old man you see walking to town with his shirt off sometimes?” she said.

  “The very one.”

  “Now there’s a good man. What does he do?”

  “Well, he grows potatoes and zucchini, eats dinner at midday, and walks to town once a day. That’s about all I know, except that he grew up on a farm in Sweden and worked as a grounds-keeper for someone after he came to this country.”

  “Well, he’s a good man,” she said again. “The world needs more walkers.”

  She went back to raking, letting me know, without saying so directly, that she had no time to talk to me that day. I said goodbye and moved on.

  “Come again,” she said.

  “You come to my house,” I said. “You must see my little gardener’s cottage I’ve built behind my old house. You’ll like it. I stole the design from Andrew Jackson Downing.”

  “Well, it must be good then. I’ll come.”

  There were a lot of rumors about Megan Lewis in the community. The most prevalent was that she had been an actress in New York City in the late forties. She had had a modest success on the stage, it was said, but quit because of some scandal and retired to the country. People also said that in the 1950s there had been a constant flow of exotic guests from the big cities at her place. One morning one of the farmers who lived nearby saw a man in robes standing in his pasture declaiming Shakespeare to one of his cows. This same farmer claimed to have seen a horse-drawn carriage filled with “actors and actresses” in period costumes on the deserted road that ran between the highway and the lake on the west side of the ridge.

  I remember well my first conversation with Megan. “We heard you have been cutting your lawn with a scythe,” she said to me. “We heartily approve. I am sick to death of these noisy, smoking motors. They scare the rabbits and the mice.”

  Megan always used “we”—the royal “we”—referring, I supposed, to her husband, Charley, a man rumored to be a lawyer, but who seemed to spend most of his time repairing their house, with little to show for his efforts. The place was a wreck, the talk of the town. It was a marvelous conglomeration of architectural styles, starting with the colonial period and ending sometime in the 1930s. It was an accumulation of wings and porches and connecting sheds and barns, not one of which was entirely painted or perfected, but each of which was in the process, apparently, of being fixed up. “I like puttering” is the way Charley once explained his various projects to me. “To be finished is death.”

  Although Megan complained about their house, her gardens were in a similar state. She was forever digging up one bed of flowers to replace it with another of some other kind, and she seemed to have a horror of the close-cropped, neatly tended suburban yards that were fast becoming common in the town. “Charley’s failures notwithstanding,” she said, “I do indeed prefer these old ruinous barns to the new face in this town. Laurels and yews, yews and laurels—and clean green lawns. My God, can they think of nothing else to plant?”

  She was outspoken and opinionated, a woman of sensible shoes who knew all the songs of local birds and frogs and who used to allow the blacksnakes and milk snakes to winter in her cellar. “They hate the cold as much as I do, poor things,” she said.

  Normally Megan and I would talk in her yard. But one November afternoon she invited me in for tea. Charley and Megan had an English cast to their personalities. Tea was one of their many small rituals, and it was done properly in fine old pots, with bone china cups and saucers, and a little “bicky,” as Charley called his tea biscuit.

  It was at one of these teas that I learned that, appearances to the contrary, Charley and Megan had led a rather normal life, up to a point. They had two grown children; and Charley had indeed been a lawyer in Boston for some thirty years before he retired. On weekdays he would commute into the city from their “place,” and on nights and on weekends and holidays he would revert to putterer. I suspect he was not comfortable in either world.

  Megan was from New York, although she had lived in England for years in her youth and also in Tunisia. She had learned gardening from her mother, but early on she had thrown out traditional designs and attempted to bring to her land what she called her “wildings”—wildflowers that grew in the woods and old fields around her property.

  “I gave that up soon enough,” she told me. “It was a big mistake, I can tell you. These things have their place in the world. You tear them out, and they may or may not survive. But that’s not the point. We have to learn to let things alone.”

  She replanted, for the second time in her life, a traditional English country garden, with hollyhocks and delphiniums and foxgloves all along the little winding paths, which she kept mowed with a scythe. After that she let these newer plantings grow old, and then she more or less had what she wanted.

  “Eschew order. That’s what I say. Controlled disorder is the most harmonious landscape. Just look about you. Just look at the woods.”

  Megan had had a hard year. Charley had died of a heart attack not long before I started building my cottage, and she had been spending a lot of time with her daughter, who lived near the Adirondacks. I hadn’t seen much of her during the time I lived away from the ridge, but since their house was rarely empty—students, renters, family members, and weekend guests who somehow stayed on for months were always living there—I presumed she must have had plenty of company and solace. But she did come to my cottage after I invited her.

  One Sunday morning in August, when Jill Brown and I were eating breakfast in the meadow, I saw Charley’s old Peugeot tentatively poking its nose up the rutted driveway. Megan got out of the car slowly, fixed her hat, and began walking toward the cottage, not looking at anything, as if she had been there a thousand times. We hailed her from the meadow and she wandered over, but she was as distant as she had been the morning I invited her to come by. Jill had known Megan for years—in fact she had introduced me to her—but still Megan seemed oddly formal. There were none of her usual opinionated asides, no nasty little comments about the slow destruction of the town or about incompeten
t or corrupt local officials. She inspected the modest beginnings of my garden along the stone wall on the west side of the property and politely withheld comment. She had toast and coffee with us. She made small talk, but she seemed profoundly bored. Yet she didn’t leave.

  I began to tell her about some problem I had had while building my house, and was in the middle of a sentence when she broke in and changed the subject. “But this is actually quite nice back here,” she said, as if surprised. “You’ve got a crazy, mad way of life, simply building a little house back here behind your family when you have to separate—if you must separate. I mean, this is very good I suppose. Good for the children.” I saw Jill look up at her.

  “They love it here,” I said.

  “Well they might,” Megan said. “And this woods. You don’t let them go out there alone do you? All those nasty teddy bears and their picnics. You should stay on here,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know whether you mean to have a temporary place for yourself, but I wouldn’t leave here if I were you. You’ve got to hang on to things.”

  She picked up her empty coffee cup and put it down again. I poured her more from the pot by the fire.

  “Well, I really must go now,” she said.

  “Come again,” Jill said. “We always have Sunday morning breakfast here, except when it rains.”

  “But it is lovely here,” Megan said. “I want to tell you something.” She sat down, gathered her cup against her chest, but said nothing.

  “I’ve become addicted to this place,” I said.

  “It’s a good addiction.”

  “Sometimes I dream about the woods.”

  “I do, too. I dream that Charley is in there in the woods and I go looking for him and we meet. But I always have to leave, and he has to stay in there.” She paused. “Oh, my, I am sorry to bore you.”

  “Not at all,” Jill said. “We understand.”

  “But it is lovely. And you die, you know, when someone dies. I just want to say that. It’s flat—the sky, the garden, the world itself—just flat. But for some ungodly reason your heart keeps on beating and you eat and you sleep badly and you wake up and eat again and all the while the world just goes on.

  “Well, now, I am really going,” she said. “But it doesn’t need you, you should know that. This world I mean.” She nodded toward the dark wall of the woods behind us.

  I saw Jill’s hand dart out to Megan’s arm; Megan was on the verge of tears.

  “I love this ridge,” I said awkwardly. “I love this black wall of forest at midday. This is really one of the plainer pieces of land around here, probably. But you live here, you get to know it, and it has draw.”

  “It has its draw indeed,” Megan said, quietly.

  “Sometimes I have a feeling that this place, this actual spot where we are sitting is the center of the universe. It seems to me that anything can happen here—the beginning and the end . . .”

  She broke in again: “You are right; it is the center. But it doesn’t need you. I’ll tell you that much, it goes on in spite of you. And that’s its power.”

  “What power?” Jill asked.

  “To restore.”

  She was quiet again, and then she said dreamily, “Restore thy body and soul.” She laughed.

  “I haven’t been to church in fifty-five years, save when we buried Charlie. But I guess I have a religion. Quiet moments in a garden. Time in the garden. I suppose you would call it sacredness.”

  I had dinner one evening that same month with Higgins and Jane. After dinner we talked about the various ways in which different people, including homeless families, manage to survive. In passing Jane mentioned an old man who lived without electricity or running water in the house in which both he and his father had been born. It turned out she was talking about a man I already knew, Sanferd Benson of Concord. Jane was worried that Sanferd was going to die soon and take with him all his knowledge of nineteenth-century ways. She wanted to make a video tape of his story. Sanferd was profoundly shy, suspicious of even such simple technologies as a still camera (I took a photograph of him once and I could tell he was uncomfortable). In any case I agreed to talk to him about the project since I used to visit him regularly.

  I walked down the dirt road to Sanferd’s place a few days later, but as usual he wasn’t at the house. In an upstairs window a ragged shred of curtain was blowing in the wind, little swirls of dust were rising and settling in the sandy driveway, and a screen door was swinging loose. The only cars were the dead wrecks in the surrounding fields, parked there by Sanferd’s car-loving nephew. Sanferd was never around when I went looking for him; he would simply materialize, as if he had been watching all along from some hiding place.

  I found him in his strawberry patch, down the road from his house toward the Concord River. Sanferd was half blind; he wore smoky glasses he had repaired with tape and glue and little bits of wire, and he was tragically frail. He dressed always in baggy coveralls and a grim, blue-gray work shirt that smelled, even in summer, of kerosene and wood smoke, and he was rarely clean-shaven.

  Sanferd was a man of limited horizons. He was born the same year as my father, 1893, and although he lived only a few miles from Concord Center, he was one of the most sheltered, isolated people I have ever met. He had lived on the same small farm all his life, hardly ever left Concord, had never married, and, from what he told me, rarely even left home. Once a week in the early part of the century his father would take the wagon into town to buy supplies and Sanferd would go with him, waiting patiently at the store counter to be offered some small favor by his father or the shopkeeper. His primary connection with the outside world was the Concord River, which flowed past his land about two hundred yards from his house. While he worked the land near the river, he would sometimes see boats passing by. It was this activity on the river that accounted for one of the crowning experiences of his small life.

  Long ago there was a boathouse down the river from the Benson farm that rented rowboats and canoes. Sanferd was cutting hay in a nearby field one day when he heard a strange cackling coming off the river. He went down to the riverbank and saw two canoes, paddled by yellow-skinned men with slanted black eyes.

  “They were talking chicken,” Sanferd said. “And I was terrified. I hid in the bushes and watched them go by. I didn’t know they were Japanese people. Didn’t even know there was such a thing.”

  Once the flotilla had passed, he ran home and told his father, who explained to him the phenomenon of race. His world expanded.

  Once he got started, Sanferd was a nonstop talker, but never, in all the years that I knew him, did he invite me into his house to sit down. I would always find him outside, and we would talk outdoors standing up, sometimes for two hours straight. After an hour or so my legs would begin to give out, but Sanferd would show no sign of fatigue. In fact he seemed to gain energy, talking more rapidly as time passed, layering on more stories, stringing them out one after another without prompting.

  He was quieter than usual that day, so I decided to put off talking to him about the video tape, and since he was not forthcoming with his usual stories, I explained that I was headed out for a walk along the river and would see him later.

  On my way back from the river I met Sanferd’s nephew, Colburn, the old-car collector.

  “I’m worried about Uncle,” he said. “He’s been staying up late at night and sleeping in his chair in the day. Sometimes he walks down to the river in the dark.”

  Colburn Benson was Sanferd’s closest relative and his protector. Sometimes when I came to see the old man, Colburn would tell me he wasn’t home or that he was asleep. Then, mysteriously, Sanferd would appear from the barn, in bright spirits, talkative as usual.

  “A couple of friends of mine want to record some of your uncle’s stories on video tape,” I told him.

  “Forget it,” Colburn said. “He’s too sick. We’re going to have to take him to the hospital soon.”

  “What’s wrong?”


  “Just sick. He’s getting old.”

  “No symptoms?”

  “He doesn’t sleep at night, and then he wants to work all day in the strawberry patch. We got to protect him. He can’t be standing around telling strangers stories for some film or whatever it is. He might get sick and that would be the end. He’s ninety-four.”

  “Well, tell him about our idea anyway. Maybe he’d like it.”

  “Maybe he would,” Colburn said. “Maybe he wouldn’t.”

  Across the valley that month the workers at the Digital plant would appear each morning to put the finishing touches on their building. They would swarm over the construction site, carrying heavy materials, hammering, climbing along high scaffolding, driving immense earth-moving machinery, backhoes, cranes, and bulldozers. Supervisors and engineers in short-sleeved shirts and hard hats would stand looking at large sheets of blueprints and pointing at things.

  On my side of the valley things were quieter. On the twenty-sixth of August, crossing the meadow in the early evening, I noticed that the sky had turned a rich green. It seemed to merge with the forest in a uniform dome. Overhead I could see the fluttering silhouettes of feeding bats appearing and disappearing against the many shades of green. I would often see bats as I crossed the meadow at evening, but that night there seemed to be more than usual. They were everywhere, diving out of the pale heights into the darker green pools of the shaded depths just above the ground.

  A colony of bats used to live in an old musty horse barn behind the house in Centreville, Maryland, where my father was born. As a boy I would make a point of going out into the backyard on summer nights to watch them. Everything seemed so lush in those summers—the sky, the green wall of the vegetation, even the air seemed colored, infused as it was with the odor of boxwood and old rose. Bats always summon up the memory of those summer nights. Whenever I crossed the meadow with my children on summer evenings the year I lived in my cottage, we would select a few stones from the ground and throw them in the air in front of the bats and watch them dive to investigate. Sometimes it would seem to me, standing there in the pale evening while my children tossed stones to the sky, that this was the way the world should be—a simple life without praise or blame, casting lures to bats on green evenings.