The Garden of Blue Roses

by Michael Barsa

  "Is there anything else I can get you before you go?" Phil asked.

  I paused, wondering if I could salvage something yet—an insurance policy, so to speak. "Actually . . ." I smiled meekly. "You wouldn't have any sodium nitrate fertilizer, would you?"

  It was simple enough to find information at the local library concerning the impact of sodium nitrate on ornamental plants. In a monograph entitled "Soil Fundamentals," Dr. Willis Greene writes that "sodium ions increase the density of clay and can lead clayey soils to assume a cement-like hardness." Mrs. Meg McDonald, in her seminal work Your Perfect Rose Garden, suggests that "to keep from burning the rose, apply inorganic fertilizers to moist soil and avoid spilling fertilizer on the bud union. If this occurs, wipe off fertilizer at once!" Both sources agreed that over-use was harmful because sodium nitrate was concentrated and fast-acting. "No more than a light dusting of nitrates, followed by a good watering," says Mrs. McDonald. "Or else you'll quickly drown your roses in nutrients. You can have too much of a good thing!"

  I returned home and parked the MG in the garage just as it had been before. I left the fertilizer in the trunk. I was taking no chances. The workmen's truck was gone, as was the Peugeot, but Henri may have dropped-off Klara and Marta—they might be watching through the windows. I walked into the entrance hall. "Hello?" Nothing. Still I didn't move. The emptiness weighed on me. Because no place was truly empty. There was history, memory, and I began to see them—the ghosts of Mother and Father flitting across the tiles. They were getting ready for that last reading at the Barnes & Noble in Manchester. "Don't forget your coat," Mother said. Father didn't reply. He was more distant and self-absorbed than usual. Maybe he was drunk. Music from Klara's bedroom trickled down the stairs—brooding, low, romantic—Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, as I knew from her long-ago lessons. Father was listening to it intently, like it was some kind of code. Klara had been anxious all day, knocking at his attic door, yelling that she'd steal a key. Did Mother have a clue what was going on? Did she even care? She planted a kiss on my forehead and said: "Be a good boy." Father nodded as if he agreed with her, then turned to me, his mouth open, eyes bleary, some painful pretense to profundity shambling across his lips. But in the end not a sound emerged. He couldn't seem to muster it. Then they were gone. I watched them march across the driveway, watched the Volvo pull away and their footprints fill with snow and the silence as the whole world slumbered. That's when I retreated to my study and my tiny Greek.

  Finally they came.

  Tires squealed across the driveway. I'd drifted into the kitchen and was consuming a tall glass of water to flush away the memories. The front door burst open. I heard Klara and Henri conversing in urgent whispers and Marta's protesting moans. Heavy footsteps on the stairs. Henri's insistence on medicine. "It will help you sleep." Then the kitchen door swung open and there he stood, bottle in hand, his thin red lips an O of surprise.

  "Milo?"

  I closed my eyes. I needed to be strong, I told myself, to not succumb to his charms as easily as Klara had, for I was fighting for my—our—future, the future that had been so achingly close before he arrived. "I can see you're disappointed," I said, looking at him straight on, studying that chiseled, suntanned face.

  He smoothed a hand over his ponytail. "Nothing could be further from the truth. I am only sorry we've not had a chance to talk. Perhaps after I've given Marta her medicine?"

  He moved past me to the sink, his rough veined hands pulling a glass from the drying rack and filling it with water. I watched him, how carefully he moved, how conscious of being watched, and while he was preoccupied I sent a whisper across his sweat-damp back, an insinuated magical word:

  "Malevolent."

  I told myself it was a powerful word, one that Father always loved, with its shades of reverent and violent and malignant. Yet as soon as I'd uttered it, I realized my mistake. Because suddenly it was more than a word. More than a spoken one, I mean. I saw it hanging in the air like an invisible word cloud. What was happening? Henri turned and flashed his yellow teeth. Then the word was gone, bits of its dismembered letters dribbling down his chin. I saw a footless a, severed m, decapitated e. I backed up, moved a chair between us, a flimsy barrier that I was sure would do no good. Yet I clung to it for something tangible to hold onto.

  Is this how a fictional character reveals himself?

  "Are you alright?" he asked. He'd become absolutely still, a rough hard trunk of a man with branch-like hands, the scar oozing sap across the knotted base of his thumb. His body was all sinews and crooked angles, a tree growing in poor soil.

  "I . . ." No, I wouldn't give him more words to chew and spit out, so I just shook my head and watched him bend toward the door, keeping an eye on me as if I might hurl the chair at him at any moment. "I am sorry if the garden feels like—an imposition," he said, before smiling and flicking his tongue.

  It took only a moment. Afterwards I wondered if it had happened. If any of this was real. I rubbed my eyes and squinted. Still I couldn't tell. It was like those times when I see a familiar word and fail to recognize it, when the letters themselves can't coalesce.

  "Have you considered a vacation?" he said, a hand already on the door. "Going someplace to relax? I know of a place outside of Burlington where they are very kind. A wonderful facility. If you like, I can place a call."

  Go away. Leave us.

  He gave a sly smile, a slight shift of his mobile mouth as if he'd heard my thoughts.

  "I am only trying to help," he went on. "To make things easier for you."

  He turned to leave, and that's when I decided to risk more speech: "You mean until you have me arrested? Or killed?"

  This time the words swirled around him too fast for his snatching jaws. He smiled again, which I didn't expect—the eager expression of a boy with a slingshot who's finally spotted his elusive squirrel. He must have been relieved to finally know what he was up against, to have the battle lines so unambiguously drawn. But was I? The man remained a cipher, and that was the trouble. I thought of what he'd told Klara earlier—that Father had inspired him. Inspired as in breathed life into? That would be just the joke Father would make, a double-entendre to hide the truth in plain sight.

  "I understand you had a difficult relationship with your father," he replied with a hint of wary tease.

  He shifted shapes again, leaning against the countertop with his shoulders hunched to make himself appear like a rattlesnake about to strike. "You cannot escape him, am I right?" he said. "He influences you still? Yes, I can see that. You have a powerful imagination, just like him. In fact both you and your sister have a touch of the artist about you."

  "What are you making her do?"

  "No one can make anyone else do anything."

  "Are you saying she's . . . ?"

  I closed my eyes. I remembered marching off to look for them. That workman dialing his cell phone. "You knew I was coming," I said. "In the woods."

  But when I opened my eyes again, he was gone.

  The next thing I knew I was in my room, writing the whole strange scene in my secret diary. Again I wondered if any of it had been real. Still I kept thinking about what he'd said at the end: No one can make anyone else do anything. Klara's sympathy for me in the woods had given me a glimmer of hope. Only now I realized it wasn't that simple. The fact that they knew I was coming meant the entire thing could have been staged—to make me think Klara was an ally.

  Yes, the more I thought about it, the more I realized this might be a classic John Crane plot, where nothing was what it seemed. After all, it was Klara herself who'd always insisted the car crash had been an accident. She'd refused to admit that Father might have been afraid of something at the end. Was that because he'd been afraid of her? Or of Henri? Or of them both? Had Father finally realized the power of his fiction—the power to literally create a life that leapt off the page and crossed over into the so-ca
lled real world?

  The questions wouldn't stop. I had to do something. They'd overwhelm me if I didn't. So I peered into the hallway. It was empty. My mind screamed to stay inside my room where it was safe, but no place was truly safe anymore. Cautiously I crept out. Past Klara's room, past oil paintings of Father's literary heroes looming from shadowy nooks—Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe—between guest rooms that I had no memory of ever being used. I opened the first one. A single band of sunlight leaked through its wooden shutters. I imagined dead moths trapped between the slats, crumbling if you breathed on them. Otherwise it was empty, a pile of unused furniture covered in sheets. The others were the same—all except Mother and Father's at the end of the hall. That's where I finally found her, sprawled atop their bed, uniform disheveled, skirt riding up her bare puffy legs. Marta had once lived with us in the servant's quarters off the kitchen, and a memory came back to me of watching her sleep, trying to decide if she was dead. Why had she moved away? Had she been running from something too? It was impossible to know. She never talked about herself—about anything, really—but I hoped she'd talk now to me.

  "Milo? Is it you?" she whispered.

  I went to her side. One foot was still in the boot and there were bandages on her arm from drawing blood. "Are you alright?"

  "Don't worry about me."

  Her eyes were heavy. I knew I didn't have much time. I bent low, nearly overwhelmed by her animal scent of sweat and fear. "Did you notice the gardener's real name at the clinic? On one of those forms he had to fill out?"

  "He was so nice. The doctor was his friend."

  "What's his name, Marta?"

  "One time the doctor called him . . ." She moved her mouth. A long sibilance emerged: "tthhhhh." She smiled. Not at me, at something beyond. I turned. There was the ladder. I had another idea. "This doctor . . ." I began.

  Too late. She was already gone, her mouth open, her chest barely moving. I could only imagine what Henri had given her—what he'd conspired with his doctor-friend to do. I draped a dusty blanket loosely over her. Then something drew me to the balcony. I opened the door. Night was rapidly descending. Trees were becoming silhouettes. Nature itself was turning dark and inward.

  I tried to sleep that night. But I should have realized I couldn't, that my dreams would conspire against me. In my mind I saw Klara enter my room, her face like a wooden mask in a museum: Helmet Mask, Kingdom of Bamum, 19th Cent., Cameroon. "Would you like supper?" she asked. Then Henri pushed past her and sat on the edge of my bed. "It pains me to see you so unhappy."

  "You're a fraud," I told him in the dream. "A fiction."

  He untied his hair, shaking it loose like a girl. His neck was thin and red, his skin blotched from the sun. "Do you think that only those things in your history books are true? What about belief? Faith?"

  "You're making Klara think the most terrible things about me."

  "It doesn't have to be this way, Milo."

  He smiled like the daguerreotype of a snake-oil salesman holding up a flask of "Peterson's Copper Canyon Snakeroot Cure-All" in George Lyon's Illustrated History of How The West Was Won. The figure in the daguerreotype had a thick moustache and more muted expression, but one that contained the same promising quality, in all senses of the word.

  "You can choose to be happy with us, or unhappy without us. It's up to you."

  "And what if I want nothing to do with you?"

  He leaned close, his smile becoming lopsided as if he were daring me to recognize him, as if to say that's impossible now. "I've seen your models," he said. "You are precise, with a flair for the dramatic. I think you'd be a natural gardener, just like her. Why not join us?"

  "Because you don't really want me. This is all a lie."

  "What's your favorite color?"

  "My favorite—?"

  "Color."

  I paused, uncertain where this was going. "Blue."

  His eyes sparkled beneath those sleepy lids. "I've always said that blue is the most underrated color in the garden. Red, pink, yellow, everybody uses these colors. But blue? Now there's a challenge. There are beautiful blue hyacinths and irises and crocuses and daffodils, but did you know that no one has yet been able to breed a blue rose? It is the holy grail in roses. The first to breed a blue rose, he will be someone who is remembered. Our garden is already ground-breaking for so many reasons, why not try for the blue rose too? We could have a corner of the garden devoted to nothing except that. Think about it, Milo. Think about it."

  He reached up and placed a hand on the side of my neck. His skin was cool. Mine, by contrast, burned.

  It took me a moment to realize I'd been dreaming. I could still see Henri's face hovering close, still smell his musky incense-laden scent and hear his unspoken challenge: impossible. Yes, that's what my dream was telling me, that there was something impossible about him—that he was the blue rose. I pushed back the covers and got to my feet. I peered through the curtains. A sliver of moon had risen high in the night sky; it suffused everything—the driveway, garage, woods—in a dim blue light. The Peugeot was gone. I crept down the hallway and listened, first at Klara's door, then at Marta's. I heard nothing. Both were fast asleep.

  I put on a black cotton turtleneck and trousers, then floated down the murky stairs into the kitchen. I opened a drawer and removed the heavy scissors that Mother had once used for her artistic projects. From another drawer I took a thick rubber flashlight and a garbage bag, and from the cupboard an old plastic cup I knew no one would miss.

  I stole across the entrance hall and crept out the front door, into a cricket-filled night whose constellations hung low outside the soft aura of the moon. I recognized these from Klara's drills: Draco and Cepheus and Leo Minor. I also saw what's commonly known as the Big and Little Dippers, which were of course not constellations but rather parts of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor—the big and little bears. I could only hope there'd be no bears tonight.

  The flashlight's beam extended forward like a lance. I picked out the garage. The crickets went silent as I approached, their bug-eyes and quivering antennae alert behind every tree. I lifted the door. The MG's trunk was barely visible. I slipped in the key, creaked it open with the hushed deliberation of a priest. My light washed over the fertilizer sack with its picture of a jaunty mustachioed farmer in overalls. I raised the scissors. He didn't flinch. I stabbed him in the face—again, again. Then I thrust the cup into the gaping wound, scooped out fertilizer and added it to the garbage bag. I took only half the sack—that was all I could carry. I found one of those funnels for changing oil and a pair of old work gloves. I slipped on the gloves and carried the bag and funnel to the rear of the house. The old Roman glowed a cadaverous green, moon-shadows falling across his eyes. It lent him the same haunting surprise one sees in photos of dead troops. And here I was, about to add corpses to the heap.

  I began with a cluster of yellow roses near the patio wall. They were in full bloom. Henri must have planted them that way. I wasn't surprised. I dug out the soil near its roots and with the funnel carefully replaced it with sodium nitrate. Then I doused the buds. I could practically hear the flowers scream. I repeated this procedure with the others—the pinks, whites, purples, reds—replacing their soils with this binding agent, choking them with "too much of a good thing." I worked for almost three hours until my back ached and I could hardly breathe through all the dust. Still I was careful to cover up the sodium nitrate with a thin layer of soil to conceal my handiwork. I felt sure no one could tell what I'd done, how I'd break Henri's spell. Yes, Klara would have to doubt Henri now—she'd see the failure of their garden to thrive as symbolic. We'd both been immersed in novels long enough to feel the heavy weight of symbolism.

  Suddenly I heard something. A footfall.

  I froze. The night felt alive. Like the trees were aware of my presence. But I couldn't see a thing. I glanced at the house.
For a moment I thought I saw Marta in the window—saw her eyes trained on me with the same hovering inscrutability she'd displayed when I was a child. But when I shined my flashlight, no one was there.

  Keith breathed it in: the trees, the rocks, the humid earth,

  The perfect place for nature's sweet rebirth

  As "Devil's Garden." So he dragged her body by the hair,

  A body he had touched and loved and dared

  To tell the truth to. Truth: the cold indifference of the stars

  To us, our hopes and dreams and fears, our feelings we're on par

  With God, not dust, recycled dirt, and food for worms.

  She couldn't hear it, couldn't come to terms,

  Her shrunken face, protective hands across her belly,

  "Think of the future," she had said. He had to tell her:

  It wasn't real. So now, her flesh excised in steaming piles,

  Her belly packed with dirt and face a mild

  Reproach, he could relax, and smoke, and run his blade

  Across his left (or sinister) thumb, not green! But red, with blood,

  A hallowed nothingness that gave aborted birth

  To his profoundest work: MOTHER / EARTH.

  In a nearby park stands a wooden sign commemorating the massacre of Baylor's Dragoons. Hardly anyone knows this history. During the Revolutionary War a band of British soldiers detached from Cornwallis' main army and stumbled upon several Americans on their way to join Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys. The Americans were under the command of a local blacksmith named George Bellows Baylor—an enterprising fellow who thought the future of weaponry lay in hand-manufactured swords. He'd outfitted a motley crew of farmers with his own shining cutlasses, training them to parry and thrust in high officer style. Not surprisingly the British made quick work of these fools and collected their fancy weapons as prizes, one of which still hangs against a blue velvet board in an obscure corner of the historical museum in Bennington.