by Steve Himmer
The air in the garden was crisp, and the apples in Mr. Crane’s orchard to the east of my glade were red and ripe and pulling their branches so close to the ground that whether I was meant to or not I reached up and plucked one to taste. The apple was dull, even drab, without the shine I’d come to expect, and it took me a moment to realize this was the first apple my mouth ever met without the mask of wax and chemicals, the first apple I’d eaten that was only and wholly an apple. That apple started my apple-eating life over, and I silently thanked Johnny Appleseed for his scattershot planting, for founding a nation on forbidden fruit.
Second Nature had experimented with an indoor orchard once; it was expensive, but the price included a service in which Orch-ease crop technicians (Orch-ease was a word I’d invented myself, though I’d never intended for it to be used; it was a daydreaming doodle seen by the wrong eyes) would come to the client’s chosen location throughout the seasons to hang plastic leaves and then blossoms, returning to replace them with plastic apples in advancing stages of color, then to pick the whole yield and haul them to storage along with the leaves until the next year’s cycle of seasons began.
Orch-ease hadn’t taken off, and no wonder. Who wants to stare at apples all day knowing they can’t be eaten, or to be reminded that the apples they are eating, the waxy, too-shiny supermarket produce they’ve purchased, is as far from the real thing as those plastic imposters? And Orch-ease had been costly, requiring all those site visits, so while only a man like Mr. Crane could afford a fake orchard, he could also afford the real thing.
As I walked home from the river, crunching my apple, I spotted a crew of men in orange vests and hard hats. They may have been the same crew that installed the river, or not, but they stood near my cave beside something that looked like a cement mixer with a long black hose running from it. As I drew closer I heard the whir and whine of motors and blowers inside the truck, and as I watched the men hoisted that hose and sprayed wet, sticky snow all over the top and sides of my cave, all over the ground by my door, and made a small pile—a drift, I suppose—in its mouth.
They were close to my cave, too close for me to pass unnoticed, not that they’d be surprised someone lived there. They must have noticed my pallet and possessions and home. I hid behind snow-blanketed blackberry bushes to watch them at work and to wait until I could slip past. My feet were freezing, and my fingers were too; I wasn’t dressed for winter in my short, sleeveless tunic.
The snowblower shuddered and shook while it spewed white foam into the air in thick streams that broke up and drifted back to the ground in soft flakes, softer and whiter than seemed possible from the horrible sound of that machine’s engine and its stink of burned oil and gas.
When the snow finally stopped blowing and the snowblower sputtered to a rattling stop, rattling almost as loud as my own cold bones, the workers wound up their hose and levered levers on the sides of the truck. I hoped the snow would prevent that truck’s tracks from taking too hard, and that I wouldn’t be left with a reminder of its intrusion for long.
The men lit cigarettes and stood smoking outside my home, talking and laughing. I couldn’t hear most of what they were saying, but it was something about Mr. Crane, something about how he’d demanded they not disrupt his estate, work out of sight, and where—as one worker put it—“that rich shit” could stick it. Then the other took off his hard hat and rubbed his bald head, and said something about Mr. Crane being in the newspaper that morning. He didn’t explain about what, he didn’t have to, because the other worker said yes, he’d seen it, too, and they both laughed.
The bald man holding his hat said more, but I caught just “only paper in town he doesn’t own.” Then they flicked their spent cigarettes into my fire ring (at least I could thank them for that), climbed into the truck, and were gone to other parts of the garden from which I could still hear the rumbling of men and machines. At last I could return on numb feet to my cave.
I’d never seen snow before, not in real life, and I was amazed it could come from machines. With the men working elsewhere, I took that chance to lay in the snow by my doorway, tumbling and rolling and slipping about, trying to make an angel the way I’d seen children do on TV, but I didn’t get it quite right: my snow angel looked more like the pedestrian figure on crosswalk signs.
I was bothered by the men blowing snow on my world, not by the snow but by the presence of the people who’d made it. I was always thrown off when Mr. Crane’s projects involved a disruption, a presence apart from my own. I liked that my meals came anonymously, I liked that I never saw who was maintaining the blackberry bushes and trees. So to see a whole crew of workers in orange vests, to hear the rumble and roar of snow machines and truck engines—or to have seen the crew making the river with bulldozers and diggers and dynamite—it always took a few days to recover, to put the intrusion out of my mind and for the garden to feel like my garden again.
Though for the moment, it wasn’t my garden. Not the way I usually knew it. The snow wasn’t any colder, really, than the river in the morning, but it was cold in a new way: the waters of the river are always moving, so the cold is like a cloud passing over. The chill of that snow hung on my body like some backwards blanket, but for all that was cozy in its cold way. I thought I could give myself up to that kind of cold, drift to sleep and forget to wake up, though maybe I thought so because it was numbing my nerves and my brain and everything else while I tried to create my first angel. Even my rash, which had flared on the short walk from river to home as my fiery thighs brushed together, had been cooled in the snow. There had been a bit of a sting and a shock in my balls as wet snow splashed up my tunic, but after those first startling seconds everything down there went quiet and calm, and I felt wonderfully still both in body and mind.
I thought of a painting I’d seen, or a photograph, maybe—or was it a scene from a movie?—of an old man in a dark coat and hat standing alone in a snow-covered field, hands in his pockets, the sky above him the same deep shade of white as the ground, and framed by a few skeletal trees filled with crows. I remembered wondering, as I’d looked at that image, whether birds hibernate in their trees. In the snow-covered garden, lying on the cold, thickened ground, I imagined myself in the man’s place, out standing in my field like a shadow cast on the white world.
But my fingers turned blue and my toes went numb—no wonder people wear socks and gloves in colder climates—so I went into the cave to warm up. I lit a bit of a fire in the smaller ring of stones I’d laid just inside the cave after getting rained on while cooking outside a few times. It was early for dinner, though the bucket containing my stew was already in its nook, leftover from lunch, with a ragged, hand-torn hunk of bread at its side. I set my feet against the outside of the stone ring, and as the rocks became warm a tingle went through my toes and soles, then that tingle grew painful, and I realized I’d let my body grow colder and more numb than I’d thought and now had burnt my bare feet. I’ve wondered, since then, how close I came to getting real frostbite from that fake snow, and losing some of my toes.
It was cold that night in my cave. Whether it was meant to happen that way or not, whether the truck and its crew spent those hours of darkness right outside my door with their fans and their hoses and vests, all night long while I tried to sleep puffs and spurts of snow blew into my face and under my blankets and wedged tiny ice cubes between my toes (they’d melted away when I reached down to pluck them out, though the skin was still cold where they’d been).
The next morning I crawled from my pallet with stiff joints and sore bones and, I was sure (though apparently wrong), a touch of frostbite on my burn-blistered feet. I’d had enough of winter already. I set my small fire, ate my porridge, and boiled my tea, but when I tried to climb to the cave top I couldn’t get purchase on the ice-coated walls, and spilled hot tea all over myself. It was too cold to sit on the ground and too cold to tumble in snow, and there wasn’t any dew-dripping grass to roll in, so I ate my breakfast
indoors for the first time since arriving in Mr. Crane’s garden. I tried to have my morning meditation in the cave, too, but couldn’t get anywhere with it because there was nothing to watch but my own flickering shadow cast by the small fire onto the gray wall, no birds and no foxes and no clouds on the ceiling, no swaying green trees or flowing blue river to catch my attention and lead it away.
The second time I emerged from my cave that day, the snowblowing crew had returned and was piling more snow on spots that had grown bare as the sun warmed them up, and making tall drifts even taller where shadows kept the ground cool. Near the mouth of my cave, buried halfway underground, I found a vent I was sure hadn’t been there the morning before, blowing icy, cold air into my home, which explained why I’d struggled to sleep. There was even a camouflaged speaker beside it with a loop of howling winds and what I took to be clattering icicles, playing again and again like a call from the deep heart of winter.
I walked to the river, hoping the movement might warm me up, and on the way I noticed more speakers and vents at the bases of trees and in what I’d previously taken for rocks, so it was cold everywhere in my garden and the howling of wind could not be escaped.
I should have expected it after all that, but I was surprised to find the river stilled by a thick skin of ice, the first frozen water I’d ever seen that wasn’t in a kitchen or rink. The ice held the orange shadows of workers toiling downstream, doing something at the edge of the water with long pipes that ran under the ice. In its way—in any way, really—the frozen river was beautiful; though the ice itself wasn’t moving, I could still see the current flow underneath, rippling and churning as it always did, and I felt warmer already just watching the river refuse to give in to the winter thickening its water. I realized, thanks to the river and its wise example, I needed to keep my own waters flowing whatever the surface became. It was cold, I was disoriented, but I had a purpose that had to be met: I was meant to swim in the river, and whatever men in whatever vests were there and whatever sounds swelled from speakers suspended in iced-over trees, I was going to swim because that’s what I did every day.
From the riverbank I spotted Jerome poking his way along the shore, sniffing and snorting and swishing his tail, scratching one lean yellow side against a tree bent by the snow. Mr. Crane’s workers eyed him nervously from the edge of the ice, though they were a good distance downstream. They must have been told he was harmless, they must have been told he was trained, but he was still a lion if not such a leonine one. I couldn’t blame them for worrying, because against all that snow, in that blank world of white, their safety vests made them stand out like peppers on ice cream and perhaps like snacks for a lion.
Jerome started across the frozen river but only made it a couple of steps before all four of his paws slipped in different directions and he fell to his belly, spinning like animals do in cartoons when walking on ice. He tried to get up a couple of times with no more success, then he gave a sad groan—the opposite of a roar, if there is one—and retreated to the bank, then wandered out of my view up the hill toward the house.
I found a large gray rock, silver-specked and the size of my head with one pointed end, and I scuttled over the ice on hands and knees, pushing the stone ahead of me until I’d reached the deep center. At first I tapped gently, trying to chip at the ice, but it was thicker than I’d imagined (much later I discovered the reason for this was freezer coils installed in the river itself, something I’d missed while watching it under construction). So I swung the rock harder, with both hands and from over my head, but that knocked me off balance each time I brought my arms down and pushed me around on the ice. Those blows made a tight web of fine cracks, but I still couldn’t get to the water. I tried standing up and dropping my rock, first from knee height and then from my chest, and at last from overhead, which worked out too well because the surface of the river suddenly splintered and split, and the rock and I plunged through together into the arctic waters below.
My body was shocked and instantly stiff, and I tried to scramble back out of the hole but had already drifted away and was under the still-solid ice sheet downstream. I panicked, pounding at the ice with my fists and my feet, kicking and punching and clawing in vain. My lungs became tighter, my head swam and swirled, then all of a sudden—how can I explain this? how might it make sense?—all of a sudden I felt all over calm, comforted the way I’ve felt in my bed when swaddled in blankets and sheets, and the Old Man put me at ease. I hadn’t come to call him that yet, that name wasn’t mine yet to know, but I felt his presence in the garden for the first time that day—something I realized much later, looking back on that day. I knew just by knowing that I was fine, that I would be fine, and the river wasn’t going to harm me. I knew all was well and that all would be well. I had honored my side of our silent bargain by coming to swim even when waters were frozen over, swallowed up by Mr. Crane’s winter, so the Old Man honored his side of things, too.
I floated underwater as I had floated so often above. I drifted beneath the ice, which was so clear in places that I could look up to the incongruous blue sky above—the reach of Mr. Crane’s winter was only so far; it couldn’t reach into the air—and I felt warmer than I had a right to, warmer than it made sense for my body to be. I’m not saying I breathed underwater, I’m only saying that I didn’t drown. There was always a pocket of air trapped under the ice right where I needed a pocket to be. And when I knew it had been long enough for my day’s swim to count, I turned and carried myself against the current back to the hole I’d made in the ice, where I lifted myself without any problems and made my way to the shore.
It was colder in the air than it had been below, and my sopping, thick tunic was no help at all nor were my bare feet, so I all but sprinted uphill to my home, beating my arms and hands against my chest and my sides, taking high, comic steps to make the blood flow through my legs as hard as it could and to prevent myself tripping in snow, slipping and sliding with every step. And when I got into my cave I stripped off my garment—already frozen and stiff—and wrapped up in my blankets and started a fire and warmed my feet on the stones as I’d done the evening before, too cold to feel the pain they should have been in.
The next morning winter was over, as quickly as it had come; the snow truck was gone and the wind had stopped howling and the cold was no longer piped into my cave—even the vents had been hidden or moved. The river had thawed and it flowed as fast and as free as it ever had, and I floated all day on its surface while clouds floated on their own deep blue sea overhead. Everything was back to the way it belonged, but none of it was quite the same now that the Old Man had revealed himself to me.
When I accepted Mr. Crane’s offer, when I came to this garden, I thought I’d have a few years with an interesting job in which I might figure out what I was going to do afterward and would end up with the money to do it. But after that morning spent under the ice, after the river’s own voice spoke to me—so to speak—I knew there was nothing else after this, nothing else for me outside. I was finally doing what I was meant to, I had found my place, and I might have missed that if not for the ice.
Rather than the end of my seven-year term releasing me into the rest of my life, making me rich and ready to take on the world, it loomed now like an exile I knew was approaching. I would be cast from the garden, a pauper with millions of dollars. And already the moon had been full ten or eleven or even twelve times since my arrival, so my term of employment was creeping away toward that no longer distant deadline.
But thinking like that made my garden no longer feel mine; it broke the illusion Mr. Crane and I had built up together and it made my day hard to get on with. There were still a few years to go on my contract, and hadn’t I only just learned from the river to trust? To go under the ice with full faith? So I shook my head clear and got on with what needed doing, which was more or less nothing at all and everything that there could be. I got on with what I’d been hired to do.
17
This morning they followed me down to the river. It was unnerving to have them so close. It was one thing to walk by their tent, to overhear zippers and buckles and the bodily noises of morning, but another to have them walking behind me, their steps obviously shuffling and slowed to keep pace with my hobbling as I picked my way down the path on my stick, favoring my swollen knee and also sore where that rough stick rubbed my ribs and armpit raw. But it looks like I’ll have to keep using it for some time, the way my knee isn’t healing, so I’ll be calloused there soon enough. Like everything that gets introduced—the river, a lion, some snow—that stick will become part of my practice, and if they stay long enough I suppose those hikers will, too.
It’s hard to forget I’m in pain, that my encroaching blindness is making this life of mine less possible by the day, when there’s someone—two someones!—close by to remind me. When I paused on my three-legged walk to the river, they paused, too, and I heard them rooting around in blackberry bushes and feigning interest in trees along the path as if I wouldn’t know they were only stopping for me. And that made me try to walk faster, to thump along with my stick at a dangerous pace, and inevitably I twisted my knee again and almost fell before reaching the river. But I didn’t, I stayed on my feet, and got into the water where my wounds could soak.
I felt the weight of their eyes as they watched from the bank, as if waiting for what I would do, as if I would do more than float, more than think, more than ache and try to ignore it. Their expectations—the ones I assigned them—were heavy hands holding me underwater. I paddled for the deepest part of the river, out to the midpoint between its two shores, to a distance across which their gaze might burn with less heat, and I pretended as well as I could they weren’t watching. I did what I do every day: I floated and sometimes fluttered a kick or a stroke to keep away from the shore. I moved no more than I needed to, I kept my body as calm as the water and hoped my mind would reach that calm, too. And though it usually does, it couldn’t with those two blurry bodies up high on the bank and the eyes I couldn’t see looking but all the same knew were upon me.
