The Alyssa Chronicle

by Michael Strelow

  I could hear my mother below in the kitchen. My father was lighting the fire. I took a deep breath and jumped right back into my old life armed, for the first few minutes anyway, with the information Eugenie had given me about the collapse of a roof at the market. Who was hurt, who was responsible, what was going to be done? My mother, without missing a beat, continued the conversation she had begun with Eugenie the day before. I acted my part. The change was perfect. I felt I had landed on my feet. And running. Off to the barn after breakfast to do the old familiar chores. Here I was, a princess with a pitchfork mucking out the stalls, milking the cows, humming my old songs.

  Jake entered. I had my back to him, my forehead against the cow.

  “Hi, Alyssa.”

  “Hi, Jake.”

  That was how much it took for him to make the discovery.

  “Welcome back,” he said, as if he had been in on the whole thing.

  I thought I had better play it out a little longer. “Whatever do you mean? Back to the barn? I was here yesterday. Same old cow. Same old pail.”

  “Yeah. Got ya. Mum’s the word.”

  And that was the whole thing? I would like to report that he slowly figured it out, and that there was great drama, the secret finally coming out. But no. Bang, just like that. He was onto us. And the amazing thing was that he didn’t seem to care one way or the other. I’m still not sure what he saw or sensed. He was like an old dog that had only to sniff the air twice to get the truth. He was behind me! He couldn’t see my face. What could it have been? But I was not going to bring it up as long as he was willing to go along and let live. And that left a nagging feeling in the back of my brain that somehow, somewhere he’d want something in exchange for his good will. You know, as if he had it all in the bank like money, and he’d just wait to take it out. Rascal. I loved him dearly, but he was a rascal—a good rascal.

  And so the day went on. My mother and father were busy with the farm. I knew how to fit in, and the return was seamless, sort of.

  “Lyssie,” my mother said to me later. She was the only one who shortened my name this way. It was the badge of her being my mother. “Please keep the garden up. I know how angry you were when the King’s men said it belonged to the castle now. But we don’t want trouble with them. Let’s think of it as a gift. A gift so we can live in peace.” She patted my back to calm me.

  Eugenie is much more a foot-stomper than I am. She told me she’d threatened to destroy her flowers before letting the castle take them. Our mother had promised to discuss it with our father, and they would talk to her about it. Eugenie told me she wanted to eat all the vegetables, pick all the flowers and leave the King (her father, remember) nothing but a patch of bare ground. And, she raved that she planned to leave her father’s men an additional prize of a big pile of manure right in the middle. Our parents would not take kindly to the idea of getting crosswise with the King.

  I mumbled to my mother something about doing what I could to keep the peace. But I knew that Eugenie, would be roaring through the castle, and would be the one really doing what had to be done. From the castle she would have a big stick to wave. On the farm, I thought it best to let things alone in the meantime.

  I went to tend the King’s garden, get dirt under my fingernails and crack one or two, begin work on a few callouses, get acquainted with Eugenie’s new fertilizer mix, and say hello to the animals. Jake had swung up into some high perch out of sight. He always did his chores quickly so that he was free to do whatever he did up in trees. What a strange and wonderful brother! He was like a monkey in a people suit.

  Eugenie was, I imagined, finding her way around the castle. I hoped she was taking her time, as I was doing, and was working her way back into the swing of things there. The scurry of preparations for Arbuckle’s wedding was, I knew, underway. There were more people in the castle than ever before. I hoped she was greeting everyone who greeted her and making her way into the kitchen where I had spent a lot of time learning the sauces. I thought of my kitchen time as graduating from the garden. I began thinking about vegetables in a new way. A beet in my farm-world would poke up out of the ground, then be pulled up, washed off and boiled. Of course, we’d eat the leaves too. But in the castle kitchen, the beet was slow roasted or pickled or carved into a blood-red flower to decorate the meat that had to be brought to the table like a work of art. I knew immediately I wanted to learn these mysteries. And, as I said, my Queen mother indulged me, thinking my interest, like Eugenie’s dirt fascination, would run its course, and I would get on with the princess stuff.

  The farm garden—Eugenie’s garden—was already aglow with health. The mixture she had invented—her super soup, she called it—was obviously doing its job. The beans were twining up the trellises she’d made, four poles tied together at the top. Tendrils waved in space feeling for the next grip to reach for the sun. Her flowers were brilliant: large dahlias in yellow and red and one mixture of the two, blue larkspurs she had grown from wild seed, delphiniums in another blue, then rows of zinnias and dianthus and geraniums she had spaced for red-orange-pink splotches. Looking at them, I could just see Eugenie’s saucer eyes growing larger with anger when she’d told me about the “looting” of her garden.

  She had generations of plants with some just started and some mature and flowering so that she’d have flowers to cut right through the first frost. Her cosmos, fall flowers, were just beginning, hiding among the towering summer blooms. Eventually they’d get leggy and fill the space with dazzling pink. I think she kept the garden to have bright colors around.

  Our farm clothes were all homespun grays and browns of the original yarns. All the brightly colored clothes of the castle were bright only until they were washed. Then, with the first washing, the dyes ran in rainbow streams and the clothes were dull with barely a hint of their original color. I was stunned when I found out that most clothes were worn once by the ladies and then thrown out and replaced. There was a second life of sorts as the clothes trickled down the social ladder to maids and others where they were remade and worn with all the juicy colors gone.

  I sighed some over the garden wondering what to do. The food as well as the flowers would be looted—in the future, of course. Nobody knew how much of the food would be taken; but we all knew the flowers were marked for Arbuckle’s marriage. About every four or five days a rider would come from the castle and simply trot into the farm yard, look at the garden and then ride off. I guessed he was checking that we didn’t pick our flowers or, worse yet, not water and tend them.

  It wasn’t long before I heard, we all heard, that a farm wife two valleys over had simply abandoned her flower garden after it had been taken. No water, no fertilizer, not staking up the heavy flower heads. Soldiers came and she was dragged from the house and put to work replanting the garden while the farmer and her children stood by. She wasn’t injured, but the King’s men stayed to make sure that she planted a new garden and, well into the evening, she was released to go and cook for her family. From what I knew of the castle types, some self-appointed person had decided on this punishment to make an example of her. The garden, of course, would not give the wedding flowers. But the message was clear: all the flowers belonged to the King.

  I couldn’t help myself. I immediately began to think about blowing up the whole Arbuckle wedding. It was fun to think that Eugenie and I could raise a “garden army” that would pick all the flowers before the wedding and feed them all to the livestock. Wouldn’t that be hilarious! We’d appear together, both dressed as the princess as if princess-power had suddenly doubled and had taken over the country. We’d frog-march hapless Arbuckle out in front of his intended bride and shame him for letting the King’s men commit flower mayhem in his name. We’d insist that only vegetables could decorate his wedding. There would be cauliflower centerpieces with sprigs of rosemary sticking out. Broccoli florets would be arranged like tiny forests with little brown mushrooms scattered below. Beets would be carved into red accents her
e and there. Onions and leeks and garlic bulbs would hang from poles in braided glory.

  I mused to myself about this: You know who would like this vision? Eugenie, that’s who. She’d chime in her contribution and we would laugh and laugh. But, of course, we really wouldn’t risk everything on a lark like that. Would we? Bring the whole charade of the last year to a crumpled pile on the castle floor? No, no no no. Eugenie give up what she had longed for her whole life? Me give up what was just getting very interesting for me—the life of court intrigue in the halls of power? Still, how much fun would it be for a short while? A royal wedding with wheat sheaves tied up in little pointy triangles. Pumpkins—oh, joy, where do I begin? Heads with carved faces lit up in fools’ grins. Stacked into mazes with secret passageways. At this point, we’d have to consult with Jake for the high tree decorations, the stalks to hang from trees to blow in the wind. The strings of bean stalks and paw-paws and maple leaves draped high above the festive vegetable-festooned tables.

  It was fun imagining it all. I didn’t even mention my musings to Eugenie. I would find out very soon after that day what she was up to at the castle as we met again in the old man’s garden. He and the old lady were nowhere to be seen. But I noticed immediately—my newly acquired princess sensibilities—that the bench had been thoroughly cleaned off for us.

  Chapter Four

  Things had changed since Eugenie had walked the castle halls as a princess. She told me she’d found herself a stranger, but a stranger who was required to nod and greet her way along the hallways. Corrine, her old nanny and then protocol chief, had become some kind of main organizer for Arbuckle’s wedding. She plowed the hallways issuing orders. Eugenie wondered if she had been the source of the flower-looting scheme. I told her I didn’t know.

  Eugenie retold the story of when she was young, chasing Corrine around the garden with muddy hands threatening Corrine’s white apron; how powerful Eugenie felt the mud must be if it could scare this full-grown woman into running away from her. She said that maybe, just maybe, that was the first time she realized the power of dirt that would occupy her mind the rest of her days.

  I said, “The flower business seems to have been one of those things where somebody suggested something and then a bunch of other people jump on the bandwagon. It came from nowhere and then somebody said, ‘of course,’ and then somebody else patted that one on the back and it grew from there. The talk was about how important this wedding was because our kingdom would act as a lesson in good conduct for all the visitors. It seems no one was thinking anything except the impression we’d make on our neighbors. No one, I guess, thought about the gardeners working every day to have beautiful flowers. I heard an old advisor mention that he believed all the flower growers would be delighted to add their bounty to the kingdom’s great day. He said we’d show our neighbors how to do it. We would teach them about water and how great people should live. And then, you know, on and on. Blah, blah. But he was serious! He had no, what should we call it? No sympathy. It was like he had a hard time even imagining what it was like to actually be someone else.”

  Eugenie sighed. “And we would begin this lesson by stealing all the flowers in the kingdom from the people who grew them! How dumb has this become?” Little devils and flying knives didn’t really come out of her eyes, but it certainly seemed like they could. She had been back in the castle for only a short time and wanted to try out some ideas on me before she attacked the wedding plans. I didn’t dare tell her my imagined scheme where we would feed all the flowers to the livestock and then impose vegetable decorations on Arbuckle’s festivities. She just might jump on the idea and insist we do it.

  She seemed to calm down a little, and said, “I need some time with you to keep my plans reasonable. I know that.”

  Our time on the bench, the magically clean bench I might add, was like adding up our two brains, our two versions of one face but two selves so that we could rise up into the sky like a big, thinking bird. Or that was my version, anyway. Eugenie’s version was just caution. But hurry-up caution because the time was getting tighter each day. We only had time to try one thing, and then the wedding would be upon us, and it would be too late. That is, unless we brought the livestock to the wedding and let it roam and eat the flowers… I reined in my imagination like an unruly horse.

  I didn’t notice it until Eugenie-the-gardener pointed it out, but all around us the flowers were fresh and new. She said there were always flowers fading and being replaced by new buds. Most plants had some kind of cycle. But here in the old man’s garden, the old woman’s too, all the flowers were full and beautiful. “It’s not natural,” she said, and we both laughed because it was the very thing Arbuckle had said about the two of us once he found out our secret. It’s not natural. You bet.

  Then a stranger thing happened.

  The old lady appeared in the doorway of the pretty cottage, with its red berry-colored shingles, and the deep blue of the door. She stood, a tidy apron around her waist, her hair gray and alive as if birds lived in there. She had her hands on her hips and seemed to be surveying her garden and trees and us. The old man was nowhere to be seen.

  After a minute, she waved over the whole scene as if blessing us all and then turned and went into the house. But very soon she came out again carrying a watering can. She tipped it to sprinkle the flowers in the window boxes around the house, but it seemed from where we were that nothing came out of the can. Still, she continued to water as if the can could never run out: first the vegetable garden, followed by several small trees at the edge of her apple orchard, and then she turned to the garden where we sat.

  Eugenie said that it was time for us to go. I wanted to stay and watch the pretend watering or whatever it was. But Eugenie insisted and tugged my arm. She said we should take the path back to the farmhouse, and then she would go back to the castle through the woods. But I wanted to watch the old lady a little longer. The inexhaustible watering can still poured out something invisible.

  “She taught me the secret for making my fertilizer soup,” Eugenie said, as if what we were watching was perfectly normal.

  “But there’s nothing coming out of the spout. Is she just pretending to water?”

  “It looks that way, doesn’t it? But I think something must be coming out. Look how carefully she waters each plant. The big plants get more. The small ones get less time. So she must think she’s doing something. That’s what I see. She’s certainly saying something too, words we can’t hear. Once I was just behind a tree watching, and she really wasn’t saying anything out loud. But the watering and the talking must be something because, look! The plants certainly are doing well.”

  We watched from where the paths went separate ways. The old lady continued her rounds, and I knew it must be just that the light was changing, you know, the way it changes toward evening when the sun gets low. But the plants seemed to light up, and the colors got brighter after she watered them. She made a path around the garden leaving a glowing trail like a magic snail. Eugenie held up her hand when I started to speak. “I know,” she said. “Watch.”

  And the old lady finished her rounds, the sun slid into the trees, and the entire garden was a kind of fire in the clearing. I think I held my breath because suddenly I found myself gasping for air as a sign for the world to get back to normal.

  Eugenie finally said, “There is some part of what she does that I think I will never understand. I was taking a walk one afternoon a long time ago, when I saw this for the first time. And there’s one more thing—well, I think there are many more things, really—but one more thing for now. The people from the castle came to put the ribbon around her garden. You know, the one that says these now belong to the King. And the workers tried to walk across the garden but somehow couldn’t. They could put the ribbon around it all right. But they couldn’t seem to get into it. I think it will be interesting when they come to pick these flowers for the wedding. I want to be here to watch. But maybe that will be you this
time. You have to watch carefully and tell me everything.”

  The old lady circled back toward the house but stopped to admire her handiwork. She set down the watering can and wiggled her fingers as if greeting a small brown bird that had flown down from a tree. I had to be getting back home. I didn’t know what to think about what I’d seen or what Eugenie had just told me. I had to go. We would talk next time.

  I had known about this old couple all my life. My parents said they preferred to live by themselves, and that I should leave them be. My father said only to talk to them if they asked me something. I knew that Jake would climb the trees in the woods just outside their clearing, and that he would watch and watch. I asked him what he saw, what was so interesting. He only said that he didn’t know why, but he liked to watch their house and garden from high in a tree. It made him, and these were his exact words, “feel like I’m just two eyeballs in the tree.” I asked him what he meant, and he said that he sometimes felt as if he had disappeared and was only the looking part and nothing else. And the further I pressed him to explain, the more words came out of his mouth that sounded like pure nonsense. The harder he tried to explain, the worse it got. I gave up. But it was Eugenie in her comparatively short time in my place, who had seen the strange power of the old couple—the nearly blind man who could see without his eyes, the old lady who pretended to water with water no one could see. Personally, I preferred things like my experiment with mice. I could write down what I saw, make up my mind, and then see what I had found out. The light, the invisible water, the finger wiggling—these confused me.