by Wall, Carol
“Betula nigra is occasionally called a river birch,” I read aloud. “The tree is native to an area spanning most parts of the eastern United States . . . from New Hampshire west to southern Minnesota, and south to northern Florida and West Texas. It often grows to eighty feet, with multiple trunks. After pruning, scaffold branches should look like ascending spokes around a central axle.” I turned the book toward Giles, to show him the picture. He nodded respectfully, to indicate he took it in. “This will provide a structurally strong tree that is attractive, balanced, and allows sunlight to penetrate and wind to pass through the canopy. To ensure strength, major scaffold branches should have at least eight inches and preferably twenty inches of vertical separation. Should I get a yardstick, Giles? I have one in the house.”
He didn’t answer right away. I heard the whistling wind and birdsong, the flapping wings of a red hawk soaring high above the burbling creek. I wondered if Giles appreciated the information I was sharing with him. I hadn’t meant to come across as arrogant or heavy-handed. It’s just that, working together, I thought we could achieve the best result.
“This tree is a fine example of a popular type of birch that likes to get its feet wet,” Giles finally answered. “I have pruned the species before, and will not need a yardstick.”
“Don’t let me interfere.” I closed the landscaping book. Apparently, Giles saw this as his prompt to get down to business. He took two giant, backward steps, his face reflecting concentrated energy, and I realized with horror that he was planning to climb the tree. I called out to him, “Don’t you need a ladder, Giles?”
He sprinted past me, a streak of energy advancing toward the tree. He pushed himself off with one foot, and as I watched him rise, I was amazed that a person of his age could be so nimble, strong, and fearless. The branches shuddered as he found a place within. His tennis shoes scraped the bark until they settled on the first of the substantial horizontal limbs, about six feet from the ground. From there, he climbed until he disappeared into the canopy of leaves. Aware that I had absolutely nothing to contribute to this endeavor, I retreated to the asphalt pad that made up our basketball court, and pulled out a black metal lawn chair to sit in. I couldn’t see Giles, but I could hear him working and see the shaking of the leaves.
I set my book aside. My gaze fell on a brand-new pair of dark green garden gloves that Giles had taken from his pocket when he arrived (although I’d prayed he would forget). They lay on top of his folded gray sweatshirt, in the shadow of the birch tree, exactly where he had placed them with what seemed a careful glance in my direction.
A ripple of annoyance passed over me. He brought them, but then gave no explanation. I walked closer and confirmed my initial impression: two green cotton gloves that were bulky and too large for me. I studied them. My mouth went dry. I hoped he didn’t intend for me to dig in the dirt. The very thought of it made me queasy. I could have simply asked Giles what he meant by needing my “assistance.” But I sensed I’d pressed the limits by reading to him from the book.
The leaves that shielded Giles shivered. “Are you okay, Mrs. Wall?”
Rhudy tilted his snout up and barked to let me know that he was on the job. I scrambled back to get my book. “Are you about to make your cut?”
“I will await instruction,” he said.
I pictured him hanging precariously by one arm, one foot propped against a sturdy limb and the pruning saw poised for action. I needed to hurry. “Here it says you don’t cut flush against the tree when pruning,” I called up to him.
“Okay.”
“You’re supposed to leave an angle, which I thought was interesting. I wish you could see this picture. It shows why you don’t want it to be flat, because disease and weeping can result from the way it used to be done, in the old days. Flat against the limb, that is. We don’t want that.”
“Very good,” Giles said. “It’s very true.”
I heard the sound of sawing and pictured sunlight flashing on the steely blade.
“Giles, how long have you been working with plants?” I was surprised to realize I hadn’t asked him this before.
The sawing stopped.
“I have loved them ever since I can remember. Especially the flowers.” His voice was soft, yet vibrant with feeling.
“Do you have the river birch in Kenya?”
“There have been cultivars from other lands. But they are not native.”
I felt my cheeks grow red with embarrassment, and the tiniest suspicion that I had made a mistake in thinking that Giles needed my help in pruning the tree properly. I skipped to another page I’d marked. It showed a row of inkberry hollies intermingled with some rhododendron, planted in an interesting design at the base of a traditional brick house like ours. Azaleas played no role in the design.
Perhaps I just needed to modernize Giles’s perspective on azaleas. I called up to him, “Don’t you think certain plants go in and out of style?”
There was no reply, and I wondered if he’d heard me. Just as I was about to repeat myself, the pages of my landscaping book were ravaged by the wind. My fingers grasped the cover tightly so it wouldn’t be blown away. The sheets whipped forward in quick succession, right to left, as if a nervous ghost were turning them. To gain control, I held the volume to my chest and planted my feet more firmly. Then my gaze fell again to the extra pair of garden gloves, whose lifeless fingers curved suggestively as if, like me, they’d heard a rumor of some unnamed task ahead and wanted to be prepared.
Giles’s own gloves were a chestnut brown. He had produced them from the pocket of his navy work suit just before he leaped into the tree. Now, as I stood watching, one of Giles’s gloves somersaulted past lime-green leaves with silver undersides that seemed alive. The glove tumbled quickly past the slender branches with their scrolling, vanilla-colored bark and the tawny, paper-like curls along the triple trunk. It landed among the blades of grass where our children used to have their summer picnics. I rushed to pick it up.
“Please stand back,” Giles said, his voice unusually firm. I closed my garden book with a resonant snapping sound and scurried across the grass to the basketball court, where my metal lawn chair waited. Rhudy, too, backed off, as if he understood the warning. I heard more sawing, and the first branch landed some twelve or fifteen feet away from where I sat. It was about the length of a golf club, but thicker in diameter, with a smaller branch and fluttering leaves attached to make a lopsided V.
“Rhudy, can you see the sky?” Giles inquired, clearly pleased.
A triangle of bright blue showed through the airy space that Giles had just created. The lime-green splendor of the leaves was even more pronounced against the turquoise of the cloudless sky.
“That’s absolutely beautiful,” I said.
“Now this lovely tree can breathe,” Giles said, with obvious pleasure.
“That goes for all of us.” Only in that moment did I realize how coiled and ready I’d been for disaster, how truly uncertain I had been that Giles knew what he was doing and wouldn’t come tumbling out of that tree like his work glove. I heard Giles sawing again, and another branch of similar size to the first rattled down. It cut a second elegant swath of blue near the top of the birch.
Then an answer came to me regarding the mystery of the dark green gloves. Giles probably wanted me to join him in picking up debris afterward. Relieved that no digging would be involved, I scooped a few small twigs from the ground and started a pile. A short while later, Giles landed on his feet with expert poise. I retreated to the kitchen to get him a bottle of water from the fridge. From this higher vantage point I gained a full perspective on the transformation of my tree. Where once there was merely a short white triple trunk with a shapeless expanse of green on top, I now saw leaves and branches; limbs that reached for the sky. A blue jay perching on one of the higher branches greeted me with his shiny eyes. A pair of crimson cardi
nals swooped in just below, as if to say, “Where have you been?” Giles’s masterful pruning also yielded clearer glimpses of sunlight dancing on the churning creek. Against the backdrop of these improvements, I was surprised to notice Giles making quick work of the clean-up job that I thought was going to be mine. At the rate he was going, he’d be finished picking up debris and clearing the space before I could get out there. Dick had always chastised me for delaying workers around the house, keeping them talking when they were on the clock. It suddenly occurred to me that Giles was probably in a hurry and had a schedule to keep—visits to other yards, or maybe his shift at the grocery store. Not for the first time, it struck me how exhausted he must be. I grabbed my checkbook and headed out to the yard with the bottle of water.
There was a lightness in my step as I walked toward Giles, but my sense of joy was short-lived. As I handed him the bottle, he extended the dark green gloves to me.
“But, you’ve already cleaned up, and made quick work of it!” I protested. “The yard looks great.”
“But there is one more thing we need to do,” Giles said.
He picked up the shovel he’d propped against our fence and made a few preliminary stabs into the sparsely growing grass along a very empty, eight-foot area beside the pickets.
“What on earth are you doing, Giles?”
“We’re going to make a flower bed,” he said. His blade chopped away at the ground. “There is good news. I have some specimens found in another client’s small greenhouse. She offered them to me, because she has so many things, and I told her, ‘I know a very nice lady who may want them.’ They are annuals, so if you don’t like them, leave them in the ground and they will not come back next year. Their colors are deep red, with some blooms being purple, and another species, yellow. That wouldn’t be too many colors, would it? I could bring them to your yard when the danger of frost has passed, in mid-May, installing them while you are at school, if you like, and you could just return home to the beauty. But for now, we should prepare the soil. It’s why you need your gloves.” The whole time Giles talked, he dug away at the ground with rhythmic cuts. Then he stopped, and in his inimitable way he looked at me without actually looking at me. Although his face was as still and unreadable as always, there was an unmistakable twinkle of amusement in his eyes. “Will you help me get it ready, Mrs. Wall? After all, it is your yard.”
I desperately wanted to be able to twinkle back at him, a silent acknowledgment of our tug-of-war over the azaleas and my lecturing to him from the garden book that he so clearly didn’t need. But instead, I struggled to maintain a pleasant expression. A familiar feeling of dread sank like a stone in my stomach—and in my heart. I turned around to face the creek, grasping the fence pickets until my knuckles turned white. I hoped that Giles wouldn’t notice my distress at the mere thought of joining in with his project. It amazed me how he didn’t seem troubled in the least by any sad thoughts of the way his blooms would inevitably turn brown in spite of his best efforts. I so wanted Giles to think well of me, and I wondered how I could possibly explain to him that what he loved so much filled me with horror. How could I tell him that I couldn’t abide the feel of dirt beneath my fingernails, or even weighing heavily on a damp garden glove? He would think I was crazy if I confessed how repelled I was at the idea of a flower garden planted in the yard that collared our cozy house. I shuddered, imagining petals falling away in advance of the winter that was always on its way.
Instead of making my confession, I told myself that Giles was just a person working in my yard, or, at best, a casual friend who didn’t need to hear my complicated family history.
“I don’t like dirt around my fingernails,” I said. “And gardening gloves make me feel clumsy. Is that so hard to understand?” I realized with embarrassment that despite my best intentions my voice had grown testy, with a sharp edge. But I couldn’t stop myself once started. “This was a basketball court for my children. It’s not a place for a garden.”
Giles glanced around as if weighing our options. “I’ll space the flowers out. The clusters will be beautiful, not overwhelming. The basketball stays in the garage these days, as far as I can tell. So our problem there is solved.”
That marked the end my patience. “No, Giles!” I burst out. My voice was now angry. Then, as if to prove to both of us that I had no business employing anybody, I said, “We’re willing to increase your pay.” I truly was a ridiculous woman, I thought to myself—bribing my own gardener not to do his work.
Giles’s face registered my panic and he trained his gaze on a point very near my face. It was the closest he had ever come to looking me in the eye. “Don’t worry,” he said, a little twinkle of humor returning to his face. “A riotous blend of flowers is not required.” Then his expression grew brighter, as if an idea had just occurred to him. “We will plant some shrubs, though not azaleas.”
I looked at Giles and then up through the canopy of what was now a well-pruned birch tree. I had not realized the extent to which the leafy tree had bathed our yard in shadow. Things looked more cheerful with the brighter light pouring in. Even Rhudy seemed delighted. He celebrated by running circles around the tree. Giles bent down to pet him.
“Rhudy, I see you are a gardener, too,” he said, pointing to a hole Rhudy had managed to dig near the base of the tree while we were otherwise occupied. I thought about Giles’s stubborn resistance on the subject of removing the azaleas last week, and his patience today while I was holding forth on the instructions for trimming the birch tree. At times, Giles seemed to meditate before taking action, but once a decision had been made, it didn’t take him long to act. His intuition seemed to guide him in important matters.
As a senior in high school, I studied Aristotle’s views on the nature of friendship. He described the highest level as “a friendship of virtue,” where there was no agenda other than a devotion to the welfare of your friend. There was no place for selfishness in this kind of relationship. It was more like a calling, anchored in respect and a keen regard for the other person that could not easily be shaken. Was it possible that Giles Owita could be such a friend to me? Was I worthy of being his friend? There was only one way to find out.
Unspoken truth lay between us. I made a quick decision of my own.
“Some people say I have a gloomy outlook,” I said. “I think they may have a point, but I want to tell you about something that makes me that way. Almost ten years ago, I had some tests that indicated breast cancer. I had a lumpectomy and a series of radiation treatments, and my prognosis is good. But the whole experience changed me spiritually and emotionally. I just can’t stop worrying about it. Anytime I see the breast cancer commercials on TV, or I see well-adjusted women in their pink sweatshirts, I just cannot identify with them. I wonder what is going to happen to me next. I can’t stand to think about losing all of the wonderful things in my life.”
“Yes, Mrs. Wall. I understand.” Giles looked across the creek and his eyes grew narrow. His expression, as always, was difficult to read. “Worry is a part of life. For now, there is work to do in our garden.” He knelt to sift through the soil with his bare hands. The sight was mesmerizing.
Filled with a growing resolve, I put my naked hands inside the green garden gloves. My fingers felt bony, too small for the yawning openings. Just touch the soil of Mother Earth. It would make Giles happy, a voice inside me said. “All right, Giles. But I’d rather do it this way.” I tugged the right glove off, and then the left.
I allowed my fingertips to brush the surface of the ground. The soil felt frozen at first, yet I found my fingers soon exploring dirt that clumped and caked, and if dry, fell in ribbons from one hand to the other. Its color and texture reminded me of coffee grounds. I recalled how, in my Southern childhood, we would often go barefoot, without worrying about bee stings, broken glass, parasites, or jagged rocks. By August, our feet would be leather-tough, prepared for anything. The
sound of bare feet slapping against dry, hard-packed dirt as we played our games of softball, kickball, tag, or red rover came back to me. It had been a long time since I thought of how quick I used to be—a cagey, confident teammate almost always chosen first when older kids were forming their teams.
As I pondered these memories, I was vaguely aware of Giles going back and forth to the garage for supplies. He handed me a familiar-looking garden claw with chipped red paint on the wooden handle, and I began to lose myself in the work that was nearly as old as the planet itself—scraping, digging, and mixing to prepare the soil for what it did best.
While I worked, I fell under the spell of other memories. The effect was hypnotic. Even my awareness of Giles faded as I was transported to a solitary hemlock where I used to stop for a rest as a child walking home from school. I hadn’t thought of it in years. In my vision, I was sitting in the grass beside the compact tree with feathery-looking, dull blue branches stretching over me. There were bright yellow dandelions around the skirt of the cotton print dress my grandmother had sewn for me, and I was still young enough to feel sorry for children whose grandmothers didn’t sew and, therefore, sadly, had to buy their dresses from the stodgy women’s clothing stores downtown. I wasn’t on a schedule and had no checklist for the day. All I knew was the happy hum of living in a household run efficiently and lovingly.
I remembered also how I skated down the steep-pitched hill of Sleepy Hollow Road with older children, at a breakneck pace. Or, as the sun began to set, how I climbed my yellow apple tree to the very top with a library book tucked under my arm. I played touch football with neighborhood boys and was a noted wide receiver (even if a girl) in our flat front yard whose curving limestone sidewalk formed the perfect undulating fifty-yard line. Breezes carried the delicious aroma of tender roast beef and buttered biscuits wafting out onto our football field from Mama’s kitchen. She loved to watch our games, but at some point I realized that what she really wanted was another baby and another. She wanted happy, healthy children to fill every corner of her home, to make up for the losses she had suffered. Instead she had to settle for two, me and my younger sister, Judy.
