“I woke up almost as if I was supposed to remember this one.” I yawn and stretch out on the leather easy chair. “Madora, my great-grandmother, was this very dignified, upright figure, so it’s interesting that she was driving the car. And Grandfather Rutledge was the opposite. He was handsome and charming and a philanderer who abandoned his family in the Depression. I think my father became a priest as a reaction to his father’s behavior. I think old Grandpa Rutledge is my shadow. He said he’s growing, which is sort of alarming. Then Clinton is clearly another image of my shadow—a celebrity sex addict.”
“Like your recurring Elvis impersonator.”
“Yep. And all the pretty girls—vampires, sirens calling out to seduce me, who would drink my blood and trap me in the night world. Then I’m not sure about my father’s office—the rubber stamp and the embossed stamp.” I pause, picturing the stamps, struggling for associations.
“Are you carrying on the work of your father?” Dr. Pearce suggests. “Are you seeking his authentic approval, not simply his rubber-stamped approval?”
“Definitely only his rubber-stamped approval—his approval of my income,” I say. “He would be disgusted, literally nauseated, if he knew what a sexual glutton I am.”
“Whom do you think your great-grandmother represents, assuming that she is symbolic of a component of your psyche? She drives up in an expensive sports car to ‘comfort’ you?”
“Anima? My undeveloped femininity?”
“
Great
-grandmother,” Dr. Pearce says slowly. “The
great
mother. And Hannibal? The dream zoomed in on that word.”
“Hannibal the Cannibal, the serial killer who eats his victims,” I say quickly.
“The Great Mother, your little friend, will eat you alive.” Dr. Pearce looks hard at me, waiting several seconds for me to say something, goes on, “Then, passing through your father’s workplace, you are delivered to the lovely, chaste Miss Ballou and a peaceful vision of the night.” Dr. Pearce rises, heading with his empty cup for the espresso machine.
“As if by following my father’s ethical code I will attain a girl that I can love and a sense of peace?”
Dr. Pearce turns back to me and nods almost imperceptibly.
“My unconscious is giving me moral advice?”
“In so many words.”
“But then we die. Twice I asked people—”
“Women, you asked women.”
“—if there is some form of life after death. Do you think my unconscious is telling me that there is not?”
“No, I think these are just expressions of your fear of death. Perhaps the death in the dream is a symbolic death.” The steamed coffee hisses through the tube into his cup. Dr. Pearce clears his throat. “The death of your old self, the death of your shadow, that you will have to survive if you are going to change your life.”
“You can kill off your shadow?”
Dr. Pearce laughs gently. “Most guys and gals never change. Some do through serious psychotherapeutic experience or near-death experience. Is this part of your psyche going to die and go away? No. You’re going to have to live with the son of a bitch for the rest of your life. The Elvis impersonator is pretty well entrenched and it’s going to take a while to be sure that he doesn’t get out. It’s going to be a slow, hard-fought battle.”
Suddenly I twig Madora’s words,
You can’t know someone in death.
You can’t know someone while you’re a creature of the night.
T
he early shrubs flower in March. The snow-on-the-mountain bushes pile up against the house like high drifts left after a winter storm. Around the columns supporting the porte cochere roof over the drive are yellow forsythia and white lilies. Along the five-foot-high stone foundation of the front porch are pink and blue hyacinths. At the edge of the front lawn, a shaggy row of burning bush—reddish pink and orange japonica—flickers in the wind like a wall of fire. Beyond, on the field of tall grass that rolls a quarter mile to the road, the tall oaks and elms are bare skeletons, and under their lowest branches dogwoods and redbuds tremble white and red. In the clear sky a V-shaped line of geese heads north. The murmur of a ceaseless stream of cars swooshing along the road reaches the front porch. Cage’s Bend is my Walden Pond. Thoreau’s cabin was only a stone’s throw from Concord and my little sanctuary is hemmed in by Nashville sprawl.
There’s a low diesel rumble from the gate, hidden behind a stand of cedars, and a minute later a tractor comes slowly up the drive. I go down the steps and along the walk to the flaming row of burning bush, nervous about meeting John Henry Clay, who is from a long line of farmers, the owner of the last big farm on the road, though he’s retired now and only keeps some cattle while his descendants wait for him to die so they can sell the property for millions. I used to duck-hunt on his ponds when I was twelve, thirteen. I haven’t seen him in years but he must have heard that I’m a nut. The old man’s weathered face looks severe as he rolls to a stop at the end of the walk. Nanny comes out on the porch and waves just as he cuts the throttle down to idle.
“Morning, Mr. Clay,” I say. “Thanks for coming.”
“Morning there, Cage.” He climbs down and takes off his faded Ford cap and waves it by the bill. “Morning, Mary Lee.”
“Good morning, John Henry,” Nanny calls from the porch. “Isn’t it a beautiful day? So much rain over the winter, bound to be a beautiful spring.”
“Yes, ma’am,” John Henry yells. “Everything is going to blossom like wildfire.”
“I can’t wait!” Nanny calls with delight.
John Henry laughs and says, “She sure is a sweet lady, your granny.”
“Yes, sir.” Looking at my feet, I wonder if he knows that years ago I got her to sell ten grand in stock, a huge hit for her, to keep Korean loan sharks in Nashville from killing me. I look back at John Henry’s craggy face. “Yes, sir, she sure is.”
“You go on in, Mary Lee. It’s too cold for a ninety-year-old lady to be standing politely on the porch.”
Nanny laughs. “What about an eighty-three-year-old man out driving a tractor in this wind?”
“Cage is going to till his own field. I’ll be in directly for coffee.”
Nanny waves and goes inside and immediately locks the winter storm door.
“So, son, you going to try your hand at farming?”
“More of a garden, really.” I look past him at Nanny now locking the glass French doors. “I worked on some organic farms out in California.”
“I hear out West they’re crazy about
organic farming
.” He stretches out the term sarcastically. “Hell, all it is is going back to the forties before we had good fertilizer and pesticides. I don’t know why they got such a fancy name. Might as well just call it primitive.”
“How ’bout
natural
?” I force my eyes to stay on his face.
“Cage, son, you can call it whatever you want. It’s going to be you toting buckets of cow shit around, not me.” John Henry laughs and claps me on the shoulder.
I try to smile. “I’ve got it staked out behind the house, down near the lake.”
“Then let’s get at it.” John Henry climbs back on the tractor.
At a slow jog I lead him past the house, past the ruins of the formal garden of tall hedges and a dry wishing pool, past the boarded cabin and the low foundation stones of three others to a flat stretch of crabgrass before the land slopes another hundred yards to the lake.
“Reckon you got about an acre and a half,” John Henry says from the tractor seat. “This is where the Cages always kept their kitchen garden.”
“When I was a little boy.”
John Henry nods. “Started long before that. About the time they built the new house, I imagine. The turn of the last century.”
“They were organic farmers.”
John Henry laughs and climbs down from the tractor, with the engine still idling. “Cage, you ever driven a tractor?”
“Yes, sir, in the summers at Rugby when I was a teenager.”
“That’s a mighty pretty place up there on the plateau,” John Henry says, squinting, then he smiles. “Well, I’m happy to let you borry it. I ain’t got much use for it anymore. Hardly use it at all.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Climb on up. You got your work cut out if you want to have it planted out by Easter.”
The old metal seat is worn silver except at the rust-brown edges. I sit astride the thrumming transmission and go through the pedals and handles and John Henry nods and says, “You still know your way around. Bring it back when you’re finished.”
“How are you getting home, Mr. Clay?”
“Call me John Henry. I’ll take the old path. If I’m lucky, I’ll see a pileated woodpecker.” He turns abruptly and walks toward the back porch.
I lower the disks behind the tractor and commence to till the old garden for the first time in thirty years, ripping out the grass along the boundary between the stakes with the satisfying feeling of immediately seeing the results of the work, of finally being back at work after so many months. A few cedar waxwings dart over the field. Sam flies over and sits on a bare oak branch, watching from a distance. A plane circles over the lake, passing almost directly overhead. Is it looking at me? Strange synchronicity of flying objects—the waxwings, the crow, the plane, which is now coming from the lake back over Cage’s Bend. Listen to the sound of your breath coming in through your nose. Exhale. Tell yourself it’s just a plane. After plowing the perimeter I till the first row again, then tear up the grass in parallel rows, laying out the garden in my head, the seedbeds for corn, beans, peas, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, celery, garlic, eggplant, and even asparagus, a four-year commitment. One corner will be for a variety of lettuces, another for cut flowers—statice, purple cornflower, stock, nasturtiums. On the end by the lonesome faucet sticking up out of the open field, from a kit with a hooped metal frame and plastic, I’ll build a little greenhouse to start seeds. The wind drops and the sun feels warm on my face.
Sowing seeds, preparing the way for life to come, is like stepping forward in time. And then, in only a few revolutions of the world, before the oaks and elms are even showing leaves, the first shoots appear in the long straight rows raised between the furrows. My mind burrows beneath the soil like a mole, imagining the exploded seeds, the white net of little roots spreading deeper. The voice of a towhee darting over the garden is like a fine silver wire singing of the peace of wild creatures who cannot burden themselves with the forethought of grief or sins gone old unforgiven, and I see that to be at home in this world I must like a thrush travel beyond words, outside of regret and fear of the future.
At dawn, past tall cedars standing like guardians, I walk across the dewy grass into the rows of black mulch, careful not to break spiderwebs shimmering like sails between poles where tomato vines are starting to twine skyward. I stand looking at the first bunches of lettuce, half mature, thinking how my body will one day nourish the soil, how farmers embrace death yearly in the darkness of winter and come back with the lengthening light. My life stands in this place, rooted like the garden.
“April is the cruelest month, mixing soil with cow shit.”
“What?” It hurts to open my eyes. I squint at Cage standing over me.
“Come on, get up,” he says, “you overpaid Wall Street face man. You self-centered last-born narcissist. You vodka-swilling, coke-snorting, pussy-chasing sensualist.”
“FYI, I haven’t done any blow for a while.” I clear phlegm from my throat. “Not to mention my dry workweeks.”
“That’s only because I call you every night to check.” Cage laughs. “I still think you should go to meetings.”
I don’t want to go into this now. “What time is it?”
“Nanny done made breakfast and cleaned up and wrote cards to sick folks from church,” Cage says in exaggerated redneck. “I done weeded the carrots and moved the drip tape from one side of the garden to the other. Now it’s time for the morning run.”
Swinging my feet to the floor, I think how far he’s come since Christmas when he was obsessed with a doomsday Y2K scenario. Not until the world was still turning on New Year’s Day would he believe that 1 January 2000 was an arbitrary, man-made date of no cosmic significance. “I’m glad you’re through the bad delusions.” I give him a big bear hug. “They are just too fucking much to deal with.”
“Tell me about it.” Cage breaks loose and hands me some old sweats and trainers. “Dem ol’ delusion blues.”
“You on an antipsychotic?”
“Nope. Nothing but lithium.” He looks slightly annoyed, points to the desk. “Quaff that OJ. This weekend is your boot camp.”
I guzzle the juice, wipe my mouth, and say, “I was thinking I might drive down to Memphis early tomorrow morning so I can hear Dad preach.”
“You can’t bamboozle a bullshitter. You been dropping down to Memphis on weekends to catch a glimpse of that Ballou chicky. That’s the only reason.”
“What if it’s love?” I slide my legs into the sweats.
“I’ll be surprised.” Cage shakes his head. “You just want what you can’t have.”
After the first mile on a path worn by his feet up and down rolling pasture, Cage is way out ahead. My lungs wheeze painfully and my legs feel weak as noodles. Cage turns around, running backward, yells, “John Henry Clay walks faster than you run.” I’m huffing too hard to reply. Cage smiles and spins back around on one foot, streaks over the top of the next hill. Gardening every day, jogging every day, grocery shopping twice a week, dropping Nanny at church on Sundays: Simple routine and simple accomplishments pump Cage’s spirit back to life, lightening the spirits of four others—Nanny, Mama, Dad, and me, though Mama still frets about his future, whether he’ll be able to hold a steady course, how he’ll provide for himself when they are gone. Give those worries to God, Mama. He’ll do it, I tell her once a week. Cresting the top of the hill, I think that families are put here to help each other through this thing, life, whatever it is. I need him as much as he needs me. Maybe Cage is my redeemer. Or maybe I’m beyond redemption.
Old Hickory Lake. The name commemorates a mass murderer, Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson, running buddy of Cage’s namesake. I must have been nine years old the last time I was out here, skimming across the murky surface in Poppy’s flat-bottomed metal fishing boat. From the front I watch the bow rushing over the brown glass and omelets of white scum, listening to the whine of the antique outboard. In the stern, his hand behind him on the throttle, Cage stares past me into the middle distance, his face twisted, perhaps absorbing the sting of a flashback, maybe an image of his birthday cruise a year ago today. In the middle of the lake, a mile from our dock, Cage cuts the engine off and the boat glides forward in the abrupt silence.