Rose's Garden (31 page)

He looked up, returned the coffee cup to Burden's freckled hand, his worried face hovering above.

“Thank you,” he said. He looked around vaguely. “Thank you. I need to go home.”

He stood, tried to prepare himself for what was to come. How many days would it be until the water withdrew, until he could get into the loft, bury his birds, the necessary business of what came afterward? He was so familiar with it, he thought, this aftermath. Suddenly he was so weary.

He patted his pockets, feeling that he had forgotten something. And then he remembered. Where was Hero?

He looked away from the circle of concerned women.

“Hero Vaughan,” he said abruptly. “I had her with me. She was in the truck.”

He saw Mignon glance at Henri.

“You have the girl?” Henri said.

“Well, I did.” Conrad felt suddenly impatient. “I found her, down near Eddie's.”

There was a silence. At last Mignon stepped forward, laid her small hand on his arm. “Conrad, they found Eddie. Harrison did. On the hill.” Mignon's voice, full of that lilting Southern inflection. He turned to her, shocked.

“He'd had a heart attack, Conrad. He was walking up Forest.”

Conrad looked at her numbly. A heart attack. But at least Eddie had tried, he thought. At least he hadn't jumped in the river. But how could it be? How could he have missed him? He'd driven that road a hundred times, looking and looking. He'd seen nobody. He hadn't seen Eddie, fallen by the curb, clutching his cash box, trying to make it to high ground. He shouldn't have left him there at the restaurant, Conrad thought, his heart seizing with guilt. And now Hero—

He looked around him. “I need to find her,” he said, and broke free of them. And then he spun back. “And Nolan Peak?” he said. “Has anyone seen Nolan Peak?”

Mignon shook her head. “No,” she said. “Nobody.” And then she glanced up to the skylights.

“But look.” She pointed.

And they all followed her gaze then, up to the roof, to the iron cross ties laid one against the other like swords, to the glass dormers high above. The rain had stopped, and a weak, sorrowful light shone down on their upturned faces.

CONRAD LOOKED FOR
an hour, searching among all the people gathered in the natatorium. She seemed to have disappeared completely, with that strange habit of hers. He worried that someone had told her about her father, had taken her to him, his body already cooling in the basement of the hospital sixteen miles away. He stood outside the natatorium, watching the backs of people as they stood on the hillside in the gray light, looking down at their town.

At last, exhausted, he got in his truck and drove toward home, heading back on the roads that curved high above Laurel, coming back to Paradise Hill the long way. He was mindful, as he drove, of the world melting away beneath him, of the flood that washed through the low streets. He could hear it, a steady, muffled roar like the ocean, the intermittent, low sound of explosions, the wail of sirens.

He could think of nothing now except how cold he was, how much had been lost. He had not been able to save Eddie. His pigeons were gone. His mind ran forward and back. He worried about the girl. Someone must have told her. Where had she gone?

He pulled into his driveway and stopped the truck. He wanted to hear Rose's voice, Lemuel's voice. He strained toward the emptiness that lay ahead of him.

It's a trick, Lemuel had said. Close your eyes. But there was no trick to this, Conrad thought, closing the truck door, walking up the steps to his house. This is the habit of the survivor, one foot before the other, the hard work of continuing on. The new light that fell from the clearing sky was pale, apologetic, tender; not bright, he thought, not like the light at the end of the tunnel under the Sleeping Giant, the same day winking ahead after a passage through the dark. This was a different world altogether, nothing like the one he had left behind.

Once I thought I could not live a day without her, not an hour, he thought, stopping at his door. And yet here I am.

He opened his door, walked quietly down the hall to the kitchen, postponing the trip he would have to make, the moment when he would stand on his highest terrace, look down at his flooded loft. He stripped off his wet shirt, rubbed himself dry with Rose's apron, which hung over the doorknob of the pantry. I have so many things to take care of now, he thought, shaking, trying to find in himself some core of will. He rummaged in the pile of laundry on the floor, found a dry shirt. His hands fumbled with the buttons. I have to bury my birds, help my neighbors, he thought. Someone has to see to the girl. I have to see to the girl. She has no father now, no mother. Someone has to help her.

Hold my hand, Rose, he wanted to say as he left the kitchen.

He passed through the house and out to his terrace, moved to the low stone wall to look down and meet the black mirror of water there lapping the roof of his loft. He was already filled with the sadness of such a loss, the cold business of what came afterward, the unforgivable permanence of continuing on in a place made forever strange by the absence of what you loved. He thought of his garden, of how his footfalls, Rose's, had left a faint and resilient mark over each part of it, a random, uninterpretable
path. He thought of the angel's great feet, Lemuel's feet planted before him. He thought that for a man who had had an uneventful life, he had in this last week been given enough mystery. He had entered it, walked into it, as through a door in the air itself. He had wandered there, weaving among the visions of his past and his future, and now was passing, slowly as the minute hand of a clock marching round the hour, back into the present. He would wrap his birds in white sheets and bury them beneath the birches, he thought, where the motion of the leaves was the motion of flight itself. He was amazed that he thought of this, that he had acquired the aptitude of the survivor, this instinct for what was right. The sun will rise and set each day from now until the end, he thought, and he made himself look down.

She loved you. Rose loves you.

He shook his head, put his hands on the wall.

A late summer bumblebee rose offended from the stones, zigzagged away into the soft air, a tiny black dirigible. He followed it with his eyes as it gradually lost altitude, sailed down the hill on steps of air, toward his loft.

Look. Look again. For above the tomb of water, on the tiled roof of his loft, was not nothing, not a space where something should have been, but a miracle, the white wings themselves, the dance of his birds, not lost, not drowned, but freed and clinging to the roof, to home, to what they knew. All around them the river had risen over the meadow, had rushed through the doors of the loft, had climbed to its curved roof. But his birds were safe.

He put his hands on the rough stone, climbed to the top of the wall. He stood there until his heart registered a perfect, mysterious balance, its chambers swelling. And then he threw back
his white head, raised his arms, and held his face to the clearing wind.

From the roof below, they saw him and rose to meet him, circled his head in a crown of flashing light, came and lined themselves along his outstretched arms, white feathers billowing, taking on air, poised for flight. Wings.

SOMETIMES, NEAR THE
end of his life, he was not sure whether he lived in the past or the present. They could not save his eye—central artery occlusion, they said, caused by a small blockage in his heart, a clot breaking free at last and traveling up to his eye.

Mignon or Hero or May Brown drove him around for weeks until he got used to the sensation of navigating the world with only one eye. Lenore came over and cleaned the house, Burden carrying loads of trash out to the truck, months of rubbish. Conrad taught Hero to feed the pigeons. Eventually he learned to adjust to the feeling of imbalance. He acquired a cane. He started to take the truck out again himself, Mignon sitting placidly beside him for company, but he did not drive once the sun had set. He took the steps down to his pigeon loft slowly, one stair at a time.

Gradually the two states—his life with Rose, his life afterward—lost the line of demarcation between them, a chalk stripe that faded gracefully over time. Sometimes he thought he was on the Sparkses' rooftop, would see Lemuel spread-eagled beside the balustrade, the city lights below winking in the darkness, the wind in his hair, his pigeons rising around him. Sometimes he saw Adele turning from the stove, a long-handled spoon in her hand, her eyes laughing at him. Sometimes he thought he was with Rose, sitting on the bed in his socks and undershorts while she undressed at night, a brush in her hand. He spoke to her, to Lemuel. He would stop before a plant, reach his fingers toward its petals, and the name of it would come to him, Rose's voice in his ear. Honesty.
Veronica. Forget-me-not. His garden grew wild, more overgrown each season, volunteer wildflowers sowing themselves in the rich earth. Birds did most of his planting now, and deer most of his harvesting.

Sometimes, sitting by Rose's marker at the cemetery on the long summer afternoons, he would start as Hero's shadow fell across the grass at his feet. “Come inside,” she would say, leaning down, offering her arm, the sun behind her. Hi Roller, who never liked to be far from her, would circle their heads as they walked across the grass toward Hero's cottage through the falling light. There on the worn linoleum floor, the little terrier would lie still, watching the pigeon eat from the dog's supper bowl, and Hero would laugh.

It pleased Conrad to have made her this gift, to have given her a homing pigeon. The cemetery always seemed a lonely place to him, though he felt happier knowing there was a lost pigeon who called it home now along with Hero, a bird who came when she whistled, dipping through the dusk, its wing mended, its single eye fixed on Hero's roof. Hero might fix Conrad dinner, drive him home later under the domed sky massed with stars. He never confused her with anyone, though. He always seemed to know her.

Sometimes he asked her to tell him again about how she had come to his door the day of the flood. Finding no one there, she had run around to the back of the house, looked down into the meadow, and seen the water crawling toward the loft. She had run down the slick, stony steps, two, three at a time, had flung open all the doors, had urged the pigeons skyward, into the rain, waving her arms. They didn't want to leave, she told him. Of course, he thought. They're homing pigeons. Where would they have gone?

What he remembered of the months after the flood was the sound of industry, of Laurel being rebuilt. From high on Paradise
Hill, he could hear the grinding sound of the heavy trucks bringing lumber to Laurel, the steady ring of hammers, the buzz of chain saws. He saw facades resurrected, saw new gardens laid out with string, saw bricks laid one atop the next, mortar spread between them. A new flag flew from the pole in the square; a second plaque was added to the wall of the bank, six inches higher than the old one.

One evening he went to the Congregational church for an exhibit of the photographs Toronto had taken from the roof of the bank. He passed before the pictures, amazed at the strangeness of walking now where water had once buckled the pews and submerged the marble altar. Staring with his one eye at a picture of the bandstand, torn loose from its moorings and spinning crazily in the center of the flooded square, he suffered a moment of severe imbalance, staggered back, and found himself supported by Toronto.

“Steady,” he said, and tightened his grip on Conrad's arm.

The Pleiades planned an after-the-flood party for the town, served up hot dogs and hamburgers and chicken from grills set up on the town square. Some people, the young people, danced, and Conrad took a turn or two inside the bandstand, now resettled on its old foundation, with May Brown.

No one rebuilt Eddie's, though. Harrison Supplee arranged with the city authorities to have the site turned into a tiny park, with a sundial at its center and two benches and an American flag. The grass there was studded with clover.

There was a wedding held in his own garden, Nolan's shaking hand placed atop Betty Barteleme's. Betty wore pale blue, a sequined jacket that made her look, Mignon said, leaning toward Conrad with her hand over her mouth, like the body of a great silver fish. The Pleiades catered the affair from their own kitchens.
Betty gave Nolan a bound volume of his columns, “From Peak's Beak”; Conrad had gilded the lettering on the leather cover. Nolan gave Toronto the Aegis—“Have fun,” he said sarcastically—and Betty a ring with an opal at its center, a tiny, bright eye. He wore violets in his lapel, and Conrad pushed his wheelchair to the makeshift altar set up in the arbor.

Nolan had suffered one stroke after another, four in all, though Betty believed it was the cold that had caused them, not his effort to brace the dam. How very cold he had been that afternoon, carried back to her on the shore where she waited, her own lips growing blue. It was some young man, she never knew who, who had pulled Nolan from the water where he sat, a surprised expression on his face, not three feet from the bank, unable to move. He could talk, though he didn't much anymore, and when he ate, food dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He wore his bow tie, held Betty's hand. He smiled in a lopsided way at the well-wishers who came before him and held out their hands to him or touched his knee. He always remembered ringing the bells, the perfect sensation of weightlessness as he'd clung to the ropes.

Sometimes, kneeling in the garden at Mt. Olive, near the double helix of rosebushes planted by the Pleiades in Rose's name, Conrad thought he saw Rose walking toward him through the flowers, a bouquet in her hands, her white dress fluttering around her.

And he would try to sit up straighter then, try to show her his good side. “How sweet you are, bird boy,” she would say tenderly, coming to stand before him, reaching her hand to his cheek. “How I love you.” And he would try to smile at her through his tears.