The Winter Gardeners. Dennis Denisoff
“Deaths Duell” he expounded all over the baby Jesus,
‘About midnight he was taken and bound with a kisse, art thou not too conformable to him in that? … There now hangs that sacred Body upon the Crosse, rebaptized in his owne teares and sweat, and embalmed in his owne blood alive. There are those bowells of compassion, which are so conspicuous, so manifested, as that you may see them through his wounds. There those glorious eyes grew faint in their light: so as the Sun ashamed to survive them, departed with his light too.
‘See here, how the baby Jesus, his forehead as smooth and round as a young girl’s knee, is most venerated when he is viewed at some distance – as we do with portraits and monuments – there, on the cross, so tenderly, only a few yards away.’ Giggy reached one arm out as if to touch a crucifix only she could see levitating above the sink in the Wachannabee Elementary teachers’ lounge. ‘And then, as Donne demonstrates, even further, as far away as the sun, with which he is one, verily.’ The perspiration of her convictions had destroyed the remainder of her notes; there was nothing for it but to ad lib. ‘This then is how best to view children, for it gives us patience and keeps us from punishing them too readily and from forgetting that they are not our possessions but our charges. That would explain why, legally, one must demand “custody”of a child, would it not? A type of ownership. One is encouraged to do so, as if it were a biological right to have this authority, verily, over somebody else.’ Because Giggy had never wanted custody over Jem, it seemed obvious to the woman that he would gravitate toward her, just as most children gravitate away from the parents thrust upon them from birth.
Jem himself felt that he had not so much drifted away from his parents as been drawn by the kindness of strangers. The notion of personal agency had never entered his evaluation of the meanderings of his life. Absent-mindedly stroking the threads of his shorts, he recognized the boredom that characterized these wanderings – an apathy arising from a cultural familiarity with everything that had been invented or discovered since his birth, arising from the world being driven toward universalist essentialism despite being so far from the metaphysical. Rather than trying to understand it all, he conjectured, we assume that what we know is everything there is. Perhaps this new view had not only prepared him for his life of observation but also given him the patience and pacing that his recent sense of guilt and caution required.
So recently, he had felt no guilt at all, because of his unique love and lust for Robert. It had seemed as if he might always retain the lump of nervous passion in his gorge that he felt on first seeing the man there at the Winter Garden. None of the Winter Gardeners actually went in for the horticultural; that was why Giggy had had the landscape redesigned, planted entirely with vegetation requiring the least amount of maintenance. It was in this unnatural setting of plants free from human interference that Jem saw Rob standing among a contortion of raspberry brambles. Giggy was trying to steer her nephew and Chappy, the house whippet, in another direction, toward the fleshy leaves of rhubarb and Potter’s hostas, and the boy’s body obeyed. But his eyes, imagination and nerves clung with lust to Robert who, unaware of being watched, was picking overripe raspberries with only his lips, kissing them one by one off their branches, leaving behind a trail of naked nubs glowing white where the red berries had just been.
‘I say,’ Jem murmured as he relaxed across from his aunt, ‘Passive observation.’ He envisioned it as a career option. He knew some people who had careers.
He lifted his fingers off the hard-on that he had unintentionally coaxed to attention. Language did that to him. His mahogany-heavy eyes settled on the tool shed, as erect as a sentinel’s station at the west flank of Auntie’s mallows. Yet another of the gardener’s garish constructions, it seemed to burn in the sunlight. ‘Aloo-minium,’ he chattered to himself, ‘aloooo-minium.’ There was something refreshing about the word. It sounded millennial, like spray paint or Swedish toiletries. Something cool slipping between his lips. But he was also using it as self-flagellation, to punish himself for the rodenticides that he may so recently have committed.
‘Aloominium.’ So soothing a sound for a word marked by such pain. It was only yesterday that Jem had found the bundle of baby squirrels pasty-eyed and huddled in a corner of the tool shed. Upon discovery, he had latched shut the door to ensure that they would develop safe from the threat of predators. He’d then re-settled himself in the gazebo and consumed the last of his ginger ale and grenadine and had begun to fondle the edge of one of his aunt’s novels. And it was then that his attention was drawn back to the shed – the squeals, the squeals. Another squirrel, one much larger, was trying to get into what Jem only at that moment realized was becoming a sweat box of death. The gardener’s edifice was baking the babies alive.
‘Shirley!’ he squeaked in horror. The squirrel was one of Giggy’s familiars. (‘No, we don’t know the creature’s sex,’ Giggy agreed, ‘but it is the mother regardless.’) Guilty, guilty, guilty – the word spun about the boy’s head with the persistence of deer flies over roadkill. Yet he just watched, dumb-glazed, as Shirley scratched at the walls. Should he dare to interfere with nature again? The creature, its taut sinews soon torn and bleeding, continued to scrape at the barrier that kept her from her babies. All the while, she flayed her head back and forth as if unable to understand why nobody else was turning up to assist in the rescue. Even after her claws had begun to drip scarlet, she persisted in ramming her arms through the sliver of space she’d managed to scrape away beneath the door. Jem could just hear the infants, who must have recognized their parent’s chatter, letting off faint hullabaloos of despair. And then, in frustration, in a final act of defiance against futility, Shirley began running circles of rage (as Jem himself had done on occasion), stopping only to throw her body against the siding with the dynamics of a percussionist before renewing the frantic dervish.
At last the boy, picking his moment, rushed to the structure, flung open the door and flopped backward onto the trimmed lawn as wafts of August heat poured forth. The waves hit him like Florida hits foreigners, but before he could even formulate a headline for the Wachannabee Orderly (‘Heroic Youth Yanks … ’), the rodent lunged at him and clamped her dingy teeth onto the denim of his shorts. Jem stumbled backward crablike, trying to shake himself free. Shirley was flung headlong into the air. She must have made her decision before she had even landed to retreat to the security of the garden, for she did so in a bounce and an arc so smooth and art deco that it whiffed a touch too much of practice.
Jem escaped into the gazebo and, latching shut the door, watched the waves of heat flow up across the metal siding of the shed, wails of despair emanating even more strongly now from the heat of darkness. ‘Hullabaloo! Hullabaloo!’ the infants cried like impassioned extras in South Pacific. How many of their pelts had he parched with his thoughtlessness? How many might yet even die? It seemed hours before he caught sight of scarlet-eyed Shirley risking a return, scuttling through the sweet grass, darting from willow to willow to whortleberry as if she were a master of espionage.
He slipped behind a porch pillar and peered out furtively. Saliva flashed off yellow squirrel teeth. ‘Yellower than the chaste moon,’ Jem would soliloquize among the other Winter Gardeners later that evening, ‘yellower than the roses that children place at the feet of the Queen of Araby.’ The creature, upon reaching the heat-heady chamber, leapt into the darkness with nary a glance askance. Amid the chaos of chattering and rustling, the young man could only wonder who was scolding whom, and then the adult finally sprung Houdini-like into the daylight. In her teeth, she carried not one but two of the babies. Limbs abounding, the trio bumbled off toward the soothing darkness at the heart of the garden and the safety of its fronds. The evacuation continued until each of the infants was removed – eight in all, some so limp that Jem doubted that they had survived. ‘Probably just snoozy,’ Giggy would console him.
Today, a day later, the deathtrap stands once again as barren and silent as a women’s public washroom, as barren as an ill-speculated condominium east of the Pickering nuclear plant, as silent as the Winter Garden itself ever since Giggy had discovered Rob’s long, naked body unconscious on the Prussian blue rubber mat in the hallway near the weight room. No hair on his chest, or his legs, or his crotch, or even his armpits – just all that taut, glistening