The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [70]
On the way home from the university one afternoon, Jean came across a man, perhaps forty years old, well dressed in a good suit and tie, asleep on the grass in a public garden. It was startling to see someone so nicely dressed sprawled on a lawn; had he been alone, she would have thought he'd been struck down. But he lay next to an old woman who must surely have been his mother. The woman, also neatly dressed in a light coat, lay on her back, one arm across her eyes, in the sunlight. The man lay curled beside her, his back to her, as if they were in a bed. Jean could only glance, so intimate was the scene. She did not know what detail made her imagine the woman had emigrated, left her home in the last years of her life to join her son, yet Jean felt certain it could not be otherwise. They were together in this foreign place and he would face the responsibility of burying her far from everything she'd known. When Jean returned some days later to that patch of grass between the two flowerbeds, she could not look upon the spot where they had lain without feeling it now belonged to them. It was then that she began to feel a purpose; it was then that her plan first came to her. Very early the following morning, she returned to the spot and planted, quickly, a trespasser, in the existing beds, cuttings that would grow unnoticed except for their fragrance. If she had known their homeland, she could have planted with precision, flowers that would have reminded them of Greece, Lithuania, Ukraine, Italy, Sardinia, Malta … so that if they came back there to sleep on the grass, familiar scents would invade their dreams and give them an inexplicable ease. But she had not heard them speak and so had no idea from where they had come. So she planted wild sorrel, which grows in every temperate country, and which is both edible and medicinal.
At first, Jean planted in the ravines, then in laneways, along the edges of parking lots, places without obvious ownership, overlooked for years. Then she grew bolder, planting at night in the selvage between curbs and pavement, between pavement and front lawns; rims, crevices, along civic fencing.
She kept track in a notebook and sometimes returned to investigate the progress of her work. One might think this gave her pleasure. But after a night of planting, she was stunned with loneliness, as if she'd been tending graves.
It was not yet completely dark, but already even the streetlights above the thick trees revealed little. This was the dimness Marina painted with such knowledge, before the first real starlight, or even the shadow of the moon. Jean kneeled. She felt the damp soil of the small city park staining her legs. There would never be a time now when the coldness of the ground, no matter how black and wet, would not remind her of the desert. She parted the soil with her trowel and, one by one, drew rough round bulbs from her bag and slipped them down after the metal blade. She worked steadily, her hands found their way. She felt her fingernails fill with earth. From a distance, her trowel, a flashlight tied to it, was a firefly bobbing erratically a few inches above the ground.
Jean dug, wishing she had acres to upturn with only a trowel; the meditation of lifting the earth one scoopful at a time, submerged in thought, for hours moving toward an understanding that is at first merely visceral and then becomes conscious knowledge, as if only such physical action could bring the thought into words. She would sink her mind into an image, something she perceived in someone's face in the street, or something Avery had said, or a sentence read while standing in front of the bookshop shelves like her mother, with no money to buy the book so that later she had to finish the thought, sometimes even the whole story, in her mind.
This night she was thinking about Avery's father, about dying slowly, in the kind of pain Nature metes out;