In the garden of the asylum
Your mind is the wind in the trees
And you are that distant traveler
Pulling the landscape along
Behind him, sowing in his own mind–
Your mind–the future, the night
You will lie down in an open field
To watch stars wheeling round
Nothing but sky and this boat
Of a planet and what you became
In the garden of the asylum when
Your mind was the wind in the trees.
17
Oh Really Now
Still in my adrenaline lag, and having no real experience of the world, I wanted to play out the role of victim and witness, preferably in a breathtaking way in a courtroom—I knew just which dress I’d wear. But the drama was already over. The Strange man was captured quickly—he was not a very experienced or skillful criminal. From the weekly publication of crimes, we learned that his name was Barrett Billy. I overheard Deena having heated telephone conversations with Rodney, who apparently viewed the crime against Deena as another opportunity to bother her with requests for dates, and then Matu was on the phone, and then Rodney again.
I yearned for Molly’s company then so that the two of us could sort out or invent what was going on as we had so often in the past, but Molly was away at that idiotic cheerleading camp. I cursed the invention of cheerleading. I knew that our relationship had changed in some essential way, maybe a small way in the long view, but at that moment something that caused me genuine grief.
You would think that after the Strange Man comes into one’s life the rest of life would be different because of it in immediately noticeable ways, but things went on just as usual. Later in the summer, Matu came out to pick corn. I loved the smell of it and its green, the swollen ears like flower buds, the fine silks, the rows of cornstalks like corridors of giant green grasshoppers standing at attention. In a cornfield, you could have the illusion of being alone even though other people were just a few feet away. I loved, too, the work of it. Our pace was leisurely, of course, and the younger children insisted on helping so there was always some occupational difficulty or dispute to resolve. Deena and Matu chatted, but there were long moments of quiet when everyone was focused on the task.
It was while we were pulling corn that I caught the tail-end of a conversation between Matu and Deena, a conversation that I would fruitlessly ponder and forget until many years later when I knew personally what it meant. Speaking in a voice I had never heard before, Matu was saying, “What life is is making one big mistake that you cannot forgive yourself for and then trying repeatedly to rectify it. Or pretend it didn’t happen. Or forget it. Or escape it.”
Deena said, “Oh surely you don’t really believe that.”
“Oh, but I do,” Matu said.
Deena laughed and after a pause said, “I can’t think of anything in my life that I feel that way about.”
“Well,” Matu said, “maybe you haven’t made your particular mistake yet. Or maybe you’ve made it and just don’t know it yet.”
Deena said, “Oh really now.”
14
Summer
Summer came. Molly was going to cheerleader camp, of all things, and then spending the rest of the summer with a friend on a working ranch. Matu wanted to take me to the coast where she, Adela, Bobby, and Sara would spend a month and a half before Uncle Robber joined them for a few more weeks and a trip to some extravagant and hyperhappy theme park. If I didn’t want to do that, why, she told me more than once, I could go to a wonderful camp in the mountains where I would meet bright, charming children from all over the world now wouldn’t that be nice?
One day, Deena was visiting and overheard one of the conversations about all this that Matu was having with herself in my presence and said, “Darling, why don’t you just let Tella come spend the summer with me at Mama’s place? She won’t have to do anything except what she wants to do there. She won’t even have to see anyone, except Miss Monkey, and well, me.” Deena turned to ask me how I would like that, but Matu cut her off. Later, when they thought they were out of earshot of me, they had a heated discussion, almost an argument.
Like all—well, many– people who are incapable of imagining a null emotional state, Matu thought that depression was an imaginary affliction usually born of idleness, which she strongly disapproved of. Matu, God bless her, was one of those “you’d-feel- so-much-better-if you’d-just” people and was always ready to tell you what would make her feel better if she were you. She would not let go of her opinion that what she thought of as cheerful distractions would “get me out of myself,” and Deena, who was just as stubborn, would not let go of her opinion that what Matu considered cheerful distractions were in themselves depressing and that my “problem” wasn’t boredom or self-involvement but “naked grief” (those words conjured up quite a sight in my beleaguered brain) that I had every reason to feel.
I couldn’t understand much of what they said, and, in fact, I was eavesdropping only out of habit, for I didn’t really care what they said or did. Well, that’s not exactly true. I did have some whiffy kind of feelings that helping Matu take care of Adela, Bobby, and Sara for a few months might be impossibly burdensome, even if it was in the most beautiful place on earth. Moreover, I have always found theme parks perverse and grotesque and even frightening—particularly the people who dress up as animated characters and just won’t leave you alone.
Anyhow, Matu finally gave in, and I went to spend the summer with Deena out at Mamaw and Papaw Rennie’s farm, a place where I had not spent much time that I remembered and which hadn’t really been a working farm since long before I was even born. However, although the cows, horses, mules, pigs, and chickens were long gone, the place had many of the requisites of farm-ness and out-there-ness that I needed: a pond, a garden, fields and woods, at two-story tin-roofed farmhouse with verandahs and a sleeping porch upstairs on the back. The nearest neighbors were three miles away, and though a main road ran past its long, graveled driveway, you couldn’t really hear the sounds of any world except the country world—birds, wind in the huge old oaks and hickories and sweetgums, the lowing of cattle or cocks crowing on the neighboring farm, cicadas, the faint rustle of graveyard grasshoppers, walking sticks, my very first praying mantis, fireflies, snakes. Occasionally, we could hear a train from far away, and sometimes crop dusters flew over, though the poison they spread in great hanging clouds did not smell nearly as wonderful as that of the mosquito truck.
Summer was and is still my favorite season. I love wilting heat and violent thunderstorms, and we had plenty of both that year. Deena’s cantankerous cat, Miss Monkey, became my close friend and often slept at the foot of my bed. The only drawback to this sleeping arrangement was that Monkey became a fierce, pouncing tiger whenever anything in the bed—one’s feet, for example—moved.
Deena had told me that there wasn’t anything much to do, but there was plenty to do, and all of it by its very nature was particularly attractive to me at that moment of my life. I helped Deena mount new specimens for her personal collection of insects and moths, and helped her go through whatever was caught in the insect trap she had set in the garden (“just to see what’s passing through,” she said). I learned how to tap a hard-boiled egg all over with the back of a spoon and then roll it twice between my palms till the shell loosened and could be pulled off in one large mosaiced piece that we later crushed and scattered around the flower beds to kill snails in a rather gruesome way. I read whatever I wanted to read in Deena’s library—Dickens, Sterne, Austen, Poe, poetry anthologies, fascinating and incomprehensible entomological tracts with enticing drawings that sometimes gave me nightmares.
And the garden required daily attention—sometimes I just walked through it to smell its dirty greenness, but I also helped Deena tend the corn and tomatoes and peppers there. I learned how to hoe, how to let the hoe do its work and to work in a steady rhythm instead of hacking away with it in that bulldog way that I had. I learned to focus that summer, and what it meant, to wait, to watch, to be still, to do even small things right. And for the first time, I felt something better than happiness, something that we don’t even recognize until we are pained by its absence: peace. And for a while, it was a lasting peace, and my soul was a smooth, shining lake.
Accidental Antenna 