Paullina Simons: The Summer Garden

He wasn’t participating in the fighting either. As Anthony and Tatiana came out to the road, they saw him parked in his wheelchair in the overgrown front yard, sitting in the Maine sun like a bush while his wife and daughter hollered inside. Tatiana and Anthony slowed down as they neared his yard.

“Mama, what’s wrong with him?” whispered Anthony.

“He was hurt in the war.” He had no legs, no arms, he was just a torso with stumps and a head.

“Can he speak?” They were in front of his gate.

Suddenly the man said in a loud clear voice, a voice accustomed to giving orders, “He can speak but he chooses not to.”

Anthony and Tatiana stopped at the gate, watching him for a few moments. She unlatched the gate and they came into the yard. He was tilted to the left like a sack too heavy on one side. His rounded stumps hung halfway down to the non-existent elbow. The legs were gone in toto .

“Here, let me help.” Tatiana straightened him out, propping the pillows that supported him under his ribs. “Is that better?”

“Eh,” the man said. “One way, another.” His small blue eyes stared into her face. “You know what I would like, though?”

“What?”

“A cigarette. I never have one anymore; can’t bring it to my mouth, as you can see. And they”—he flipped his head to the back—“they’d sooner croak than give me one.”

Tatiana nodded. “I’ve got just the thing for you. I’ll be right back.”

The man turned his head from her to the bay. “You won’t be back.”

“I will. Anthony,” she said, “come sit on this nice man’s lap until Mama comes back—in just one minute.”

Anthony was glad to do it. Picking him up, Tatiana placed him on the man’s lap. “You can hold on to his neck.”

After she ran to get the cigarettes, Anthony said, “What’s your name?”

“Colonel Nicholas Moore,” the man replied. “But you can call me Nick.”

“You were in the war?”

“Yes. I was in the war.”

“My dad, too,” said Anthony.

“Oh.” The man sighed. “Is he back?”

“He’s back.”

Tatiana returned and, lighting the cigarette, held it to Nick’s mouth while he smoked with intense deep breaths, as if he were inhaling the smoke not just into his lungs but into his very core. Anthony sat on his lap, watching his face inhale with relief and exhale with displeasure as if he didn’t want to let the nicotine go. The colonel smoked two in a row, with Tatiana bent over him, holding the cigarettes one by one to his mouth.

Anthony said, “My dad was a major but now he’s a lobsterman.”

“A captain, son,” corrected Tatiana. “A captain.”

“My dad was a major and a captain,” said Anthony. “We’re gonna get ice cream while we wait for him to come back to us from the sea. You want us to bring you an ice cream?”

“No,” said Nick, leaning his head slightly into Anthony’s black hair. “But this is the happiest fifteen minutes I’ve had in eighteen months.”

At that moment, his wife ran out of the house. “What are you doing to my husband?” she shrieked.

Tatiana scooped Anthony off the man’s lap. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said quickly.

“You won’t be back,” said Nick, gaping after her.

Now they were sitting on the bench eating ice cream.

Soon there was the distant squawk of gulls.

“There’s Daddy,” Tatiana said breathlessly.

The boat was a twenty-foot lobster sloop with a headsail, though most fishing boats were propelled by gas motors. It belonged to Jimmy Schuster, whose father, upon passing on, passed it on to him. Jimmy liked the boat because he could go out in it and trawl for lobsters on his own—a one-man job, he called it. Then his arm got caught in the pot hauler, the rope that pulls the heavy lobster traps out of the water. To free himself, he had to cut off his hand at the wrist, which saved his life—and him from going to war—but now, with no small irony, he needed deckhands to do the grunt work. Trouble was, all the deckhands had been in Hürtgen Forest and Iwo Jima the last four years.

Ten days ago Jimmy had got himself a deckhand. Today, Jimmy was in the cockpit aft, and the tall silent one was standing pin straight, at attention, in orange overalls and high black rubber boots, staring intently at the shore.

Tatiana stood from the bench in her white cotton dress, and when the boat was close enough, still a bay away, she flung her arm in a generous wave, swaying from side to side. Alexander, I’m here, I’m here, the wave said.

When he was close enough to see her, he waved back.

They moored the boat at the buyers’ dock and opened the catches on the live tanks. Jumping off the boat, the tall man said he would be right back to off-load and clean up and, rinsing his hands quickly in the spout on the dock, walked up from the quay, up the slope to the bench where the woman and the boy were sitting.

The boy ran down to him. “Hey,” he said and then stood shyly.

“Hey, bud.” The man couldn’t ruffle Anthony’s hair: his hands were mucky.

Under his orange rubber overalls, he was wearing dark green army fatigues and a green long-sleeved army jersey, covered with sweat and fish and salt water. His black hair was in a military buzzcut, his gaunt perspiring face had black afternoon stubble over the etched bones.

He came up to the woman in pristine white who was sitting on the bench. She raised her eyes to greet him—and raised them and raised them, for he was tall.

“Hey,” she said. It was a breathing out. She had stopped eating her ice cream.

“Hey,” he said. He didn’t touch her. “Your ice cream is melting.”

“Oh, I know.” She licked all around the wafer cone, trying to stem the tide but it was no use, the vanilla had turned to condensed milk and was dripping. He watched her. “I can never seem to finish it before it melts,” she muttered, getting up. “You want the rest?”

“No, thank you.” She took a few more mouthfuls before she threw the cone in the trash. He motioned to her mouth.

She licked her lips to clean away the remaining vanilla milk. “Better?”

He didn’t answer. “We’ll have lobsters again tonight?”

“Of course,” she said. “Whatever you want.”

“I still have to go back and finish.”

“Yes, of course. Should we, um, come down to the dock? Wait with you?”

“I want to help,” said Anthony.

Tatiana vigorously shook her head. She would not be able to get the fish smell off the boy.

“You’re so clean,” said Alexander. “Why don’t you stay here with your mother? I’ll be done soon.”

“But I want to help you.”

“Well, come down then, maybe we’ll find something for you to do.”

“Yes, nothing that involves touching fish,” muttered Tatiana.

She didn’t care much for Alexander’s job as a lobsterman. He reeked of fish when he returned. Everything he touched smelled of it. A few days ago, when she had been very slightly grumbling, almost teasing, he said, “You never complained in Lazarevo when I fished,” not teasing. Her face must have looked pretty crestfallen because he said, “There’s no other work for a man in Stonington. You want me to smell like something else, we’ll have to go somewhere else.”

Tatiana didn’t want to go somewhere else. They just got here.

“About the other thing …” he said. “I won’t bring it up again.”

That’s right, don’t bring up Lazarevo, their other moment by the sea near eternity. But that was then—in the old bloodsoaked country. After all, Stonington—with warm days and cool nights and expanses of still and salty water everywhere they looked, the mackerel sky and the purple lupines reflecting off the glass bay with the white boats—it was more than they ever asked for. It was more than they ever thought they would have.