Michael Christie - The Beggar's Garden

Sam knew his marriage was in a condition way past hope. His terror he now reserved for the life in store for Cricket. If they separated, she would be unscrewed from him, every minute of every day not spent with her a counter-clockwise crank. She was a happy, adventuresome kid who would adapt, and as there were simply more of them here, she’d be helpless to the magnetism of Anna’s familial cabal. Sam set himself down on the carpet at the foot of Cricket’s bed, inhaling a dusty puff that rose from the thick, white pile. He considered for a moment relocating to Calgary— he could implant himself on the periphery of their lives, perhaps retain possession of at least a pittance of their affections — and admitted this to be his only recourse if Anna decided to stay.

Sam left early the next morning and checked into a motel beside the airport. He spent almost a week there, stacking greasy room-service plates outside his door and taking shrivelling hour-long showers where, in the dizzying steam and torrential fury of the motel’s Herculean water pressure, he held tight to the grippy stainless-steel bar affixed there for the disabled. Emerging pink and flagellated, Sam would crawl into the tightly made bed in search of refuge from the polar climate visited upon the room by an inadjustable air conditioner. He’d kick the sheets out from the corners and behold channels that advertised pay-for-view movies in short, entertaining nuggets, all he could stand to watch.

On the plane, Sam offered himself the sad consolation that he hadn’t told Anna about Isaac. He could only imagine her lawyerly unpacking of the ethics of what he was doing. He was using him. He was enacting a dubiously selfish plot in order to convince himself, and her and Cricket and everyone else, that he was actually a good person — a point that Sam couldn’t say wasn’t entirely true.

When Sam returned home and opened the gate into his wife’s garden, he couldn’t believe what was there. Hoses were spritzing a fine mist skyward, sending shimmering sails of rainbow light to unfurl across the yard. Each of the beds was meticulously weeded, the earth black and freshly turned with ruby worms straining for air. New tomato plants were carefully staked in beds that had previously been empty. A few lavender bushes had exploded in a purple froth and there was a walkway that Sam didn’t remember, made of flat polished stones that meandered from the peeling side door of the shed all the way to the rear of the house. Even the grass bore a lush, perky resilience. “Wow,” Sam said.

“I think you might have a nitrogen problem,” said Isaac, appearing behind him in a dirty undershirt and cut-off trousers. “Too little, I mean, and too much potash. I got you a compost going over there. But if you want, you could piss on the beds. It might help. That’s what I been doing.”

Isaac pointed a trowel over Sam’s shoulder. “That there parsley’s gone to seed, don’t blame me, nothing I could do, you should eat it up soon as you can. Oh, and you wanna wrap that elm in foil this year or the army worms will strip it clean come winter.”

That evening, they pulled two wicker garden chairs from the rafters of the shed and sat out in the sweet night breeze drinking lemonade that Isaac had squeezed fresh.

“You been gone a while. Which I guess could mean it went good or bad depending,” Isaac said.

“Not the best,” Sam said, taking a long slug of lemonade.

“She’ll come around.”

“No,” Sam said. “Not if she’s smart she won’t.”

They sat for a bit, watching tiny grey birds flit and dogfight amid Isaac’s handiwork. After a while, Isaac went and relieved himself into the kale bed at the side of the house.

“I think I might have got the taste for sleeping indoors again,” he said, sitting back down. “And my hips feel a hell of a lot more spry not parked on the pavement all day.”

“You know, I don’t mind having you around, really,” said Sam. “You could stay a while, keep up the garden, just until you find something else.”

Isaac drew a slow breath. “Sam, what’s my balance running?” he asked.

Sam crinkled his nose, then extracted his pocket notebook and descended the column of his neat script with a finger. “With this month’s interest, it looks like twenty-two hundred and some change.”

“I been thinking I may go out to that crazy institution and try to drum up my brother. I never found nothing but trouble in this city besides, and with that much cash in my hand it might help if I had someone else to take care of. I never done so well fending on my own.”

Sam drove to a twenty-four-hour teller. He had to call some tech guys at the bank to lift his thousand-dollar withdrawal limit so he could empty Isaac’s account. Before he left, Sam slipped a thousand from his own account into the wad.

“Sometimes I didn’t even believe you’d actually give it to me,” Isaac said when Sam returned, clacking the edges of the bills on the garden table like a deck of cards.

That night, Sam woke to a figure standing over his bed holding a garden spade.

“Someone’s trying to get in,” Isaac said.

Sam stopped his breath and strained his ears. He heard only Isaac’s wheezy inhalations. “In here?” Sam said, sleepily. “Why?” He rose to follow Isaac to the door, who slid the bolt lock back and nudged it open with the tip of the spade.

Outside they discovered a group of raccoons rummaging a torn-open orange bag of yard clippings. They’d surprised them, and the largest one reared and bared its teeth but made no sound. Sam stood with the cool air licking him between the buttons of his pyjamas.

Isaac drew the shovel over his shoulder like an axe. “Say the word,” he said.

Sam raised his fist in a halting gesture he’d seen in Vietnam movies and took a step toward the hackled raccoon. Tiny stones bit into his naked heels. When Cricket was four she didn’t speak to him for nearly three weeks after he refused to let her try to pet some raccoons they saw in Stanley Park. It was common knowledge that raccoons were dangerous things, especially vicious when cornered or defending their young. In minutes they could cut a man to ribbons with their sharp furtive claws. But looking down into the face of this particular beast, Sam wasn’t so sure. It seemed to him more like a gentle, nomadic creature. A lonely thing. Something that would rather live at night off table scraps and garbage than face the roaring bustle and endless conflict of the day. And this was its little family, he supposed, judging by the way the smaller ones skulked at its haunches. Really, it looked more weary than anything as it completed its appraisal of them and settled back on all fours. Then it swung its white snout toward the garage of Sam’s neighbour, mustering a final glance over its shoulder, holding Sam and Isaac in the hollows of its eyes before ushering its family beneath a camper van.

“Whew,” Isaac said when they were back in bed, and Sam heard the slosh of his jam jar.

In the morning Sam woke and Isaac was gone, just a gamey smell on the bedroll that he’d folded up and tied neatly with a shoestring. Sam sat out in the garden awhile. A few frigates of white cloud inched west toward the ocean. Fragrant wafts tore through the lanes between the houses and rustled the leaves of his garden with a pleasing hush that reminded Sam of rough hands passing over soft skin. After some time, he stood and clicked open the side gate and walked around to the front of his house. He climbed the three steps, took a little jump, and drove his brown loafer into the centre of his front door.

Thanks to:

Linda Svendsen, Rhea Tregebov, Maureen Medved, Jen Farrell, Conan Tobias, Bryce Firman, Arnie Bell, Jackie Bowers, Leslie Remund, Sheryda Warrener, Claire Tacon, Michael John Wheeler, Sheila Wilkes, Dennis LeDoux, Lee Henderson, Iris Tupholme, Jennifer Lambert, Stephanie Fysh, and my agent, Anne McDermid, for their invaluable contributions;