William Gass - Middle C

The garden was a place of battle. It was not only where campaigns against insects, disease, drought, wilt, and scald were hourly and repeatedly carried on but also an arena where flower was pitted against flower for water, food, and sun. Peace was largely an illusion, and health, prosperity, security, were as momentary as the cover of a cloud. But Miriam warmed to it, read about it over and over, so that her English, though in an odd corner of its world, greatly improved, and her interests — for instance, in soil makeup, drainage, hybrids, chemicals, birds, bees, butterflies, moles, slugs, and worms — widened and intensified. She knew that mealybugs were covered with a white powdery wax; she learned how to control pathogens such as, for instance, gray mold, bacterial leaf blight, downy mildew, scab, and pin rot; she could diagnose like a physician, prescribe like a pharmacist, and treat like a nurse; she knew in centimeters to what depth bulbs should be planted, what loved shade and muck and what sun and loam, how to improve the stickiest clay or give sand a sense of community.

She showed him an industrious ingenuity and meticulousness he had no idea resided in her. For instance, bulbs of various sizes and species were supposed to be dug in at different, and very specific, depths — too deep and their shoots would fall short, too shallow and they wouldn’t last long in unfriendly weather — so she cut a number of dowels to the right lengths, then lettered, along the wood that was to stand above-ground like the warning flag for a gas line, the name of the variety she was going to plant, put a red line around each to indicate how deeply the planting should be, and inserted them into the hole being dug, to the depth marked, before following that with the bulb itself, now safely lodged in the right place. Miriam then resettled the earth and, with a cry of “There!” stomped upon it with a booted foot. She labeled peat-moss pots with tongue depressors, taller plants with lathes of suitable widths on which she clearly printed the appropriate names in black ink, easier to do than the dowels — though carefully, as a bow to her background, in the antique German style.

Joseph was impressed with her devotion but even more with its effects. Miriam began to reflect confidence in all her actions, because the world had been shrunk to the size of her garden, while the principles and problems of gardening became universal: the mantis wore the colors of its immediate locale, it knew how to wait, it seized its prey with a grace of movement equal to its surety and calmly ate its mate. Did so in Illinois as well as Ohio. There were deities in her realm, and Miriam was one. There were kingdoms, and she had hers.

The canola had to be applied in thin coats, and one day Joseph stood behind his mother in amazement while her small paintbrush flicked about its bush like an anxious insect applying the oil. She stood up with the ease of someone who kneels with regularity. Her color was good; she squinched, but her gaze was confident and direct; her weight was in her knees; she munched on certain leaves because they told her much; she drove her hands into the earth as though they had grown there; and she put more things up to her nose than a pup would, laughing with delight and recognition instead of wagging a tail.

Joseph Skizzen saw his mother’s life begin to flower as her plants bloomed, while his — which had drawn for so long a similarly upward line — was climbing around his obsessive sentence like a predatory vine thereby — since the two pursuits were so obviously connected — adding daily to his inhumanity collection. But there was nothing to be admired in the results of his revising, snipping, and arranging: if he were writing in ink he would have made a blot; if he were molding clay, it would resemble a turd; if he were playing notes, cacophony would be heard; if he were working with string, he would have made a knot. Standing in the midst of his damning collection, his former pride in it would arrive as a belch.

Short of breath though thin as a scissor blade, Skizzen puffed up the attic stairs. Because he ate so irregularly he was always weary. Once his mother had welcomed him to her table, but now only certain holidays were celebrated with feasts. Miriam seemed to think that, like the cottage, this was her house and that he was the kid who wouldn’t leave home but hung around Mom like a hungry pet. Instead of contriving to cook for himself, Joey had learned to unwrap. Occasionally, Miriam would call his attention to a leftover, but his mother often simply passed through the house at dinnertime with an apple in her mouth and snacked while studying a catalog covered with satisfied bees.

Meanwhile, Skizzen’s eyes had become dim reading books built of footnotes. His muscles were wasted, he was so sedentary, the stairs his sole exertion since he had given up most of his piano practice. His knowledge was still spotty but intense. He had no patience, no forbearance, no sympathies. His mirror mocked him, and he mocked his mirror. The dirt he dug in was as infertile as news — in fact, it was news.

Nevertheless what Joseph Skizzen regretted most was that he would die before the decision to end Creation had been made, before the disease of human life had mortaled even earth, and all the ores and salts and oils had been removed, fertility driven from the land, the juice of every fruit drunk, waters pumped and gulped and pissed, carcasses consumed; indeed, well before the last movie had cost more than the last buck so that debt was the best bet; before every particle and property of matter had disappeared into a knickknack, a floral garment, or ceramic mug and there was nothing but uncycled trash and even dumps were being dumped; because he would like to have looked out on it a little like God on the first day and observed the mess we had made of ourselves, and seen spread out over infinity a single placid sea of shit. He would have liked to be there at the end to find accounts rendered and justice done. There was supposed to be a Last Judgment, wasn’t there? Of course, he would not survive to see such. He would not be recalled to life, either, to enjoy the late show. Only Miriam’s daffodils would enjoy that. Even if his cheeks were powdered by a peony and he was made immortal, he wouldn’t see it, because there wouldn’t be any — any end — to have an end you would have had to have some shape in time. However, there was no beginning. No end. No middle. No knowing where you were. Meanwhile, waiting for the end, he just turned and turned in one spot like the point of a top till the slowing top began to waver, threatened to flop, whereupon a new asininity would strengthen his circuits and, though he stayed teetery, would keep him going.

Among professional students of the earth there has been a growing concern about the many threats to the continued existence of the human race, but among scholars whose field of expertise is man himself, the worry now is that human beings are becoming even hardier and will never go away.

The library brought Joey Skizzen happiness. It is true he had no instrument available to him now or place to play, though he exercised his fingers daily and caught every radio concert he could. Moreover he had learned to sing a scale built from each of the twelve tones, observing the pattern: whole whole half, whole whole whole half, humming to himself as he worked in the stacks like one of the seven dwarfs. On a piece of paper where he had inscribed a circle he put C where noon would be if this were the face of a clock; then he would write around the dial the sharps from one to seven and after that the flats counterclockwise from eleven back to five, just as Newman’s book on playing had taught him to do, by counting off perfect fifths. So his music was not utterly neglected.