Once he had aroused his mother’s ire, Joey would repent his meanness and attempt to calm her by repeating what the great Voltaire had advised … Ya ya ya, she would hurry to complete the notorious sentence, I know, I know, I should fertilize … cultivate … weed my garden. So I do. But you, Professor, you do not. What do you do but stir me like a Gulasch with your smarts for a spoon. Play the day through with paste and snippers. As in the Kinder’s … ya, dass ist … the Kinder’s Garten.
Sometimes her scorn, only partly assumed, stung him a bit, but he had hidden his ego so far beneath the layers of his cultivated public selves that even the hardest blow was diverted, softly absorbed, or fended off. The truth was that he was proud of his mother’s garden now. She had achieved a renewed life through her interest in it, and her mind had prospered as much as her emotions had, something rarely true, he understood, of love affairs. She would repeatedly disappear into its shrubbery, hidden on her hands and knees, planting and weeding, folding her fingers in a more fundamental form of prayer.
The garden had but one bench, but there Joseph would sometimes sit to enjoy a brisk breeze because these discouraged the mosquitoes that flew in from every point on the globe, he felt, to intrude upon his peace and spoil its brief serenities. The swifts swirled about like bats presumably stuffing themselves with pests, but there were always bugs and always would be bugs — leaf miners, fire ants, flea beetles, earworms, borers — his mother had taught him that — aphids, whiteflies, thrips, and spider mites — the way there would always be weeds — crabgrass, foxtail, purslane, pigweed — it was a wonder, she said, that anything worthwhile remained alive — as well as murderous diseases — leaf spot and brown patch, bean blight and root rot—mein Gott! — but the Good Lord made these things, too, to bore and spoil and chew, she would say, cursing them in her childhood German — the loopers, maggots, weevils of her flower beds and borders.
So her world and his were not so dissimilar after all.
Ilex, or Winterberry, Red Sprite, seeks Jim Dandy for companionship and pollination.
From his attic window Professor Skizzen (feverish, he thought, with flu) patrolled the snowy ground. In a patch near the kitchen door, where Miriam had spread millet and sunflower seeds, numerous quarter notes swayed across a hidden score. What were the birds playing when their heads bobbed? three quick pecks, a pause, three quick pecks, a backward bound that Skizzen decided to characterize as a stiff-legged scratch (a cough), then another pause quite brief before the series was performed again. His chest felt sore, was it his ribs? It might be a dance peculiar to white-throated sparrows and their kind, if his mother’s identification was correct, because the doves rattled off eighth notes like a rifle and then rested, the cardinals cocked their heads and bounded forward like balls, while grackles clacked on nearby wires. Skizzen turned away from the window to cough again, not to be heard by the birds. Suddenly a branch would sway, out of the side of his eye a shadow slice across the crust, or a jay caw; then the flock would flee as if blown into limbs and bushes, leaving the dove, a lone hoot from a horn, placidly putting its beak to the ground—tip tip tip tip—too stupid to be frightened, yet making the most of the moment’s lack of competition by pecking solo.
Joseph’s snuffy head stared at the sheet-white yard. Its dazzle did him in. A few withered rose hips, dark marks against the snow, a few bent dry fronds with enough substance to cast an insubstantial likeness, a few thin brittle sticks: they pierced the snow’s sturdy surface to lead the eye over one stretch of death to another and encouraged the rabbits to bound across it as if it were hot, and the squirrels race to a tree, snippily flashing their tails. His own fly strips fluttered like kite tails when he coughed. Elsewhere, beneath the now-solid sod, where there remained but little warmth from a sun a month old, moles in dark runnels rarely moved, and bulbs that would later bloom so raucously kept counsel to themselves as if indifferent to entreaties from their nature. Skizzen, always perverse on Tuesdays, and made worse by phlegm and fever, let his thoughts seek those buried green blades that were so eager to push through the first wet earth offered them and flaunt their true colors. That’s where growing went to winter. That was elsewhere’s elsewhere.
Skizzen’s present season wasn’t winter. Winter in Woodbine was crisp and clear and cold and clean. The trees were dark-barked, even a sharp wind could not bend their stiffened twigs. His present climate was a stew of steaming fluids. What he saw leaked out of his swollen eyes like an overfull cup. What he smelled fell into a hideous hankie he wadded in his fist and held helplessly to his mouth. In front of him hung a column of clippings that warned against eating Chinese chickens. He stifled a sneeze and sent it to his ribs, which responsively heaved.
Spring’s final frost would bite those bulbs for their boasting and bring their beauty, so fragilely composed, to a rude and cruel close, the way wily sovereigns tempt the tongues of their subjects in order to learn who might be bold enough to wag them and thus nip oppositions, as we customarily say, in the bud. Another human’s warmth might draw him out and leave him exposed, Skizzen concluded, especially when occupied by discomfort as he was now and dearly desiring a nurse. He considered it a thought worth noting down for use when he spoke to his class of music’s lulling little openings, childishly gleeful sometimes—“carefree” was the word … yes … sunny their disposition — strings of notes that did not pull a toy train clattering behind them as they seemed to promise but drew open suddenly the very door of war.
Once most of the birds flew away in winter, performing feats of navigation while on their many migrations that made the Magi seem novices at geography, since the three sages, at least, had a star; but now so many simply stay and tough it out, counting on the sentiments of humans who have for centuries protected those they couldn’t eat, and even kept some cozy in cages most artfully fashioned for them, or prized them for their plumage, or pitted them in fights, or said they sang at night when lovers … well … so it was rumored … did whatever they do … counting on others like his mother’s hand to feed them.
Hydrangea, or Lemon Daddy, the Fickle Bush.
Joseph tried to encourage the escape of the heat that built up in the house during the summer months by keeping the attic windows open, even if he risked, through one of his rusted screens, the entry of some unfriendly flying things, especially bats, which could hang as handily upside down as his flypapered chains of news clippings, the new group especially, strung near the opening of a dormer, that featured pederasts and their victims, a bunch he had with reluctance begun collecting because he had finally noticed the possibly suspicious absence of sex crimes and criminals — rapes, brises, and other genital deformations, gays and other aberrants, exhibitionists, porncones, sodomists, and other mysterious trans-mix-ups — an absence not to be pursued, but people and practices that nevertheless belonged in any proper inhumanity museum, the nutsy fagans and other detrolleyed toonervilles — others, aliens, weirdos, those were the words — the unlike and therefore unliked, whose unnatural acts promoted inhumane behavior in the species. It gave Joseph no pleasure at all to pursue these topics, in fact they made him queasy, but he felt it a duty to his dream.