"The truth is," Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice embarrassed but determined, "you're monstrously selfish. You're a coward. You don't care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts."
They reach the tee, a platform of turf beside a hunchbacked fruit tree offering fists of taut ivory—colored buds. "Let me go first," Rabbit says. " 'Til you calm down." His heart is hushed, held in mid—beat, by anger. He doesn't care about anything except getting out of this tangle. He wants it to rain. In avoiding looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn't heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather's color stretched dense across the north. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler—edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he's fooled, for the ball makes its hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. "That's it!" he cries and, turning to Eccles with a grin of aggrandizement, repeats, "That's it."
SUN AND MOON, sun and moon, time goes. In Mrs. Smith's acres, crocuses break the crust. Daffodils and narcissi unpack their trumpets. The reviving grass harbors violets, and the lawn is suddenly coarse with dandelions and broad—leaved weeds. Invisible rivulets running brokenly make the low land of the estate sing. The flowerbeds, bordered with bricks buried diagonally, are pierced by dull red spikes that will be peonies, and the earth itself, scumbled, stone—flecked, horny, raggedly patched with damp and dry, looks like the oldest and smells like the newest thing under Heaven. The shaggy golden suds of blooming forsythia glow through the smoke that fogs the garden while Rabbit burns rakings of crumpled stalks, perished grass, oak leaves shed in the dark privacy of winter, and rosebush prunings that cling together in infuriating ankle—clawing clumps. These brush piles, ignited soon after he arrives, crusty—eyed and tasting coffee, in the midst of the webs of dew, are still damply smoldering when he leaves, making ghosts in the night behind him as his footsteps crunch on the spalls of the Smith driveway. All the way back to Brewer in the bus he smells the warm ashes.
Funny, for these two months he never has to cut his fingernails. He lops, lifts, digs. He plants annuals, packets the old lady gives him – nasturtiums, poppies, sweet peas, petunias. He loves folding the hoed ridge of crumbs of soil over the seeds. Sealed, they cease to be his. The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Self—destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe—handle in his palms.
Now, after the magnolias have lost their grip but before any but the leaves of the maple have the breadth to cast much shade, the cherry trees and crabapples and, in a remote corner of the grounds, a solitary plum tree ball with bloom, a whiteness the black limbs seem to gather from the blowing clouds and after a moment hurl away, so the reviving grass is bleached by an astonishing storm of confetti. Fragrant of gasoline, the power mower chews the petals; the lawn digests them. The lilac bushes bloom by the fallen tennis—court fences. Birds come to the birdbath. Busy one morning with a crescent—shaped edger, Harry is caught in a tide of perfume, for behind him the breeze has turned and washes down through a thick sloping bank of acrid lily—of—the—valley leaves in which on that warm night a thousand bells have ripened, the high ones on the stem still the faint sherbet green of cantaloupe rind. Apple trees and pear trees. Tulips. Those ugly purple tatters the iris. And at last, prefaced by azaleas, the rhododendrons themselves, with a profusion increasing through the last week of May. Rabbit has waited all spring for this crowning. The bushes puzzled him, they were so big, almost trees, some twice his height, and there seemed so many. They were planted all along the edges of the towering droop—limbed hemlocks that sheltered the place, and in the acres sheltered there were dozens of great rectangular clumps like loaves ofporous green bread. The bushes were evergreen. With their zigzag branches and long oval leaves fingering in every direction they seemed to belong to a different climate, to a different land, whose gravity pulled softer than this one. When the first blooms came they were like the single big flower Oriental temptresses wear on the, sides of their heads on the covers of the paperback spy stories Ruth reads. But when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds they remind him of nothing so much as the hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter. Harry has often wanted and never had a girl like that, a little Catholic from a shabby house, dressed in flashy bargain clothes. In the swarthy leaves under the pert soft cap of fivepetaled flowers he can fancy her face; he can almost smell her perfume. He draws within an inch of the massed petals. Odorless, but each individual flower wears on the roof of its mouth two fans of freckles where the anthers tap.
At this climax of her late husband's garden, Mrs. Smith comes out of the house and on Rabbit's arm walks deep into the rhododendron plantation. A woman once of some height, she is bent small, and the lingering strands of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totters along with it dangling loose like an outlandish bracelet. Her method of gripping her gardener is this: he crooks his right arm, pointing his elbow toward her shoulder, and she shakily brings her left forearm up within his and bears down heavily on his wrist with her lumpish and freckled fingers. Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers. He feels her body jolt with every step, and every word twitches her head. Not that the effort of speaking is so great; it is the need for emphasis that seizes her, wrinkling the arch of her nose fiercely, making her lips snarl above her snaggle—teeth with a comic over—expressiveness that is self—conscious, like the funny faces made by a thirteen—year—old girl in constant confession of the fact that she is not beautiful. She sharply tips her head to look up at Harry, and in tiny brown sockets afflicted by creases like so many drawstrings, her cracked blue eyes bulge frantically with captive life as she speaks: "Oh, I don't like Mrs. R. S. Holford; she always looks so washed—out and flossy to me. Horace loved those salmon colors so; I'd say to him, `If I want red, give me red; a fat red rose. And if I want white, give me white, a tall white lily; and don't bother me with all these inbetweens and would—be—pinks and almost—purples that don't know what their mind is. Rhody's a mealymouthed plant,' I'd say to Horace, `she does have a brain, so she gives you some of everything,' just to tease him. But in truth I meant it." The thought seems to strike her. She stops dead on the path of grass and her eyes, the irises a kind of broken—glass white within rings of persisting blue, roll nervously, looking from one side of him to the other. "In truth I meant every word of it. I'm a farmer's daughter, Mr. Angstrom, and I would have rather seen this land gone under to alfalfa. I'd say to him, `Why don't you plant buckwheat if you must fuss in the ground? Now there's a real crop. You raise the wheat, I'll bake the bread.' I would have, too. `What do we want with all these corsages that after they're gone we have to look at their homely leaves all the year round?' I'd say to him, `What pretty girl are you growing these for?' He was younger than 1, that's why I took advantage of my right to tease him. I won't say by how much. What are we standing here for? Old body like mine, stand still in one place you'll stick fast." She jabs the cane into the grass, the signal for him to extend his arm. They move on down the alley of bloom. "Never thought I'd outlive him. That was his weakness. Come in out of the garden, he'd be forever sitting. A farmer's daughter never learns the meaning of sit."