It was an uncharacteristic one, she thought as the lens hovered a few feet in front of the gray-green spikes of onopordum, the architecture of the thistles coming into prickly focus. Jock loved hand tools, not technology. He’d collected them for years, mostly Burgon & Ball forged in Sheffield, where the company had been making such things for three centuries. Jock’s topiary shears alone were worth hanging as industrial art; and that’s what he’d done with them, hooking them to pegboards in his tractor shed in the Delaware Valley. For a man who’d abandoned gardening as a profession years ago, the shed was painfully revealing — something between a trophy house and a mausoleum. Jock had left the tools — more than a hundred and fifty items — to Jo at his death, two months before.
His death. The camera wavered before a clump of euphorbia, long past blooming. Even in the privacy of her own mind, she still could not say his suicide, his brutal and inexplicable hanging.
August, and the peak of the summer season in the Delaware Valley. The riotous bloom of July dwindling now to the hot colors of dahlias and Echinacea and Black-Eyed Susans. She’d been supervising the destruction of a hoary juniper hedge at a historic home in Bucks County when she got the call from Dottie.
Her grandmother was composed; she delivered the news without weeping; but blank astonishment was behind every word.
I lived with the man for more than sixty years, and he couldn’t just tell me his plans? Dottie demanded.
How did a person share that kind of thing, Jo wondered now as she withdrew a measuring tape from her bag and paced off the depth of the massive bed (eighteen feet). How did a man say to the woman he’d loved since the age of twenty, I am going to walk out the kitchen door this morning as I always do around seven-thirty, only today I’m going to take a length of tractor chain and loop it over the beam in the garage?
Nothing had prepared Dottie for the body swinging from the ceiling, the limpness of the blue hands. Nothing had prepared Jo. She’d left the junipers and the backhoe and the historic house under renovation, and did not return for two weeks.
THEY HAD ASKED EACH OTHER WHY, OF COURSE. THEY HAD hours to talk after the funeral. Depression? Jo wondered. Dottie had seen no sign of it, although she wasn’t the best at detecting those things. After six decades of marriage she and Jock kept themselves to themselves, they didn’t probe each other’s souls like young people did nowadays. They ate dinner in silence if their minds were heavy and left each other to sort things out. Perhaps she’d been at fault, there. But he’d never asked her for advice, he’d never seemed troubled. Getting older, of course… They both were.…
Jo called Jock’s doctor and asked whether there’d been a diagnosis. Something out of the ordinary. A death sentence he couldn’t face.
None, the doctor answered regretfully. He, too, felt obscurely responsible. And in any case, your grandfather was no coward.
No. Even that final tractor chain demanded courage; self-hanging was not the act of a fearful man.
She was haunted by him in dreams: perfectly ordinary visits, Jock in mid-conversation across the breakfast table, one of his old plaid shirts rolled to the elbows. She always asked why he had to leave. He smiled at her fondly, told her nothing. He’d killed himself the day after she told him about the biggest gardening coup of her young career: Gray and Alicia Westlake wanted a copy of the White Garden, and she, Jo, was going to Sissinghurst.…
For reasons she could not explain, Jo was struggling with guilt. As though her news had driven Jock to suicide.
THEN, ONE MORNING IN SEPTEMBER — MAYBE THREE DAYS after that intimate coffee with Gray, the two of them talking of lilies and moonlight — Dottie appeared in Jo’s office holding a letter.
“I was going through your grandfather’s things yesterday,” she explained. “I should have done it before, but to tell you the truth I hadn’t the heart for it.”
She’d started in Jock’s office — just a desk, really, with a stack of catalogs, some tidily paid bills. His Last Will and Testament, which she’d witnessed only six months before, secure in a drawer. She’d moved on to the tractor shed, avoiding the garage and its accusing beam. All the tools were in the tractor shed, Dottie explained, and the Will reminded her she’d need to have them valued. “He left them to you, of course — the hoes and clippers and whatnot. Honestly, Jo, if you want it all carted away I’m happy to get rid of it. Don’t worry about the Will, we know he must’ve been crazy in the end — ”
“I want Grandpa’s tools.”
It was in the shed that Dottie noticed the envelope, sitting in a wheelbarrow, in plain sight, as though Jock meant to mail it and simply forgot in all the bustle of hanging himself. “In the Event of My Death, he’d written in the lower corner,” she sputtered. “I mean, really, Jo — ”
She’d expected a suicide note. Instead, what she got was a postcard from the past.
“It was one of those things they carried, in the war,” Dottie told Jo, “ — in case their bodies were found. The soldiers wanted something sent back, as a kind of farewell.”
It was dated Somewhere near Brindisi, September 1943. And addressed to Jock’s mother.
Dear Mum and Dad and young Kip, If you are reading this, it is because old Jerry has done for me at last, never mind how, it’s all the same in the end. I want you to know that I don’t fear Death — that whatever happens, I will be all right, because it’s a relief to think of lying in the long grass as much as I like, and no marching just because Captain tells me to. I have seen a lot of Death, starting with that lady back home, and I know that what is left behind is like stubble in the fields after harvest time, the ends of things that have been used up, with the best of ’em put back into the earth.
Jo glanced around at Vita’s dying garden. The rain had thrown a sheet of ground fog between her camera and the last of the argyranthemums; the effect was unutterably lonely. The ends of things that have been used up. Is that how Jock viewed his life, in his last days? How could she have failed to notice such despair?
She stopped before a slim statue of a figure, somberly robed, more religious than classical. She glanced at her map of the White Garden; this must be the Little Virgin, the face almost obscured by the branches of a weeping pear tree. It was the sort of thing that could be adapted for the Westlake garden, with a modernist sculpture — possibly even an abstract one — something that gestured toward the original without copying it slavishly. Jo positioned the Virgin in her viewfinder and took several shots, then noted the height and breadth of the weeping pear. Flowering quince or a tree-form wisteria might do just as well — there were several varieties available in the States.
The drizzle was turning to rain, so she slipped the camera back in its case and straightened over her bulging shoulder bag, aware that Terence had moved out of view on the far side of the box parterre. It was almost impossible to imagine the glory of this place on a sunny July day; a raw chill had seeped into the White Garden. She shivered.
I cannot go without telling you why I ran that day, Jock’s letter had continued.
I lied about my age, Mum, and nearly killed you with it. I hope Kip never does the same. War comes soon enough by the front door without hustling it in at the back. But I could not bear what happened, nor explain it neither, and going for a soldier seemed best. If I am dead, I hope you will believe and honour my word: I never did nothing for the Lady but what she asked. Before God, I tried to help her, though I only harmed in the end. I will see her huge eyes before me however long or short I may live, but my soul is easy: I was not a bad boy, Mum, only unlucky.