The Night Garden Page 3

  “Yes, I know,” I said, not bothering to tell her how fast information moves in a small community. “Thus Fixing Bob.”

  “Yes, thus Fixing Bob. But Mother said she was tired of living on bases. We’d lived on three so far. And the houses are always teeny-tiny with not enough bedrooms, and the yards are teeny-tiny, and some people object to Mother crying so much.”

  “I suppose some might call her Crying Alice,” I said tentatively. “Like Fixing Bob.”

  “Oh, how clever you are,” said Winifred. “To think of that right on the spot.”

  “Well,” I said, looking down modestly but not arguing, figuring we might as well establish this at the start.

  “Flying Bob,” said Zebediah, who had already gone through all the dresser drawers and crawled about under the bed and in the closet and generally examined the room from corner to corner. He was covered in dust bunnies because Sina is a better sculptress than housekeeper.

  “Anyhow, that’s how we ended up in dead Auntie Claire’s house down the road,” said Winifred. “Isn’t it, Wilfred?”

  “Yes,” said Wilfred, who reminded me a bit of Old Tom, being affable but saying little more than that which was needed at the time.

  “It has four bedrooms!” Winifred went on happily. “And Mother said that that was it! This was our chance for a real home and if Daddy persisted in taking care of the Argot and staying in the air force instead of quitting and getting a job in Sooke—one that would allow us to live in this castle of a house we’d been left—then she would just move in there with us anyway and we would all wait for him to come to his senses. And Daddy said he didn’t mind. He would continue to live on base and come down to visit when he could. Father loves the Argot, doesn’t he, Wilfred?”

  “Yes,” said Wilfred.

  “It’s a secret spy reconnaissance plane that can fly for days without refueling,” said Winifred.

  “It also drops bombs,” said Wilfred nonchalantly, pushing his hair out of his eyes as if he were telling us about his dog who could sit and also roll over on command.

  “Because the Argot is so important, Daddy is a special maintenance guy, making sure everything is in good working order so it can be taken out in seconds if an emergency arises,” Winifred rattled on.

  “What kind of emergency?” I asked.

  “A war emergency, of course,” said Wilfred.

  “Ah, a war emergency,” I said, privately thinking how unlikely that was.

  There was military all around Vancouver Island and guns set up on strategic points around our own coastline. Ever since the start of the war, soldiers had lived in a temporary barracks on land that belonged to us but which we were lending to the war effort. At first this was very exciting, the idea that our shores would be protected from our very own farm. But despite all this vigilance, nothing much ever seemed to happen. It didn’t look like the war was going to come to Vancouver Island at all, which was fine with me. Miss Macy, who was a neighbor without either job or family, liked to take long walks on our property, mostly along the coast, and visited the soldiers with Girl Guide cookies. She had told me that mostly the soldiers sat around and played poker.

  “Father works every day twelve hours a day to maintain the plane’s readiness,” said Winifred. “Mother says he has no time for us anymore. That he loves that plane more than he loves us.”

  “Which is nonsense,” said Wilfred. “Mother is prone to exaggeration.”

  Zebediah had said not a word through all this. He had crawled back under the bed, crawled out, and pulled the mattress up to inspect the cot’s springs and tried to get to the top of the highboy dresser from the chair that was stationed next to it. Now he was at the window looking out.

  “What kind of garden is that?” he asked.

  I joined him. “There are several. Which do you mean?” I asked.

  “The one with the fence and the big lock.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s the night garden.”

  “Why do you call it the night garden?”

  “Look out the window on a night when the moon is bright and find out,” I said.

  “Do you keep it locked to keep out the deer?” asked Zebediah.

  “No,” I said.

  “The bears, then?” asked Wilfred.

  We were all looking now.

  “No.”

  “Well, then what?” asked Zebediah.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s Old Tom who locks it.”

  I did know because Old Tom had once told me. But I didn’t care to repeat it because it just sounded crazy.

  THE MADDENS SETTLE IN

  Well, that first night started fine. I took them on a little tour, showing them the chicken coop and the bull pen and the cows. Then I took them to see the plow horses and I turned to Zebediah to impress upon him that he was never to get into the bull pen or in with the horses. The horses, Tag and Molly, were very sweet but very large, and accidents do happen. The bull was just mean. But when I turned, Zebediah was gone, and it took some hunting to find him climbing up the fence that surrounded the night garden and peering through.

  “Did you hear what I said about the bull pen and the horses?” I asked.

  “Why do you keep this fenced? There aren’t any animals in it,” said Zebediah.

  “I told you I don’t know. For heaven’s sake, leave it alone. There’s two hundred and seventy acres to explore; why choose the one thing that’s locked up to obsess over?” But, of course, I knew that it was the fact that it was the one locked thing that drew him.

  “Do you take care of the animals at all?” asked Winifred.

  “Yes. That is, I help. Old Tom mostly takes care of the animals, and Sina does the milking. I help gather the eggs and candle them, and I help take them and the milk to Brookman’s with Sina.”

  “Who’s that?” asked Wilfred, pointing to a hunched-over figure going across one of the fields and crossing the road the military had put in that cuts through the forest to the coastal points where they had installed the big guns. I think the guns were stationed strategically to shoot at passing submarines or something, although, of course, we’d never seen a submarine. Still, it was a well-known fact that the waters around Vancouver Island were lousy with them: probably not Hitler’s submarines—they were too far away—although who knew? But Russian submarines, Japanese submarines, and American submarines. I didn’t know what they did, they just seemed to circle the island, but then there was so much about the war that they didn’t tell us.

  “That’s the hermit,” I said. “Sina and Old Tom let him build a cabin in the forest on our property a little way down the coast. He’s probably going to the creamery to get the box of groceries Old Tom leaves for him once a week.”

  “You’ve a lot of people using your land who don’t really belong here, don’t you?” asked Winifred.

  “I guess so,” I said thoughtfully. It would have been tactless to have pointed out that this included the three of them.

  “I want to see the soldiers,” said Zebediah and went running toward the military road.

  “Hey, come back here,” I screamed.

  We ran after him, and Wilfred, reaching out an arm, grabbed Zebediah’s shirt collar and yanked him back the way you would a dog on a leash.

  “Stop it, you idiot! You’re going to get lost,” said Winifred.

  “He never gets lost,” said Wilfred.

  “Yes, actually, that’s true,” said Winifred. “But it’s still rude to run off uninvited on someone else’s property.”

  Zebediah didn’t seem to mind. It was my guess that he was used to being yanked back by his collar and that the idea of an invitation first meant nothing to him.

  Then I showed them all the beaches and coves, and before we knew it Sina had rung the dinner bell. She had installed this years before, as Old Tom and I were apt to be anywhere on the property and she didn’t like yelling herself hoarse when dinner was ready.

  We sat around the kitchen table eating Sina’s tuna casserole, which was one of about six things she knew how to make. She had a limited but tasty repertoire. Sina’s eyes kept darting from one child to the next nervously, and she later confessed to me as we did the dishes together and the Maddens took baths and unpacked that she expected one or the other of them to burst into wild sobs at any moment.

  “You know,” she said, “I figure nature or nurture, they had it coming and going, and surely one was bound to have caught it. The melancholic hysteria.”

  “No, they seem really like quite reasonable human beings,” I said. “Zebediah is a bit twitchy.”

  “All little boys are twitchy,” said Sina. “That is, if they’re getting enough to eat and so have normal boy energy. I suspect all the poor starving little boys in war-torn Europe have lost their twitch, and what a sad thing that must be. But given enough food, that’s what happens to a boy’s energy. It all goes into the twitch. Feed them, they twitch. Do you think the children are getting enough food? I’ve never cooked for six. You don’t suppose they’re going to expect three meals a day, do you? I mean cooked? Should I hire a cook? You know what, I think Mrs. Brookman said her niece was staying with her and looking for employment. I’ll ask when we get there tomorrow. It’s very hard to be an artist and a domestic at the same time.”

  I was quite excited at this prospect. Sina was a good cook, but there was a certain sameness to what we ate. I had read a lot of Victorian English novels as well as spending many hammock summers skimming ancient issues of Woman’s Home Companion that I had found in a box in the root cellar. Through them, I associated cooks with large households where there were eighteen-course dinners with pheasants and puddings and dishes with intriguing names like bubble and squeak. Where every meal was an adventure. I liked the idea of
a cook and hoped the niece was at least fat; it was clear she wouldn’t be old if she was Mrs. Brookman’s niece. But cooks in Victorian novels and the stories in Woman’s Home Companion were always fat and old and unattractive and so devoted entirely to their kitchens. I saw puff pastry swans and Baked Alaska and other dishes that were redolent of magic coming my way. Then something dreadful occurred to me.

  “She won’t have to live here, too, will she?”

  “Good question. I can’t imagine I would want to pay anyone what it would be worth in gas to come here and back every day from Brookman’s. She’s apparently staying with them over the store, so conditions are quite crowded. She’d probably jump at the chance to move out. We’ve got the cabin we keep for the hired hands when we have them. She can have that.”

  “You will ask her if she can cook first, won’t you?”

  “I shall endeavor to do so,” said Sina.

  * * *

  After the dishes were done we gathered in the parlor and Sina played the piano and we all sang songs, songs from musicals, folk songs, hymns, and the popular songs of the day. Sina had shelves of sheet music. Winifred knew quite a few of them, as she’d been in a choir. Zebediah played the drums on the top of a side table with two pencils he’d found. It was rather annoying until Old Tom went into the kitchen and got them each a couple of spoons. Old Tom showed him how to play the spoons and they played together for a while until Zebediah tired of this, too.

  “I want to go out and see the night garden at night,” said Zebediah. “I want to climb over the fence and see what it’s like inside.”

  Old Tom stopped playing and held Zebediah’s spoons to quiet him for a moment. “The night garden is off-limits,” he said simply. “You are none of you to go into it. Not ever.”

  “Why?” asked Zebediah.

  “Never you mind,” said Old Tom, and he put down his spoons, went to the couch, and began to read his newspaper.

  There was an awkward silence after that, which Sina tried to fill by breaking into a rousing march on the piano, but it was too late; the happy mood of the evening could not be recovered, and in the end everyone decided to head upstairs. Sina lit the coal lanterns and distributed them. Usually Old Tom, Sina, and I liked to read for a long time in our beds before we slept. I don’t know what Winifred, Wilfred, and Zebediah normally did, but they went up to their rooms as well. I decided to make one more try at my mermaid story before going to bed, so I went up to my cupola. With the advent of the Madden children I could see that I would get in little daytime writing and would have to resort to an evening schedule.

  Despite that, and despite houseguests, it had certainly been successful enough, even a rather normal evening.

  Then the shouting began.

  THE CONVERGENCE OF A UFO, A COOK, AND THE BEGINNING OF THE MYSTERIOUS LETTERS

  I was at my desk writing. Old Tom had gone downstairs to get some water. The Madden children were up in their rooms doing whatever they were doing. It sounded very much as if Zebediah was jumping on his bed. We may have been feeding him a bit too much, I was thinking, when suddenly Sina came tearing out of her room, screaming, “UFO! UFO! UFO!”

  We ran downstairs after her until we were all standing on the front porch, where she was looking up into the sky, frantically turning this way and that and screaming, “UFO!” We looked up with her, but none of us could see anything except the night sky filled with stars and moon.

  “Out my bedroom window!” said Sina, panting. “Out my window! I was sitting in bed reading when I heard a noise, looked up, and saw through the window over my bed something covered in lights, mostly blue lights, and it stopped right outside my window, that is, on the other side of the three pine trees there. And it just stood still. At first I thought it must be military. A military helicopter, because what other kind of aircraft could stay still like that? I sat there peering through the trees and wondering why in God’s name it was parked right out my window and then I noticed it was really large. Large and completely stationary and I kept thinking, Why is it covered in Christmas lights? And then, from staying totally still, it took off at the speed of light. I’ve never seen anything move so fast. It was gone in a tic. Nothing of this earth could travel like that, from stillness to thousands of miles an hour.”

  “What’s a UFO?” asked Zebediah.

  “Unidentified flying object,” said Winifred.

  “Complete nonsense,” said Old Tom. “No such thing.”

  “Well, I didn’t think so before tonight either!” said Sina with exasperation. “But you can’t argue with what you’ve seen with your own two eyes! Are you saying I didn’t see a UFO?”

  “I’m sure you saw something,” said Old Tom, scratching his chin. “Some trick of light. Probably was a military helicopter. You said it was on the other side of the pine trees and you could only see it through the branches. Probably confused the issue.”

  “Don’t be daft. No helicopter could move that fast,” said Sina.

  “Did it sound like a helicopter?” asked Old Tom.

  “It sounded like something. I could hear it—that’s what made me look up from my book. But it didn’t sound like a helicopter.”

  “What did it sound like?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Sina. “It wasn’t as loud as a helicopter.”

  “Come indoors and stop frightening the children,” said Old Tom.

  “I’m not frightened,” said Zebediah.

  “Me neither,” said Wilfred.

  “Maybe it was Flying Bob checking up on us,” said Zebediah.

  “No, Zebediah. Daddy doesn’t actually fly. He just does maintenance,” said Winifred.

  “He could fly if he wanted to,” said Zebediah. “He told me so.”

  “Yes, yes, let’s all go indoors,” said Old Tom.

  We trooped back in, but I could see Sina didn’t want to. When she saw the UFO I must have been absorbed in my mermaid story, typing away, because I hadn’t seen or heard anything.

  “I think we should all go back to bed. You tell us if any more Martians start spying on you,” said Old Tom, chuckling.

  “Stop that,” snapped Sina. “I know what I saw.” But then she looked a bit uncertain. “I didn’t mean to snap,” she added, beginning to calm down. “I know you didn’t see it. But that doesn’t change matters. I did.”

  “Lights play tricks at night,” said Old Tom. “I’m not saying you didn’t see something. The question is what. Could have been anything.”

  “It could have been Flying Bob,” insisted Zebediah.

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Zebediah,” said Winifred. “It wasn’t Flying Bob and it wasn’t Santa Claus.”

  “Well, what was it?” asked Zebediah.

  “Probably we’ll never know,” said Old Tom. “Could be Sina drifted off and dreamt it. Dreams are curious things. Sina has been known to sleepwalk.”

  “I wasn’t asleep and I didn’t dream it,” said Sina and marched up to her room and slammed the door.

  Old Tom raised his eyebrows and rolled his eyes at us, but instead of going back upstairs, he took his lantern and went to the couch to read. I lingered in the doorway watching him. He might have professed to be disbelieving, but I noticed his eyes went to the window more than once.

  * * *

  In the morning everyone was cheery at breakfast. Old Tom lifted his coffee cup and picked up the plate beneath it, making circles in the air.

  “What’s this, then?” he asked Zebediah.

  “I don’t know,” said Zebediah.

  “Flying saucer,” said Old Tom.

  “Ha, ha,” said Sina. “I’m going out to my studio. Franny, let me know when you have the eggs packed, and we’ll put them in the truck with the milk to take to Brookman’s. I want to see about the cook while we’re there.”

  “Can we go, too?” asked Winifred.

  “All right,” said Sina. “You’ll have to ride in the back with the milk cans and the eggs.”

  “Oh boy!” said Zebediah.

  “Keen,” said Wilfred.

  “You boys want to help me plant the potatoes while you wait for the girls?” asked Old Tom.

  “Oh super boy!” said Zebediah.

  “Yes, very keen,” said Wilfred.

  “So you think now,” muttered Old Tom. “Ever plant potatoes?”