"The Gardener"

Samuel Saks
Oak Park, MI
USA

Deep South v.1 n.3 (Spring, 1995)

The long, screeching sound of tires against the cement woke me up. It was a sad, sunny Tuesday in summer and I had been sleeping on the curb. At least that what it felt like in my dream. A tornado of old yellowing newspapers and plastic wrap tormented me in my sleep. I felt everyone's unseen stare as they trampled through my bedroom.

"Are you going to wake up today? You sleep like a dead man," my father screamed standing on the side of my bed.

I turned and squinted through tired eyes at the dark, swollen figure that hung over me. He was on his way to the small bathroom I was fortunate to sleep next to. He held the Detroit News under his arm like a rifle. I heard a muffled shot as the door slammed shut. I did not call the police. Finally, when the room became light I opened the coffin top. It laid doubled over disguised as a light blue blanket. It never fooled me. I dressed quickly, throwing on my old, ripped jeans and black T-shirt that were like my teddy bear but were never outgrown. Instead, they lay crumpled on my dresser during the night, a likeness of my grandparents who had similar creases and tears. I loved my summer clothes. I ran out of the room escaping the decaying body of my father that sat on the toilet, crumpled over like the newspaper he read. The walk to the living room (and to the redeeming glow of the florescent lights and the flashing of the TV) took longer than usual today.

My phylacteries hung like half empty grocery bags from my arm. The thin, black leather straps made my hand a red, swelling sickly bulge. I needed medical attention. No one came to save me, no men in white suits or carrying a stretcher. My mother just sat at the dinner table eating a muffin and watching a talk show. My mother watched, scared and excited, eating faster in an uneasy style. I fell on the couch and swayed piously, the ancient words falling like candy wrappers littering the floor. And in the sad, barren sea of mess (I created) drowned. My mother gasped loudly as the guests walked on the stage and were ripped to shreds by the audience. I watched an old woman tugging a shopping cart full of soda can to a nearby grocery store. As she crossed the street in slow, wobbly strides she was almost killed three times by drunken drivers. From my house everyone looked drunk. Everyone did strange, mysterious things that were never explained to me. Soon I stopped asking and blamed it on the dirty glass of the window. A window that was never cleaned by but was used, constantly, by my mother, when people would walk by and she would criticize their behavior or attire. The giant dirty, critical window almost shattered that day.

The white, smoky summer clouds surrounded my house, covering everything with light soot. I gasped for air. Everyone else in my house was unaffected by the snowstorm. Even the goldfish swam happily about in his clear, globe shaped prison. My father, the warden, finally reentered and looked at me strangely.

"Are you done praying already?" he inquired surprised. His face was a pale light but he looked good for a dead person. Instead of giving him a direct answer I sat down to eat. A privilege that one must pray for.

"Well at least you remembered to pray before you eat breakfast," he said as his face slowly rushed to life.

"Are you going to go to work already? . . . It's only ten-forty," my mother shot out sarcastically.

This time my father ducked and hid with me in the bomb shelter -- out of my mother's cross hairs, far from the TV. And within twenty minutes he was gone. I too tried to escape quickly stopping only when my mother came up with another chore for me to do. After everything was done I left my mother still sitting (and chewing the same muffin) in front of her favorite show. I penetrated the empty, dark, vacuum of the bright cloud and fled to safety into the backyard.

I entered a graveyard of old rusty bikes and long, green wild vines that tried to grab me. Bees busily worked away attaching themselves to the weed flowers and sucking the life out of them. I knew they would come for me next. On the western side stood the remains of the hut we used for Succoth. With the vines wrapped around it looked dead. The dried out maple branches that used to be the roof were scattered on the once sacred floor. I still remember the look on my father's face when he made Kiddish. The cool wind ripping through his thinning hair; the gray strands longer than their younger brothers and growing. It was the first time I saw him smile as the prayers flowed from his mouth. He did not need a prayer book or his reading glasses that day. The well trained orchestra of grasshoppers chanted and sang throughout the night, their song annoying and shaking the foundations of my house and the Jewish community that was forced to listen to it. They preferred, instead, to pay and go to professionals whose music was weaker and fake. The journey over, I found my bike resting in the shed. In its small, rusty doghouse it slept waiting for an adventure. E.T. and I have been all over the city on its seat. Untying the metal lock, I freed it. I mounted it and pedalled away.

The farther away from my house and the synagogue that was next to it, the stranger things seemed. My bike was now pedalling for me and I had no control over it. I watched the cars passing quickly by me. Each one with a mind of its own but every one speeding. There was no giant sale in any store. Even the old men and women I passed -- holding their grocery bags tightly as if they contained gold -- seemed to be rushing. They were pouring in streams to the retirement home like rain water in the street only dirtier. I also felt myself being pulled in by same force as strong as the summer breeze flying behind me (trying to keep up). After the long journey I finally ended up at a big plaza. All the stores formed into one long building spread out like a street block. It jutted unnaturally from the forest of trees behind it. A forest that had seen better times and better people. The stores bustled with death. All the people carried packages and pushed carts in and out like zombies. It looked like an army of ants attacking a moist block of sugar. As I approached the ant hill the wind grew stronger, objecting to my presence. When I finally reached the ugly face of a small video store on the corner my skullcap blew off. It was the skullcap I had received on my Bar Mitzvah from my grandfather. It had my Jewish name in big golden Hebrew letters. I remember what my grandfather told me when he gave it to me. "This kippa has your real name on it. It is this Hebrew name that you must live up to. No matter what happens to you, remember this name." Now it was a tiny, circle shaped kite that blew away like a dead leaf in the summer wind.

I carefully followed the bouncing, winding path the skullcap took. The cars that whizzed by nearly hit me. It was a long, strange path. It led me behind the giant stores. Next to the forest grew a field of giant trash bins. I saw the skullcap leap and I followed painfully to its new resting place -- on the square head of a blue garbage bin. The rest of the bins were arranged in neat rows gently overflowing with candy wrappers and empty cardboard boxes once full of china or produce. A strange unmistakable horrid stench rose from the bins; it was some strange imitation of the incense used in the temple. It was a synagogue in which the smelly prayers spread out and eventually ascended to heaven. There was a large bin in the center with two big sliding doors that looked like an ark. Various bags of garbage decorated its sacred top and the contents within. The trees made up the women's section. Inside this desperate, lonely and terrific place of worship wandered a beggar woman.

I flinched back reflexively, cutting short my search. I, just a seedling, kneeled down and pretended to tie my shoe.

"Hey kid . . . don't be embarrassed any, I've done it all before myself when I's a lot younger 'dan you," she called in an eerie, hospitable tone.

I immediately sprang to life once again and stuck my head out of my shell. She came closer. All I could think of was my mother's constant warning when I would leave the house. "Never talk to strangers," she would always say; she tried to engrave that motto on my forehead. Even with my mother's voice screaming I talked to the old woman.

"I was just looking for my Kip . . . I mean my hat," I muttered back strangely embarrassed.

The woman approached me and eyed me. She smelled worse than the garbage she seemed to take care of. In her left hand was a big bottle of Miller beer which hung on her breath like her ripped clothes. Despite this I treated her like my grandmother.

"Hey! You one 'dem Jew boys ain't 'cha?" she asked as she looked at the star sewed in my shirt, her eyes lit up like the cigarettes she smoked.

"Ma'am I was just looking for my . . .," I tried to escape the question but it haunted me long after she asked it.

"Yah, I know you, you one of 'dem bastards who killed my husband and kids," she accused, stabbing the air with her fist and smoke.

I tried to break the mold she was forming around me and failed. Soon she calmed down and her anger disappeared when her cigarette burned out. She gulped down some beer like a thirsty shark. The woman seemed to grow younger as she sat on the curb drinking, although I hadn't kissed her. She started talking like my mother.

"Damn good weather today. Much better 'den the winter. It was winter 'dat took my family from me. Damn Jewish winter!" she said gulping some more beer.

"Yah," I agreed, feeling sick.

I looked away from the woman and tried to locate my skullcap amongst the forest of garbage bags.

"What 'cha lookin' for, boy?" she asked, noticing my momentary looks of horror.

"My skullcap ma'am," I replied cautiously.

"What 'da hell's 'dat?" she asked, surprised.

For some reason I couldn't come up with a fitting answer. I tried to explain it by saying it was a hat that helped remind us of God.

"I don't need no head covering to do that. Every damn cold or rainy or foggy day I remember and cuss. Don't need notin' to remind me anymore," she attacked.

"Well I find that . . ."

"What the hell do you know you're just a goddamn Jewboy who hadn't ever lived a day. You're a stupid baby that hasn't even learned to walk yet," she interrupted.

Soon she calmed down and began to mutter -- more to herself than to me -- about her family. She remembered the big house they used to have and her son who was always wandering around and how mad her husband used to get when he came home. And how she ran out on them. She sang her whole terrible, sweet life to me like a nursery rhyme. My mother never read me nursery rhymes. After digging a little I managed to recover my skullcap and after cleaning it placed it securely over my head. Then the lady woke up again.

"You're leaving me again Max, I knowed it, you bastard!," she cried out, her arms swaying wildly like windy tree branches.

I turned back in a sudden desperate motion and saw the woman, now changed in front of me. Her breath smelled the same. The trees behind her seemed to grow larger as she screamed.

"'Dis time I ain't gonna let you leave. I'm not strong anymore, you got to stay and help me," she begged.

She leaned against a bin and cried. I stood still not daring to speak, when a sudden feeling of guilt came over me.

"No, I'm not going to leave you this time . . . I promise," I said with my finger uncrossed.

"You a goddamn liar, and you know it you always lied! Well I don't care no more 'cus I don't need 'ya anyways," she said sobbing.

She took a long gulp of beer and sat once down once again. Her bags laid next to her crying like children. She protected them from the wicked son and huddled them up behind her like she used to. This time she would not run.

"And I ain't gonna let you near the children no more 'cus they don', need a bastard like you, nobody needs a bastard like you!" she screamed now facing the bin and acting like a teacher.

I left her there sitting like Cinderella after midnight trying to fit a glass slipper over her swollen feet. I rode away, a knight in sparkling armor on my metallic wheeled horse. I heard a loud scream and a cracking of glass as I reentered the busy market that forever bloomed with zombie people. Only behind it, only between the garbage bins arranged like a giant electric fence did a sprawling forest grow wild and a grand gardener that tended it. My skullcap never blew off in the wind or snow; it stayed fixed on my head with my name on it; a small, budding garbage bag.