by Danielle Bonnici
My father is a tender of death. He can smell it coming around the sick, the aged, the weary. All of his friends and neighbors passed under his hands as they passed out of this life. I saw them all. My grandmother and my math teacher, the postman and the mechanic, even the doctor who birthed me eventually came under our roof, to the shallow basement of formaldehyde. As a child, I helped apply lipstick and curlers, almost like a game of dress-up. That was after my mother, too, had passed beneath the hands of my father, only this time his hands had trembled, lost their dexterity.
*******
I married young. My family, though wary, had no reason to disapprove of the match. Will came from a good family and had a stable income. They feared for my happiness in a home that served as a way station for the dead. But this did not bother me. I knew at the time of our marriage Will’s occupation, but I knew that within him was a man of warmth, a man capable of giving life. He had courted me slowly, with long walks through the park and trips to the museum. I had fallen in love with his solemnity, the way his eyes always had a distant look in them, like they saw a timeline of births and deaths constantly growing forth into the future.
When my first child was born with a fragile body wracked with illness, I tended to the boy, did all I could to keep him from passing under the hands of my husband. Will spared no expense on his care and well being. We went from doctor to doctor, but none could save our son. When our baby died, I refused to let Will perform his task. I could not touch the hands that would embalm my son, so instead I stole the tiny body away into the woods behind the house, and buried him among the silver birches. I planted a bed of lilies above his grave, and cared for them as I would a child. This small garden was my only comfort. I sang lullabies as I worked, trying to bring peace to a child that never had a chance to live.
*******
I inherited my job from my father. Once, I thought perhaps I would join the church or the military, but both required an academic success that was unattainable to me. I was never very good at school, preferring daydreaming to mathematical equations and British literature. After high school, my father suggested I carry on the family business. At first I was horrified. I had always been ashamed of my father’s work. But I didn’t really want to go to university, so I accepted my heritage. I hated it in the beginning. I woke up in cold sweats; fearful of the path I had chosen. But I became accustomed to it. I got used to preying on the dead, filling their bodies up with formaldehyde, coating their skin with waxy cosmetics designed to mimic life.
I never expected to marry. But Cynthia was unlike other women; she was not put off by my work. Her vibrancy and capacity for joy fascinated me, she brought relief from my long solitary days washing and embalming the dead. I looked forward to the end of each work day, and I would walk into her arms like a child coming home from a first day of school. When she told me we were to have a child, I picked her up and danced around the room— I was ecstatic to have been blessed with such a gift. When he was born ill, I hid my sorrow and my fear, and remained calm. I was accustomed to grief, and knew I had to be strong for my wife. She was not prepared for such a thing. She no more thought of death than I forgot about it. To have a dead child when she herself was still so young— it was devastating. She lost some of her youthful bloom, and spent all of her time out of doors, tending to the clandestine grave of our child and planting flowers about it.
*******
When my second child was born, less than one year after the death our son, her cheeks were full and rosy. The doctor slapped her back and her cries filled our quiet house, rattling windows and cupboard doors. I sighed heavily, her health my relief. Her lungs were powerful as an opera singer, her every utterance counter to the silence I had become so accustomed to. I called her Amelia. On the day she was born, I planted lavender next to the lilies atop her brother’s grave. I never told her of her lost sibling, of the life that would have canceled out her own. One child. I was never to carry another within my womb.
*******
My mother taught me how to sow the ground, to plant seeds, to feed and water them like a newborn babe. I learned to walk amidst her garden, the tendrils of ivy and the fragrance of roses. I learned to speak the language of living things from her hoe and spade, from the roots of lavender, the tender bulbs of tulips. My first word was not “mother” or “father,” but “lily,” after the abundant white flower that stretched beyond the borders of my mother’s plot of land. As long as it was warm enough to be outside, there we were. My mother recited the names of flowers to me as I played beside her. She whispered what each seed needed to grow in my tiny ears. I did not remember all that she told me, but later, when I was in school, I daydreamed of the wild garden behind our house, the place where I learned everything that I would come to need.
*******
My husband took little interest in our Amelia. I don’t think he ever fully recovered from the loss of our son, a child who never grew into a name. His sickness was so consuming that the birth certificate remained blank; in the space for his name the words “baby boy” were written in the nurse’s slow hand. When I lay his body among the soil and stones, I christened him. I called him Niran, eternal. He feeds his life into the earth; his energy bursts forth into the flowers and herbs planted in his name. The garden grew rampant. Keeping it under control required constant care. Without attention, the flowers would twist and tangle into each other; the vines would stretch beyond view.
I never told Will that I named our son. His grief, though he tried to hide it, enfolded him, and when I denied him the task of burial, a service, all of the rituals that were his routine, he never mentioned him again. That was the first time during our marriage that I did not defer to him; the weakness of our son became my strength. Amelia was my baby, my girl. I nursed her in open air, under the sun and the rain.
As soon as she was able to crawl, I made sure she knew that her home was outside, within the grove of birches. Her first words were the names of flowers and herbs; her first steps atop her brother’s grave. She was my apprentice, and her primary education took place beneath the shade of my garden.
Even when I became ill, I worked every day in the garden until I felt too weak. Sometimes, though Amelia was still so small, I would sit on the soil and tell her what she needed to do for each plant.
*******
My wife died when Amelia was seven. The cancer that had ravaged our son took its turn on my wife, and I watched over her, waiting, waiting, to give her love in the only way I had come to know. In death, I was soft with my touch. I cleaned and prepared her body with trembling hands and closed eyes. Amelia hid in the corners of the house, refusing to look upon her dead mother, or upon my grief. Her voice grew soft, and she almost stopped using it. She had watched her mother die as a plant in the heart of autumn, with a slow waning that left her unable to leave her bed. Amelia was afraid to care for the flowers planted so carefully, despite everything her mother taught her. As her mother wilted and died, the flowers and ferns grew wild, vines and roots wrapping themselves around tree trunks. I buried her in the garden, next to our son. I took interest in my daughter for the first time. Without my wife, without my son, I had nothing but the unspeaking bodies of my neighbors, the disquieting silence of the dead.
*******
My father sent me to school. I made few friends; children my age feared my father because of his work, and were convinced of my own hand in his daily doings. I spent hours in the library, studying botany books and learning how to care for my mother’s plants. It was all she left me. She was a plain woman, and wore no gold or gilt cameo pins tucked at her throat. Her garden. I never understood her dedication to it, her obsession with that one patch of lilies that have since grown beyond my control. But I could not abandon it. I took the knowledge my mother taught me and set out to learn more.
The Encyclopedia of Perennials, The Language of Flowers, The Gardener’s Reference, American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers, The Passionate Gardener— these books were my bibles. I took them with me behind the darkness of the house, and armed with my mother’s gardening tools, read and worked until nightfall. There was a crust of soil beneath my fingernails; my knees were chapped. I tamed the tangle of vines and roots that had missed the touch of a gardener. I learned what I already knew from watching the hands of my mother, and grew into her daughter.
*******
It was not my intention to be an absent father to Amelia when she was born. I was stricken by the death of my son and the illness of Cynthia. My wife was diagnosed with cancer when Amelia was three. It had progressed slowly—the doctor said the fresh air and sunshine she took in from gardening every day gave her strength. She was never afraid, not of me or my work, not when her son was born ill, not when she became ill herself. She filled the solemnity of my undertaker’s home; even when she abandoned it for her garden, it still basked in her light. When our son died, she left me. She was part of my home, woke up beside me, but she was a shadow to me, and with her, our daughter. When Amelia and I were left alone, there was such awkwardness between us. I knew her gender, her name, but nothing that distinguished her from any other child. I tried to connect with the girl, to show her I could be her companion, as her mother was. I made attempts to allay her fear of my work by showing her the basement. She tried to understand; she even tried to help on occasion, by rolling curlers or brushing airless noses with powder. But the other children made fun of her, and she stopped her efforts. She spent little time in the house. In her mind I had never arrived, and she left before I had the chance.
*******
I did well in school. I learned to appreciate the routine it afforded me. I rose early, before my father, and prepared for the day undisturbed. I made coffee, and always left plenty for him. I walked three miles down shaded streets to the chipped bricks of the school. It was the first time I became comfortable with the indoors. The interior hallways were the same brick as the outside, giving the impression of being close to a hearth. The classrooms were painted violet, a strange shade that reminded me of a ladies’ sitting room. The teachers were clear and deliberate, their voices spouting out streams of information that I wrote in my unsteady hand. Like the garden in the backyard, I had to keep it under control. I wanted to write outside the margins, to let the ink scroll the roots and stems of flowers across the pages. I learned to be patient. I learned to pay attention. I was mesmerized in biology class, where I learned the life cycles of plants and flowers. I memorized dialects of mathematics and French; I came to appreciate Shakespeare’s allusions to the womb of the earth. I daydreamed about going to university and studying botany. I think my academic success made my father proud. On report card days we met in the kitchen, and as he read my achievements, he placed a solid, firm hand on my shoulder, and gave a subtle squeeze. My whole body tingled with the sensation of his touch; even my heart trembled. His hands, so foreign to me, were an entity separate from the man who stood beside me on report card days. But that hand on my shoulder was the closest he came to affection. I looked forward to the end of every marking period.
*******
I watched Amelia grow from a distance. She seemed to grow older every time I looked at her. With the exception of her appearance, Amelia was little different to me than she was at age seven. She worked in the garden; she went to school. On cold nights she read in the attic, next to a wood stove. The garden grew with her, every season bursting forth its motley assortment of flowers and herbs. She was not as methodical as her mother; under her care it grew into more of a wilderness than a garden. It became visible from the rear window of the house, the part set aside for our living space. The cove of color attracted the eyes of the friends and strangers who came to attain my services as they walked up our drive. They asked if I also provided floral arrangements. I decided to approach Amelia.
Our conversations were brief, polite, and practical. They usually dealt with school or the house. Never of any importance. Then Amelia asked me about attending university. Her voice, always so serene, betrayed urgency, a desire. For a moment I though I heard Cynthia. I always knew that she would go. Her grades were high; a number of her teachers had approached me over the years. I knew it was unusual to send a daughter away, especially when she has long been the woman of the house. But I knew that Amelia had left long ago; where she left to made no difference.
I asked Amelia if she would work with me on weekends to provide floral arrangements for my clients. We agreed that what I would have paid in salary to an employee would be placed in an account for her to go to school. In this way, enough money was saved for her tuition.
*******
It was not easy to leave. The garden was gorgeous, growing unrestrained from the grove of birches to the entire area surrounding it. It was but ten feet from the perimeter of our house. It was chaos I learned to tend with care and patience— it was all the home I needed. The rooms of the house were practically untouched from the day my mother took sick. I left no imprint upon them. Even my bedroom was bare, the whitewashed walls broken only by the occasional bouquet in an empty milk bottle, and the overfilled bookshelf at the foot of my bed. Packing took less than a half hour, but saying goodbye… I worried for Father. He seemed so unable to cope for himself. His routine had changed little since I was old enough to take over my mother’s responsibilities. Meals were always prepared for him, clothes always folded. He told me he hired a housekeeper, a widowed woman of fifty who knew how to make a good potato soup. But still I was uncertain. And the garden— who would take care of it? I planted purple basil in the spring and it still needed attention… the lilies were out of control something needed to be done… one of the birches was sick and had to be cut down before it infects the whole backyard… my rose bushes my lavender my plot of sunflowers and Mother… Who could be trusted to such a task? I had not thought to teach father how to care for it. Now it was too late. My train left at noon; I could not delay. I was ready for what was beyond our bordered acres of land. For the other world that existed past the boundaries of Pleasant and Spring Streets, those tree-lined thoroughfares that marked the outline of my life for the past eighteen years. I felt so very young and so very old at the same time. I felt that every day of my childhood had been marked by the quiet wail of sustained grief; the sadness that comes with loss and death. Thousands of mourners had passed under my father’s roof; I watched the lines of cars come up the drive and I heard the slamming of their doors, drowning out the sniffles and polite coughs of the bereaved. I would close my eyes and wish them away, then turn back to the blood red of my roses, as if their color was a sound, filling my ears with the anthems of life that existed beyond this house, this untamed garden. It was a song that I had heard ever since I could remember, and it called me to find it, to live it, to be it. No, I could not delay. The lapping waves and sunshine of a strange coast waited for my eyes to gaze upon them and drink them in like a teenager’s first sip of liquor—a sweetness and lightness to delight in and to savor, an innocent drunkenness that one never again experiences. I left. I knew that somehow life would sustain itself, with or without my care.
*******
At first it seemed like there was little difference between Amelia being there and not being there. The housekeeper kept everything in order, and the house ran much as before. But the morning coffee was not the same, there were no flowers on the table, my shirts were not folded the right way. There were no silent meetings in the kitchen or nods across the dinner table. Please pass the salt dear. I had to get the salt myself. These small details told me of her absence.
My work continued as before; I partnered with a florist. His arrangements were symmetrical and monotonous. They spoke of the solemnity of death, not of the affirmation of life. The house was ever filled with shade; Amelia must have taken all the light that was left.
*******
Everything was new. I was new. The western shores of the country were magnificent—vast seas of rich blue, like blue bells and morning glories. And the cities, the cities were a different breed from what I knew of cities back east—the crowded grey cabinets that were offices and apartments, the cold concrete sidewalks that glistened in the rain, the oceans of people walking, sitting, eating, living shoulder to shoulder within brick and steel. I never lived in a city before and here the sun always shined and the buildings glowed with color. There was space to walk and to breathe. There were fragrant gardens that bloomed every season and open stretches of sky. The air invigorated the aureoles and pores of my body and cleared the synapses of my mind. The rooms where I lived teemed with young women waking, walking, sleeping, talking. And from the windows birdsongs and windsongs permeated the walls. I fell asleep amidst the unmetered language of life.
*******
The house, always quiet, hummed in silence. For the first time I noticed a smell, nauseating and familiar. It came from my hands and clothes. It came to inhabit all that I touched. My son, Cynthia. Amelia fled for her survival, to be freed from the bond of my hands, the tenders of death that cleansed and prepared corpses. It seemed that all the things that my family had taken refuge in— the garden and the flowers on the table and leaving— were all because of that smell.
Amelia’s garden, always somewhat untamed, grew wild. I did not know what to do. I tried to take care of it in the beginning, but I was wary of touching anything, and so left it alone. Without Amelia’s careful tending, it burst forth uninhibited and grew closer and closer to the house. At night I could hear stems and branches tapping against the windows in the wind. I let them grow. I watched them grow. It was how I brought Amelia home again, listening to the rustle of her garden. Imagining that it was she that I watched grow. I identified each flower and plant using Amelia’s encyclopedia. I knew them. She wrote letters, brief and distant, inquiring after my health and the business, checking in on her garden, outlining her progress. She did not visit. I worked my way into the garden for the first time after she left, and visited it on the birthdays of my son and of Cynthia. After some years, I also went on the anniversary of Amelia’s departure.
I became consumed with the odor invading the house. I could not get rid of it. It filled my nostrils with fervor, like there was no other scent in the world. I could not even smell the perfume of the encroaching garden, despite open windows and a favorable breeze. I asked the housekeeper to clean the house from top to bottom, to air the rooms, to scent the linens and the cabinets, but to no avail. Why had I never noticed this smell before? If I had, would it have made a difference? With this smell came a profound sense of isolation, a fear and a realization that all that was missing was connected to that bone-chilling odor.
I stopped taking new clients. I cleared and swept the basement myself, certain that it would make a difference, that my hands, that have touched so much cold, could somehow make it warm again. I closed the doors and locked them and did not turn back. I was leaving too.
I did not know what to do with my days. I let the housekeeper go. I made my own pot of coffee, ironed my own shirts. I prepared simple meals— roasted chicken and baked potatoes, scrambled eggs and bacon, roast beef and carrots. I read the newspaper. Filling my fingerprints with ink. The smell seemed to grow fainter. Sometimes, I wrote back to Amelia. That task filled half my day; I never did know the right words. I wrote of her garden, how the vines were spreading across the shingles of the house, over the basement windows and around the drainpipes. She wrote back and said maybe she should come, tame it back into order, but she never came. The vines and flowers only continued to grow.
*******
It’s not that I didn’t love Father. I showed him my love every single day, with every pot of coffee, with every shirt collar. He dwelt among the dead, his warmth and care drained by the icy breath of them. He grew strange in my absence, retiring, firing the woman who made potato soup. He spoke often of the garden, how he watched it. I wanted to go back, to see it, to touch it, to tend to the grave of my mother, but my feet had rooted themselves to new soil, and I could not sever them. I imagined him alone in the empty house, the basement and the viewing rooms empty and closed. I wondered about the ghosts who kept him company, if he knew they were there, who they were, if they were there at all. He seemed concerned about a smell— he was vague about it. Was it the dead, haunting him?
I imagined him at night before I fell asleep, wearing an apron, his surgeon-like hands breaking eggs into a clear glass bowl, cleaning bacon grease from a dinner plate. It was strange to see him there, finally embracing what he had left so long forgotten.
My own days were so different. I had a much smaller garden here, a designated plot of the backyard that I used to grow practical plants— mint and rosemary, thyme and basil. I missed the lilies and the roses, the endless rows of lily-of-the-valley. But a time for the impractical would come again. There is always a need for beauty, senseless or otherwise.
*******
Soon, the vines grew over the windows on the first floor, then the second. One day, I tried to go to the store for milk, and I could not open the door. It seemed that that too, had been covered by the endless growth of the garden, and I was trapped inside. I refused to cut them. I had enough food to last awhile. Amelia and the housekeeper had stocked my cupboards well over the years. I continued with my days as usual: newspaper, meals, letters, and watching the world created by my wife and daughter grow not like a slow garden, but like a stubborn weed that grows despite heat and cold, wetness and dryness. Everyday it grew larger, the house darker and darker.
When it became too dark to read except in the middle of the afternoon, when the sun is her highest, I spent most of my time sitting and waiting. I felt expectant, but I did not know what I was expecting. Perhaps Amelia would come. But she did not come. Once in the night I was awoken by the sound of cracking wood. I thought the house might be collapsing. I lie in my bed frightened by the soft taptaptaptaptap of wooden splinters breaking their fall somewhere within the walls of my home. I fell asleep curled up like a babe in the womb, teeth and fists clenched. I woke with the sunrise, and searched the orderly rooms for signs of what had happened in the night. Everything was the same as it was before. But then again the next night, the cracking and the taptaptapping. I checked the house again and everything was still the same. I decided to check the basement. I hadn’t been there since I cleaned and locked it up some years earlier. I found the key in a kitchen drawer. The door stuck a little as I tried to open it, and inside the air had that sour-sweet smell that had once emanated from every corner of my house after Amelia left. In the center of the floor, a thick stem had worked its way through the foundations of the house, and had broken the panels of wood. It was sprouting rapidly from the floor, and other smaller stems had come up through the paneling. There were flowers starting to blossom, all different colors. It was beautiful.
*******
I stopped receiving letters from my father. At first, I did not worry. I thought perhaps he became bored, and did not know what to say. His letters had always seemed labored. I continued on as before; I was almost done with my degree, and had taken a job at the botanical garden. I was in charge of the cottage garden, a place that reminded me of the garden I had left, dense with flowers. I had even found an apartment to call my own, the bottom floor of a house with two rooms, a kitchen, and western facing windows. There was a small backyard, and I had begun a new garden by planting lilies, in memory of my mother. I thought of her often, despite how little I knew her. I never thought to ask my father about her. I did not know what she was like before she was married, I did not know how my parents met, and I did not know what she liked to do besides gardening. I saw my parents speak little, do things together even less. I wondered how they ever began talking to each other in the first place. How does love grow from silence?
But then almost a year passed. I finished school. I wrote to my father to tell him. Nothing. I started to wonder. I couldn’t sleep. For the first time since I left home, I decided to return. I had held back for so long. What had prevented me? I had so long looked upon the dead that I could not bear it any longer. I could not bear the rare love of my father, the silence across the dinner table, the subtle nods of communication. I could not bear the dark, echoing halls of our house with a silence so heavy that the sound of my breathing was intrusive. Even more, I could not bear the thought of returning to a place that had lost its capacity to live.
I requested two weeks off and bought a ticket. My heart and head were racing and pounding, I did not know which was doing what. I packed a small valise and headed east. It was just as difficult to leave my new home, as it had been to leave my father five years earlier. Except this leaving brought only trepidation, none of the elation of that first departure. I tried to stay my emotions by reading a novel about a woman who loses her passport while traveling— she then seems to lose her identity. Is that what has happened to my family? To my father, who abandoned the dead, to my mother, who abandoned my father before I was born, to myself, who abandoned both of them in search of something I could not name? Is it possible to lose who you are?
The journey seemed to take forever. I grew more and more restless. I could not even begin to speculate what had happened to my father. What if he were dead? Who would tend to his body the way he had tended to others for so many years?
*******
The street was quiet as the taxi drove towards the house. It was always quiet. I just wanted to go back the way I came. When the car pulled up in front of the house I was stunned. The garden. He had written in his letters that it had grown out of control. But this. This was savage. The house was encased by a wilderness of flowers and herbs and vines. There were tree roots coming out of the foundations, enormous leaves of black nightshade crawling in and out of windows. The bricks and wooden shingles were completely covered in thick green ivy. The roof, also encased in a myriad of foliage, was sagging in the middle. I walked up the drive and tried to peek in the small spaces in the windows. All I saw was more leaves; I could see nothing else. Did the ghosts I speculated about finally take their turn against him? Had he taken a trip and not come home? Was he ill? I knew I had to leave Father to whatever fate he had chosen. I wanted to believe that he had finally left, not just his work, but also everything, that he had finally found a source of light again. And part of me wanted to never know.
I walked down towards the grove of birches, feeling the sharp touch of the overgrowth as it scratched my cheeks and arms. I found the small patch of ground where my mother lay. Using my bare hands, I tore and pulled at the weeds and tangled vines upon it, until the mound was clean. Kneeling, I lay my head upon the soil, and listened to the hymn of colors around me.
