Had I a Hundred Mouths (7 page)

And for a while it was reported that a floating door bearing the bodies of two men was seen moving on the wide river through several towns. At one town people had said that when it came through there, the raft was whirling in the currents as though a demon had hold of it; but the men stayed put, though it was considered that they were dead. And another time, near the river's mouth where it flows into the Gulf, they said it rode the crests of dangerous rapids so serenely that it was easy to see the two men, one, alive and fierce, holding the other, dead. I waited to hear more, but after this, there were no further reports of the precious door.

I
N
THE
I
CEBOUND
H
OTHOUSE

It is true that I have not been able to utter more than a madman's sound since my eyes beheld the sight. I've lost speech. And so they have asked me to write. Since you are a poet, write, they told me. Little do they know what they might get. Little, even, do I.

So I'm writing this in the Detention House, where they're holding me until I can give word. Little do they know what I might give. Little, even, do I. A “suspicious witness” they name me. I am, certainly, a witness—or was. But was there no “suspicious witness” for
me?
To help me explain? Maybe the dead naked girl was my witness. Had she watched from the high window of the Biology Lab? As I loitered near the icebound hothouse? As I knocked on the ice-armored door? As I peered through the ice-ribboned windows; as I waved to the sullen Nurseryman inside? No use wasting time on that, her lips are forever sealed, cold, kissless and silent. But the dead naked girl certainly was my key to the hothouse; it was she who, at last, gave me entrance, opened the icebound door barred to me heretofore. Through her death. Before my eyes, at the sound of crashing glass, sprang open the door, shattering ice over me. I got in! Oh I got into the hothouse all right. Her sacrifice! The diving girl's sacrifice! I notice as I write how my mind throws rapid thoughts. Not like my mind. Which usually operates in languor; at slow bubble; and darkening and thickening, like a custard at simmer. Symptom of my bad head.

But would not working among green things make for a certain bliss? Harmony, peacefulness? What had disturbed the Nurseryman that he was drunken among his growing things? A crocked Nurseryman in the hothouse! Drunk among his plants, drunk in the greenhouse. Drunk in the shooting galaxy of Fuchsias, knocking his head into the Comet blossoms. His drunken breath scalding the Maidenhair Fern; alcohol fumes over the Babybreath. Pissed among the tuberous Begonias.

Seedsman in a warm nursery of sprouts and tendrils, so close to the making of leaf and bud, to the workings of bulb and seed, wouldn't you think the nursing man might be tranquil? What ate at you, green man, that you drowned your sorrows? What blighted your joy, nurse, that you sought relief in the deadening of it? What is the canker worm that ate at your roots? If you, among healing flowers and leaf, got a kind of madness, what about us lost in the bloomless? If the green be mad, then what of the dry? What does it mean that the garden is greening and the gardener withering? For if the gardener walk dumb, be two sheets in the wind, what of us, who speak and are sober and have no garden? “In a world of grief and pain, flowers bloom, even so,” to quote an old saying. Even so.

Even so, I was haunted by the drunken Nurseryman. Plotzed, smashed, a bag on. The Phlox grows so straight and is so festered with blossoms: what of the afflicted hand that shakes as it tends, and scatters the blossoms? How can a quivering hand tie a leaning stem? Without a clear head—hung over in the greenhouse—can bulbs be sorted? In a plague of Whitebug was both nurse and patient afflicted? Then who nurses the nurse?

There for most of the month of January, everything was frozen cracking silver. We'd had a “silver freeze”: rain all night, a sudden drop in temperature, everything brittle, silvery, ice-encased, breakable trees cracking, streets and sidewalks paved with ice, houses like iced cakes. Fierce, burning world, untraversable, a harsh world of thorns, daggers, blades. Passing every frozen morning in this silver winter, the elegant greenhouse, tropical oasis on that desert campus, in the month of January when everything was frozen silver, I saw him weaving inside the ice-gripped glass. Under a frozen sky I moved like a cripple over the frozen land. The greenhouse was a cake of ice decorated with blooms and silver windows. I could hardly see through the panes with their white icing. Yet inside I saw glimmering colors, salmon and rose and purple and red, glimmering in the roselight lampglow. I was drawn to the glow and laureate warmth of the icebound hothouse. The vision in the frozen hothouse! Glimmering and locked in the icestorm. And through the window I saw the figure of the Nurseryman. Drunk! Worming his way under hanging baskets of showering blooms, staggering around fountains of lace-leaves, lurching through fountainous palms. An evil figure? Would he harm the growing, the blooming? This lone figure, moving among the glowing blooms—he haunted me, haunts me yet. Even now.

Why does the Nurseryman drink? I questioned. Has a giant Begonia, that he nursed almost upon his bosom for weeks when it was sick, died? Has a Maidenhair Fern, fragile as a mist sprayed from an atomizer, evaporated? Did the death of delicate things drive the gardener to bottle? But does he not know, has he not heard that all flowering things fade and die? That the grass with-ereth when the wind blows over? All things die? Does he not know? I asked the dark of night. Living among green (the most perishable color), was he not accustomed to daily yellowing (leaf) and graying (frond); all things die…? Did insidious insects arrive? That unstoppable march through the ages, millions of legs, millions of antennae moving through the centuries. Did bugs come? And do quick damage, effect sleight-of-hand change on a tray of Pansies so perfect-looking that a gardener would believe they were changeless, like china flowers? Did a dragon worm get to the Ficus tree and draw its infernal saw across the root; did a viper-like insect, thick as a snake, hatch in the very soil that caressed and gently clasped the Tree of Eden plant and in a time when it had gained its power, strengthening itself as the buds fattened, strike with one strike at the bulb of the Tree and bring an end to it? What losses a gardener suffers! But was the gardener not accustomed to devastation by insect? What was the canker eating at the roots of the Nurseryman? Did he reach for the bottle instead of the bug killer? I cannot yet understand this gardener. In his greenhouse all was order. Cleanliness; not one leaf on the floor. The rows of green were neat. But he was disordered. And lurching a little. Yet he never fell over a little cradle of nursing seedlings or crashed against a hanging
Habernaria grandiflora
. He moved cautiously through the rainy tropical leaves and the sunny blooms far away from the blue sea whose light had nourished them and given them color, far away from the hot noons, from the rain wilderness and mossy coves and humid crevices, from soft shadows of hidden glens. Like a ghost he was here, gone, then there. Sometimes I'd see his shadow falling over the green; sometimes he seemed like a statue standing in the shadow of huge leaves, head bowed, fixed like stone.

But why was I banned? Why did the Nurseryman say
no
to me; why did he turn me away when I waved to him, knocking at the bound door that was garlanded with flowers of ice? Why did he turn me away? At the first rejection, when he held up his rough Nurseryman's hand, big as a spade yet gentle enough to touch a bluet without bruising it—when he raised his big hand before me saying
no!
no admittance to the hothouse, I stepped back surprised by the inhospitality—if not cruelty—of being turned away and with that old feeling of expulsion that stabbed me. But I tried again. And again. Each time that the Nurseryman repulsed me he grew more passionate, darker, more threatening—more desperate each day. Why? Each time he reeled more, swooned more. Sometimes his rubeate face would be close to the icy glass of the door and it wavered and glowered through the frozen water. His features were then distorted and a little monstrous. His eyes were dark shadows, his face fiery and forlorn; he seemed a man of sorrows. Sometimes he seemed almost ready to admit me, to open the frozen crystal door to the faery bower of the hothouse. O tender nurse of this forbidden garden, what have you to say?

But what were my feelings as this strange denying relationship grew? At the beginning it was clear to me that I rankled because a figure of power had denied me. Defiance heated me. Rebellion dizzied me. I'd throw a stone through a window, climb to the top of the Biology Lab, which was on the top floor of a building that rose up beside the greenhouse, and drop something—hurl a chair—through the glass roof, and let in the freezing air and so burn the warm flowers, vandalizing the beautiful thing I was denied. Once because the first-grade class didn't elect a boy to be the one to take home for the weekend the class goldfish—a dreaming delicate creature wafting on golden wings through a green waving paradise—but chose a girl, the boy reached into the bowl and squished the golden fish through his fingers like pudding. I felt like that—again—after all these years. Also—beauty denied. I defied those who had held back from me, who had given me the pain of feeling not-taken. Whatever their reason, I had fallen into states of rage and accusation. Not chosen, kept outside—these feelings gave me such heartbreak at first that I wanted to vanish and hide. So abandoned, I thought I'd die, and wished to. But I rose up in defiance.

My next visit to the greenhouse was around midnight (the first had been at twilight). I had to get in. The cold was so bitter. Yet the icebound hothouse was glowing like a radiant stove. I felt that I was dying. My room in the Guest House was bleak with chill; the awful pictures of founders and donors were glaring with comfort and satisfaction. I had felt quite mad in that room of transients' odors and early American pewter, those white curtains scalloped at the bay window, that chintz. If only the Nurseryman would let me in. From the freezing cold outside I saw him in the distance in a drunken trance, there by the sunny orange tree. Seeing me, his old enemy, he held fast for a moment and I thought he was about to come to me to give me, at last, welcome—in a split second a look of yielding, of need, of almost reaching out, had crossed his body. But in another moment up slowly came the awful interdicting hand. I only showed him, in my answer, my own face of need; and then I went away.

The third time was in the early morning at daybreak. As I stood at the ice-veiled glass door, it happened. I saw it chute. Something like the rushing sound of wings drew my glance upwards. Whatever was falling from the top of the Biology Building in another second crashed through the glass roof of the hothouse. A plume of silver steam rose and floated over the broken greenhouse. Some pressure sprang open the frozen door like a miracle, and I entered, at last, the ripe heat of the Nursery. I was admitted. I was in. The smell of humid mulch and sticky seed was close to the smell of sex, genital and just used. I was for a moment almost overcome with the eroticness of it.

And then the fog rose from the ground and from the very leaves and through the fog I saw the body. The body lay face up, flat on its back. It lay out like an anatomy lesson figure. Arms outstretched, legs spread. Who had leaped from the Biology Building into the frozen lake of the glass roof of the greenhouse? To crash and the among the ferns and blooming Oleander in the frozen month of January? And naked? My God this white body of marble skin and coal-black finest hair lying splashed among the curling ferns. Just as the diver must have envisioned it—if she had planned the leap and had not simply insanely hurled herself down. My door-opener, my admitter. She died for me, I thought.

The drunken gardener edged out of the steaming gloom of a far corner. He shook all over and now could not move, frozen with fear in the hothouse, fixed to the ground near the Camellias. Did he think the body had dropped out of the sky? Fallen like a lavish blossom, some human-like blossom that had been torn loose by the Nurseryman's jerking hand? When I came through the fog to him and we were face to face, the look between us showed how deep had been our knowledge of each other, and then he staggered free and began fidgeting mechanically about the greenhouse like a toy man. He simply bobbled and jacked round and round the greenhouse, in and out of corners and along green byways, a berserk fox-trotter. I saw the body of the young woman whole and unbroken except for a wisp of purplish blood in the corner of her pale-lipped mouth. Flesh among greengrowing things. Leaf and skin. It was the sound that I was still hearing in my ears. Flesh against glass. Stone, rock breaking through glass is different. Flesh and bone crashing through glass, as though against water—you know, without looking, that it is a body hitting the water.

Gazing down upon the greenhouse in winter might have been a bewitching experience for somebody. Rosy in the black nighttime, it would glow below through the frosty glass like a sherbet, like a giant bouquet, like some centerpiece on the white snow table of the field it rested in. Such a delectable vision, such a faery confection of glass, ice, roseglow and bloom, might finally have drawn the gazer into it. Or did Nature? Was Nature arranging a still life (
nature mort!
) in the greenhouse? Adding flesh, skin, bone, hair. But there it lay, dazzling piece of mortality, delivered to the Nurseryman and me,
ex machina
.

Now I saw the Nurseryman begin to shuffle slowly towards me and the fallen body. There he stood gazing down upon the figure for the longest time. He gazed and gazed, as the fog floated up from the freezing once-warm earth of the Nursery. Was it somebody come back? Returned to collect an old debt? Somebody leaving themselves on the Nurseryman's doorstep… a self-delivered foundling? How to read the answer in the gardener's eyes. Those eyes! The look of Cain was in those green orbs. I watched them change as they gazed on: now hazel, now blue, now palest green. Chameleon eyes hath the Nurseryman. Or at least half that murderer brother's look—a look of horror and a look of madness—the brute look of the ages: killer's brother. But I saw the other half of the Nurseryman's look—the lover brother's, the keeper's, Abel's look of brotherly tenderness. I, brother to each brother, one-time looker through the iced glass of the forbidden greenhouse, bundled in wool, booted feet grinding on ice, hooded with animal fur to my brow, outsider refused entry, had now arrived within.