Secrets of Harmony Grove (13 page)

I explained that before the main point of the story—the part with Cupid’s arrows and the whole unrequited love thing—Ovid gives a long, fictional tale about the forming of the earth.

“There’s even a great flood. I think the quote on the marker comes from that part. The flood destroys all of humankind, and the ones who are left have to start over and repopulate the earth.”

“Sounds like the Bible to me,” Mike said.

“Similar elements,” I replied, “but this story is definitely not biblical. Instead of our one real God, the world Ovid describes is created by many mythical gods. In fact, it’s the gods that keep messing up things for the humans, from what I recall.”

“So when does the Cupid guy start doing his bit?”

“About two thirds of the way in. After that, the whole rest of the poem tells what happened to poor Phoebus and Daphne.”

We came to the bridge, which was so narrow that we had to cross in single file. As I started over, I thought back to the many times Scott and our Amish cousins and I had played here. We had elaborate pretend games about an ogre who lived underneath. Striding quickly across the wooden planks now, I could only hope there weren’t any real ogres hiding under there, just waiting to come out and grab me around the ankles.

Once our little group was on the other side of the bridge, we found ourselves facing the centerpiece of the grove, the bay laurel tree. As we stood there taking it in, I was surprised to realize that while most of the grove seemed neglected and untended, someone had been taking care of this area recently. Here, there were no fallen limbs or intrusive weeds or even any autumn leaves. In fact, I realized, looking down at the ground, the clearing had recently been raked, the ridges created by a rake’s tines still visible in the dust. Before I could point this out, the technician picked up on it as well. Telling us not to move in any closer lest we contaminate any evidence, he very carefully and thoroughly began examining and photographing the scene.

While we waited, Mike and I read the markers etched into plaques mounted on the benches circling the tree. Nearby, Charlie and Rip stood guard.

“So what happens to Phoebus and Daphne?” Rip asked, which made me smile, knowing that he was genuinely interested in the poem’s story.

“In a nutshell? He pursues her, she runs from him, and when he’s about to catch her she begs the heavens for help and is turned into a tree. A bay laurel.”

I added that the markers on these benches, when read in sequence, provided the climax of the poem, starting with the final chase through the wilderness, followed by her plea for help, and then that bizarre transformation of human into tree:

Her strength was gone, she grew pale,
overcome by the effort of her rapid flight,
and seeing Peneus’s waters near cried out
“Help me, father! If your streams have divine powers
change me, destroy this beauty that pleases too well!”

Her prayer was scarcely done when
a heavy numbness seized her limbs,
thin bark closed over her breast,
her hair turned into leaves,
her arms into branches,
her feet so swift a moment ago stuck fast in slow-growing roots,
her face was lost in the canopy
.

Only her shining beauty was left
.

I read the next one out loud, its words familiar simply because as children it had always made us giggle:

Even like this Phoebus loved her
and, placing his hand against the trunk,
he felt her heart still quivering under the new bark.
He clasped the branches as if they were parts of human arms,
and kissed the wood
.

“That’s why we always called this one the Kissing Tree.”

“Is that this Ovid guy’s version of a happy ending?” Charlie asked, frowning.

“The poem’s a tragedy. Unrequited love, remember? It doesn’t have a happy ending.” I read the next plate in the series:

But even the wood shrank from his kisses,
and he said “Since you cannot be my bride, you must be my tree!
Laurel, with you my hair will be wreathed,
with you my lyre, with you my quiver.
Just as my head with its uncropped hair is always young,
so you also will wear the beauty of undying leaves.”

“Okay, that’s pretty sad,” Rip said. “Since you cannot be my bride, you must be my tree? I mean, personally, I’d like to find my soul mate, but I’d rather have no one at all than fall in love with a tree.”

We all laughed.

“Is that where it ends?” Charlie asked.

“Almost. There’s one more,” I said. “I’d read it to you, but it’s on the marker over where they’re working.”

I hadn’t thought that either Mike or the tech were even listening to us, but they must have been because the tech paused in what he was doing to read it for us.

“It says, ‘The laurel bowed her newly made branches and seemed to shake her leafy crown, like a head giving consent.’”

“At least it ends on an upbeat note,” Mike commented. “Sort of.”

“Yeah,” Charlie replied, “’cept that’s a bay laurel and this is zone seven. Not gonna be a happy ending for
this
tree.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, but Rip understood and soon the two men were discussing trees and gardening and climate zones. Apparently, Charlie was of the opinion that bay laurels could never survive a Pennsylvania winter and in this region should always be planted in giant pots, ones that could be moved inside when temperatures began to plummet. Rip disagreed, insisting that if you nursed one along carefully enough and protected it until its roots had been well established in the ground, that it could be done. His was the winning point, because I was pretty sure that this was the very same bay laurel tree that had always been here.

Both men finally quieted down, focusing again on their guardsman duties. I waited quietly nearby, shining my flashlight out into the grove, looking for more holes in the ground. I felt hopeful that we would find something, but despite my searching and the efforts of both Mike and the technician, they couldn’t find any special evidence in this area either, nothing except that which we had originally observed, the tended and raked ground.

We continued on toward the German Gate. As we walked I began picking the brains of the two gardeners, wondering if perhaps the Fishing Tree had received its name not from the quote on its nearby metal marker, but
instead for some horticultural reason. The two men tossed around ideas for a while, but they couldn’t come up with anything.

“No ‘catfish rose’ or ‘trout vine’ or anything like that?” I pressed.

Charlie replied that fish heads and fish powder were sometimes used as fertilizer, but otherwise he couldn’t think of any plant or tree that had “fish” in its name. Rip said something about it was ringing a bell, and he offered to look at his gardening books at home and let us know.

“I think you’re both barking up the wrong tree,” Charlie quipped, making us smile.

Our smiles faded as we neared our destination: the German Gate.

As children we had always avoided this area, not liking the violent and dark poetry on the markers here or even the trees themselves. Unlike the rest of the grove, which featured a wide variety of tree types, the ones on the other side of the German Gate were all the same kind, beech trees I think, and they had been planted in straight, tight rows, like soldiers standing at attention.

Unlike the rest of the grove, which mimicked its German original, this section had been entirely of my grandfather’s design. If the grove was shaped as a sort of long oval, this section was a bulge on the outside of that oval. The gate was closed, blocking the entrance to the bulge, though of course all one needed to do to get into it was walk around the gate. Its lettering faced inward, into the grove, the words “
Jedem das Seine
” spelled out in a stark, art deco style amid the wrought iron, crisscross pattern of the massive doors.

Taking it all in, as an adult I could appreciate the symmetry of the creation, but I still didn’t like it. Standing there, playing our lights along the closed gate and the rows of trees beyond, it struck me that I should get more information about why my grandfather had decided to add this extra part to the grove. Maybe my father would know, or my grandmother. I should ask, as well, where the quotes on the markers among the beech trees had come from. Though the quotes in the rest of the grove had been pulled from
The Metamorphoses
, the ones in the bulge beyond the German Gate were from some other source, and now I wanted to know what that source was.

Even on this side of the gate, though, where the quotes were still from
Ovid, the choices were strangely disturbing. Looking down, I read the one nearest to where we stood:

Immediately every kind of wickedness erupted
into this age of baser natures:
truth, shame, and honour vanished;
in their place were fraud, deceit, and trickery,
violence and pernicious desires
.

Next to that was my least favorite of all, because it was surely one of the ones that had started rumors in the past:

He himself ran in terror, and reaching the silent fields
howled aloud, frustrated of speech.
Foaming at the mouth, and greedy as ever for killing,
he turned against the sheep, still delighting in blood.
His clothes became bristling hair, his arms became legs.
He was a wolf, but kept some vestige of his former shape.
There were the same grey hairs, the same violent face,
the same glittering eyes, the same savage image
.

“These markers are freaky,” Charlie said, reading another one out loud. “‘Her sons’ dreadful bodies drenched Earth with streams of blood’? What’s up with that?”

“Yeah, how about this one?” Rip replied from the other side of the path. “‘These progeny were savage, violent, and eager for slaughter, so that you might know they were born from blood.’ Good grief.”

“Guys, come on,” Mike scolded. “Stay on task here.”

Both men snapped back to attention, but as they focused on their duties as watchmen, they asked me to read them some more.

“Here’s the one closest to the gate: ‘War came, waving clashing arms with bloodstained hands.’”

Rip shook his head.

“I gotta say, this Ovid fellow was one dark guy.”

He wasn’t the only one
, I thought. Watching the technician pull out his tools and go to work checking for fingerprints on the gate latch, all I knew
for sure was that my simple, Amish-raised grandfather had grown up to become one very odd, very complicated fellow. No wonder people thought this place was haunted.

“What do the words in the gate mean?” Mike asked, shining his light on them. “
Jedem das Seine
? Is that German?”

“Yes. I don’t speak German myself, but Jonah says it means ‘To each his own’ or something like that. Why those particular words on this particular gate, I have no idea.”

Mike kept looking at it and squinting.

“I’ve seen this before,” he said slowly. “Somewhere else, in a photograph or something. Not necessarily with trees around it, but this gate…I’ve seen a picture of a gate that looks just like this one.”

I could tell he was trying hard to remember where, so I didn’t speak. Instead, I simply waited in the darkness beside him, hoping that by figuring that out, he might shed some light on why it had been put here and if that could relate in any way to the family diamonds or to Troy’s death. All five of us were silent, the night deathly quiet around us. Even the crickets didn’t chirp here. The only sound was the wind rustling the branches above. Finally, Mike shook his head and said he couldn’t remember but it might come to him later.