Wild Gardens of Lemuria

My cousin Robert and I walked down the sandy dirt road. It was right after lunch, and since we couldn’t go swimming again for an hour by our parents’ decree - a lifetime to lively 10 year olds during summer vacation - we had changed out of our swimming suits and gone for a walk.Robert claimed he had found a really neat place he wanted to show me, and since I was allowed to go much farther afield when we were together, I was game and ready to go as soon as our baloney sandwiches, Kool-aid and limp potato chips were finished. We grabbed three cookies each and raced out the back door, the screen banging behind us to the usual adult chorus of “Don’t slam the door!” It was too late. We were already halfway down the driveway and moving fast.

When we reached the small, little used dirt road we slowed down. The fine white sand of the road felt good under our bare feet, and we scuffed our toes deep into it, looking for the layer of damp cool sand underneath. The southeastern U.S. summer heat pressed down heavily and anything cool was welcome.

Robert led me under the big chinaberry tree and past the slough where a small spring surrounded by marsh oozed down to the river. Then we went past a few more houses and fields. When we came to a fork in the road, Robert led me down the wooded branch.

“Where are we going, anyway?” I asked.

“You’ll see. We’re almost there. This is where I got those plums yesterday, remember?Come on, it’s this way.”

Robert left the little dirt road, taking a path I hadn’t noticed deeper into the woods and away from the river. The path itself was clear, which was a bit unusual given the growth rate of wild plants in the hot wet summer weather, but I could clearly see the briars and thorny vines and stiff scratchy bushes growing close by the sides of the path. Well, if Robert could do it, so could I. Neither of us wore shoes, but at least I had a shirt on. Robert, like most of the young boys, only put on a shirt in the summer when he was forced to.

We carefully watched where we put our feet, as snakes were a real possibility, and followed the sandy trail deeper into the woods.

“There’s another way in, but it’s all the way around on the other side,” said Robert as we climbed over a fallen pine tree. We pushed past a last bush and suddenly we were in an overgrown clearing. I could tell that there used to be a house here, and a garden, but it must have been a long time ago. We walked into the area in silence. I stared around me.

There was the foundation of a house, with a chimney rising out of it, surrounded by overgrown bushes and with a pine tree rising out of the middle of what had been the house. There were several ancient crabapple trees and the plums Robert had mentioned. I saw the remains of daylilies about to choke themselves out and rose bushes running wild. The whole place was knee high in grass. Robert grabbed my arm. “Come on, over here!” He seemed a little bit antsy for some reason.

I shrugged and followed him. He led me over to a young plum tree heavily covered with ripe yellow- green fruit. There was no way it had been here when the house had been, so some wild creature must have accidentally planted it. Robert picked a plum and handed it to me.

“Here, eat this,” he said. I noticed that he didn’t have one for himself and was instantly suspicious. We were cousins and best friends, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t above a practical joke. He noticed my look and picked a few more.

“They’re good, really they are,” he reassured me. “Just take a bite.”

I thought about it for a few more seconds and then decided what the heck. I bit through the translucent yellow- green skin and tasted the tart yet sweet juice gushing out. It was very good, and I savored that first bite. I took another bite, and then, hearing Robert sigh anxiously, I looked up with plum in my mouth. Robert was eating his, too, and looking around the clearing. I followed his gaze, and my eyes widened.

The clearing had changed. We were now standing in the middle of a lovely old fashioned garden with carefully raked dirt paths. Roses grew everywhere, and I saw a huge camellia bush. The daylilies were in full bloom as were many other flowers in the bursting flower beds. There was still a plum tree beside us, though, and there were several others too.  The house itself was there along one side of the garden, two stories tall and painted white with porches front and back. A crepe myrtle grew by the house, along with several lilac bushes and there were pecan trees and walnut trees and young crabapple trees here and there. Peach trees dotted the yard and a grape arbor stood a little ways away. I could even see a sizable vegetable garden on the other side of the house where I had seen woods just a few minutes ago.

Robert said, “You see it, don’t you.”

“I see something…”

“The garden. And the house. And the yard. You see them, too, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Oh man.”  The relief was plain in his voice. “I thought I was going crazy. But if you see them, too, then it’s okay.”

I was looking around the former clearing some more.  Beyond the garden, washing hung on a line and I could see a barn with a faded grey exterior. I could smell pigs, too, and as I swallowed the next bite of plum, I realized that I could hear things as well. A mule braying, the pigs grunting, chickens and guinea hens, and last of all, children laughing and shrieking in play - the sounds joined the buzzing of the cicadas that had been there all along. Robert said, “It  all just fades away again after a little bit. I guess the plums wear off or something.” He smiled wanly.

I finished the plum, and Robert handed me another. Without any discussion, we walked away from the plum tree and wandered through the garden. It was fragrant and lush. Insects hummed and buzzed and birds flew everywhere. After a few minutes, we came out of the garden near the house.

There was an old hound dog lying under the porch, but he didn’t seem to notice us. We came closer to the sounds of the children playing and found them playing tag in the shade of a big old hickory nut tree. They were five of them. The oldest ones were about our age and they were strangely dressed. They boys wore faded overalls without shirts and the girls had different looking dresses on. The dresses were very wrinkled, like they were made all of cotton, and just looked strange to my eyes.  I looked again and realized that the youngest one, a toddler, was actually a boy wearing a dress. I thought back to the stories my grandmother liked to tell and remembered that little boys used to wear dresses until they were out of diapers. I turned to Robert and whispered, “I think this is the past. This is like when our grandparents were little, like the stories grandma tells, in the twenties or thirties.”

“I know. It’s really weird, isn’t it?”

The children still hadn’t noticed us, even though we were standing quite near them.

“I don’t think they can see us,” Robert said. “Yesterday, I tried to tell someone ‘Hey,” but they didn’t notice me.”

While we watched, a woman in an old-fashioned dress and apron stepped onto the porch and called, “Dinner!”

The children ran squealing towards the house, and a man dressed in overalls came from the barn. We edged closer to the house and peaked past the lace curtains in the window. The family, including several older children who hadn’t been outside, was seated at a long dining table full of food. Fried chicken, biscuits, dishes of vegetables, all were being passed around the table with gusto. Soon everyone was tucking in. The scene began to fade and I bit into the second plum.

We stayed for at least an hour before we decided we’d better get home before we got into trouble and weren’t allowed to go for walks anymore. We agreed to come back for a while that evening before it got dark.

We spent our afternoon swimming in the river with Robert’s younger brothers. It was nice and cool, and we had fun, but our minds were elsewhere.

As soon as we could, we finished our supper, made some excuses and ran for the road again. We had two free hours before it got dark and we intended to use them.

Since we both knew where we were going, we made good time to the clearing and were soon licking plum juice off our fingers. This time we could hear clinking and clanking in the kitchen along with the sort of argument that children get into over dishwashing. A boy was at the pump on the back porch, filling buckets. An older boy came from the direction of the barn carrying milk buckets. A girl was feeding the chickens. On the porch, an older woman was rocking the toddler and singing to him as his head drooped sleepily against her. We watched the family settle down for the evening, doing chores and just settling down. By the time we left, everyone was relaxing on the porch with newspapers or books and the littlest one had been taken in to bed.

The next few days saw us at the clearing every free minute. Our parents warned us that we were going to get belly aches from all the plums we were eating, and we had some trouble getting away without Robert’s younger brothers, but we still managed to get there twice a day. We learned the names of the children and a little about them - the chores they did, the games they played, the books they read. The littlest one, the toddler boy, loved to run to our plum tree in the garden and beg for the fruit. Usually some indulgent older sibling would pick one for him, and he would sit contentedly in the shade and eat the pieces they sliced off for him. We watched as the mother and grandmother tended the flower garden lovingly, and taught the children to do the same. It was a beautiful, special place that everyone loved.  The whole thing was like watching the stories our grandparents told coming to life.

Our constant munching was threatening our plum supply, though. We had tried other trees, both plum and crabapple, but none of them had the same time travel results that this plum tree did. We knew that we were going to be out of plums soon and our adventures would be over. Finally there were enough for one more day, and that was it. We were really upset by this. We had come to know the family well and were going to miss them very much. Somehow, it didn’t seem like they lived so long in the past; to us they were real and they were now.

That night we were grumpy and cranky. Our parents decided we were overtired and sent us to bed early, saying that we would have to stay home tomorrow because we clearly needed the rest. Robert retired to his house and I to mine next door as our parents sat on the river bank and talked. I fell asleep thinking how unfair life was.

I woke up around midnight, sweating and trembling. I had had a nightmare in which the house in the clearing was burning. I could hear the screams and shouts of the family, see the flames against a stormy night sky as lightening flashed and thunder boomed, hear the timbers crumbling and crashing. It took me a long time to go back to sleep. I was heavy eyed and groggy the next morning, and when I met Robert after breakfast, he was the same.

“I had a dream…” he began.

“The house burned down.”  I said.

“Yeah.”

Our parents’ decree that we stay home all day suddenly was all right with us. We had no desire to go to the clearing today, and maybe not ever again.

Over the next few days, we tried to worm information about the house in the clearing out of our parents without being too obvious. It didn’t do any good, though, because they hadn’t lived here then, and no one knew anything.

Finally, a few days later, we decided to go back and visit the house once more. It seemed silly, I told Robert, to be so upset. After all, they had lived a long time ago. They’d all be grandparents or dead by now anyway, fire or not. He agreed, and we set off. It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon with the threat of a thunderstorm hanging in the distance as we set off down the road one more time.

We were silent as we approached the house. The plum tree was empty, the birds having enjoyed the last few fruit in our absence. We were wandering around the garden area, remembering where things were, how the flowers had looked and smelled, the way the children helped in the gardens, when we heard someone coming. An old pickup ground to a stop at the far edge of the clearing, and an elderly man climbed out of it. We turned to run, but he saw us first and waved to us. “It’s all right!” he called, “I don’t care if you’re here!” Then he ignored us and went to the back of the truck to take out one of those brush mowers. Feeling cautious, we snuck over to the edge of the clearing and hid, watching him for a while. He mowed part of the clearing and cleared away some of the extra growth. At least that explained why the whole thing hadn’t gone back to woods.

Then he stopped by our plum tree. He looked at it for a minute, and then went back to his truck. He brought a large flat stone back to the plum tree with him.  We crept closer, wondering what he was doing.

The old man looked up at us and saw the questions in our eyes. “It’s a memorial stone,” he said in a quiet voice. “For my baby brother.”

“Was he in the house when it burned?” Robert asked all in a rush.

“Yes, he was.”

“Was he the toddler?” I asked with my heart in my throat.

“Yes…” the old man was clearly puzzled as to how we knew these things.

Robert and I looked at each other. I began, “This is going to be really hard to believe, but, well, when we ate the plums from this tree, we saw things.”

“The past, she means. We saw the family here, only they couldn’t see us.” Robert shrugged. “I know you won’t believe us, but it’s true.”

The old man looked at us consideringly. Then he asked a few questions about the family which we answered quickly and correctly.

He nodded. “Well, when you reach my age, you’ll know there’s awfully strange things in life that are real. I believe you. And that fits. My little brother was the only one who didn’t get out of the house. Me and my sisters and brothers, we took his favorite toy that he‘d left under the big hickory tree the night before, and we buried it here, because this was his favorite tree. I don’t know why we did it - I guess it just seemed like the thing to do. I’ve kept a plum tree growing here ever since. I guess he didn’t want to be forgotten, or us to be forgotten, and he gave you the memories. It’s fitting. I’m the only one left, now, and I can’t get here as much as I’d like or do as much as needs doing. I’m glad you can remember the house and the garden and us kids, the way we used to be.”

We stayed there for a long time that afternoon, talking and listening, living in the past in a different way, sitting beside that magical plum tree in the old forgotten garden.

-She Wolf (c)2007