Visitation

THE GARDENER

NO ONE IN THE VILLAGE knows where he comes from. Perhaps he was always here. He helps the farmers propagate their fruit trees in the spring, inoculating the wild stock with active buds around Midsummer’s Day and dormant ones when the sap rises for the second time, he grafts new scions onto the trees chosen for propagation using whip or cleft grafts depending on the thickness of the stock, he prepares the required mixture of wax, turpentine and resin, then bandages each wound with raffia or paper, everyone in the village knows that the trees propagated by him display the most regular crowns as they continue to grow. During the summer the farmers hire him as a reaper and to build the shocks. And when the time comes to drain the dark earth of the parcels of land along the lake, his advice is eagerly sought, for he knows how to weave green spruce twigs into braids and place them in the boreholes to the proper depth to draw out the water. He helps the villagers repair their harrows and plows, lends a hand cutting wood in the winter and then saws up the trunks. He himself owns no land, not even a patch of forest, he lives alone in an abandoned hunting lodge at the edge of the woods, he’s always lived there, everyone in the village knows him, and yet he is only ever referred to by both young people and old as The Gardener, as though he had no other name.