Visitation

THE GARDENER

IN THE VILLAGE they say the daughter of the house has been seen at night sitting with a few boys out on the pier where the steamboat docks, smoking and drinking. Especially when the moon is full she likes to clamber over the railing of the little balcony beside her window with her parents and grandmother none the wiser, she climbs down the window frame of the downstairs window, then steps into the interlaced hands of the gardener held up to assist her, and later she ascends again by the same method.

The subtenants are glad the gardener remains sitting quietly on the threshold with the cold cigar stump in his mouth when they start to saw down the big fir bush, what they’re after is to lay the telephone wire in as direct a line as possible from the house down to the workshop so that this cable they have purchased themselves will reach. In any case the fir bush has become yellowed and unattractive in recent years, besides which it’s been hollow inside for some time now. When they are removing the huge stump with its roots, they discover a crate filled with porcelain. Not bad, all the things that grow in a garden, the young householder says when they show him the crate. A miracle of nature, he says. The gardener nods. The householder picks up the crate and carries it to his car.