Dead Flowers
Fiction by David Laidlaw
It was three o’clock in the morning when I finished a second draft of my letter to councilman Kane, written because I’d read recently in the news that his wife was dead. It is such a shame, I wrote. She was just such a beautiful woman. I mean, besides whatever else she must have been. The truth is, I had only ever seen her photo in the papers. But councilman, it pays to see the good in a bad situation. The whole world considers life cheap, and really that’s the only sensible way to consider it. In the end we are better to have thrown it off. Better that she was able to do it on her own terms and in her own time. At the end of the letter I signed off saying, Up, up and Away! After that I fell asleep, sitting upright in my chair.
When I awoke it was already morning, and I found myself lying in bed. And it’s for reasons like this that I hate this utterly miserable time of year. Nothing holds together, or makes any sense. Everything starts to unravel. I can’t even hold myself together, as every thread is cut, and now I can’t even trust that I’ll awake in the place where I fell asleep.
This morning I lay in bed for hours doing nothing, like a rabbit, with my head in my hands. And for hours I watched at the window, where outside the rain was falling, and every so often a little black bird flitted in and out of view. Grape vines, although wasted by the cold, still clung to the garden trellises.
Earlier today Joe had had his friends in for coffee, and there’d been a ruckus above. I knew all about it, even though I’d been asleep at the time. I knew of it because of my dreams. It had been the end of the Second World War. Grizzled voices shouted in broken English over the radio. Eyes were blinded in a smoke of cigarettes. Tears were shed. I had heard something tumbling down the stairs. I had dreamt of Joe, standing under the window, yelling at someone, something about plums. He had held a pyramid of golden-purple plums in his outstretched hand. But his hands, as always, were thick with dirt. And Joe was, as always, drunk. Coffee in the morning meant three fat fingers of rum spilled into every cup. It was the same thing every Wednesday, he and his friends started in around seven o’clock.
But don’t you think of judging him. Not anymore, you haven’t the right. That’s a thing you forfeited when you left and you forgot the fact that Joe was still alive. Still putting in hours. Still shaking his legs. Just as you forgot this house, this room, this bed, still as it is.
By the time I was up this morning, his friends had gone and, in all probability, Joe had taken a bus downtown. To wet his whistle at the old Tin Flute. And that’s just one more thing that I can’t stand about this time of year: the silence, with no sign of life. Just a dozen pots and pans laid out to try and catch the rain. And the sound of hot blood and of piss roaring through my open ears. That’s maybe why I’m writing, writing letters, writing words. Because I get lonely, understand? And I go crazy with this loneliness. I get out of bed. I take out the trash. I eat a slice of buttered toast, with coffee and an egg. I go outside and smoke yet another cigarette, standing barefoot in the cold, then wander up and down the muddy byways of the garden.
Every year Joe tends his garden, grows an array, both of flowers and food. Every year he overwhelms his neighbours and his friends, with apples, plums, figs, onions, beans, peas, and bunches of kale. Then every year around this time, the garden, it just up and dies. It leaves him floundering. And every year he flounders just a little further off.
I ask him what it’s like.
He says, It’s exactly like I lost my wife.
More than anything else he misses the flowers, he says, he wishes every year that they’d be quicker coming back.
But Joe isn’t sentimental. His baseball cap reads, Old As Dirt. All day he walks through town, drunk, and with his zipper collapsed, and with the soiled tails of his shirt sticking out like a tuft of feathers from the seat of his pants. He calls me a son of a bitch. Asks, Don’t you ever get tired of always fucking yourself? And he boasts he’s been growing food for over seventy years, ever since he was nine. I know everything there is to know, he says, with his face right close to mine.
It’s a story I have heard before, at least half a dozen times. About how his father left to fight in the war, and his brothers left to fight in the war, and the war raged all around, to east and west and north and south. So Joe had to learn to work on the farm, or else see himself and his mother starve. In fact the only part of the story I had never heard before was something Joe told me this afternoon, about how one of his brothers never came home. His body, according to the army, was lost, and the only thing the family ever had of their son was a postcard. It came by mail one day, many months after the boy was supposed to have died. It was addressed to the mother, saying only, I miss you, please come home.
I said to Joe, That doesn’t make any sense. Then he started in asking for rent.
Tonight I am at the desk, sitting with a cup of coffee, staring off into the distance, through the walls of the room and into the night. All around me are the scattered pages, full of old ideas and of worthless thought. Letters that will never be written. Letters written which will never be sent. And all the while I know that the only thing I ought to write, the one and only thing which could make a difference, is a letter to you.
I pick up a pen and a sheet of paper, but at first nothing comes to mind. Well no, it isn’t nothing, but it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, it isn’t something you would understand, now that our lives have split and have come undone and we are far apart. You won’t understand, you will think one thing, but the truth will be something different. Still, there are no other words I can write.
So I pick up a pen and bend myself once more to this task, this composition. I scratch a few words onto the page. It’s a single draft. I’ll mail it tomorrow.
Saying only, I miss you, please come home. »