I swung my leg at the pile of frogs and a handful jumped off to the right. I followed them with my gaze as they dived into the water and then lifted my eyes to see, in a secluded grove of trees, the ruin of a house. It was Victorian and gray, not the clean gray of a rehabbed bed and breakfast but the tired gray of weathered wood long neglected. The foundation had shifted and the building sagged with the sad weariness of a tragedy whose story no one remains alive to tell. Some of the windowpanes were shattered, others were boarded with plywood, itself weathered to gray, and the lower part of half the house was charred on the outside by some sort of brushfire. It must have been an old caretaker’s cottage, I figured, situated as it was so far down the hill from the main house.
While climbing back up to the main house my attention was drawn to a large bosky grove to the right of the pool. It looked to be untended and its setup completely haphazard but as I approached, I noticed a definite shapeliness about it. While each of the individual plants had a disordered look, the general shape had corners and lines, as if those bushes were once part of a wall of hedges that had long gone untrimmed. The plants were wild vicious things, the leaves spiked, the branches studded with a profusion of pale thorns, some more than an inch long. I walked around the grove until I saw a spot in the wall of green that was less dense than the rest and appeared to have been closed off only by the most recent growth. I looked left and right, spotted no one watching, glanced up at the porch, saw that still it was empty, and reached my hand into the opening. I pulled my hand back again, inspected it, and then stepped right on through.
I found myself on a pathway bright with sunlight and wildflowers. The grass was high and the pathway was narrow, with thorny branches thrusting like spears across the gap, but still there was plenty of room for me to walk after brushing away the errant stalks. I followed the pathway around a corner until I found an archway of green that led to another pathway. The flowers were random, full of lovely yellows and violets and a few lurid reds. Two birds serenaded one another in the morning light. A cardinal hopped from one bush to another. It smelled like a different world, all fresh and ecstatically fragrant, full of life, the very opposite of the must-ridden house or the mucky pond below.
I knew where I had sneaked myself into, of course. This was the maze of hedges and flowers that had been described to me by Grimes, the dentist, in his mournful soliloquy at the Irish Pub. He had described it as immaculately tended, but it had apparently not been touched in many many months, not since, I would guess, the death of Caroline’s sweet widowed grandmother, Faith Reddman Shaw, Grammy, who seemed to have a hand in many of the goings-on in that house. I followed the maze like a rat looking for cheese, ducking into almost completely covered entrances, under archways of branches, moving ever toward the middle, until I stepped, as cautiously as a heathen in a church, into the clearing Grimes had described so vividly.
The sun was brightest here and the plants had seemed to mutate into wild stalks of color. Flies fell upon my neck. The statue of Aphrodite was there, on her tiptoes, reaching up to the heavens, but now it appeared she was being held down by a thick hairy vine that cloaked the base of the statue and wrapped itself like an arm around her rear leg. The bench across from the statue was also covered with a vine, but this one sported bright orange flowers. Between the two was an oval covered with high grasses and stalks of weedy green not yet brought to flower. I stepped around the oval toward the statue, feeling some dark presence beneath my feet as I walked, and pushed away the handsized vine leaves covering the base until I could see the stone in which was deeply engraved the word “SHAW.”
I felt something on my foot and jerked it away suddenly, seeing a frog hop into the surrounding bushes. Another frog leaped by. I turned and saw two more come bounding like little flashes of light from the entrance arch and then a boot.
I backed away, almost ducking behind the statue, but before I could hide the boot’s owner came into view and smiled at me in an unsettling way from beneath a wide straw hat. “A little sightseeing, Mr. Carl?” cackled Nat.
“I didn’t mean to,” I stammered, backing away. “I wasn’t…”
“You’re allowed,” he said, and his smile warmed to genuine. The spot around his left eye glowed a lurid red. “It’s just a garden.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, trying to recover my breath.
“You should have seen it when it was tended. I spent half of each of my days maintaining it to Mrs. Shaw’s specifications. She was a demon for pruning. The elder Mrs. Shaw, I’m talking of now. Not a bloom out of place, not a weed. ‘Take off every shoot whose value is doubtful,’ she taught me, ‘and all you have left is beauty.’ It was a masterpiece. Yep. Some magazine wanted to do a spread, but she wouldn’t have strangers stomping through it with tripods and cameras.”
I looked around at the weeds and the vines pulling at the statue. “Why’d you let it go?”
“This is the way the elder Mrs. Shaw, she wanted it. ‘Just let it go when I die, Nat,’ she told me.” His voice took on a strange power as he imitated hers. “ ‘Let the earth take it back,’ she told me. So that’s what I’ve done.”
“It seems a shame.”
“That it does, yep. Every once in a while I come with my shears and get the urge to straighten it up, some. To prune. But the elder Mrs. Shaw, she was one who liked her orders carried out to the letter. It was the least I could do for her to honor her wishes. It was her place, you know. She’d been coming here ever since she was a girl. Built it up herself.”
“What was she like, Nat?”
“The elder Mrs. Shaw? Quite a woman, she was. Like a mother to me. Brought me here when I was still a boy and made sure I was taken care of ever since, almost like I was one of her own. She’s done more for me and mine then you’d ever imagine, Mr. Carl. Can’t say as she was the gentlest soul I’ve ever met.” He squatted down and pulled at a long piece of grass, wrapping it about his hand. “Nope, I could never say that. But deep in her heart she wanted to do good. N’aren’t too many like that.”
He stood and strolled over to the statue and kicked roughly at the base.
“She’s laying right there,” he said. “In some special urn of hers. Her ashes mixed up with her husband’s. I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Carl. She loved him more than she loved anything else on this good earth. That kind of love coming from a woman for a man, she’s got to have more than a little good in her.”
“How did he die, her husband?” I asked.
Nat’s blue eyes looked into mine and he smiled as if he knew that I knew the answer, though how he could I couldn’t know. “It was before my time. But I’ll say this, the elder Mrs. Shaw, she was probably right to let this place go. Sometimes what’s buried should remain buried. No good can come from digging up the dead. Come along, Mr. Carl, I’ll show you out. The way it is now, it sometimes gets tricky and you might end up here longer than you’d expect.”