Chapter 7 - The Garden in Winter
By the second week of November, the first real snow had fallen over Cleveland.
It was not the dirty, gray sludge that accumulated in the gutters of the Flats, but a deep, pristine blanket of white that muffled the entire world, turning the grounds of the Whitmore estate into a silent kingdom of ice and marble.
Grace was out of the hospital, but she was not on Elmwood Terrace.
The flat on Elmwood Terrace did not exist anymore; Arthur’s crews had already begun the process of renovating the entire block, replacing the rotten plumbing, installing steam radiators, and converting the upper floors into decent apartments for the families who had lived under Croft’s thumb for a decade.
Grace sat in the sunroom on the south side of the Whitmore mansion, wrapped in an enormous shawl of Scottish cashmere that Mrs. Higgins had brought down from the guest rooms. Her cheeks had regained their color—a soft, healthy rose beneath her pale skin—and though she still coughed when the cold lake wind rattled the windowpanes, her eyes were bright, clear, and steady again.
In her lap lay a heavy, cloth-bound textbook: *Principles and Practice of Modern Nursing*, by Bertha Harmer.
Across the room, Annie was sitting on a braided rug beside the stone fireplace, carefully drawing a picture of a three-story brick house with yellow curtains using a box of sixty-four colored wax crayons Arthur had bought for her at the Higbee department store.
Through the tall, arched French doors of the sunroom, I could see the western terrace.
Arthur was standing in the snow.
He wore his heavy charcoal overcoat, a pair of thick leather gauntlets, and a black woolen watch-cap pulled low over his ears. In his right hand, he held a long-handled pruning saw; in his left, a pair of heavy bypass shears with forged steel blades.
He had been out there for an hour, cutting away the dead, tangled briars that had swallowed the stone urns for seventeen years.
I pulled on Julian’s tweed coat, slipped into my boots, and stepped through the French doors into the freezing air.
The snow crunched beneath my feet with a dry, squeaking sound: *whump, whump, whump.*
Arthur didn't turn around when I approached. He was standing in front of the central rose bed—the place where Annie had found the ring beneath the dead leaves three weeks ago.
The briars were piled six feet high along the stone balustrade, their dark, thorny canes stark against the white snow like bundles of barbed wire. Arthur was breathing heavily, his breath rising in thick, white plumes that mingled with the frost on his eyebrows.
“You’re cutting them too close to the graft,” I said, stopping beside his shoulder.
Arthur paused, the saw halfway through a thick, woody cane that was as thick as my wrist. He turned his head slowly, his pale gray eyes squinting through the glare of the snow.
“And since when did an eleven-year-old scrap-metal merchant become an authority on *Rosa gallica*?” he grunted.
“Since Mrs. Higgins gave me the garden journal from the potting shed,” I said, pulling my hands into my pockets to keep them warm. “Your wife wrote down the pruning instructions in nineteen-thirty-five. She said if you cut the canes below the swelling at the base, the winter freeze gets into the crown and the rootstock dies before April.”
Arthur looked down at the saw, then at the base of the bush where a thick, gnarled knot of wood rose two inches above the frozen soil.
He let out a short, sharp snort that was almost a laugh—the first time I had ever heard anything resembling humor come out of his chest.
“Eleanor always did think she was smarter than the nurserymen from Rochester,” he muttered. But he moved the saw two inches higher, above the swelling, and began to draw the blade back and forth with steady, rhythmic strokes.
The saw teeth bit into the dead wood with a clean, dry rasp: *zipp-zag, zipp-zag.*
“Why didn't you sell the house?” I asked, watching the sawdust fall like orange cornmeal onto the white snow. “After she died. You had enough money to live anywhere. You could have gone to New York, or London, or bought an island in Florida.”
Arthur finished the cut. The heavy, thorny cane fell into the snow with a soft thud.
He straightened his back with a groan that sounded like an old timber settling in a gale, leaned his weight onto the handle of the pruning saw, and looked out over the vast, white slope of the lawn toward the frozen lake in the distance.
“Because, Caleb,” Arthur said softly, “when you have spent your life building things out of steel and concrete, you begin to believe that strength is the same thing as endurance. You think that if you make a thing heavy enough, cold enough, and hard enough, it will never break.”
He pulled his leather glove off with his teeth, reached into his waistcoat, and touched the pocket where he still carried the sapphire ring.
“Eleanor was not made of steel,” he continued. “She was made of things that grow, things that need water, sunlight, and forgiveness. When she died, I thought that if I turned this house into an iron box, I could keep the memory of her from spoiling. But an iron box doesn't keep things safe, boy. It just suffocates them until they turn into rust.”
He looked back at the sunroom, where Grace was turning a page of the nursing textbook, her face serene behind the glass.
“Your sister told me something yesterday,” Arthur said.
“What did she tell you?”
“She told me she was going to pay me back,” Arthur said, the corners of his mouth twitching with that dry, almost-smile. “Every cent of the hospital bill. Every cent of the oil for the furnace. Every cent of the tuition for the Case Western nursing program that begins in January. She calculated it on a sheet of brown wrapping paper with a grease pencil. She says it will take her fourteen years and eight months, assuming she works forty-eight hours a week at the university hospital and doesn't buy any new shoes until nineteen-sixty.”
I looked down at my boots—Julian’s boots, polished to a deep, glowing mahogany.
“She will, too,” I said. “Grace doesn't like owing people.”
“Grace is an idiot,” Arthur said, though his voice was entirely devoid of malice. “She thinks that the world is an accounting ledger where every debit must be cleared with a pound of flesh. She doesn't understand that some debts cannot be paid in currency because the thing that was given had no price to begin with.”
He handed me the bypass shears.
“Take those,” he commanded. “Clear the dead wood from the western border. The ones with the yellow bark are the tea roses Eleanor brought from Virginia. Prune them three inches above the snow line and don't touch the lateral shoots. If you kill her favorite climber, I’ll take the cost out of your sister’s tuition.”
I took the heavy iron shears. The forged steel was cold through my gloves, but the handles were balanced, clean, and sharp.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
May you like
For the next two hours, the old man and the boy worked side by side in the freezing quiet of the Cleveland winter. We didn't speak. The only sounds were the rasp of the saw, the sharp *snap* of the shears biting through the canes, and the steady, rhythmic breathing of two people clearing away seventeen years of neglect to give the roots beneath the frozen mud a chance to breathe when the spring finally came.
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