The Fountain

The garden had long ago stopped asking permission to grow. Vines climbed over the fence, flowers spilled from old stone pots, and ferns unfolded their delicate green fingers beneath the trees. There was no particular order to things, and the man who tended it had come to prefer it that way. Each morning he walked among the plants with his coffee, pulling a weed here, lifting a fallen branch there, sometimes doing nothing at all. A small white statue stood half-hidden in the greenery, its face worn smooth by rain and summer heat. He could not remember when he had placed it there. Some things became part of a garden so completely that you forgot they had ever been separate from it. In October, the garden began its slow conversation with autumn. The sunlight arrived later and stayed a little less, slipping through the leaves in golden pieces. T...

  He had always thought of sleep as what came when the day was finished. You turned off the lamp, pulled up the covers, and disappeared. As a boy, he resisted it because too much remained to imagine. As a young man, he surrendered from exhaustion. Later, sleep became precious, arriving some nights easily and others just beyond the door. He lay awake listening to the old house settle, the refrigerator humming, a car passing, rain touching the roof. The clock moved through hours no one seemed to own. Two seventeen. Three eleven. Four-oh-six. Strange countries on the map of night. Sometimes he wondered where we went when we slept. Scientists had answers about neurons, memory, and the brain’s strange housekeeping, and he believed them. But sleep seemed to loosen the knots of the day. The dead walked through kitchens. Dogs came running from distant rooms. Mothers were young; fathers had strong hands. A demolished house stood again beneath summer trees. Dreams accepted resurrection witho...

He had begun thinking about it in the mornings. Not every morning. Mostly the quiet ones, when the coffee was hot, and the sunlight came through the kitchen window at an angle that showed the dust floating in the room. He would sit at the table and listen to the house settling around him. There were photographs on the refrigerator, a scratch on the floor where an old dog used to turn circles before lying down, and a small dent in the wall from a Christmas tree carried through the doorway badly many years ago. He had spent most of his life believing that important things announced themselves. Promotions. Weddings. Funerals. Birthdays ending in zero. But now he wondered if a life was measured differently. Perhaps it was measured by sandwiches made for children who were hungry, doors held open for strangers, lawns cut for neighbors who were sick, and phone calls made when there was nothing particular to say except, I was thinking about you. He had known love and he had known loss, and so...

  The garden was not much to look at. A narrow patch beside the back steps, bordered with old bricks that had settled crookedly into the earth. There were coneflowers and black-eyed Susans, a little lantana, some milkweed he had planted because someone told him the monarchs needed it. Nothing matched. Nothing had been planned on paper. He watered it in the mornings with an old green hose, pulling weeds when he noticed them and leaving some when he did not. The garden asked very little of him. Sunlight. Water. A little patience. Most days, that seemed like a fair arrangement. The butterflies began arriving in June. First a yellow one, small as a fallen leaf. Then swallowtails with dark wings and little blue moons along their edges. The monarchs came later, drifting down from the enormous blue sky as though they had remembered his address. He would sit on the back steps with his coffee and watch them move from flower to flower. They never hurried, though their lives were terribly sho...

People said he was always happy. They said it as though it were a condition he had been born with, like blue eyes or a crooked finger. Some found it admirable. Others found it suspicious. Nobody could be happy all the time, they said. Life simply did not permit it.  But he never claimed to be happy all the time. He had known hospitals and funerals. He had stood beside graves when the ground was still raw and watched men with shovels wait politely at a distance. He had received telephone calls that divided his life into before and after. He knew what it was to wake at three in the morning and stare into darkness while his mind inventoried everything that could still be taken from him.  He knew sadness. He simply refused to let sadness have everything. So he noticed things.  That was his secret, if there was one. In the morning he noticed the first smell of coffee drifting through the kitchen. He liked the small click the coffeemaker made when it finished. He liked hold...

The boy woke before the others, when the woods were still gray and the birds had not yet decided what kind of morning it would be. He crawled from the tent wearing yesterday’s jeans and a sweatshirt that smelled faintly of smoke. The fire was mostly gone, but beneath the white ashes he found a few red coals waiting for him. He fed them pine needles first, then twigs, then two pieces of wood his father had split the night before. He blew gently until a small flame appeared. It seemed like a secret the earth had trusted him to keep. He set the black skillet over the fire and dropped in three strips of bacon. They curled and snapped, and the smell moved through the trees faster than daylight. He cracked two eggs against the side of the pan the way he had watched his father do, although one shell broke badly and he had to fish a piece from the white with a stick. He laughed quietly. There was bread to toast near the coals and coffee boiling in the old blue enamel pot, though his father h...