… THE WINTER IS PAST
THE RAIN IS OVER AND GONE
Over the decades, the roots of a wisteria vine had discovered the rock, crept in, and entangled the base. A jealous lover’s embrace.
Throughout its life, the pendulum had swung between beauty offered and utter disrepair. When worked, tilled, toiled in, sweat over, and bled in, the garden had opened itself, accepted the stiletto roots, and then emptied itself, filling the world with color and sweetness and life. But when overlooked and forgotten, the weeds rose up, choked out most everything else, and loose vines serpentined rampant.
When we were young, rumor held that the brick wall encircling St. Bernard’s had been constructed to protect the nuns from the outside world. We’d also heard that some of them hadn’t spoken in thirty or forty years. A vault of silence. Only they knew the truth of that, but the wall stood taller than I remembered. Thicker too.
I ran my fingers along the mortar and then scampered up the tentacled limbs of the giant live oak, spiked with rusted twelve-inch nails serving as steps and handholds, and stepped off onto the top of the wall—twelve feet off the ground.
When we played here as kids, the garden lay overgrown. A jungle of weeds, disrepair, and indifference. Because of that, we escaped here. And that night after the game, shivering in the cold, she tasted like hot chocolate and red hots.
It’d been homecoming. The wind was howling and creating an unusual windchill for south Georgia. Audrey stood outside the locker room, wrapped in my letterman jacket, which dwarfed her, blowing into her hands to keep her fingertips warm. I showered, walked out of the locker room, and she slid her hand in mine. Neither of us wanted to go home. A little while later, we found ourselves here. Huddled beneath a copper moon. Midway through the garden, she’d stopped, tugged on me, and we sat on a cold marble bench. She’d whispered, “You’re shivering.”
I was on fire. “I don’t feel cold.”
I had never been in love and wouldn’t know what to do with it when I found it, but when she looked at me, my heart melted, slid out of my chest, and landed in her hands.
And that’s the last place I remember seeing it.
The garden before me now was anything but disorderly and overgrown. The golf tourney in August didn’t look this kept. Not a blade of grass was out of place. Twenty-two fig trees spilled over the wall and shaded walkways. Given my slightly aerial view, I tried to make sense of the pattern and could not. Precise vertical rows of plants marked either side, intersected by several horizontal, equally spaced rows, dotted with an indiscriminate array of colors and sizes. Roses scattered the lawn in between. Some were bunched together, almost intertwined, while others had been singled out and left alone. A scarecrow stood in the middle—aluminum foil plates spinning in a slight breeze. A few feet away, a stump rotted conspicuously out of place. Despite its apparent lack of order, something about the layout struck me as strange. It was ordered without being orderly or symmetrical. I turned my head, squinted, and scanned it again. Not able to make sense of it, I walked the rim of the wall to the clock tower, where I slid through a window and shimmied up the steps to the top. Standing beneath the bells, I studied the garden. It might have taken longer in the daytime, as the impressionistic colors would have added to my confusion. But given the moon, and the black-and-white contrast, the pieces fell together. Finally it hit me.
Audrey.
The detail was incredible. She had recreated the final play of the national championship, thirteen years prior. The last great moment we all shared. Looking through the lens of that last play, she had used the colors and textures of the garden to recreate one second in one game—complete with opposing teams crowding the sidelines, coaches, umpires, goal lines, sidelines, hash marks, goalposts, and then there were the players.
I stood in astonishment. How long had it taken? Where did she start? And why? It was as if she had taken a snapshot of one of the most perfect moments in all our lives and frozen it. A living, 3-D recreation. Theater-in-the-round.
I wanted to get closer, so I climbed down and walked out into the garden and onto the field among my larger-than-life teammates.
You had to know him to recognize it, but center stage, larger than life, stood Wood. She’d trained a climbing rose with finger-thick vines woven through and around each other in such a fashion that his trunklike legs grew up and out of the earth, then twisted at his torso where they fed into a barrel-like chest and giant, powerful arms. I had no idea how she’d trained the rose’s vines to do that, but carefully, meticulously, over time, she’d crafted a masterpiece. She’d even figured out how to craft great effort, or angst, or struggle. His arms were intertwined—or locked with—another dominant, darker rose that grew over the opposite side of the stump. I stared up into the frame that fanned and stretched out over me. Major Hawkins. He was the linebacker who’d been eating my lunch. Jake, my right guard, had his hand—or a trained branch—hanging on Wood’s shoulder, the other on the rose leaning over the stump. They were double-teaming the linebacker. And in that play, they had. They’d bought me time, and it’s one of the only reasons I ever got the pass off. Crowder, the fullback and my secondary receiver, had spun out into the flats and was waving his arms at me, uncovered. He was represented by a single, squatty bush surrounded by several feet of cropped grass and two loose vines waving in the breeze. A single stray vine draped across the ground, trailing behind him. Crowder was famous for never tying his shoes, and in that play they’d come untied, which was why he tripped coming out of the backfield. I turned my attention to the corner of the end zone and stepped it off. And just like in the game, Roddy was forty-seven yards away. Audrey had planted a tall, skinny rose with long branches fully extended. I ran my fingers along the vines and laughed. No thorns. She’d either clipped them off or found a rose without them because everybody knew that Roddy didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He was confident, borderline arrogant, but never mean. Everybody liked Roddy, and standing there, stretched across the sky above me, he never looked so graceful. Because he could leap like a gazelle, she had suspended him along a wire frame several feet in the air. His outstretched arms were intertwined by three roses coming up out of the end zone and climbing up his back—in that final play he’d been triple-teamed by both corners and the safety. Their limbs had been cropped short, never quite reaching his fingertips. Around us, the fans were represented by an indiscriminate web climbing up the wall on one side of the field and along a slanted wooden frame opposite—like a bleacher. Interestingly, beneath the slanted woodwork, she’d planted several small roses huddled around an even smaller stump—kids playing a pickup game. Every player, coach and referee, trainer and water boy was represented by a rose, or series of roses, except the quarterback, who was nowhere to be found.
Then the scarecrow caught my eye.
Clever.
While the rest of the garden was pristine, perfect, pruned, and not a weed in sight, the scarecrow was a patchwork of broken pieces of junk, strung-together fragments of fabric held together by twine, wire, whatever she’d found on the potting room floor. His arms and legs were made of PVC pipe. Aluminum plates, suspended by fishing line, swung from each. Each piece looked like it’d been run over by a tractor, chewed up by the mower, and then reassembled with little thought to permanence or form. A spinning copper wind vane comprised the head of the poor scarecrow. Once round like a roof vent, it had been bent and rebent and now looked more like a piece of rock candy. A thick wrapping of silver duct tape held it oddly canted atop the shoulders. A hole had been cut in the chest of the white T-shirt—right where the heart should have been.
My eyes climbed above the field and scanned the silhouette of the wall. Rising periodically above the top were six odd-shaped boxes, mounted on single rough-hewn timbers and standing just inches from the wall. They were tough to see in the dark, but from a certain perspective—like down on the field—the poles and boxes might look like the lights of an athletic field. I climbed back up o
n the wall and across the oak limbs along the top of the wall, approaching the first box. Squirrel-proof bird feeders. Full of seed.
Audrey might be hiding from the world, but she had not forgotten the one she came from. And she had spent considerable time—a decade or better—recreating a single moment in time.
When all the world was promise and possibility.
I was sitting, my feet dangling, marveling at the world Audrey had recreated when a squeaky, swinging gate caught my ear. The person walked briskly, not stopping to smell the roses but almost walking over them, breaking off blooms with her arms as she strode quickly by. In her hands, she carried a stick of some sort. It was tough to make out in the dark, and several times I lost her in the shadows of the fig leaves. She disappeared for a moment in the back of the end zone, reappeared beneath Roddy, across the red zone, through the defense, and toward the center of the field. Her pace was fast, determined, purposeful, and I’d seen it before.
My junior year, National Championship, fourth quarter. We were down by six. Eighteen seconds on the clock. Their defense had put together a pretty good blitz scheme, and my offensive line was so confused they were cross-eyed. Their outside linebacker was a guy named Brooks who later spent a decade in the pros. But before he left for Dallas, he left his mark on me and the BCS Bowl Game. Every time I turned around that guy was in my face and I was on my back. The fourth time he sacked me came on the second-to-last play of the game. I was looking downfield, scrambling, trying to find anybody open, and when I turned he hit me blindside. I remember hearing the announcer say, “Rising down. Rising down.” I didn’t know what my name was, much less what quarter it was, but I knew I needed to stand up before the trainers raced out onto the field and the officials made me sit out one play. Wood recovered my fumble, allowing us one more play, which was eventually intercepted in the end zone. Not my best effort. When Brooks stood up—and thereby climbed off me—he danced around, made some hand motions toward our fans, and then began the return to his huddle where he, as captain, was calling the plays. Before he got there, a speeding and undetected bullet shot from our sideline en route to his body. The bullet launched itself airborne four yards in front of him and intersected his vertical and celebrating body with a horizontal and knifing plane. The blow flattened him and knocked off his helmet, causing more embarrassment than harm. When the dust cleared, the umpires pulled Audrey off his chest, where she was pounding his shoulder pads with her clenched fists. The referee obviously ejected her from the game, but not before a standing and raucous ovation from 121,000 people. Two State Troopers led her, laughing, from the field, and she watched the final play from the media room, where they had welcomed her with open arms. After the game, one of the sideline reporters had used the description “Spider Monkey” and the name stuck. Brooks would later describe the incident as one of the more memorable hits in his entire football career. A year later, Audrey and I had our picture taken with him when I convinced her that he was a good guy.
In the garden, Audrey approached the line of scrimmage and without notice, she swung backhanded at what would have been Wood’s gut. The dismissive blow bent the well-trained vines of Wood’s stomach, swaying the branches but doing little harm. He’d live to play another day. Unphased by Wood, she approached the scarecrow, which stood innocently staring down the field, its plates spinning slightly. Its head turning with the direction of the breeze. Within arms’ reach and without any verbal indication, she stepped, loaded, and swung like Hank Aaron, completely removing the scarecrow’s already tilted head from its drooping shoulders. The blow sent the wind vane sailing into the bleachers, where it banged off the brick and came to rest hanging in the thorns about three rows up. Reloading, with short, quick blows, she broke off the right hand, shattered both arms, and removed both legs with a vicious swing accompanied by a belly-deep groan. Standing over the pieces, she then began chopping downward, smashing the small pieces into even smaller pieces. Not content to just chop it to death, she spoke to the pieces—grinding them into the earth as much with her words as the stick in her hands.
She used to fight for me with the same intensity.
Having dismembered the scarecrow, removing him from the field of play and doing a pretty good job of telling him what she thought of him in the process, she walked to a bench along the wall just below me, dropped her weapon to the ground, and leaned back, breathing heavily. If I’d had a raspberry, I could have dropped it on her head. A minute passed. Followed by another. Finally, she pulled her knees up into her chest and sunk her head in her hands. At first the sobs were muffled. Then she came unhinged and the angry cries echoed off the brick and clock tower above us.
The last time I’d heard that sound it occurred in the courtroom. It bellowed from her soul and exited her mouth without restraint. Then and now, the sound cut me.
Off to the left, the lights of the school and the male and female dorms—just a few hundred feet away—shone through the trees. The pressure of the collar on my ankle spoke to me.
I slid over the side of the wall and dropped onto the grass just feet from her. Doing so startled her. She looked older; her eyes were cold, almost lifeless, and the years had not been kind. Her hair had been cut boy-short and looked gray. More silvery white. Entirely. Her eyes were shadowed by circles, and she was skinnier. She wore no wedding ring. Audrey had always reminded me of Angie Dickinson. Penetrating eyes, high cheeks, defined lips, ample curves, sultry voice. I couldn’t speak for her voice, but despite the color of her hair, little had changed since I’d last seen her.
I’d been in prison six months when a guard fetched me and told me that I had a visitor. I grunted. “They got a name?”
“Audrey Michaels.”
Using her maiden name was a bit of a sting. I took a seat and waited. Audrey walked in, arms folded across her midsection, holding herself. I stood, wanting to reach through the glass, my chains echoing off the walls. She’d lost a good bit of weight. Gaunt. She’d not spoken or communicated with me since the trial. She perched on the edge of the chair, angling away, not looking at me. I wanted to say something, anything to ease her pain. But Audrey wasn’t here. Just her body. She sat there maybe ten minutes. Finally, she glanced at me out of the corner of her eyes, then returned to looking at the floor. She said, “Why?”
What answer could I give? Would one more denial satisfy? The first ten thousand had not.
I said nothing. I wanted her to look in my eyes but she would not. She stood, paused, wrapping her arms tighter around herself, as if she were keeping her insides from spilling across the floor, and walked out.
It was the only time she ever came to see me—eleven years, 187 days, and nine hours ago.
I reached down and picked up the stick. Hefty, it was a worn and gnarled hardwood, well oiled from sweat and use. She stood, a cold resolve returning. Three feet separated us. I held out the stick. An offering. My voice cracked but no words came.
I guess we were past words.
She stood and took the stick out of my hand. At first it just dangled while she considered it, then she spun it in her hand and propped it on her shoulder. Finally, when the ice water glazed over her eyes, she extended the stick and touched me on the side of my cheek and jaw, holding it there several seconds. Her bottom lip trembled. She opened her mouth to say something, closed it, then gritted her teeth and pressed the stick to my temple. For several seconds, she held it there, looking more through me than at me. After a moment, she began shaking her head and gripped the stick with both hands. I looked into her eyes and knew that if my wife was in there, she was buried beneath a world of pain. Gathering herself, she tucked the stick under her arm like an umbrella and returned through the way she’d come.
I watched her disappear across the field, leaving me alone in her garden. It wasn’t until after she was gone that I noticed the tears dripping off my cheeks and chin.
CHAPTER TEN
Sometime before daylight, I awoke sweating in Wood’s cabin while th
e fan spun noisily above me. The outside world was quiet. In the distance, I heard a train horn, hollow and haunting. After a workout in the junkyard, I showered and stood in front of the sink, shaving, remembering the sight of Audrey’s face. Wood stuck his head in the door. He nodded toward the junkyard. “You don’t look like you’ve lost much. The way you scampered up the hill out there, I’d say you still got some juice in your legs. You sure you don’t have some plans you want to tell me about?”
I shrugged. “Some habits are tough to break.”
“You thought about today?”
I glanced at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got about four hours to register before people in uniform come knocking.”
He glanced at a cheap digital wristwatch, which was not the Rolex I’d bought him just before the draft. “You better let me drive you to town.”
The sign out front simply read SHERIFF. I waited in line while those in front of me posted bail or requested to see someone locked in jail. The lady dispensed of the guy in front of me in about two words and then craned her neck and raised her eyebrows at me. Several people were milling around so I tried to speak softly. I leaned across the counter, “Ma’am, I need to register as a… an offender.”
She scratched her beehive head with a pencil. “Say again.”
I spoke slightly louder but still kept the conversation between the two of us. “Ma’am, I need to register as a sexual offender.”
Her expressionless face spoke with great volume and clarity, and when she added words people passing on the sidewalk outside could have heard her. “You need to register as a sexual offender?”