Chapter II
Humbled low to the skin of the earth, the old man slid his right hand into the sleeve of his tunic and withdrew a sharp, plum purple jewel shaped like a pumpkin seed. He began to push it into the back of Pence’s head, but he stopped halfway. He pulled the jewel out, set it aside, and looked down to the dirt. Perhaps he worried that if anyone abroad were to discover that the boy’s brain was worth more than a small kingdom, Pence would probably be divested of his crown. Or perhaps the old man felt that it was prudent to keep a young lad’s thoughts better grounded. After a short search, he pressed a scuffed-up pebble into the hole in Pence’s head left by the jewel.
Shivering, the old man took a moment to muster his energy against the deathly chill that gripped him. When he had composed himself, he began rubbing his fingertips together, slowly at first but then more and more fervently until he suddenly brought them to the sides of the boy’s head, let the heat sink into the potato flesh, and molded Pence’s scalp shut around the pebble like so much warm clay. Finally, he snapped his fingers, punctuating the intangible.
He set the boy down in a sitting position atop the stump, which was where he did his infrequent whittling, and leaned back to better look over his handiwork.
Pence’s head flopped forward, bounced back, nodded forward again and no sooner than that but his nodding fell into rhythm with the pulse of the heartseed, its tempo once more a leisurely walking count.
The boy shrugged his shoulders. He wiggled his crudely notched fingers, swiveled his feet inward and outward, then lifted his hands onto his thighs; all his motions were a ghost-slow pantomime. He slid his hands up his chest unswerving to the burial site of his beating heart, his own dim pulse his first impression of the world, beat by beat, one by one, each deep as a penny. All this yet before the gardener had given him eyes or ears or a mouth.
There was an expression like ancient concern written into the structure of Pence’s countenance by the blade of the whittling knife, highlighted by the shadows that played on the garden, for the sun smoldered like a red coal low behind the root-white fence. It is impossible to know whether the boy was aware of his new life then or not; if he was, it would be as a person deaf, senseless, and unseeing–unable to share any piece of their experience with others, unless you were an authority at interpreting the hypnotic head-nodding of supernaturally animated vegetable avatars.
It was no coincidence that the gardener was precisely such an expert. Unfortunately, he uttered no explanation, not even to the plants with whom he so often conferred–many of which leaned toward the stump, vying for a better view of things like curious children packed around a street magician. Or perhaps it was only their natural inclination to descend as the sun did likewise.
The old man arched a single eyebrow as he watched the boy, then he reached into a leather pouch tied to the threadbare rope that served as his belt. With sun-browned fingers he extracted a single grain of uncooked rice and push-pinned it into the middle of Pence’s hitherto blank face.
“Your brothers and sisters will be the fruits and flowers and all that grows in the garden. And, like all families, there is a little fungus here, as well.” The gardener took a luxurious whiff of the night air. “It will do you good to learn the difference. I’m not telling you to walk past the poor and pungent holding your nose, though, no, no, no,” the old man whispered as he fine-tuned the rice’s placement. “No, it’s always wise to keep an open nose. Even something so small as a scent may pull a person… or a potato… to the path of their destiny. In fact, that is precisely why I pulled you.”
Pence continued to nod in time with his heartbeat.
“It’s a big nose, yes,” the gardener mumbled. He scooted back to the stump on his knees, his face level with the boy’s own. “And I know you must be thinking: girls won’t love me on account of my beaky honker! Not so! Not so, no. My nose is so big I can store nuts up there for the winter, and yet long, long, long ago the most beautiful princess in a hundred kingdoms fell in love with me, when no other girl would give me so much as a how-do-you-do? Not that I introduced myself to every milkmaid and innkeeper’s daughter… but I divert. If you find that the girls you meet give you snooty looks, you can always push it in a bit more. It might poke into your brain, but that shouldn’t hurt at all.”
Twilight diminishing, the gardener had to squint as he stared at the boy. “Anyway, as for the girls, remember to pull it back out after you part ways. I don’t think it would do well for you to go about whiffing your own thoughts all the day long–that’s best left for people with lavish names and impressed opinions of themselves.”
Pence kept nodding.
The gardener chuckled to himself then because Pence could not yet listen to a word he spoke. Rather, he had no ears; in fact he was a better than average listener.
A purple-handled knife hung at the old man’s hip. He unstrung it and nicked two acute slits on either side of Pence’s head, twisting and tilting the blade as he withdrew it so that each slit became a spiraling flourish like tiny seashells poking their way out of the boy’s head.
At once, Pence stopped nodding. He sat stock still as a potato may sit.
A dreamy swarm of glowflies appeared beside the stump, seemingly drawn to the boy’s drumming heartseed.
“Your name is Pence,” the old man whispered to the boy. “Don’t ask me why.”
Pence tilted upward his faceless head. He put his hands to his new ears, seeing them through his fingertips.
“Do you… hear me?” the gardener asked. He held his breath, the knife forgotten in his hand. His eyes trained on the boy, following his every experimental movement.
Pence slowly raised one hand out toward the voice of the gardener.
The gardener extended his muscular right arm and bent his wrist such that he met Pence’s fingers with the sensitive skin on the back of his own sun-browned hand.
Pence blindly ran his fingers up and down the smooth skin aback the gardener’s hand and never felt its end.
The old man closed his eyes to wait. What ancient thoughts swirled through his head then, what lessons of long-forgotten history, no one can say. Such is the mystery of old men.