Making new roses was a long process.
When it was spring, the first pollinating season, Francisco began work early, as soon as the sun appeared to give him light to work. He moved among his roses, finding the buds that were due to open that day, and then he removed every petal except the bottom five so that he would be able to find them again. Carefully, he detached the stamen from each bud and discarded it. These would be his seed parents, the mothers. They would dictate if the new roses would be bushes or climbers, dark-leaved or light-leaved. He would have already prepared the stud roses by cutting them a day or more before and leaving them to dry so he could shake the pollen from them onto a sleeve of white paper. The stud roses, the fathers, would tell his new roses what sort of blossom to have, lending their fragrance or shape or color.
Then, in the perfect silence of his greenhouse, he moved carefully with a small paintbrush and painted the pollen carefully on each of the rose mothers’ stigmas. In the language Beatriz had invented, he marked the potential rose’s father on a tag and attached it to the mother rose. And then he waited.
It took months for the roses to form rose hips full of seeds, and then those seeds had to be chilled and kept in the dark for nearly three more months. Those that he had not lost to fungus or poor spirits he carefully planted in pots marked with their origins. Then one leaf and two leaves and three leaves would appear, and Francisco carefully policed them for disease or pests that might have snuck into his greenhouse. Then, finally, six weeks later, each fragile rose plant would produce its first, hesitant flower.
If it was not the black bloom he was hoping for, he began all over again.
Sometimes, Francisco thought that people might be roses. It was not that he disbelieved Darwin and the classification of the species. It was only that every time he carefully applied the pollen, he thought about the process, how the pollen would work its way over the rose’s stigma and then enter the egg cell and fertilize the egg nucleus, and how wondrous and strange it was that it was the same process by which we were made. Many of his days, particularly in these slow summer months, were spent engrossed in thought clouds triggered by small actions, and he lost weeks to thinking about what it might mean that so many creatures under the sun, from roses to birds to trees to sharks, came to life by the same, complex process. Even those whose process often looked quite different from the outside—like the meiosis, or cell splitting, of the sea urchin—still used much of the same raw stuff: cells, fertilizations, sharing of chromosomes. He mused on why it might be that evolution had not instead designed most of the world to share the simple asexual process sometimes used by plants such as pelargonium, a flower known commonly as storksbill. A cutting was taken from the original plant, dropped into moist soil, and left to make another plant. By the same process, to create Beatriz, he would have merely planted one of his fingers and she would have emerged later, fully formed and independent.
Why indeed, he wondered, did we need life to make more life? We took it for granted that two creatures met and mated and made another creature, when we would not expect a cloud or a fire or a cooking pot to be fashioned the same way. Yes, all of those processes required combining other ingredients as well, but without the cell, the egg—? If there was a great creator who had fashioned us in his own image, why, then, was more life not made in the same way, by merely breathing a word over a handful of dust? Instead, reproduction and love became a messy process, and messy processes meant there were many places where it could fail.
These were the thoughts that occupied Francisco’s day.
An additional thought occupied the day following Beatriz and Pete’s all-night chase, however, because late in the morning, Beatriz tapped on the glass before letting herself into his greenhouse.
“Good morning, Papa,” she whistled in their language.
“Is it morning?” he replied in kind, not looking up from his notebook. He was not displeased that she’d come to visit. Francisco found it very difficult to work with certain forms of distraction, such as music or conversations with heightened emotions playing in the background, but he did well if people were reading to him in a fairly undramatic voice, or if the visitor had a quiet way about them. Beatriz generally had the latter, and had, upon occasion, read to him in the evenings when he had first moved out to the greenhouse.
“It is, though it doesn’t feel like it. I need to ask you a favor, and I don’t know if it is possible, so you can tell me now if it is not acceptable and I will be fine,” Beatriz said.
It had been some time since someone had asked Francisco for something he was capable of giving, but that was mostly because they had only been asking him to move back in with Antonia. He dearly hoped that Beatriz, a highly intelligent young woman, was not here to request that.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’d like for you to keep this chicken in your greenhouse for a while.”
Beatriz was referring, of course, to General MacArthur, the fighting rooster they had repurposed just hours earlier. He was missing feathers in places from his fights, and had a wicked scar across his chest from another bird’s blade, and still had a bit of blood streaked through the pale feathers around his head.
When Francisco turned to look, Beatriz added, “I didn’t know if he will bother your plants.”
Francisco divined immediately that there was an involved story to this rooster, but also that if his daughter had wanted to share it, she would have begun it already. He said merely, “I assume there is a reason why the rooster can’t stay outside with the other chickens.”
“He has a problem with aggression,” Beatriz said. “And Rosa would not be happy if he killed her rooster.”
Francisco considered the request. Chickens would eat rose petals, but he had plenty of discarded rose petals that could be fed to a chicken so it wouldn’t bother the blooms still on the plant. Chicken manure was messy, but also very good for roses. He did not want to have to look after an animal, but he also felt his younger daughter never asked anything of him, and this was a small sacrifice to make for her.
“Leave him for the day,” Francisco said, “and I will see how he does. What is his name?”
Naturally, Beatriz did not know the rooster was called General MacArthur, as they had stolen only the chicken and not his name. She held the bird out from her chest, his wings pinned to his body, as if he might somehow have his moniker somewhere about his person.
“I don’t know,” she finally admitted.