He kept the heavy flashlight in hand and it knocked against his thigh, throwing tall shadows against the maze walls. The owl had made him lose count of the turns and he was starting to think he was lost, sweat needling his forehead. Who do you think you are, city boy? He heard his father’s voice. You got me there, Pops. Touché.
He found his way—left, left, right—and was startled as he turned the last corner. It was his own shadow stretched across the stone path to the garden. He called himself a coward as he shone the beam on the hawthorn and beech and red oak. The short apple trees whose blossoms were just turning to fruit (he was still trying to figure out if they were Gala or Jonagold and would know for sure midsummer); the tall hermaphroditic linden trees, whose perfect flowers had both male and female parts, each beloved by the bees for their honeydew nectar; and the paper birch whose white bark he and Eva had peeled away that morning, covering the thin strips in magic marker hearts and stars and rainbows. He’d told her it was the wood used to make Popsicle sticks, and she had loved that.
He almost dropped the flashlight. The bark of the trees quivered, a blur of movement that made him wonder if there’d been a small earthquake, wonder if he was more than just a little drunk. He stepped closer. The caterpillars shimmied up and down the tree skin. Too many to count. The blue and red dots on their bristled backs like a thousand eyes winking at him in the flashlight’s beam. He ran from one tree to another to another, tripping over roots, vines slapping his face. They were everywhere.
His knees buckled and he sat, slumped, into the ferns that circled one of his favorites—the full American chestnut. Its slim flowered catkins drooped overhead like Christmas ornaments. It had felt like a miracle spotting that chestnut on his first trip to the Castle. It was a survivor among few, of the blight that had destroyed its kind at the turn of the century. He and Eva had spent hours watching the happy squirrels scramble up and down the tree. He’d even taken photos of it, had them developed at the drugstore in town, and mailed them to Dr. Seth Feinstein, his old Harvard botany prof. Proof, and validation—how could it be that he, Jules, had lucked upon this rare discovery?
He remembered, years ago, telling his parents about his acceptance into Harvard. His father had urged him to pick a more practical profession.
Plumbers, electricians—these are the men people can’t live without, his pops had said.
As if being the first black man to enter the Graduate Program for Landscape Architecture meant second tier.
He’d come to understand, only after his father’s death, what the old man had hated most about Jules’s ambitions—his son worshipping the beautiful things that belonged to white people. A beauty, he knew, his father felt they both had no right to.
So, he loved beauty. Who doesn’t? Why should he be like his father and hate what he desired? Why wouldn’t he want a castle and garden and queen of his own?
During those weeks in between the trips to the Castle, before he’d given in to Leslie’s demands to leave the city, he’d lain awake planning the renovation of his garden, his acres of blank canvas, trying to ignore the noise of the taxicabs and buses and stoop bums outside their window. He had wanted that beauty more fiercely than anything (almost as much as he’d wanted young Leslie back in Cambridge). He hungered for it. He fell asleep walking the land that had belonged to the racist motherfuckers he’d never met, who had refused the existence of him and his incontestably beautiful children. He surveyed it from above like a hawk circling. He dreamt of digging his naked fingers into the soil, black and arable, and, when he woke, his muscles were sore, as if he’d been working the land all night.
He stood, found his pail, and set the flashlight beam on the chestnut. He picked caterpillars off one by one until they were three inches thick on the bottom of the pail. He shined the light on them and watched them squirm blindly. He grabbed handfuls and squeezed. Mashed his open palm into the bucket bottom the way he’d seen his mother make fruit preserves when he was a boy.
As his hands grew slick with their gummy remains, he promised he’d be nothing like his father. His father would surrender the garden—see these invaders as a sign of his unworthiness to possess such beauty. Jules would fight.
Various reports indicate that gypsy moth larvae can feed on at least 500 species of plants that include trees, shrubs, and vines.
In the East, the gypsy moth’s favorite trees include apple, speckled alder, basswood, gray and river birch, hawthorne, oak, poplar, and willow. Less desired but still attacked are black, yellow, and paper birch, cherry, cottonwood, elm, blackgum, hickory, hornbeam, larch, maple, and sassafras.
—“The Homeowner and the Gypsy Moth: Guidelines for Control,” United States Department of Agriculture, Home and Garden Bulletin, No. 227 (1979)
13.
Dom
It was the first hot day of the summer and Dom woke sweaty in tangled sheets. He poured vodka and OJ into his old He-Man, Masters of the Universe thermos, packed two bologna sandwiches, and headed for Singing Beach.
He used handfuls of sea-chilled pink clay to paint stripes across his chest, and symbols up and down his arms—circles slashed by an X, an infinity loop sitting on its side. Half-moons cupped his eyes, just like one of his favorite WWF wrestlers, the Indian warrior Tatanka.
He was Tatanka all morning, chasing an enemy tribe. His mission, a rite of passage for a brave young Indian chief in training, was to return with the scalp of the enemy chief. As he leapt over storm-felled branches furred with moss, the fern fronds he’d tucked in the waist of his swim shorts whispered. He attacked his enemy with Tatanka’s signature moves—a high knee to the kidney, a battering-ram head butt to the gut, and then he’d climbed to the top of a tree downed in the last storm to deliver a crucial, match-winning, diving cross-body Tomahawk Chop combo.
He hacked at tangles of bramble and vine with his father’s machete, the caterpillars flying. The murmur of their feeding—caaa-caaa-caaa—was the voice of the spirit gods urging him on his mission. Thwack, his blade buried into a tree. The white meat underneath, he imagined, was the flesh of his enemy.