The Garden of Lost and Found Read Online Free PDF Page B

and, smiling sheepishly, I sat down again, leaned against the stone, closed my eyes. The next thing I knew I was being jabbed in the ribs. In the last fleeting moments of sleep I dreamed that what poked me was a deer’s antler—a particularly fantastic dream, given that it was June. Then I blinked my eyes and saw that I was being prodded by the blunt end of a scythe. It took a couple more blinks before I was able to see that the scythe was in fact an upside-down push broom wielded by a rail-thin woman cloaked in a long white shift, her dark narrow face draped by silver hair as stiff as cardboard curtains. Maybe it was the confluence of black skin and white clothes and light hair—maybe it was just the fact that I was still half-asleep—but for a moment I mistook her for the boy who’d wandered out of the blackened fields into Selden a little less than a year before, and I breathed deeply, sniffing for smoke. I even thought I smelled it, but then I realized it was probably just those shoes . The faint aroma was overwhelmed by the scent of my own stale body, and then the woman’s features congealed into her true shape. She was as old as Divine had been young, as visibly strong as he’d been weak. Even the deep lines in her face gave off the air of scrimshaw etched into tobacco-stained ivory, and it was only when I caught a glimpse of blue sky beyond her head that I realized it was morning.
    You gonna have to move on now , I heard as I rubbed my eyes and attempted to make sense of this new vision. Perspective was skewed: the woman’s head stretched all the way to the top of the building behind her, the bristles of her inverted broom seemed to have brushed the sky clear of clouds. My clothes were wet, my mouth parched, I ached in so many places I couldn’t pinpoint a single pain save the most recent—the spot where she’d poked me—and even as I put a finger there I tried to blink her shade away. But she refused to disappear.
    “I said ,” she said, “you gonna have to move on.”
    This time there was no mistaking the reality of her words. The woman still seemed familiar though, and what I said to her was, “Do I know you?”
    “Don’t you be starting in with no questions. It’s morning now, you got yourself a good night’s sleep, now go on and find some other stoop to haunt.”
    Her tone was so authoritative I found myself standing up, fully ready to move along, when the gleam of the brass plaque caught my eye. No. 1. The Lost Garden.
    “This is Dutch Street?”
    “This is Dutch Street. What it ain’t is Easy Street, and it ain’t Sleep-on-somebody-else’s-front-steps Street, so why don’t you—”
    “No. 1 Dutch Street?”
    Her expression changed then. Impatience was replaced by true hostility, and she hefted her broom as if to smite me.
    “You’re not James Ramsay?”
    For the first time since I’d deplaned last night the facts of my life laid themselves out straight: I was James Ramsay, abandoned and now orphaned son of Virginia, and this was No. 1 Dutch Street, which my dead mother had left me in her will. I lived here now.
    The woman continued to fix me with her eyes and, as I had tried to do with her, her blink willed me gone. But I remained as she remained, we were both still there, and with visible reluctance she set the broom down.
    “I guess I should-a seen the resemblance. You skinnier than your momma, but the features is the same.” She laughed, but I could see she was faking it. “My goodness, child, where’d you get that costume?”
    I looked down at myself. My cabana shirt was canary yellow, and it was open too, revealing an acid-washed chartreuse tanktop; my pants were cerulean blue, and in the substantial gap between cuffs and those shoes —Trucker was so used to me squatting over him he had no idea how tall I was—a pair of red socks was visible. It seemed less a clown’s costume than a crazy man’s get-up, something, say, Cousin Benny might have worn, and I marveled that