THE ORACLE
I.
HAT WAS A ROSE BUT THE LIVING PROOF OF desire, the single best evidence of human longing and earthly devotion. But desire could be twisted, after all, and Jealousy was the name of a rose that did well in arid soils. Red Devil flourished where no other rose grew, at the edge of the garden, in shadows. In many ways, a rose resembled the human heart; some were wild, others were in need of constant care. Although many varieties had been transformed and tamed, no two were exactly alike. There were those that tasted like cherries and those that smelled like lemons. Some were vigorous, while others faded in a single day. Some grew in swamps, some needed bushels of fertilizer. Rose fossils dating back three and a half billion years had been found, but in all this time there had never been a blue rose, for the rose family did not possess that pigment. Gardeners have had to be satisfied with counterfeits: Blue Moon, with its mauve buds, or Blue Magenta, a wicked rambler that was actually violet and had to be cut back brutally to stop it from spreading where it wasn’t wanted.
None of these false varieties grew in Elinor Sparrow’s garden. She wanted a blue that was true, robin’s-egg blue, delphinium blue, blue as the reaches of heaven. Clearly, she was a woman who didn’t mind taking on an unattainable task. Other gardeners might have backed down from the rules of genetics, but not Elinor. She wasn’t scared off by what others proclaimed impossible any more than she was bothered by the clouds of mosquitoes that rose at dusk at this time of year, as soon as the earth began to warm and the last of the snow had melted.
Elinor Sparrow hadn’t cared about gardening until her husband’s accident. The garden at Cake House, established hundreds of years earlier, had been neglected for decades. A few of the old roses Rebecca Sparrow had planted still managed to bloom among the milkweed and spiny nettles. The stone walls, carefully chinked by Sarah Sparrow, Rebecca’s daughter, were still standing, and the wrought-iron gate put up by Elinor’s own great-grandmother, Coral, had not rusted completely and was easily cleaned with boric acid and lye.
Elinor should have built her world around Jenny when Saul died in that accident on a road outside Boston, but instead she walked into the garden and she had never come out again. Oh, she’d gone grocery shopping, she’d passed her neighbors on Main Street on her way to the pharmacy, but all she had truly wanted was to be alone. All she could bear was the comfort of earth between her fingers, the repetition of the tasks at hand. Here, at least, she could make something grow. Here what you buried arose once more, given the correct amounts of sunlight and fertilizer and rain.
Elinor Sparrow had brought forth record-breaking blooms in past growing seasons: scented damasks as big as a horse’s hoof, rosa rugosas that would flower until January, Peace roses so glorious that upon several occasions thieves had tried to steal cuttings, until the wolfhound, Argus, whose canines were worn down to nubs, managed to scare the intruders away with a few deep woofs. Seeing all the greenery behind the stone walls, even in the month of March, when the buds were only beginning to form, no one would ever imagine how difficult it had been for Elinor to garden in this place. For two years after Saul died, nothing would grow, despite Elinor’s best efforts. It may have been the salt on her skin, the bitterness in her heart. Whatever the reason, everything withered, even the roses that Rebecca Sparrow had planted. Elinor hired landscapers, but they failed to enlighten her and merely suggested she use DDT and sulfur. She sent soil samples to the lab at MIT and was told there was nothing amiss that a little bonemeal and tender care couldn’t correct.
One day, when Elinor was working in the garden, nearly defeated, thinking it might not be possible for her to go on, Brock Stewart, the town doctor, stopped by. Dr. Stewart still made house calls back then; the reason he was at Cake House was because Jenny, only twelve at the time, had called and asked that he come. Jenny had a long-drawn-out bout with the flu, accompanied by a hacking cough that wouldn’t go away and headaches that were so bad she kept the room dark. She was only in sixth grade, but she had already learned to take care of herself.
“Where’s your mother?” Dr. Stewart had asked after he’d examined Jenny. Why, the girl was quite feverish, and she didn’t have a glass of water on her night table or a cold cloth for her forehead.
“My mother is in the garden.” Jenny was a serious individual, even then. “It’s the only thing she cares about, so I put a curse on it.”
“Did you?” Dr. Stewart was a fine physician and he never overlooked a child’s opinion. “What sort of curse?”
Jenny sat up in bed. She had meant to keep the curse secret, but she was so flattered by Dr. Brock’s interest she let him in on the intricacies of the hex.