The Ides of Matt 2014

The Ghost Of Willow’s Past Facing the challenge laid down by Kristine Kathryn Rusch noted in the introduction, I was in something of a panic. The fact that the deadline was fast approaching didn’t help matters. My wife, being the far more rational half of our partnership, decided that we would go for a walk. She then declared that by the time we were done with the walk, we would have an idea hashed out. Perhaps she was as sick of my whining as Kris had become. We were living in Portland, Oregon at the time and one of our favorite walks was up the hill and through The International Rose Test Garden. Four acres of ten thousand rose bushes in the heart of the enormous Washington Park; it is an astonishing sight in any season. The season happened to be shortly before Christmas, a perfect time to think about the next year’s Christmas story. (A year delay between writing the story and having it published in an anthology is quite normal in the publishing industry.) As we walked and talked on that cold, gray, drizzly evening (which you’ll recognize in the opening of the story), my wife suggested setting it in my Night Stalkers world. (The Night Stalkers are the real-life US Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. They’re the folks who flew into bin Laden’s compound, just one of thousands of incredibly dangerous missions.) At that time, my Night Stalkers series was just two novels long. The more confines we built on the story, the more alive it became as we discussed it. Christmas. Night Stalkers. The Rose Garden in Portland. And then I recalled Dusty James from my series. He was never destined to be more than a minor character, but I’d grown to like him. He flew as a gunner on one of my military helicopters. Also, in the book I had just finished writing, Wait Until Dark, the crew gets a one week vacation at Christmas time. In a throwaway line, Dusty says that he’s from Oregon and states that, “…he missed the rain after a year in the desert, though he admitted that about a week of it would be plenty.” One thing I have finally learned as a writer, there is no such thing as a throwaway line. The subconscious is always tinkering away somewhere in the background. With everything in place, I only needed one more element and our walk provided it. When we reached the garden in the darkening wet evening, we saw that the gorgeous old willow tree that had dominated a whole section of the garden was gone—cut down. Now we had our ghost. (This story was originally released in December 2013 in Fiction River’s Christmas Ghosts.) “And Tomotada looked so long upon her face it grew rosy red from chin to forehead, and though she smiled, her eyes filled with tears.” -from “Green Willow” (an ancient Japanese folk tale of a samurai who marries the ghost of a willow tree) 1 Master Sergeant Dustin James nudged a clod of dirt back into place with the toe of his boot. The rich black soil of the Portland Oregon Rose Garden simply dissolved and left a blackish patch of mud on the worn leather. Today was the Winter Solstice. It was raining and about three degrees above freezing. Pretty typical. He stared down at the Rosa canina. This rose had been propagated from a cutting of the oldest documented rose bush on the planet. The rose now huddled, dormant and pruned back for the winter. In bloom, it was the least assuming rose in the garden, a single layer of five pink petals around a yellow center. Four days before Christmas, it was a cluster of frosty twigs decorated by bright red rose hips. Most people passed it by, but not his father, the head gardener of the nearby Japanese Garden. He had visited the rose every day after work on his walk home. Dusty and his mother had often walked up to meet him at the old Briar Rose. “I met your mother by this rose. We married right here.” Being a man of few words, his father never embellished the story. It wasn’t the most scenic spot in the garden, but with ten thousand rose bushes in a couple hundred neatly tended beds, not bad either. The fact that they’d married here on the Winter Solstice when nothing bloomed had been a little odd perhaps, but then his parents had been rather eccentric. Dusty had come home for this Christmas, even though his parents had been gone for three years. Their small condo now lay empty most of the year due to a crashed tourist helicopter. An old Bell 206 called in an engine failure and then auto-rotated right into an Icelandic volcano, no survivors. That Dusty was a crew chief and mechanic on a Sikorsky Black Hawk for the US Army’s 160th SOAR had made the loss beyond ironic. His job was to fly, fight, and keep the Special Operations Aviation Regiment choppers running perfectly despite war conditions. His parents had died, probably from a broken fan belt. So, any time that he was home, but especially on the Winter Solstice, he made a point of coming to visit their rose as his parents had done so often for their three decades together. “I’m glad you went together, at least you got that much,” he told the sleeping rose. With no ashes to scatter, he’d gathered some ash from the volcano and scattered it onto the rose’s soil. His parents belonged together here. His father, a quiet man who loved visiting the garden’s roses, such a contrast to his artistic Japanese garden, and his wild mother, a true child of the sixties, who had never understood Dusty’s choice to serve. They appeared such an oddly-matched couple, the slight Eurasian and the tall, busty blonde. “She brings me to life like the spring warmth.” “He keeps me steady with his deep roots.” When would Dusty find that? His own dreams had just been pruned back hard. He’d found out, on no notice, that he had a week’s leave. He’d rushed back to Portland only to discover that Nancy had meant to Dear Dusty him, but forgotten, as usual, to follow through. Another woman who hadn’t understood his need to serve his country, his need to protect that which was so precious. She was living with some software geek named Ralph. Dusty’s few friends still in the area were busy with pre-holiday family stuff. Some invited him over for a meal, but being a third wheel in some other couple’s holiday wasn’t his first choice, nor his second or third. On call, Dusty really didn’t have time to go anywhere else— The cry of pain echoing across the garden snapped him out of his damp reverie. His Special Forces training had him sprinting down the garden path before he even fully registered what was happening. One hand slapped for his sidearm, and came away empty. The other slapped for the med kit on his SARVSO survival vest, but he wore only a rain slick over his heavy sweater. The cry sounded again, a woman in agonizing pain. Halfway across the garden from his parents’ rose, he spotted the source. Not that it was hard. On a rainy, winter Friday morning there was only one other person in the garden. She knelt in the mud at the edge of a garden bed. Dusty rushed up beside her. “Where are you hurt?” Seeing no obvious wounds he started unzipping her parka. Her punch came out of nowhere. She hit him square in the solar plexus so fast he had no time to block it. He tumbled backward among the pruned roses, the thorns carving painful scratches across his cheek and bare hands. “What the hell are you doing?” the woman shouted down at him. Her hands were poised to strike another blow. He recognized a Taekwondo black belt when he met one and held his hands palm out. Dusty rolled slowly from the rose bushes onto the wet grass and inspected his hands. “Ow! s**t, that hurts,” he flexed a hand and felt every little scratch. “Answer the damned question!” He eyed her more carefully. It wasn’t your average woman who issued commands to men half-again their size. He blinked the rain from his eyes. She had well-defined cheek bones, arched eyebrows that indicated brunette hair would be hiding under her hood, and eyes the brown of autumn leaves. He shook his head to clear it. “You sounded like you’d been shot.” “Soldier?” She watched him closely. “Yes.” She settled back on her heels in perfect balance, clearly poised so that she could attack easily if she decided it was needed. “Okay. Maybe.” She puffed out a breath. “I’m fine.” “You look fine, but you didn’t sound it.” She did look fine. Not the white of porcelain, but refinement shone in her features. He considered mentioning how much he’d love to draw those features with the artist pencils his mother had given to him as a young child. He didn’t know if he’d ever seen so much personality in a woman’s features before. It was a face made to laugh and smile, but was now drawn grim and closed. “I…” In the single word he heard all of the wounded distress return to her voice. She glanced back at the bed of roses she knelt in. “They cut down the tree,” she whispered as softly as the rain. Dusty looked around, trying to picture this part of the garden in his memory. A tree had been here, a big one. “It was their willow tree.” That was it. She pressed the heel of her palm against the center of chest. “It makes my heart hurt.” 2 Willow saw them in the rain. They reminded Willow of memories grown deep. Though so little remained beneath the soil, the past lay there in Willow’s roots. The roses had still been young and new then. Their voices high and nattering. So sure of their beauty, judging themselves in the mirror of human gazes. Silly little things. Willow remembered a Winter Solstice that had been a lifetime ago. Willow knew the two squatting in the rain needed the story. Knowing the cost, Willow reached deep into its remaining roots and prompted the woman to tell the tale. # # # “It was the summer of 1917 when Hiroshi Yamada and Amelia Patterson fell in love. I was named for her.” Amy wrapped her cold hands around the large mug of coffee, though it did nothing to warm her hands. She wasn’t ready to tell this story, and yet here she was. Despite her best instincts, the man who had rushed to her rescue had coaxed her out for coffee. Amy had been about to refuse when he’d mentioned her mother’s favorite bakery. St. Honore was a neighborhood place, a locals’ secret. The boulangerie provided a small slice of France in the heart of Portland’s oldest residential district. They sat at the end of the long wooden table, a scattering of croissant crumbs on each of their plates. A couple of guys with laptops sat farther down the table, probably writers, as St. Honore didn’t offer wi-fi. Two women, girding themselves with caffeine before picking up kids from kindergarten, occupied a tiny ironwork table crowded among a half dozen similar tables. One hardy soul sat outside at a steel table beneath the awning, turned to shield his book from the occasional gust of rain that spattered against the windows. “Amelia, my great grandmother, was upper crust Portland Society, a founding member of the Rose Garden. There she met Hiroshi, an assistant gardener for the city. Such a marriage of course wasn’t allowed. My great grandmother’s diary was kept sealed until she’d been dead for as long as she and Hiroshi had been apart. We actually opened it a year early so that my mother could read it before she died.” Amy’s hand shook and she set her coffee down quickly. How had she revealed that her mother died? To a stranger? She hadn’t meant to say that. There was no way she was ready to face the loss. Dusty slid one of his nice hands over hers. She wanted to pull away, but if she did she’d start crying. Actually if she didn’t, she’d start as well. There’d been no one to offer her comfort in the last week since her mother’s death. She’d been the one offering solace to her mother’s friends and facing down bankers and insurance agents and… She closed her eyes and did her best to close off her feelings. First she had to find her breath, focus not on thoughts but only on what was real, what was physical. From there find her center. From there find the calm. But when Amy focused on the physical, she felt the warmth and strength of his hand over hers. That warmth drew her attention back off her path and she opened her eyes to look at him. Dusty wasn’t holding her hand, merely resting his over it in comfort. They were working hands, not like hers. No matter what she did, her hands were still long, fine, and delicate. Her mother and her grandmother both had the same hands. People commented on their feminine gracefulness, right before she used them to take the person down in sparring practice. Dusty was soldier strong—it showed in everything about him—but not some over-built guy. His strong, working-man hands were simply backed up with good shoulders and a trim frame. It was his face that captured her attention. He had beautiful blond hair that rolled down just past his ears, unusual in a soldier. And dark eyes ever so slightly almond shaped. “What are you?” It didn’t come out right. His face was such an odd mix that somehow blended together so wonderfully. He raised his eyebrows as he sat back and gathered the large porcelain mug into his hands. He didn’t appear to take any offense. Nor had he appeared upset when she’d pummeled him into the thorny roses. There was a steady calmness about him that could weather any storm. Amy missed his comforting hand the moment he withdrew it. You’re feeling way too vulnerable, Amy. Don’t do anything stupid. Her inner-voice guidance system was always wise, so Amy made a practice of following it carefully. “What am I?” Dusty toyed with the question, again proving he had a great smile. That’s how he’d convinced her to join him for coffee, he’d smiled at her. A genuine smile that reached those dark eyes so effortlessly. Amy hadn’t realized how starved she’d been for even so simple a gesture. “I’m my parents’ son.” Shit! Amy could feel herself closing down again. She no longer had any parents. She needed to go. Now! 3 Willow waited. Willow knew how to do that. For as long as the life span of humans, Amelia and Hiroshi had met each other at Willow. Hiroshi had planted Willow on a Christmas Eve while Willow was still a mere shoulder-high sapling. Willow remembered each of Hiroshi and Amelia’s meetings. In the summer’s sun, if they met, they spoke only with their eyes. But Willow had waited eagerly for each Christmas Eve, when the roses’ inane chatter had finally settled into mere winter mumbles. Then Willow watched and listened and stored those memories in the deepest roots. Willow saw exchanges of small gifts, a kiss, and heard sighs of two hearts broken.