Light Action in the Caribbean (3 page)

He employed one man, David Cordera, and boys one after another, always bright, one or two at a time, to help with the
onerous and tedious work of mowing and edging so that he might concentrate on planting and tending to flower gardens, to mulching, and pruning trees. It was rumored that he contributed financially to the college education of these young men, but he did not, beyond a bonus of $100 or so at the end of the summer if the boy was going back to school.

In 1978 Thomas Lowdermilk employed a woman for the first time, and some of the things that went wrong seemed to date from that summer. She worked for him only that one time, after she graduated from high school. Her name was Lumera Sanchez. One afternoon, when they were working together in the extensive gardens of Marian Merrick, a taciturn widow of seventy-five—these were gardens thronged with roses and irises, in which Thomas Lowdermilk had planted an acre of native California wildflowers that swirled capelike in big winds that came off the ocean in the afternoon—on that day Thomas Lowdermilk had placed his hand for a moment on the small of Lumera’s back to pivot past her and avoid stepping on a pile of bulbs. Mrs. Merrick, whose constant vigilance bred suspicion, detained him in the front yard at the end of the day while the girl waited in the truck. She would hate to lose him, she began haughtily, but if ever again he touched a young woman like that in her presence she would be forced to let him go.

Thomas Lowdermilk nodded blankly. He did not mention her words to Lumera or anyone else.

The following year he again hired a young woman for the summer, Agnes Littlestorm. She and a high school boy worked with him and David Cordera in a pattern, according to what had to be done at different houses. If they split up, the
girl always worked with Thomas Lowdermilk. At the end of the summer, Agnes Littlestorm left for California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo with $95 in her pocket from Thomas Lowdermilk. She worked for him every summer, and when she graduated with a degree in nursing in 1984 she returned home and was hired right away at Palomar Hospital in Escondido.

Two sorts of stories circulated among the people who employed Thomas Lowdermilk. The oldest stories were about how he could make salt pan bloom, or about his genius for breeding roses, or how he had brought a diseased tree back to life. These stories were connected fittingly in people’s minds with stories about his generosity toward younger people, how he had helped Agnes Littlestorm, for example, stories that led to speculation about his wealth.

The other kind of story, which started after he began hiring girls graduating from high school, alluded to flaws in Thomas Lowdermilk’s ways. Mrs. Merrick was the first to urge these perceptions on her acquaintances. Indeed, she fired Thomas Lowdermilk after she saw him boost a girl onto the lower limbs of one of her walnut trees. But others began to ferret from memory unresolved incidents of petty theft or to recall times when he was late, to warn their friends that Thomas Lowdermilk had changed, that he was subtle and had appetites.

Most of his clients had employed Thomas Lowdermilk for more than twenty years. They regarded him with affection, though he returned little of this. He was more self-contained
than aloof, however, concentrating more on his work than on his employers’ emotions. His reluctance to speak and the patience and industry with which he applied himself led some even to think him stoic, to regard him as a kind of poetic presence. The early death of his wife, the fact that his children lived far away, and stories of his generosity all contributed to this impression; and the stories told by Mrs. Merrick and her friends did not change the image these others had of him.

He himself was aware of all these stories of wealth and talent and suspicion, often through David Cordera, but it did not occur to him to explain or clarify his life to anyone, especially a stranger.

Thomas Lowdermilk rose each morning at four-thirty, worked every day but Sunday, and spent one or two evenings a week at a bar called Los Hombres del Sur in Escondido, where he drank beer and smoked small cigars with four or five friends who, like him, were employed by many people. A kind of fantasy they all indulged in was that their services as gardeners and repairmen gave them a true and also an enviable independence. They could drop any one of their clients in a moment, for any reason they chose. No one ever compromised the others by saying what each of them knew, that only Thomas Lowdermilk had this freedom. He alone was not constrained by the impressions he made on his employers.

Thomas Lowdermilk did not say to his friends that they were not as independent as he was. The illusion shored up their dignity. And he was not certain of his own independence, of its source. He viewed the people he worked for simply
as occupants of the plots he gardened; and the work fed an understanding of beauty and sustained his sense of worth. In all the years of planting and cultivating, of trimming and watering and weeding, he had lost access (as he construed it) to only a handful of plots. Someone moved and the ground around the house was subdivided. Or people lost their jobs and had to economize. A man Thomas Lowdermilk regarded as deranged accosted him one day in a supermarket parking lot, leaped from his car, leaving the door ajar and the tape deck blaring, and accused him of sowing his garden “with stupid Mexican curses and Indian crap!”
“Brujo!”
the man kept shouting at him, while Thomas Lowdermilk, who did not answer a word, put the remaining bags of groceries in his truck and drove away. Only Marian Merrick had fired him for something he knew he’d done.

He loved the field he had planted with wildflowers below Marian Merrick’s house, forbs he’d spent a week on his hands and knees to plant, bulb by bulb. He was devastated when he learned that she had had the field plowed under and sodded. He went to her house before sunrise one morning, trespassing, and walked back and forth over the lawn as though searching for names in a graveyard.

In the summer of 1984 Thomas Lowdermilk hired a girl named Luisa de la Paz. In the fall she went on to Pitzer College, where she majored in art. It was course work that made her parents anxious, but Thomas Lowdermilk supported her decision. He employed her the three summers she was there and gave her $125 each September when she went back. A year after she graduated, she and Thomas Lowdermilk married. Her paintings began to appear in art shows in Escondido,
then in San Diego, and finally in Los Angeles. Three years after they married, she and Thomas Lowdermilk had a child.

In the estimation of his friends at Los Hombres, the birth of his daughter, Lucinda, created a problem for Thomas Lowdermilk that he had not had before. He enjoyed the company of these men, though he did not crave it. He endured their jeers when he brought Lucinda to the bar one night. “So that Luisa can paint,” he explained. “And so that I can show all of you how to change a diaper.”

Ignoring his humor, they tried to reason with him. An employer, they argued, does not want to be involved in what he regards as the scandalous behavior of an employee. He looked at them blankly. The men he gardened for, they continued, thought his employing young women to help him was amusing, a kind of fun to have; their wives thought his decision was courageous and right; or, like Mrs. Merrick, they were suspicious. This break with tradition by itself made no difference. Marrying young Luisa, that was something else. Certainly he could not show very much affection for her in the presence of an employer—if he kissed her passionately, he might be fired on the spot. The fact that Luisa painted, they all agreed, worked somewhat in his favor. It added to the mystery about him that people liked to make up. But having a child with Luisa, that, they thought, was going to prove very bad. They were not sure why—his age, her age—who could say. But they believed trouble would be coming.

Thomas Lowdermilk smiled at them, these men mostly his
own age, as though he were their father. “I do what I love,” he said calmly. “I grow flowers at other people’s homes. I make love with my wife. I spend evenings with my friends. I have gardens to show for this, a child, your companionship. How can you discuss the danger in this? These people do not care about me. Only the occasional lunatic to deal with, the man who thought I was a sorcerer. Or Mrs. Merrick.

“No one will notice,” he said. “If they do, they will be happy for me.”

But people were not. A woman who had never before spoken with Thomas Lowdermilk about his private affairs inquired one day whether he had sufficient employment with his other clients to cover the baby’s doctor bills. He had not told her he had had a child. She gave him baby clothes he did not need, as if he were a poor man. Another woman asked him if his kind of people had the same objection to men of fifty-four marrying women of twenty-two as hers did. A man he’d worked for only a year made a lewd gesture with his hips when Thomas Lowdermilk told him his wife’s age, responding to a question he meant not to answer. Two teenage boys in another family, who gawked openly at his wife’s swollen breasts when she came to pick him up, would clap him on the shoulder now and say, “Radical score, Tombo,” a nickname he had never heard.

Most all of this Thomas Lowdermilk was able to ignore. He quit working for one family where a pressing interest in his private life did not let up; and he felt a subtle change in his work, for he was now on guard against any inquiry—how many students had he sent to college? Was it true that Luisa
had heard from the Elaine Horwitch Gallery in Palm Springs? Had his first wife died in childbirth? Did he find he had any more energy having sex with a young woman every night?

The light and air around Thomas Lowdermilk’s life became more and more disturbed. He did not mention the insults or his anger to Luisa. He did not want to upset her. He feared, too, that somehow she would be angry with him. He mentioned a few incidents to his friends at Los Hombres, but even with them he was not entirely frank. The root of his worry was that for the first time in his life—that he could remember—he doubted himself. Against his will he considered whether he had married Luisa for good reason, whether, as some said, he was too old at fifty-seven to be a good father to Lucinda. He hated the way these questions now intruded upon him. And he was angry, finally, that after all these years of ignorance, people who knew nothing of him, who had never been to his home or eaten with him, were concerned, were judging him.

An avocado rancher named Angus Clipper, who lived near Fallbrook and for whom he had worked for twelve years, was as respectful and sympathetic an ear as Thomas Lowdermilk might hope for. Once, some years before, he had returned to his truck at the end of the day to find Angus Clipper holding two hoes. He saw instantly that the edges had been evened and sharpened.

“You would have done this better,” said Angus Clipper, “but perhaps I have saved you some time.”

Thomas Lowdermilk nodded at him with genuine appreciation. Another time Angus Clipper put a handful of Louis L’Amour paperbacks on the front seat of his truck. “A little
romantic, this guy—fantasies of the West and all,” said Angus Clipper with a self-deprecating shrug. “But I like him. You might.”

Against his instinct, Thomas Lowdermilk returned the gesture by giving him a copy of Juan Rulfo’s
The Burning Plain
. Angus Clipper thanked him the following week as though he’d been given a saddle or some other important or practical item. Thomas Lowdermilk knew then they’d made a floor both were standing on. But he could not bring himself now to pursue any conversation with him. All he could do was accept his sympathy. He knew Angus Clipper, who’d met Luisa, had heard the rumors.

Early one morning at a huge house in Rancho Santa Fe, Thomas Lowdermilk was watering a border of marigolds, inhaling an odor he loved, when the hose went limp. He turned to see a man in a dark, pin-striped suit step carefully away from the tap and continue toward him.

“Tom,” said the man as he approached with an air of distress and impatience, “Petch and I are going to have to let you go. I know this is very sudden, and I will make it up to you with some sort of severance, but the truth is we—well, mostly Petch actually, this is certainly not my idea—we just can’t be a party to these rumors anymore. Our daughter is being ridiculed at school—or so says her mother. I know you would never, ever approach Jennifer with the wrong idea or actually touch her, but everyone knows what happened at Marian Merrick’s place—now, really, there’s a bitch for you, but that’s something else. Anyway, Jennifer. Petch says it
looks awful when Luisa comes and you hug her, because she’s so young and it’s not the way you would hug her if she were your daughter, you know? And you can’t go out there and explain it to everyone, what the real situation is.”

Thomas Lowdermilk made no response. He held the empty hose.

“So I’ll pay you for today,” said the man, taking his checkbook out and twisting the cap from a fountain pen. “And—what, a month’s severance? Is that fair?”

Thomas Lowdermilk didn’t move.

“Great, all right,” said the man. “It’ll be a bitch, I can tell you, getting someone half as good as you to look after the place,” he went on, leaning over to write the check out against his thigh.

That night Thomas Lowdermilk could not fall asleep. Luisa got up in the dark to tend to the baby. “I know what’s troubling you,” she said when she got back in bed.

“It is my own business,” he answered quietly.

“No, it is our business. Do you think none of this comes to my ears? Do you think that I do not hear the stories?”

“I would have been better off if we had met years ago.”

“What about Rosamaria? She wouldn’t have permitted it.”

“Rosamaria was a very fine woman.”

“Does Mrs. Merrick,” asked Luisa, “say you were pimping, that you ran Agnes and me, all of us, while we were in school, and lived on the proceeds?”

“I have not heard that one, perhaps it’s coming.”

“My prayer is, not before your sense of humor comes back.”

“Luisa, this is not funny. I can’t sleep. These people have pulled me out of my own life, the way I pull up a weed. My work is not peaceful anymore. I am always waiting, expecting to hear something stupid or ignorant.”