← trailhead · ← the previous stone
The Record That Survives
from The Third Cycle — fourteenth of seven stones.
There was a gardener on the trail whose evenings puzzled his neighbours, for after the watering and the weeding he would sit and write — not letters, and not accounts, but the garden itself: what was planted where and why, which graft had failed and what the failing taught, where the water pooled after rain. Every evening, without fail, in a plain hand any stranger could read.
"You will remember it," the neighbours said. "You made it. Who forgets their own garden?"
"I will die," said the gardener, agreeably, and kept writing.
The neighbours found this morbid, for they had gardens too, and their plan for their gardens was the common plan: to be irreplaceable. To hold the knowledge so close that the garden could not do without them — which feels, from inside, exactly like being loved.
A traveller once put it to him directly: "Don't you fear being forgotten? A book any hand can use is a book that makes you unnecessary."
"I fear the garden being lost," said the gardener. "You fear being unnecessary. Those are different fears, friend, and only one of them can be worked on with a pencil. The dream of being irreplaceable is the fantasy of every keeper of every thing — and I will tell you what I have learned at this bench: keeping a record that survives me not being here is the opposite of that fantasy, and considerably harder to fake. Any gardener can be needed. It takes work to be survivable."
He is gone now, as he agreeably predicted. The garden is not. The seventh keeper tends it this season, a stranger to all six before her, and on wet mornings she reads where the water will pool before the rain has decided. The neighbours' gardens are lawns.
The fifteenth stone: The Impossible Erasure.