Such Pleasant Smells

The Garden

Everything beautiful you have grown is planted over something you will not look at.

This is the thing The Garden says, and keeps saying, and will not stop saying. It says it in fragments and in prophetic sections and in a letter written in dirt before the walk. It says it in the voice of a man and in the seven voices warring inside him at five in the morning. It says it on a page that breaks down as the book moves, because the subject breaks down the one who writes about it, and the book keeps faith with its subject.

Most books about shame want to help you. This one watches you.

It was written for readers who are finished with the vocabulary of healing. Who have sat through the workshops and read the books and paid the people who use the words vulnerability and presence and showing up for a living, and who have understood, somewhere along the way, that the words were flowers planted over the thing the words were meant to reach. The garden grew a layer of language, and underneath the language is still what was underneath before.

The book goes there.

A man kneels in the soil he has tended for fifty years and understands that the tending has been the hiding. His wife is asleep in the house. His first wife is a continent away. His mother is eighty and will die inside her own garden. His adult daughters are strangers to him in the way children become strangers to fathers who were never fully in the house. A baby boy sleeps in the nursery. A three-year-old girl will come to his bedside next week and he does not know which man will answer her.

He walks to the gate. The gate has always been open. He was the lock.

The book does not tell you what he finds.
The book does not tell you whether his wife calls him back.

The book does not tell you whether leaving was the right thing.

It tells you that the tending was the lie, and that a man cannot raze his own garden without the people who loved the flowers believing he has failed them. It tells you the razing is the one act of love that refuses to look like love. It tells you the walk is long and the field is silent and the horse that was born in an attic when the man was nine is walking beside him.

Joe Nichols wrote Holy Hell and Feral Masculinity. He runs Beautiful Heresy. This is his most ambitious book and his hardest.