Aromatherapy. That’s what Bags calls the medicine side of it — the funny things smells do to you, I mean. Smells, he told me, early in my farmerly training, are powerful stuff. I was exceedingly doubtful at the time.
I remember he grabbed a handful of the dirt from the hole he was digging at the feet of this big cedar and stuck it under my nose and said, “Sniff it.”
I obey of course. I always obey Bags. All the little apprentice farmers obey Bags. Obeying Bags and Kaymart has a kind of soothing effect. And in my case, I’m making up for all the years I had nobody to obey but me.
I sniff. I smell rich loam, moss, wet grass, cedary perfume.
“Yeah?”
“Do you think this soil’s fertile?”
I nod.
“Because why?”
“Because it’s got good mulch in it, so it’s rich, but it’s light, so it should drain well.”
I’m very proud of this pronouncement. Bags has taught me a lot and I like the chance to show off, even times like now, when none of the other little apprentices are around.
“Yeah? How can you tell all that?”
“Because it....” I get the point. “The smell. Okay, so smell can tell me stuff about stuff.”
He squints at me in that way he has when he is delivering wisdom. “It can do more than that.” He reaches off to one side and picks up something from the ground and rubs it between his fingers. “Close your eyes and sniff.”
I obey. I smell attar of fir.
“What’s that remind you of?”
“Doug,” I say and can almost see him sitting on the front porch of the Farmhouse, enjoying the sunshine. I smile.
“How’s that make you feel?”
“Real good. Happy.”
It’s true. My heart seems to swell up with Doug feelings.
“Powerful feeling, ain't it?”
I nod.
“And all from a little attar of Doug.”
He’s right, I realize. The smell of fir or pine or cedar or cypress all make me feel fine — I mean, really fine. Almost like I’m floating in a warm, glowing place. And I realize now that there are other smells I been taking for granted all my life that do powerful things to me — the smell of Mrs. Lopez-Alvero’s tortillas, of rain-wet concrete, of salt-fog, of tar-soaked wharves, of the Hau Bau bakery on Market. I remember the clean, cold scent of Bunuelo’s fur when he’d just come in from outdoors. I spent a lot of time with my nose buried in that old cat’s fur, which is funny, considering how I pretended not to like him. Funny, too, as much as he pretended to be above me, he never seemed to mind.
Now that Bags has scored some points about the power of smells, he goes on to teach me more about them. We dig up the mulch we’re after and head back to the house with it. Smoke curls from the chimney and mingles with a light wu gau that floats above, aloof as Bunuelo. Bags stops to look at it.
“Smell that?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I love the smell of wood smoke.
“What’s that smoke say to you, Del?”
“Home.”
It’s true. Wood smoke was home long ago, too, when home meant mi madre y padre. When I’d been out in the cold and wet longer than I should, that smell always said there were people waiting for me who would make me warm and glad to have even a drafty four walls to come home to.
“We all got smells that make us feel alright,” Bags says. “And we got smells that make us feel rotten. But there’s more to it than that. That wood smoke smell, that reminds you of your mom and dad, don’t it?”
I nod.
“Bet you can almost see ‘em, huh?”
I nod again, feeling sad now, and kind of wishing Bags’d get onto something else.
“Smells evoke memories,” he tells me, sounding more like Kaymart than Bags. “They make you call up things you might’ve forgot.” He smiles funny. “Could be a good interrogation tool.”
I snort. “Yeah? And what’m I gonna interrogate — asparagus?”
“Smells can do other stuff, too,” he says, ignoring me. “They can soothe the up-tight breast, calm the jangled nerve, heal the wounded soul.”
“Now you’re jinkin' me.”
He stops at the porch steps and looks at me most somber. “No, Del,” he says in all seriosity. “I wouldn’t do that. Smell is a greatly powerful thing.” He hands me the sprig of evergreen he has crushed in his fingers. “A greatly powerful thing. Now, you get cleaned up and help Kaymart with dinner.”
He shoulders his shovel and heads off for the tool shed, leaving me with the bags of rich-smelling dirt.
It takes me a moment to realize that Kaymart has come out of the Farmhouse and is standing on the top step watching him. When I look up, I see in her eyes that she really loves that old guy like crazy. I pray someday somebody looks at me like that. The prayer is answered only by the strong smell of crushed fir needles.
I shake my head. “He’s a weird old dude. I sure wish I knew what the power of smells has to do with farming.”
“Farming?” Kaymart echoes.
“Yeah. And he’s always doing that. I mean, yesterday he was showing me how to plant corn, when he gets this weird bug in his noodle and starts telling me how a seed has to sacrifice itself to the tree, and how the tree gives everything it’s got to its cones or fruit or whatever it uses to give birth to its seeds.”
Kaymart nods. “And then it starts all over again.”
“That’s what he said,” I note.
“And what’s so odd about that, Del?”
“Well, it just doesn’t sound like farming.”
She laughs at me — just outright laughs. “Is that what you think he’s teaching you?” she asks.
“Yeah, sure. What else? Isn’t that what he’s teaching all the kids?”
She’s stopped laughing, except in her eyes, which are having rare old time. “Well, he may be teaching them farming, but he’s teaching you magic.”
“Magic? What’d he know about that?”
She shrugs. “Ask him. He hasn’t always been a Farmer, you know.” When I twitch to go after the old guy, she adds, “After you’ve helped me fix dinner. I need you to husk some pine nuts.”
I sit on what Kaymart says for over a week. I mean, it seems too weird, you know — Bags, a merlin? I mean, if he’d been a merlin, what the hell was he doing vegetating down on the Farm? I'm afraid if I ask such a jingbing question (“So, Mr. Bags, is it true you were a merlin, once upon a time?”) he’ll laugh at me. And I hate to be the source of guffaw for the old man. When Bags laughs at you, you feel like you’ve done something not just humanly stupid, but cosmically stupid.
Which is not to say that Bags does anything to make you feel cosmically stupid, it just happens. It’s like with colors. Red is red, but it looks really, truly, redly red when you put it next to green, say, or blue.
I gotta admit, too, that in my recollection, Bags doesn’t wax esoteric around the other apprentices. At least, not that I’ve ever heard.
So anyway, I sit on all this for about a week, trying to think of a way to ask THE QUESTION without asking THE QUESTION, and one day I come up with something I think is not too cosmically stupid.
We are sitting on the front porch of the Farmhouse, me shelling acorns, him petting this old rag-eared cat named Zorro — when I say slyly (I think), “That stuff you put on the tomatoes sure got up a good crop.”
“Yeah,” says Bags. “Best ever.”
“Magic, huh?”
He spocks an eyebrow at me. “Science. Been working on that formula for a coupla years. Finally got it right. Gonna have to get some to Felicidad for his plots over at the Presidio.”
Huh. That went nowhere.
I sit and contemplate my options and lean toward forgetting the whole thing when Bags says, “You interested in magic, are you?”
“I like reading about the first Merlin and Gandalf and those guys.” Now, I try to get sly again. “I studied the latter day merlins too, like Joseph Braghorn, merlin to King Levi Menorah, and the amazing Stanley Nemecec, merlin to the illustrious and artful Troubadour.”
I watch him out of the tail of my eye. He’s smiling and I see several toothless holes.
“Joseph Braghorn,” he repeats. “Stanley Nemecec. Those are names I han’t heard for a month of Feast days.”
“You know ‘em?”
“Well, I remember seeing Joseph when I was a boy. He was an old man even then. Great merlin. The best.”
I wax bold. “You know anything about merlinry?”
His eyes sting my face. “You care, do you?”
“Yeah.”
He nods and strokes the cat’s tatty old carcass. “I know a few things.... You wanna be a merlin, do you?”
I laugh out loud — too loud. “Me? I got no merlin stuff. I’d have to be a certifiable ditz to think I got that Calling.”
“Then I s’pose that means I’m a certifiable ditz, too, ‘cause I think you’ve got merlin stuff. Fact is, I wouldn’t have you here if you didn’t have magic in you.”
“But, I’m — I’m too small,” I babble. “I got no aplomb, no erudition, no sense of importance. Hell, I couldn’t even get a damn cat to look up to me. A merlin’s got to have aplomb and erudition and-and — ”
“A merlin,” he tells me, pointing a crooked finger at my nose, “don’t need none of that. A merlin only needs a channel.”
“A channel?”
“A sort of cell-phone to the Almighty. A cell-phone that picks up all those little whispers in the Universe.”
“What sort of channel?” I ask.
“Well, that depends on the merlin. Me, I had a cat named Pearl. A gray cat. And my Pearl’d whisper all the little secrets she knew — which was lots. But a channel, now, could be anything — anything at all.”
“Anything?” I try to feature God whispering to me through one of the acorns in the palm of my hand.
Bags cocks his head, also looking at the acorns. “Well, any living thing.”
There is this supreme MOMENT of silence in the Universe, after which I say, “Like...like a tree, for instance?”
“A tree would make a righteous good channel. God’s partial to trees.”
There is more silence, mostly from my end of the Universe, as I ponder this. No, "ponder" is the wrong word. There’s no brain action happening here — this is all metaphysical stuff. And at the center of it is a little Doug fir in a clay pot.
Right about the time the silence has waxed lengthy, something tickles my Alice bone most outrageously. I remember that there are questions lying around unanswered. I pick one up and give it a shake.
“So, after Pearl the Cat whispered all this stuff into your ear, whose ear’d you whisper it into?”
He strokes the cat a few times and says, “Troubadour’s for one, and then there was Hismajesty’s daddy for a while.”
“But, Troubadour's merlin was Stanley Nemecec.”
“That’d be me.”
“But then...what’re you doing here?”
“And what’s wrong with here?” he wants to know.
“Well, nothing, it’s just not merlining. S’posing you were — are — the great Stanley Nemecec — why’d you quit?”
“Well, there’s no simple answer to that one. First, there was the death of Hismajesty the First, who was more to me than just a sovereign lord; he was a friend. And then there was Kaymart and the Farm, and the green things tuggin' at my old heart-strings. And there were kids — Kaymart’s apprentices — who needed a full-time father-figure, so she said. I told the young Majesty he oughta find hisself a younger merlin and recommended an apprentice of mine for the job. That’d be Mad Jin Gao. I suspect he’s doin' a fair job of it. Haven't heard any complaints from His M, and His M the Second being the son of His M the First, I reckon I would, if there was a problem. There, that satisfy your Alice bone?”
I'm torn. I don’t know whether to scoff or be very impressed. I decide to be impressed. Bags may seem like a crazy old man, but I’d been with him long enough by now to believe that crazy is just something he does so folks will size him up all wrong.
Needless to say, I am taking notes.