Free The Night Garden by Lisa van Allen Page A

yard, that all his book smarts and bitterness gelled and he finally made sense to himself. It wasn’t until many years later that he understood it was far more difficult for a man to understand what he stood for than what he stood against.
    By the time he and his neighbors realized that they would not be able to stop the hippies from descending on their farmland like a plague of locusts, Arthur had solidified his place as one of the most respected men of his generation, and the last of a dying breed. The Van Winkle policemen and firemen and nurses leaned on his porch rails in the evenings to vent their frustrations, and they talked with him as if he had the wisdom of Solomon in his bones.
    As the Concert grew close, Arthur prepared. He loaded his shotgun with fine corn kernels—because of course he didn’t want to kill anybody, but he wouldn’t accept trespassers ruining his beds of lettuce and mucking up his potatoes. He blocked offhis driveway with fifty-five-gallon drums and battened down the hatches of his farm stand.
    When the kids arrived—he called them kids because he felt so very ancient then himself—it was as bad as he’d thought it would be. They sped through Green Valley, music blaring, hanging out the windows of their psychedelic vans and howling like demons. Little groups or individuals in all kinds of bizarre dress and undress would walk their slow, backward walk down the road with their thumbs raised. When the traffic backed up to a standstill, the hoodlums just left their cars in the middle of the road and made an indecent parade of themselves in their moccasins and macramé, their feathers and fringe, singing at the top of their lungs. Once, he’d had to warn a handful of sky-high kids in camo not to eat the flowers on the side of the road—and though they didn’t know it, he’d saved them from ingesting deadly poison hemlock. The kids had thanked him as if he’d done no more than point out a pretty flower. For five nights, Arthur kept vigil sitting on the fence beside his fields, his shotgun balanced on his thighs and his fingers itching as the throngs walked by.
    Sometimes, in those lonely hours, he struggled with the ache of his own curiosity. The kids seemed so at ease in their bodies, so … content. He did not hide his contempt for them as they flowed past his house like a throng of refugees—and yet, instead of calling him names they flashed him peace signs. They walked with their arms around one another, laughing or singing or both. To join them would have been as easy as throwing himself bodily into the current of a river and allowing himself to be swept along. But of course, his buttoned-up personal dignity wouldn’t hear of it. He sat on his fence all those long nights, eyeing the revelers, smoldering inside his skin.
    After the festival ended, quiet had returned to the valley, butit was an eerie quiet—the kind of scrubbed-clean silence that comes after a violent storm. Arthur expected life to return to normal. But on the third morning after the Concert, a cicada fell from a tree branch and landed on his shoulder with a quick, short tap that made him turn to see if someone was standing behind him.
    And someone was. One of his workers alerted him that a person was sleeping in the barn. He was instantly, blazingly angry, so angry that he’d retied one of his shoes so tight it cut off the circulation. But what he found was not the drugged-up draft dodger he’d expected; it was Alice. Sleeping in some roughed-up hay. She looked like a cross between a young street orphan and an angel. Her short dress was like it had been sewn of patched-together handkerchiefs, and it dropped so low in the back that it showed the sweet, catlike curve of her spine. Her hair, teased into an impressive dark corona of an Afro, was clumped with sticks and mud.
    She opened her eyes and blinked up at him, languid as a jungle cat. He’d waited for her to say something like Oh, I’m sorry I know I’m