The Corner Garden

By Lesley Krueger

"I think I’ll call myself Gretel in this book. It’s not really my name. My name is really Jessie Barfoot, which is a perfectly respectable name, I guess, except that there’s nothing respectable about me. That’s one of the reasons we moved to Toronto. I’ve reached the age of fifteen and a half, and we’re going to get a New Start."

Old secrets and new starts stand at the centre of The Corner Garden. Questions of being good—and very bad—are intertwined in a story that moves between occupied Amsterdam during the Second World War to modern mongrelized Toronto.

Jessie Barfoot is precocious, witty and wounded, a female Holden Caulfield whose standards are too elevated for ordinary life. She’s been raised by single mother Michelle, a part-time student and sometime cab driver. When Michelle marries a charitable lawyer, Jessie feels only dismay.

I consider myself far too young to have learned the meaning of pro bono, she tells her diary, much less feel its impact upon my so-called innocent life.

After the new family moves to Toronto, Jessie’s curiosity is piqued by their cranky next door neighbour. Originally from the Netherlands, Martha van Telligen is a superb gardener with a secret she’s guarded ferociously since she was Jessie’s age. Yet once Jessie charms her way into the garden, Martha’s past begins a slow bleed into Jessie’s uncertain present, threatening both their futures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lesley Krueger
• Release date: Dec 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9780463796825

Lesley Krueger

Lesley Krueger is an award-winning novelist and filmmaker. Her latest novel, Far Creek Road, will be published by ECW Press this coming October. Set in the early 1960s, the book follows Tink Parker, an adventurous, nosy and very funny nine-year-old living a happy suburban life. But the Cold War is slowly building toward the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world is in danger of ending -- and Tink's innocence comes under threat.According to Sheila Murray, author of Finding Edward, "With the charming and very funny nine-year-old Tink, Krueger has created an unforgettable character whose innocent curiosity busts through the societal conventions of early 1960s Canada. This is a masterful depiction of an atmosphere tense with fear and fuelled by grown-up transgressions, where adult morality is contaminated by politics that tear communities apart.”Lesley's previous novel, Time Squared, was published in 2021. Says critic Kerry Clare, "I’ll dive right in and tell you that the novel, Time Squared by Lesley Krueger, which I’ve loved more than I’ve loved than any book I’ve read in ages, could be billed as Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life meets Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, if we wanted to underline just how badly you really ought to read it. And oh, you really do."Lesley has written four other novels, two short story collections, a travel memoir and a children's book.She was born in Vancouver, Canada and after living in Boston, Mass., London, England, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City, she makes her home in Toronto. There she writes fiction, works on films, and plays hockey in a couple of women's beer leagues, at least when her ankle isn't broken.

Book preview

The Corner Garden

a novel

Lesley Krueger

PRAISE FOR LESLEY KRUEGER

By engaging us in two very different lives in a state of transformation, we become engaged in the process of what it means to become an individual, moral human being. It’s a powerful story about human. strength, and frailty. It touches something deep inside.

—The Toronto Star on The Corner Garden

"Lesley Krueger . . . has perfectly captured the laconic tone of an intelligent teen who can still offer moments of bracing lucidity and keen observation. . . . The Corner Garden is an ambitious book. It starts innocently as a contemporary picaresque journey, then delves into a history less and the nature of evil."

—Globe and Mail on The Corner Garden

The Corner Garden is about storms and angels (black ones) and history. It is also about friendship and deception, beauty and horror, ad about the difficulty of delineating, in our lives of spinning fragments, between these overlapping realms. The work's form is as ambiguous as its content. It is a good story about gravely serious matters, but it is also a satire and an ironic diminution of self. It is a novel both hysterically funny and deeply troubling.

—The Literary Review of Canada on The Corner Garden

Jess's diary entries are instantly engaging. Although her observation may be adult at times, this is because Jess is an insightful observer of her world. She is a witty, astute teen whose eyes burn deep trough to the truth of the world she examines.... It is voice that works in this novel. Jess is immediately appealing ad captivating, and the strong personality of Martha is not easily forgotten.

—Books in Canada on The Corner Garden

Krueger’s portrait of artists as young men and women is alive with wit and rebellion—an aesthetic vivisection of the young Victorian age.

—Globe and Mail on Mad Richard

Krueger’s research is evident in every paragraph: from the use of authentic slang to richly sketched portraits of the lives of the era’s rich and poor, the book confidently transports the reader to another time.

—Quill & Quire on Mad Richard

The knitting together of Charlotte Brontë’s and Richard Dadd’s different trajectories worked like a dream. I was enthralled.

—Terry Gilliam on Mad Richard

In this remarkable piece of historical fiction, Krueger (Drink the Sky) imaginatively delves into the life of Richard Dadd . . . The two story lines . . . effectively juxtapose Dadd and Brontë, two very different people who travelled in similar circles during the same era and, more importantly, who were both entirely invested in what it means to be an artist. This question anchors the novel, adding depth and dimension to a terrific read.

—Publishers Weekly on Mad Richard, starred review

There is much to ponder in this elegant novel about the potentially catastrophic emotional toll of art, the irrational nature of love, the solitude of heartache and what happens when one life touches another, however briefly.

—Toronto Star on Mad Richard

Part carefully-wrought thriller, part eco-excursion into the heart of darkness . . . a young woman struggles with questions of identity against the backdrop of modern Brazil. Her elegant prose is a pleasure to read, and when Krueger ratchets up the tension, we go with her, hearts in mouth. She has intriguing and serious things to say about human nature and the planet.

—Quill & Quire on Drink the Sky

Drink the Sky captures both the precise local colour of Rio de Janeiro (where the author lived from 1988 to 1991) and the first-time visitor’s wide-eyed wonder. Krueger renders the exotic beauty of Brazil’s landscape and wildlife with rhapsodic authenticity. . . . The hidden story emerges piece by piece, as these things do, in a series of coincidences and unsuspected interrelations that weave the book’s two parallel plots  into a tense finale. As a cleverly plotted mystery, the book succeeds in hooking the reader.

—The Toronto Star on Drink the Sky

E-book copyright © Lesley Krueger, 2021

Originally published by Penguin Books, 2003

Krueger, Lesley, author

The Corner Garden/Lesley Krueger

Issued in electronic formats. 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright holder is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

There Will Be No Peace, copyright 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the estate of W.H. Auden, from W.H. AUDEN, THE COLLECTED POEMS by W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House Inc.

Cover design: Janine Isabelle

ALSO BY LESLEY KRUEGER

FICTION

Hard Travel

Poor Player

Drink the Sky

Mad Richard

Time Squared (fall, 2021)

NON-FICTION

Foreign Correspondences, A Traveler’s Tales

Contender: Triumph, Tragedy and Canadian Baseball Player Harry Fisher

CHILDREN’S

Johnny Bey and the Mizzenglass World

www.lesleykrueger.com

The Corner Garden

You must live with your knowledge.

Way back, beyond, outside of you are others,

In moonless absences you never heard of,

Who have certainly heard of you,

Beings of unknown number and gender:

And they do not like you.

What have you done to them?

Nothing? Nothing is not an answer:

You will come to believe—how can you help it?—

That you did, you did do something…

There will be no peace.

—W.H. Auden

In memory of Sharon Stevenson

July

one

THE GIRL WILL NOT LEAVE. I am left to grasp the handle, digging the spade into the earth to push myself upright, refusing to kneel before the adolescent. It is true she is a fair girl with good strong bones. But I can see now that the bust is half bared above my climbing roses. Such frail clothes they use, it is disgusting. My roses once blocked out nosy persons in the laneway, climbing over the arbour until four years ago when winterkill took half my garden. The unforgiving nature of this cold and shabby country. This girl is its product, a yield.

I have not seen your cat, I tell her. They invent chemicals which discourage animals from soiling private property. I have the privilege to use them.

He's an indoor cat, the girl insists. I'm the person, a person who moved in next door, and he got out when a friend who was helping us move . . .

The prisoner escapes. It is a case for congratulations, in fact.

Just so long as he doesn't soil your private property.

Exactly. We understand each other.

He's black and white. All his paws are white; he's got this black freckle on his nose, and this white patch . . .

If the cat doesn't come back to your door, it is gone. Get another, if you like. There will be no problem. They breed.

________________

Sunday, July 2

I've moved in next door to a total witch. She's the best thing about this mismatched street. One scattered house after another and then there's her, right on the corner, behind masses of fruit trees and roses, like the witch with the candy house luring in Hansel and Gretel.

I think I'll call myself Gretel in this book. It's not really my name. My name is really Jessie Barfoot, which is a perfectly respectable name, I guess, except that there's nothing respectable about me. That's one of the reasons we moved to Toronto. I've reached the age of fifteen and a half, and we're going to get a New Start.

I don't know what to say about Toronto except that it's bigger than you might expect. I mean, Canada, right? It's a secondary place. But Toronto turns out to be like Amoeba City, spreading for maybe 300 kilometres along the shore of Great Lake Ontario. It changes its name en route the way that bigger streets do, but I recently discovered how you can drive for hours and the development just pushes along beside you, starting from downtown Toronto with its lofty glass skyline and needling cn Tower and the huge vinyl pincushion of a sports dome.

It's true the downtown falls off suddenly after the Dome, which appears to be the geographic signal for all the skyscrapers to shrink like dinosaurs into birds, but you still get all these low-rise offices and warehouses and newbie condos rolling by until you've blended into the western suburb of Mississauga, which is named after the former Indian tribe it enveloped, then the suburb of Oakville, which is not.

You keep waiting for it to end, but all you get are more suburbs that soon become ex-urbs of the so-called separate city of Hamilton, which scrolls out next in this unending band of urbanity that stretches right to the US border and Niagara Falls, where you finally encounter the famous Disappointment (Oscar Wilde) cascading below these wide stone walls, a mint-coloured flow of northern water thundering boisterously south.

Seven or eight million people live inside the Amoeba, all of them in perpetual motion. I don't mean just that people drive from their suburbs to work or from work to their suburbs, although if you pictured the Amoeba at night from space, it would be this throbbing electrified splat of humanity with lines of sparkling traffic blinking on and off inside its wavy boundaries.

No, what I mean is how I've learned that most people moved to Toronto from someplace else, usually somewhere more crucial than mundane little Kingston, which is where I spent Time Immemorable myself. On the shopping streets nearby this house, I have already found bakeries from Afghanistan and Scotland, a pro-Serbian Butcher, Home decorating stores from the pages of expensive magazines, bookstores made in Canada and restaurants hailing down from Greece, Japan, Ethiopia, Italy, Cuba, Mexico, India and the US, i.e. a McDonald's.

The Amoeba is digesting people from all over, making this quote, The Most Multicultural City in the World, although as far as I can figure out, that just means people arrive from different countries in order to work in the same jobs as other people from the same country and live with them in the same neighbourhoods until they can move en masse to the mundane suburbs, where they finally grow absorbed in leading Canadian lives, with dietary distinctions.

I noticed when we drove down from Kingston over the past year, for instance, that almost all the ladies working in parking-lot booths were pretty, tinted and foreign-speaking. I was informed they had recently arrived from Africa, i.e. Somalia, which made me wonder about the moment they decided to pack up and leave their war behind. They couldn't have said to themselves, I think I'll go be a parking-lot attendant in Toronto. In order to better my life, I'll subject myself to Racist and Sexist comments from the car ahead of the one driven by the sympathetic doofus from Kingston, who doesn't know that you don't have to apologize for slurs made by other white people. (Or do you?) I'm sure the Somali ladies were far more Hopeful than that. Looking around, I get the feeling that the expansive Amoeba City is throbbing with Hope, as around me millions of people from all over the world struggle to get their personal New Start.

Or maybe not. Maybe that's just my Mom's outlook, not to mention her vocabulary. My Mom tends to speak in subject headings. I figure that's because she was a part-time University student back in Kingston, where I personally find it notable that the two main industries are Education and the Penitentiary. I also find it notable that the main downtown buildings, if Kingston can claim to have a downtown, are square bulky nineteenth-century structures made of limestone, i.e. the fossilized bodies of tiny sea creatures. When you think about it, Kingston is a small hard fossil, Toronto a huge living Amoeba. Maybe my Mom is right.

That's a weird thought, considering that my Mom is the type of person who keeps a Wish List stuck to the fridge with inspirational fridge magnets. Whenever we moved into a new apartment back in Kingston, practically the first thing she did was decorate the fridge, displaying my school pictures inside these magnetized frames or putting up sticky plastic affirmations, You Are a Special Somebody, when the Wish List was already the saddest thing in the world, considering that nothing good ever got crossed off, like Car, even though she wrote (Used) after it, but only the most mundane things, like Toilet Brush. The worst thing was when she bought something at a Flea Market and then wrote it down on the Wish List so she could turn around and cross it off.

I caught this weird glimpse of Mom just before we left Kingston, the first time I didn't see her as familiar old Mom. Not that she's old, being the somewhat embarrassing age of thirty-one, but I mean that I didn't recognize her at first as she walked toward me down the sidewalk between some real students from the University. I just saw her as a certain type of person you get in school, i.e. a member of the Yearbook Committee or the un Club, the type who's only ever technically young, with that kind of thick, wavy light-brown hair you can't cut short and pale powdery skin, her sweater stretched over those huge zooms so it was too loose at the waist. The thing is, she's not fat. She's just kind of medium-sized and wide, as if some big hand laid itself flat on the top of her head and squashed her down so she popped out in selected places: pop pop zooms, POP butt.

That was my Mom? That person who was shorter than I am? That student? It was totally weird. Except that it also wasn't, since Mom has been in school ever since I can remember. Or at least in University. We moved down to Kingston when I was just a little kid so Mom could go to Queen's and the fact is, she's never really stopped. Unless she's stopping now, I guess. I'm not sure what happens now that we've moved up in the world, whether things will change or what.

I don't see how they can. I mean, she's always worked at mundane jobs like waitress, cab driver etc., this being what my crippled Family does, so it's probably genetic, plus she's very proud of the fact she's also always taken courses, even though it took her nine years to finish her ba, at which point she found it didn't get her anywhere so she had to start in on her Master's. I don't see her quitting her Master's, my Mom being so unidirectional. It takes her more or less a Geological Age to make up her mind, which can be exacerbating, but get her started down the track and she just keeps going, which can be even more exacerbating, although it's also not her fault. My Mom is really a nice person. That's just what she's like.

I didn't glimpse her on the street for very long. As usual, she was slower and I don't know, more careful than other people, so she sort of disappeared behind the real students, but I kept standing there on the sidewalk until she literally walked right into me. There was this powdery whumpf and there was my Mom, her brown eyes blinking up at me in this kind of scary uninhabited fashion, especially considering that when you looked down, all you saw was the big gross scar across her neck.

Oh, baby, are you here? I'm sorry, I guess I was somewhere else.

Now we're all somewhere else, my Mom having finally got married last month, lucking out, in the opinion of the world, by landing Pudge. That's my name for him, not that he minds it. I haven't found anything that Pudge minds, at least not yet, even though he and Mom were together long-distance for about a year before we moved down here. Pudge is pretty easygoing. When he gets old and his beard goes white, he can play Santa at the local Mall. I don't mean that he's fat, but he's one of those people who looks fat even when he isn't, with those twinkly blue eyes and the round ho-ho cheeks and all that curly brown hair and this little bowlful of jelly inside his checked flannel shirts.

His appearance is somewhat deceiving, however, since Pudge is a lawyer. Mom is stunned jawless. She married a Toronto lawyer! Who works for Worthy Causes! Personally I figure that if you're doing lawyers, why not go for the suit? I consider myself far too young to have learned the meaning of pro bono, much less feel its impact upon my so-called innocent life.

Like I say, I'm exactly fifteen and a half, my Mom being almost thirty-two. Do the arithmetic, everyone else does. But maybe that's what we're leaving behind by moving here. Maybe we're finally getting away from all the people who know the real story behind my so-called father. Not that I'm supposed to know the truth about my quote, father either, except that I do. Anyone who thinks you can keep a Family Secret never had cousins. But I have cousins up the nostril, more and more of them every year, especially Janelle Pigott. I mean that there's more of Janelle Piglet every time you see her, and I see her every summer. Not that I'm going to see her this year, I refused. This year, I'm planning to spend the summer working in Toronto.

But until now, Mom always shipped me off to visit the cousins up in Campbellton as soon as school got out, Campbellton being this little town where I was born, and Mom was born, and where we lived until Mom graduated high school when she was, I don't know, twenty? It's this little tourist town in Northern Ontario where my so-called cousin Janelle Piglet lays her head, not to mention half the boys at school. It's also where the Piglet chose an otherwise sunny day last summer to tell me the truth about my quote, father, not to mention the disgusting story of how I was supposed to be conceived, even though I don't believe a word she says. Being a person with some degree of standards, I refuse.

I'm trying not to think about Campbellton at all, actually. I got Paws, my cat, in Campbellton last summer, and yesterday Paws ran away. He took a hike while we were moving in, although to look on the bright side, that's how I met the witch next door. This didn't exactly impress me as a gripping neighbourhood until then, even though Pudge says that Amoeba City is famous for its neighbourhoods, i.e. the way people huddle together into packed little nuclei so they can feel At Home.

The thing is, Mom and Pudge seem to have gone out of their way to choose a mismatched street in an unfocused part of town known as the East End. You can tell from just the restaurants that no particular group of people lives here, and on even your brief morning walk, you end up seeing neighbourhood ladies in head scarves who are both religiously Middle Eastern and black-widowed Greek, as well as Chinese-speaking neighbours, people with Caribbean accents, a notable Unhoused contingent and born-here Canadians of many hews.

The houses are just the same, I mean in being different. You get a big house next to a bungalow, attached, detached, cared-for and not. Nothing fits together, which gives you the confused sensation that even the houses have wandered in from other developments, sadly settling their foundations down beside each other when they realized they were lost. If I don't watch myself, I can get a Lost sensation on this mismatched street. What really belongs here? Nothing seems to belong here, which makes you wonder about me.

I felt pretty bad this morning, actually, when I was out in the laneway behind the houses searching for little cat bodies or whatever. Then I saw this fountain of pink roses right next door, this total spree of pink foaming in the breeze, flowers moving back and forth like the splash of happy water. I began to cheer up, being such a crip for flowers. I'm especially crippled by roses, so I guess I went over to smell them, walking inside that rosy smell before I looked across and saw this old lady kneeling on a Golf Course-style lawn.

The fence between our houses is really high, and she's got trees and bushes where there isn't any fence down on the corner, so I hadn't noticed her before. I probably wouldn't have noticed her at all if I hadn't been searching. But there she was, right by clumps of lilies in colours I didn't know that lilies came in, these ripe peach-coloured ones and buttery ones and deeply bloody Sacred Heart flowers bigger than your hand, all these lilies and so many roses the wind smelled like incense and the fruit trees danced in total stoned ecstasy above.

She didn't see me. But I got this optimistic feeling that she probably had at least eight cats herself. I was probably calling out to the neighbourhood cat lady when I cried Hello, scaring her into dropping her clippers. First she glared at me in an Evil manner and then she tried to ignore me, but I just stood there smiling like a Down's Syndrome until she had to get up. It was weird, she turned out to be every bit as tall as I am, even though I have a general impression that tall people don't live very long.

She seemed stiff, though, and thin, so maybe she was sick. Maybe she has cancer or something, I don't know, although I think she must have been as naturally blonde as I am once upon a time, her hair being inadequate now and tied back in a bun. I wondered if this was what would happen to me: stiff, thin, pale, half bald and totally crabby, saying it was my quote, privilege, to use sprays to keep cats and dogs out of my garden.

He's an indoor cat, I told her.

Congratulations. He made his escape.

Which is true, when you think about it. My Mom was the one who wanted Paws to stay indoors, having read an article where experts from the Humane Society advised against letting cats outside to get squashed by cars. Not that Paws had anything to do with the Humane Society. Like I say, he was a Campbellton cat, a barn kitten we got almost precisely a year ago when I was visiting Gramps, and when you think about it, Paws probably inherited the Campbellton gene that programs you to Get The Fuck Out.

Not that I remember much about moving away from Campbellton, I was too little, although I'm so glad to leave lousy old Kingston that it hurts. And the thought of Paws on the loose in the big city is kind of appealing, how he'll be able to act the way he wants to for a change, hanging out with members of his own species, choking up hairballs wherever he feels like it, maybe landing a bowl of milk at someone's back door before dropping home for the occasional scratch. When the old witch predicted that I wouldn't find Paws, that he'll have to come back on his own, I kind of accepted that, and felt much better from then on.

I've been sitting here thinking about that for a while, and decided it really is true. Because the thing about Campbellton is, you really have to get out. Like I say, it's this tiny little tourist town up in the Lakes, where it clings to the rocky pink granite of the Canadian Shield, the Shield being so old it's pre-fossilized, pre-Cambrian, and so hard that even if it wasn't so far outside the Amoeba's reach and grasp, it would probably be indigestible anyway. If you don't get out of there, you end up being bent by your hard environment, my cousin Janelle Pigott being Exhibit A.

I had to beat the crap out of Janelle Piglet last summer after she told me the so-called truth about my quote, father. She's the kind of person who inspires you to beat her up, not to mention use both her names, especially given how she uses both of mine. Jessie Barfoot, Jessie Barfoot. Or sometimes only, Baaaar-foot. I'm supposed to feel ashamed I've got my mother's last name? Which is also my Gramps's last name? He's her Gramps, too. All the little Piglets are my mother's older sister's kids and they live in Campbellton. Aunt Sis never managed to leave Campbellton, even after Uncle Gord got killed the winter before.

He was drunk, it was his own fault, he should never have been driving. Everybody knows that. But I never said a word about Uncle Gord, not even to piggy Janelle, who has the family stature package, hand squashed down on head, pop pop, and in her case the family features too, which luckily my Mom escaped. Mom looks like Gramps, she has Fine Features. I look like myself, my Mom always says, which had me fooled forever.

But the Piglet looks like someone took one of her cheeks in each hand and pulled them apart, so her eyes are spaced wide apart, her piggy mouth is wide, even her snout is wide and thick as a pig-pig-piglet's, which is what I was screaming last summer on Gramps's lawn when I landed on her for saying all that total load of crap about how I was conceived.

You fucking little pig. You take that back.

Get offa me!

I made pig noises, pushing her down, kneeling on her fat pig gut so she made a squealing wee-wee sound. It felt so good to finally smash her, to feel her wide piggy face get all teary snotty wet. I hated that f bitch, she never let me alone. Anybody's back was turned, I got Bar-foot, Bar-foot. Now she says this.

You're a liar. It never happened like that. People aren’t born like that. That's totally disgusting. You admit you're a piggy little liar!

Lee me lone. Lee meeeeee . . .

Until I felt my arm pulled back sharply and there was Gram hollering behind me, strong old crap, Janelle her sweet widdle pig-pig-pigwet, both of them wide as barns, fingers digging into me, pulling me back, she's going to break my arm.

Get off! Gram hollers. Get off, you filthy little fucker!

So I did, I gave in, she was old. Kneeling there panting, both of us, Janelle still squealing like a pig but lower now, wee wee wee. The thing is, Gram never asked, she just looked at me.

The apple never falls too far from the tree, she said, and heaved herself upright and left.

Later, I was in Gramps's workshop. Gram and Gramps live on the back side of Campbellton, i.e. the opposite side from the highway, their big old house squatting on this sloping property that Gram likes to garden and mow. Gramps tends to be found in his basement workshop, and he's fixed it up like a ship's cabin the way I imagine one. It's got this nice clean sawdust smell and everything's handy to reach, the screws and nails in jars you spin around and the tools hung up on a pegboard, and my Gramps is always bent over his workbench, fixing whatever.

I must have got my height from Gramps, just like my Mom got her Fine Features. He and