Old Tom said they once had a hired girl helping with the pigs and the milking, and one day she came into the house exclaiming about the nice “set of dogs” that had suddenly shown up, all friendly-like and accompanying her to the creamery. When Old Tom told her what they really were she fainted dead away. Which is silly, I said to Old Tom. I mean, they weren’t any different at that moment than they’d been when she’d been hanging out with them. It does go to show that so much of your experience is based not on fact but on what you choose to believe about things. Her experience was of nice, friendly animals, but she couldn’t make that jibe with what she knew about Little Red Riding Hood. Even though you don’t see a lot of wolves anymore, sometimes you hear them. At least Old Tom and I do. Sina says they are dogs, but she is not always right—although like me, and I guess Old Tom, too, and, come to think of it, everyone, she always thinks she is.

While Sina showed me the house, Old Tom left to get me what I needed. He wasn’t sure what all that was, but he stopped any maternal-looking woman he could find on Douglas Street in Victoria and between all of them they cobbled together the necessary supplies. One bossy woman dragged him into Eaton’s, Victoria’s only department store, and told him what else he had to have. She even picked out the crib and would let him have no say. Old Tom says there’s always one bossy woman around. But he didn’t mind because he just wanted to get it over with and get back to his gardening.

Then Old Tom came home and, while Sina set things up in the nursery, he showed me his gardens, scattered beyond and around the hayfields. I was perhaps a mite young to appreciate it all, but I’m sure I was lulled by his voice. Old Tom has a gravelly voice, but it is oddly soothing because of this. It is a voice worn into chunkiness and rough edges by time. It is as soothing as an old quilt or the ocean boulders you can sit on because they are smoothed every day and night by the tides. He showed me the English garden and the herb garden. He showed me the Italian garden and the statuary garden. He showed me the kitchen garden and the apple orchard. He showed me the wildflower garden and the garden of exotic blooms and the Japanese garden and the heliotrope garden. But he did not show me the night garden. That one Old Tom kept locked up.

Then he walked me down the rocky path to show me all the little coves and beaches. Old Tom had a boat he took out to fish if the ocean wasn’t too choppy. It was anchored on a short dock on the quiet side of one of the coves. Then, coming up the steep old stairs from the beach to the field that leads to the house, he almost dropped me. That’s when it occurred to him that they had taken on a whole new human being, and the weight of the responsibility, he said, was pressing. He said this to Sina as he came in the back door.