Authors: Christopher Hebert
One night Constance sent Michael Boni home with a sack of okra. While his own dinner warmed on the stove, he went to let Priscilla out of her cage. She followed him back into the kitchen, and Michael Boni got out his grandmother’s slab of butcher block. With Priscilla watching beside him, he cut the okra up into little pieces, and she looked up at him with love in her eyes, or at least what looked like love, and Michael Boni could tell he’d touched something in that prehistoric dinosaur brain of hers, and that connection filled him with a primal sort of happiness, as if the universe had cracked open, and inside there was man and there was bird, living together in a state of harmony he could feel but never hope to comprehend.
That night he went to bed still feeling that warm glow, and in his sleep he dreamed of chickens.
He was awakened by the sound of a truck chugging out in the street. He got out of bed and went over to the window, pushing aside the heavy curtains. That borrowed blue Chevy was parked beside the garden, facing the wrong way. Constance stood behind the tailgate, lit up by the exhaust. It took Michael Boni a moment to make sense of what the hands on his grandmother’s alarm clock were trying to tell him.
It was four in the morning.
Constance held a box. He could make out what looked like two more at her feet. The boxes were big, and they looked heavy, and she was out there all alone. Michael Boni pulled on his pants and boots.
The only working streetlight was down the block near Clifford’s house. It was an overcast night, and Michael Boni felt an unexpected chill. It was early June now, and he wasn’t sorry to have a break from the swelter.
Constance was standing by the fender when he arrived, wiping her hands on her coat. The canvas was smeared from the hem all the way up to the corduroy collar. Underneath she wore her purple floral dress.
“What’re you doing?” he said.
“What’s it look like?”
Two of the boxes already rested in the back of the truck. Michael Boni bent down and picked up the last one from the street. The cardboard sagged between his fingers. Below the loose flaps he saw something green and leafy.
“Where are you taking this?”
Constance walked over to the driver’s side and opened the door, placing one foot on the running board. “Are you coming or not?”
“Does Clifford know?”
Constance rocked herself backward, and Michael Boni got there just in time to put a hand on her back and guide her up into the cab. With the door still open, she shifted from park to drive, and the transmission fell with a thud.
“All right,” he said. “Move over.”
The roads along the way were almost entirely empty, but the market was lit up like a movie set. It was Saturday, farmers’ market day. Michael Boni had never been, but he knew about the place, an urban excursion for the weekend brunch set.
Even though the market wasn’t open yet, the loading docks of the two biggest sheds were plugged with trucks, real trucks. There were six blocks of open-air stalls, six covered sheds in all. Flanneled, farmery-looking people were everywhere, shouting and pointing, shifting tables, hauling crates and dollies.
“Where do I go?” Michael Boni said.
Constance pointed to the corner of one of the smaller sheds, a spot between a loading dock and a fire hydrant. The pavement was slashed with yellow lines.
“I don’t think we’re allowed.”
“It’s fine,” she said.
He pulled in as directed, and Constance reached over and turned off the ignition.
“What now?” he said.
She leaned back and let her head recline against the seat. “We wait.”
When Michael Boni woke up, he was alone. The sky outside the windshield was no longer black and white. The clouds were turning caramel.
A noise had startled him from sleep. Now he heard it again, a dull scraping coming from somewhere behind him. He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror. Constance was stretching into the bed of the pickup. By the time he got out to join her, she’d already removed one of the boxes.
The cardboard had rotted even more since the last time Michael Boni had touched them. Stacked together, the boxes teetered in his arms like pillows. He had a bad feeling about all this.
“Where to?”
She started walking. He followed a few steps back, peering around the stack as best he could. He had no idea where his feet were falling.
She walked for about a block. “Here,” she said from somewhere in front of him.
He shuffled in a half circle to get a better look. They were standing at the edge of one of the open-air shelters. A pillar rose from a low concrete footer.
“Where should I put them?”
She pointed to the sidewalk.
“Don’t we need a table?”
She reached out toward the pillar and eased herself down. “What for?”
There were three rows of booths running through the shelter. Constance had wedged herself directly at the end of the middle row, an obstacle to anyone trying to get anywhere.
“Don’t you need some sort of permit?” Michael Boni said.
Constance was elbow-deep in one of the boxes, rooting around for something.
“I’m going to go check things out,” he said. If her own son couldn’t talk sense to her, what could Michael Boni be expected to do?
He turned into the first open doorway he came upon and found himself standing in an enormous hangar-like space, one of the two largest sheds. He had to crane his neck to find the ceiling. Up there it was mostly girders and skylights, the early morning sun making the panes of glass throb beyond their frames.
While they’d been asleep in the truck, the market had opened. The suburban mobs were already here, a kaleidoscope of brightly colored T-shirts and canvas shopping bags. From the doorway, Michael Boni couldn’t see any of the booths. There were too many bodies jammed together in slow-moving eddies, blocking his view. He stepped forward into the nearest current, letting it sweep him away.
His first impression was that the place felt less like a market than like a crowded museum, everyone around him eyeing pyramids of fruit and vegetables as if they were sculptures. A skeletal young woman in a tank top ran a finger along a stretch of eggplants and zucchini and cucumbers, never once picking anything up, as if content just to be in their presence. Michael Boni was heartened by the sight of an elderly couple, the man an old-world throwback in a felt fedora and baggy wool pants. His wife, in a plain brown dress, was frowning at a pile of tomatoes while the old man clenched a twisted root of ginger.
Michael Boni made two full circuits of the building, going up one side and then back down the other, and by the time he returned to where he’d started from, he’d seen every vegetable, every jar of local honey and preserves, every gluten-free scone, every pot of organic basil and sprig of thyme. And he realized, looking back, that every vendor in here—every member of the flannel brigade—was white. And so too were most of the shoppers. It was as if they’d somehow
claimed this tiny sliver of the city for themselves. There was Michael Boni and Constance and a black guy selling ribs from a smoky barbecue and another playing spoons on the sidewalk. And then there was everyone else.
There were so many people coming into the shed now that it was hard to get back outside. He had to squeeze sideways through the double doors.
The moment he reached the sidewalk, Michael Boni heard the squawk of a walkie-talkie. Beside the pillar where he’d left Constance stood a bald, spectacled man carrying a clipboard. Constance was still squatting among her boxes, palming a head of lettuce in each of her outstretched hands.
“Ma’am,” the man with the clipboard was saying, “there are procedures.”
“Lettuce!” Constance’s head appeared between the man’s calves, shouting to everyone passing by. “Here’s some lettuce.”
“Ma’am,” the bald man said, tapping the clipboard. “You have to go.”
“Just let her be,” Michael Boni said.
“I wish I could—” The man with the clipboard took a step back as Michael Boni appeared beside him.
“You can,” Michael Boni said, coming the same half-step forward. “You can turn around and walk away.”
“I can’t do that.” The bald man turned to look for something.
Someone
, as it turned out. There was a cop offering directions to the driver of a car idling in the street. “All these people have permits,” the bald man said. “All of them have paid.”
Michael Boni reached for his wallet. “How much is it?”
“There are forms,” the man said. “There’s a process.”
Michael Boni realized his pockets were empty. He’d left the house without having any idea where he’d end up. He reached for the clipboard instead. “Are those the forms?”
The man jerked away. “No, this is … something else.”
“Go get the forms,” Michael Boni said. “I’ll fill them out. I’ll pay the fee.”
“That’s not how it works,” the man said. The color was rising in his cheeks.
The car in the street pulled away, and as the cop turned back toward the sidewalk, it occurred to Michael Boni to wonder if their truck had already been towed. He looked down at Constance. The crumbling boxes were exactly as full as when he’d carried them here, except for the lettuce in each of Constance’s hands.
Michael Boni was on unfamiliar ground. But the one thing he knew for sure was that he wouldn’t be bringing the boxes back home. The stuff could be taken or eaten, by man or by rat, rained on, stepped on, or rotted into mush. He didn’t care. He wouldn’t be taking the stuff anywhere. Let clipboard man throw the boxes into the Dumpster if he wanted.
“Come on,” Michael Boni said, reaching down for Constance’s hand. She took his fingers without argument, dropping the lettuce at his feet. One of the heads tried to roll away, and Michael Boni stopped it with the toe of his boot. The lettuce had such a pleasing roundness, about the size of a bowling ball, but with just the right amount of give. He struck it with the top of his laces, just as his old soccer coaches had always instructed. The lettuce made the most wonderful sound as it exploded against the bald man’s shin.
Only now, almost a year later, at the start of his second spring in his grandmother’s house—the second season of Constance’s garden—was Michael Boni able to see the true importance of that lettuce.
“Do you understand?” he said to Darius. “Do you get what it means?” It was hard to put such a thing—a symbol—into words.
They were sitting on a blown-out truck tire in a playground not far from Michael Boni’s old apartment. It was their new meeting place, now that the plaza downtown had become too dangerous, too
exposed. Here there was even a crooked lean-to near the monkey bars in case it happened to rain.
“I get it,” Darius said. “I get it.”
Michael Boni might have believed him, if Darius hadn’t said it twice.
The chains were missing from the swing set. The seats were gone from the teeter-totter. The sandbox had been dug down to dirt. A woman had been found dead in the bushes here not long ago. Michael Boni knew better than to come around at night. But during the day it was safe enough.
“My grandmother,” Michael Boni said, “she wasted away here. And I didn’t do anything to help.” Darius didn’t need to know what a wretched soul she’d been. Anyone deserved better than what she got.
“I need to know you understand,” Michael Boni said. “This lettuce …”
Darius nodded unconvincingly.
“All you need,” Michael Boni said, “is a clean slate.”
Constance had shown them what was possible. Something new could grow.
The lettuce was an opening salvo, a declaration of war.
Winded from the short walk down the corridor from the conference room, Mrs. Freeman blustered past the upraised glance of her administrative assistant and charged on through to her office. As she let the heavy oak door shush behind her, she heard a familiar voice call her name. But rather than stop, she let momentum carry her forward, all the way to the window. Having spent the last two hours sitting like a stuffed owl at the end of a conference table, Ruth Freeman decided she would rather remain there, looking out upon the city, than have to experience, so soon after the first, yet another annoyance.
The sight outside was not pretty. Indeed, the landscape was as depressing as the foreign films of which her husband was so fond. And yet Mrs. Freeman felt she might have stayed that way for the rest of the day, peacefully staring off into the horizon, through the rain and the fog, had her administrative assistant not finally, intrusively, appeared at her side.
“What is it?” Mrs. Freeman said.
“I’ve been going over the presentation,” Tiphany said. “Your notes—I’ve been trying to put them together. But I notice there’s nothing in here—that is, you make no mention—”
“Yes,” Mrs. Freeman said, “yes,” drawing out the
s
as if it were a slow leak through which her administrative assistant might escape.
“But you promised the board … They’re waiting for your—have you gone through the reports?”
“Reports,” said Mrs. Freeman, turning once again toward the window.
“Did you read Arthur’s memo, Ruth?” Tiphany said, trying to move into Mrs. Freeman’s line of vision. “I put it on your desk. People have been asking questions. Eldenrod at the paper. And with these demonstrations, Arthur’s afraid—”
“Arthur is always afraid.”
“I hope you don’t mind, but I took the liberty …” Tiphany paused and handed Mrs. Freeman a sheet of paper.
In a glance she saw him, spread across the page: Arthur, panicking over trifles, creating pandemonium, which, in an office full of people utterly incapable of thinking for themselves, was as easy as setting fire to gasoline. And then there was her administrative assistant, who saw chaos as career advancement. Mrs. Freeman could imagine Tiphany hunched over the report, inserting her self-serving notes, and she felt herself a bit like some unfortunate king whose good nature and honesty put him at the mercy of earls and lords overendowed with hubris. Although part of her, the part that had once thought of itself as an intellectual, would have liked to be able to remember some specific king and the actual plot that had done him in, the more practical side of Mrs. Freeman was content to have remembered the gist of it.