The Naked Gardener (20 page)

“I represent a group of investors.” he began and paused to peer around the room. The men in suits surrounding him looked to me about as out of place as I would in a Board of Directors meeting on Wall Street.

“My clients have developed the mall north of town.”

“We all know what they’ve done here,” a voice shouted.

Erica rapped her gavel. “Please let’s all be civil.” She nodded to Will.

“And they have also bid on two properties that lie between the mall development and the town boundaries.”

“The Pritchard dairy farm for one,” the same man’s voice called out. Erica rapped the gavel hard this time and gave the man a stern look.

“Development is coming to the Trout River Falls area. It’s inevitable,” Will went on. “And we believe it will be good for the entire community. Therefore, my clients,” he motioned to the suits surrounding him, “would like at this time to publicly state – so there will be no intimations of secrecy later on – their intention to bid on the remaining properties in Trout River Falls – that is any properties not controlled by the trust after it’s been established and approved by the council – with the intention to develop and attract a variety of businesses tied to the area’s community developments that have already been approved at the county seat level.”

As Will finished his prepared statement, there was the sound of a group intake of breath, a as if suddenly the room had become starved for oxygen. A dozen or more hands shot up. People began to whisper and it seemed, inside that high ceilinged room, like a warning wind from an approaching storm had slipped in under the doors. My heart was thumping and I looked at Mrs. Ward, seated beside me, but she only smiled, one hand resting on top of her cane, the other in her lap, fingers curled inward around her thumb.

When she stood, it was with an attitude of authority that had much more than age about it. She surveyed the room for what seemed quite some time, gazing at the table of council members, the women who had landed so unexpectedly at her dock only a week before, and then the faces of her neighbors. She waited for the room to settle, as she seemed to know it would. She did not raise her hand for permission to speak. She did not clear her throat. She did not hold a paper with prepared remarks. Her hand rested on her cane as calmly as if she were standing on her porch steps. I was probably the only one in that room who saw her left foot tapping slightly, impatiently, a bit imperiously. Then there was silence. Complete, utter lack of any sound. The sun was setting. The lights hanging from the ceiling above us seemed brighter than they had been earlier. Will Marston sat down. One of the suited men whispered something to him, his hand cupped over his mouth.

“Well now,” Cecelia Ward began. She rested both hands on top of her cane. She was like an old tree that had grown for so many years in one spot that she and the piece of ground where she had rooted were now inseparable.

“I’ve lived my entire life right here in Trout River Falls. I’ve seen hurricanes, floods, blizzards that buried houses. I’ve been through three wars and now we’re in another off over there in the Middle East. I suppose when you reach my age, you can look back and say, ‘I’ve seen it all.’ Fact is, I don’t feel as if I have seen it all. Not yet.

“When I was a girl, this town was as active as a hive of honeybees. We had an old wooden bridge then. It was a busy bridge, something always rumbling along over it back and forth. And over the years, as I watched the town slow down, and I felt myself slowing down, and when all the things that happened to the town seemed to happen in my own life, well I resigned myself to the inevitable.

“Now these young women come along and say “Wait a minute. It is not inevitable that something vibrant has to fade away forever. There must be ways to build on the past, to revitalize what was once a dynamic, active community. We do not live in a museum. We are not wax figures doomed to watch through unseeing eyes.

“And so I agreed to set up this trust. Through the land and buildings that were willed to me by previous generations, I own most of Trout River Falls. The men in suits can come close. They can come right up to the boundaries of town if others are willing to sell. But they cannot cross that bridge. Because most of this town is going in that trust. And if others want to build on that I say fine. But find a way to build that improves on what we have. Not a way that denigrates or denies it.”

She sat down with a soft thump of her cane.

Hands shot up to be recognized. Erica raised her gavel. A fly bumped insistently against one of the ceiling lights above me Maze was down in Virginia now, where it was hot and humid and I knew when he returned, without needing any proof of this, that he would be there tomorrow and the next day. He would be there as surely as the rocks in my garden were an immutable fixture beneath the earth. He was like this town, unwavering, placid in his ability to wait out every twist and turn of the march of time. I raised my hand and Erica pointed her gavel at me.

“It’s getting late,” she said. “I know many of you have something to say but we do have to cut this discussion off before we vote. The council will recognize one last speaker.” She pointed to me.

“This is a beautiful place,” I began. “A place worth saving. A place worth nurturing. A place for everyone to enjoy. It can be a dynamic place. A place with a future and not only a past. There’s no reason why a historic mill has to lay fallow or why it cannot come alive. It may be that milling flour the old way is less economically efficient but there are markets for what is less efficient and these markets are growing. As societies move forward into an ever more advanced technological future where everything is mass produced, we will want not more efficiency but more authenticity.

“I’ve been an outsider here. But I’ve come to treasure this place and the people in it. I would hate to lose all that to another mall or subdivision that could be plunked down anywhere in the world and look exactly like any other mall or subdivision anywhere.”

I sat down abruptly. The council voted unanimously in favor of the motion to move forward to the next step. Establishing and endowing the trust, and installing its board of directors. Chairs scraped the floor. People shuffled out. Talk about the storm, the bridge, the heat wave, the new mall, and other topics could be heard in bits and pieces as we all filed out into the late evening air.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE ROCK

I stood at the garden gate again, naked with the sun on my shoulders. The sky a deep azure spread out forever above me. The green forest surrounded me in the distance. My garden wall, obscured by the riot of blooming vines, hid me from the outside world. The hose was coiled at my feet like a snake snoozing in the midday heat. I turned the spigot, heard a small burst ofwater and watched the hose plump out. I would need it soon. The cool water. But now I opened the gate and stepped into that world of blooms and brown earth, of row upon row of beans and tomatoes, mounds of melon vine and yellow zucchini blossoms like ruffled paper flowers that dotted the dark soil. Around the edges, clematis bloomed bright purple like a flower curtain. Vines with red-orange trumpet flowers reached out above the fence, standing at attention like an orchestra of small horns pointing in all directions. Pink and white hollyhocks stood in a tall array along one side, and opposite them red rambling rose hung down over the ground heavy and full. Hummingbirds zoomed from one trumpet flower to the next, jockeying for position, chasing each other in wide arcs, darting in then out from flower to flower, hovering for the few seconds it took to drink their nectar.

I saw it all as a blur of color and motion, saw nothing in particular but the whole as background music. I was aware that this was the beginning of the very height of my summer garden and with the canoe trip now over, I was back in my own world, safe but still unsettled. I picked up the cultivating rake and slipped on my gloves, lifted the hose nozzle and opened the valve. I pointed the nozzle up toward the sky and released a soft spray of cool water over my naked body. This was just right. The water ran down, cooled my skin, and I dragged the hose behind me into the garden, leaving the gate open. Droplets of water rolled off my body onto the dark soil.

In the few days I’d been away, weeds had taken hold. How fast they encroached into my space in this short growing season. Now it was time to restore order. First I pulled up the largest ones. From one row to the next, I worked methodically, pulling and then piling weeds in small clumps as I went. Those that were too small to pull got the rake. They would die from being disturbed and if they didn’t, I would go after them again another day. Outside the garden I had left a large basket. Later I would pick beans and tomatoes, fill the basket and take it back to the barn. There were green peppers and eggplant ripe and ready. Soon the ears of corn would tassel out. Then we would eat sweet, juicy corn every night. All the lettuce but a few hardy stragglers were past their prime. The sun was too hot now for them to withstand. But now, besides the vegetables, a profusion of flowers begged to be cut. The barn would look like a Bonnard painting tonight, festive, fragrant, rich with life provided by the earth.

I moved up and down the rows of vegetables. At one point, about halfway down the row of pole beans dangling like earrings from wood tripods along the south side of the garden fence, my foot struck the big rock that had worked its way above the soil. In the beginning, when Maze and I had first prepared the garden plot, we had dug up enough stones to build a two-foot high wall along the north side of the garden. Some stones required loosening with a pick axe. Others had to be wedged out from underneath and pried up from the soil. I often came upon a nest of rocks, some small, others too heavy for me to lift alone. At such times Maze and I worked well as a team. I would loosen; he would haul. Together we had built the wall that outlined the first perimeter of my garden. The fence grew from just inside the stone wall and wrapped around the other four sides to meet itself at the gate. I crafted the gate out of aluminum and copper wire strung between a frame and posts Maze built out of treated two by fours. He hung the gate on hinges at the fence posts that he set into concrete. Whenever I came upon more stones, if they were small enough for me to lift, I carried them to the wall and welled loosely around the posts with stones. By now the fence along the north wall seemed to be growing like some ancient Druid construction. A series of stone circles around pillars that stood facing each other. These circles connected to a wall that was slowly surrounding the fence.

Every summer I strung more wires into the gate. I’d wrapped and wrapped it until certain parts of it looked sculptural and began to take on organic forms as if they had grown from the garden. I wove wire around old ceramic pots and bowls, anchoring them firmly into the gate and in these I planted perennial seeds that sprouted anew each season. Cracks in the old pots allowed water to run through and the plants flourished, flowers springing up or drooping over heavy with blooms as each year they grew larger and more luscious. The pots and fragments of pots held daffodils, iris, hyacinth, crocus, and in others day lilies that hung loosely with their roots all a jumble, the blooms gaily heralding each new morning. I planted sunflowers along the south side just inside the fence. Each day they followed the path of the sun.

Now, since Maze had not yet returned from Virginia, I struggled alone with the big, round rock. It was dark gray, and I could not get a good grip on it nor find its edges. It didn’t look like the others in the stone wall and it seemed worn down with age, smooth and without any discernable shape to grab. I trudged up the path to the barn to retrieve the pick axe and the large shovel. I preferred the smaller, square nosed one but this procedure called for a pointed tip and the large one would also give me more traction under the stone.

Normally by this time of day I would have been at the pond, swimming or stretched out on the flat erratic drying in the sun. But today I was on a mission, determined to rout this stone from my garden and move it to the wall. If it was as round as it seemed, I thought it would be possible to roll it out of the garden by myself.

I reached the barn, grabbed the shovel and pick axe and trudged back along the path, bumping against the bobbing heads of Queen Anne’s Lace. Butterflies flitted among the flower heads as I moved past. The pick axe dragged along the ground, too heavy for me to hold over my shoulder along with the shovel. Beads of sweat gathered on my chest and ran down between my breasts. My feet squished a little inside the work boots.

Once back in the garden, I sized up the stone’s crown, estimating how much more of this beast lay below the dirt’s surface. How it had escaped us before I couldn’t imagine. Except that earth was always shifting in the garden and this was not an area where I had planted anything yet. Perhaps it had been buried before but had moved up until I could see it and now it bothered me just to know it was there, like a discordant note in an otherwise harmonious tune. I lifted the shovel and pointed it down at what I thought must be the edge of the rock. With a determined, muscular thrust I aimed it into the ground and jabbed hard. The shovel tip hit rock with a clang that reverberated up the wooden handle and jangled my hands. Instinctively I dropped the shovel.

“Damn.”

With the pick axe raised above my shoulders, I let it fall, aimed at what I assumed was just beyond the edge of the stone. It came down with a mighty whack farther out from the rock’s crown and again struck rock, this time with a dull thud. It sank into the dirt where I let it rest standing on the flat of its blade.

I stood there in the sun and realized sweat was now pouring down my body. I took the hose, turned the nozzle to spray and held it above my head. A fine mist, cool and sparkling in the midday sun, washed over me. I needed to dig around this thing, to get it out of my way. That meant sizing up its dimensions. How deep did it go? Was it really as round as it looked? Or did it have some odd shape that would fool me into thinking I could deal with it alone only to discover I was way out of my depth? It seemed to be too big a task for me and yet I was drawn to it in some perverse way, as if it held some secret that I had to unearth. This rock and I were now in a relationship and I had to know what made us tick. We’re like these stones, pushed around by the life around us. But we’re also like the erratic boulders. Once we stop rolling aimlessly, we find an immovable stability. If we can ever find that place where we are meant to land.

So back to work with the shovel, digging earth, piling it to the side, going around and around the rock until I had dug a moat. Deeper down the ground was hard packed, more difficult to dig. I applied pressure to the top of the shovel and, with my boot heel, pushed it as hard as I could into the ground. After a certain depth it would not budge any deeper. So I pointed the hose to run water into the trench to loosen the harder subsoil. Its always a dilemma just how deep to go with any endeavor. There’s always risk. And the promise of reward. The balance is not only delicate but elusive. Sometimes the risk is not as obvious as the reward seems to be. The risk can take different forms. Some of them subtle, almost invisible.

After the trench had absorbed quite a bit of water, I again applied pressure to the shovel and felt the ground give way ever so slightly. I moved to a new position and with the greatest force I could muster, jumped onto the top of the shovel to let my weight force it down. As I landed, my left foot didn’t quite center on the flat edge of the top of the shovel blade and I slipped and lunged left while still hanging onto the shovel handle. Both of us – theshovel and me –tilted left and in what seemed to me like a slow motion dance, over we went onto the wet earth. The shovel handle lurched towards me and hit my skull above my forehead.

I let out a yowl and, as I lay there in the mud, immobile, felt hands under my arms pulling at me. I fought to pull away but in my dazed state was not quite sure what was happening.

“It’s me,” Maze’s voice came to me. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

He pulled me up into a sitting position. I rubbed my head and realized my hands were covered in mud and I must be transferring it to my hair.

“What are you doing out here like this?” Maze’s voice seemed far away.

I didn’t answer for a minute. The garden began to come back into focus. I saw flowers, beans dangling, a butterfly here and there, green tomatoes, a few red ones now, and then I looked down and spotted the shovel and the giant stone. I struggled to get back up onto my feet. Maze held me down.

“What are you doing?” he asked again.

“Trying to get that big rock out of the garden,” I answered absently, as if we were talking over a cup of tea in the barn and not out here in the sun with me on the ground and a lump forming on the side of my head. I explored it with my fingertips.

“Ow,” I howled.

“What is it?” Maze asked and leaned over me to peer at where I had just touched the side of my head.

“Shovel hit me I guess.” Slowly I looked at the rock. “I can’t tell where it ends.”

“Let me have a look,” he leaned farther down. “Can you stand up?” He parted my hair, wet and matted with mud, so he could see the lump better.

“What are you looking at?”

“You have a lump and you wanted to see where it ends.”

“I’m not talking about that.”

I pushed his hand away.

“What are you talking about then?”

“The stone. I can’t tell where it ends.”

“What stone? What are you doing like this?”

“That one.”

I pointed to the crown of rock with the muddy moat I had dug around it. I grabbed Maze’s arm and pulled, using him as leverage to hike myself up.

He flexed his muscle and pulled me. “I don’t understand,” he said looking from my naked, mud splattered body to the stone and back. “You’re here naked trying to pry up a huge stone all by yourself?” He looked into my face, stared at my eyes, then looked back at the stone. “Why are you naked?” He asked it again sounding a little frantic now. Like maybe it occurred to him that I might be demented or suffering from heat stroke.

At that point, I let go of his arm. I stepped over to the hose, swiveled the nozzle and rinsed myself off , starting with my hair and letting the water cascade over my body. The sun had moved west, its most intense heat over for the day. A slight breeze rustled the leaves and moved through the garden.

“There’s so much you just don’t know,” I answered him finally. I had no idea where this was going to go, but I wanted to lay it all out now, to root out everything that was on my mind.

“Obviously.” He said it dryly, with no trace of emotion. “Like this.” He pointed to my naked body and waved his hand over to the rock.

I sighed. I felt tired, overwhelmed by the whole thing. And then he did something I never would have expected. He reached up and grabbed the V neck of his shirt and pulled at it and tossed the shirt toward the garden fence. It missed but he let it lie there. He grabbed the shovel and walked with determination over to the rock.

“You want it out of here?” he asked, his voice louder and more strident than the situation demanded. “Let’s get it the hell out then.”

With a powerful thrust he sank the shovel at an angle a few inches beyond the rock and pushed it deep into the soil. I didn’t hear the shovel hit rock. He pulled it out and moved a little to the right and repeated this until he had gone halfway around the stone and reached where I had dropped the pick axe. He grabbed it and raised it above his head, with the flat prying side faced forward. His arm muscles flexed. He sized up the position of the pick axe and the rock. Down he came with it in a mighty arc until the axe head landed with a thump half buried under the earth. He left it standing there and brought the shovel around and slid it under the pick axe and using it as a lever against the axe head, he pulled back. I heard the axe tip scrape against rock, saw the rock move slightly upward. Maze grunted as he pushed the shovel farther under the axe head and repeated pulling it back towards himself. His back muscles swelled as he applied pressure. The rock groaned, moved again, and now I came over and grabbed the handle of the pick axe and pulled it back towards Maze. Together we pulled and pulled, pushed both tools farther under the rock, and pulled some more.