Grandpapa's Garden Read online

  GRANDPAPA’S GARDEN

  By Deborah Smith

  Gardening is an instrument of grace.

  —May Sarton

  The southern soil knows the heart. It remembers, it cries, or it can sit in stony, dry silence when its passions tell it to sleep. In the garden, in the field, in the window box or the clay pot, our roots grow deep and our leaves unfurl with stoic hope.

  Grandpapa’s roses bloomed their prettiest the spring he died. They mourned his passing and celebrated his life along with the rest of us, a little bewildered by the invisible change of seasons, their roots shaken, but sturdy overall, thanks to Grandpapa’s careful nurturing. The roses, like us, had been established in rich earth. Grandpa, after all, was a gardening man.

  He cultivated the roses in memory of Grandmother, who died years ago. In his loneliness he sought solace through the one thing she had loved nearly as much as him and their children: Flowers. Before her death he claimed to be a no-nonsense man, a man who put his values in livestock and paying crops, but after she was gone he learned the power of temporary beauties. And so in her honor he created a scarlet red rose that grew as wildly as a long-limbed child, twining over fences and peeking from hedgerows with dozens of brilliant blooms, each big enough to fill a tea cup. The rose won many awards, which he displayed in Grandmother’s china cabinet along with her most delicate chintz plates, a porcelain celebration of living art.

  Grandpapa took on the look of a hunched garden sprite in his old age; he could frighten a child at first glance, but children always noticed his eyes right away. Warm and blue and laughing, they were as friendly as old-fashioned petunias, and then the children smiled at him. He had large, strong hands, jug ears, and a frizz of gray hair that had once been coal black. He had a craftsman’s logic, a poet’s judgment, and at heart was most at home among heavy farm equipment and men who spit tobacco. He had four loyal brothers, all younger than he, and so it was Grandpapa who inherited the family farm, a sprawling mountain home, and the unspoken title of family patriarch.

  The furrows of his life had been turned and replanted many times; he had harvested more than one kind of crop, and some said he was not much of a farmer because he couldn’t abide too much of the same produce. He laughed and replied that it was a shame to bore the earth. And so one time he planted nothing but easy hay crops for a few years, so he’d have time to serve as mayor of our town after a tornado nearly wiped us off the face of the earth. He planted self-sufficient corn while he worked for the state agriculture department as an extension agent, during that era when an agent might still drive out to your barn and help you mend your tiller; he planted moody tomatoes while he sold tractors for a living, and had a fling with cabbage when he operated a bulldozer service.

  He learned to farm from his father and his mother, and thus the urge to plant, grow, and harvest had borne in him many generations of know-how, an infinite progression of instincts for rain and sun. He snorted at newspaper horoscopes but could pinpoint the right phase of the moon for any seed. He chaired the county fair for two decades; he spoke his piece to governors and senators as president of the district farm co-op.

  He killed a man in self-defense when he was twenty years old, stopping an armed robbery at the local service station. Then he never touched a gun again.

  He chased every pretty girl in the county as a handsome young man, then upset them all when he found the perfect wife at a church reunion two counties over. He loved her faithfully, called her the best woman in the world, and together they raised children who came home regularly and loved them both, and grandchildren who learned a charmed, caterpillar’s-eye view of the world among his flowers. His life was a tapestry so rich only his garden could do it justice. When the illness came he thought he would beat it; he tilled and planted between treatments, he spread the white specks of fertilizer like a man feeding chicks, talking to the earth as he fed it. He left us unexpectedly, with weeds still to be pulled, mulch to be spread, twigs to be pruned. Life and weeds, as a lesson to us, continued without him.

  His death scared us, shook our faith in springtime, sent us to our Bibles, our liquor cabinets, and our wisest friends. We were on unfamiliar ground; the sun too brilliant, the air so sweet it could wash tears from the eyes and bring a soul to kneel on the begging dirt. Peonies still bloomed, daisies and irises and daylillies and gladiolas sprang up as before, Queen Anne’s Lace and Crown Vetch still found their sly way into the beds like uninvited guests depending on charm to ensure their welcome. Family and friends came as worshipers to take small cuttings from Grandpapa’s roses, dividings from his mums, seeds from his poppies and columbines and other plants. They wanted the heirloom inspirations of the life he had lived so fully; they wanted his secret for happiness.

  Yet when a distant relative died a few weeks later, superstitious old ladies whispered over their chicken-salad luncheons, “Death comes in threes.” When a beloved young cousin announced her new pregnancy, we congratulated her but worried about portents and timing. She had miscarried three babies before this, and the doctors had warned her and her husband to stop trying. My cousin had listened with the best intentions, but life often takes root even when you try your hardest to give up hope.

  She beamed with terrified happiness. We made her sit in a cushioned willow chair among the shade of old oaks each time the rest of us met to tend Grandpapa’s garden. Through all the months that followed we kept his covenants, but we turned dark, worried eyes to the beloved young cousin, as she grew larger and paler through the summer and into the fall. It was never enough to wish for the best result; you had to get out into your life’s garden every day, working your rows, poking around your beds for signs of trouble, plucking out the weeds and spraying the insects before they sucked the life out of your courage. Aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and cousins met in endless consultations over birth, death, and crabgrass that year, working Grandpapa’s garden, keeping our worries inside the borders of his fieldstone paths, pruning our fears as if they were blackberry briars.

  In the crisp cold of October we raked the jewel-toned leaves and burned them in fat piles, taking comfort in their autumn incense, watching their smoke drift gently into the sky. The moon rose plump and yellow, a harvest moon, and with our ripening young cousin we carved jack-o’-lanterns from small pumpkins grown from plants Grandpapa had set out immediately after the last spring frost. He still lived; his season’s handiwork had born fruit and all was well, so far, with this garden’s memories.

  Then November came, and with it the silver, iced dew, and the sun retreated. The ground in Grandpapa’s garden grew still and bare, and we waited, we waited with held breath, in that quieting time of the year, when new life is hard to imagine. She began to suffer, our young cousin. Small ailments, and then larger ones, her time so close that we could feel the boy child move, defying the coming winter. We prayed that he dreamed of warm suns and gentle rains, that the promise of life could lure him safely into our arms.

  On the coldest day of January, the doctors said his mother would not live through the night with him inside her. They opened her, they slipped him from her warmth, mewling and gasping, searching for the sunshine. Infinite dark hours followed. Many of us went to Grandpapa’s garden during that eternal night. We were drawn helplessly to the rich, quiet heart of our family, speaking to God under the shadows along empty flower beds, and beside roses with bare vines.

  She lived. Against all common sense and signs of the moon, she lived. And he lived, too, our new little boy, our next generation who would tend the garden. In the spring, when he had spent enough time with us to know how far his small hands might reach before ours reached out in response, I brought him a small offspring from Grandpapa’s roses, bearing one brilliant sca
rlet bloom, sacred and alive. He touched it in velvet wonder, and smiled his great-grandpapa’s smile.

 

 

  Deborah Smith, Grandpapa's Garden

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