Duane could formulate no clear answer to that question—perhaps he hesitated out of nostalgia. He and Karla had always gardened together—they both took great satisfaction not only from doing the work but from discussing the success or failure of this crop or that with each other. Karla was always eager to test the latest horticultural products or techniques—she and Duane spent many pleasant hours drinking margaritas on their patio and discussing their eggplants or their rutabagas. One reason they both looked forward to the summer months was because the gardening absorbed them and brought them together. In a way it was to their late middle age what sex had been to their youth: something they never got tired of; something, even, that kept them feeling like a couple.
So, after the accident, one of the most difficult adjustments Duane had to make was to accept the fact that he would never have Karla to garden with again. He would have to go it alone or not go it at all. If he had been blessed with a wetter spring or a cooler summer he might have adjusted in time to at least make a respectable job of it, but the elements were unforgiving and his energies drained by the effort to comfort his family and deal with the daily crises that Karla had once dealt with as competently as she had once dealt with the blister bugs and the tomato plants. He gave up, and the garden burned.
When spring came again—the spring after Karla’s death—Duane determined to do better. He didn’t hire a gardener, but he did pay a competent young farmer to plow the garden plot. As soon as the weather was warm enough for planting, Duane began. In the greenhouse they kept a huge pile of seed catalogues, more of which arrived every week. Duane took a sheaf of seed catalogues back to his cabin and pored over them at night, looking for new varieties of vegetables to plant. He sent off his orders and seeds began to arrive. When the time came to plant he was ready, and from then on, every day until full summer, he worked in the garden, carefully keeping watch over every plant. In the last few years he and Karla had become more interested in organic gardening—after some thought Duane decided to keep this year’s garden fully organic. He planted three varieties of corn, he planted kale, he planted leeks, he planted three kinds of tomatoes and eight kinds of onions. One corner of the garden was reserved for herbs.
This year, as if repentent, the spring provided him with an ideal combination of warm days and slow rains. The garden flourished, and so did the weeds, although no weed was long safe from Duane’s hoe. There were a number of gardening buffs in Thalia, people he and Karla had compared notes with over the years. Though busy with their own gardens, some of these neighbors would drop by in the late afternoon to admire Duane’s vegetables, by far the greatest variety to be found within the city limits of Thalia. The one who came by most often was Jenny Marlow, Lester’s wife. Jenny loved to garden, but had had a hard time satisfying herself in the last few years because of Lester’s many legal problems.
“Every time I think I’ve finally got a good garden going, we have to move to a smaller house,” Jenny told Duane. “We’re just living in four rooms now. I don’t know how much smaller these houses can get.”
Duane admired Jenny. She had carried on gallantly although her husband was a nearly insane person who had been jailed twice and might yet be jailed again. It could not have been easy to be the wife of a man who was constantly the butt of local jokes, but Jenny held her head up, did her job, and stood by Lester unwaveringly. Despite her troubles she preserved a serene demeanor.
One day in June with a nice little drizzle falling, Duane and Jenny walked up and down the long rows of his garden, admiring this vegetable and that. Standing amid the green abundance Jenny looked at Duane sadly for a moment. Though they had never discussed it Jenny seemed to understand that he had made a special effort with this year’s garden as a way of showing his devotion to Karla’s memory. The wonderful garden was Duane’s way of paying tribute to his late wife.
“I guess you miss her like I’d miss Lester, if he died,” Jenny said, putting her hand on his arm for a moment.
“Yes, I do,” Duane said, though he was guiltily aware that he was not telling the whole truth. He did miss Karla, sometimes acutely; but the fact was that it was easier to miss her than it had been—at times—to live with her. Alive, her energy, her questing was so unceasing that it was impossible to ignore it—for long stretches Karla went through life as charged as a naked wire. It was easy to love her but hard to find quietness with her. Often he had not had the energy for the level of engagement Karla wanted; often he just reached a point where he had nothing to say. Being a widower was not a better state, but it did take less energy. He could think of himself a little while working in Karla’s garden.
But he didn’t want to talk about complications of that nature with Jenny—perhaps she sensed them anyway, guessed that there were times when he didn’t miss Karla, when he was happy just to be working alone in the garden, or walking at his own pace along the country roads.
There were aspects of widowerhood Duane just did not want to get into, particularly not with someone as smart as Jenny Marlow. He was grieved, but he wasn’t devastated, and he liked to think that Karla would have understood that and considered it a healthy attitude—the attitude he liked to think she would have had if he had been the one to smack into the milk truck. Karla too would have been grieved, perhaps devastated for a time; but she wouldn’t have been stopped. “Shoot, we’re all just passing through,” she liked to say—it was one of her favorite expressions. If he had been the one to pass on through, Karla, in time, would have coped.
“This is the biggest garden I’ve ever seen, Duane,” Jenny said. “Who are you going to feed all this stuff to? You’ve got more food here than five families could eat, and there’s not a single one of your children at home. There’s just you.”
The question Jenny asked was one that had begun to nag Duane himself. Who was he going to feed all these healthy vegetables to? He might occasionally drop off a few vegetables with Dickie and Annette, in Wichita Falls, and of course any of the children were welcome to drop by and pick what they wanted, but the fact was they never did. Both Julie and Nellie had rich boyfriends who fed them in the best restaurants in Dallas or Nashville or Los Angeles or New York or wherever their airplanes took them. Jack was in Montana and Rag had died in the winter, a victim—in only six weeks—of cancer in both lungs. The last time Duane visited her in the hospital she expressed amazement at the swiftness of her own demise. “This stuff’s got me nearly killed off before I even knew I had it,” Rag said. “Reckon it was the smoking?”
“I have no idea what it was,” Duane said.
“If there’s shopping malls up in heaven maybe I’ll meet Karla and we’ll go on a spree,” Rag said. “Sonny Crawford lost both feet and he’s still stumpin’ around. I guess you can spare both feet but you can’t spare both lungs.”
Once Rag was buried Duane closed and locked the big house and sold all the unwanted cars his children had left in the driveway or the carport. The big house, filled with life for some thirty years, was now only filled with shadows.
The fact that he had a huge garden, but no one to feed the vegetables to, was an irony he had been thinking about even before Jenny Marlow mentioned it to him.
“I think I may just open it to the public,” he told Jenny. “There’s poor people in this town who would be glad to get these vegetables.”
“I think that’s a fine idea,” Jenny said. “And you know what, I may be one of them. Can you spare a little kale?”
“You can have a little of anything,” Duane assured her. “Or a lot of anything, for that matter.”
“I don’t need a lot of anything,” Jenny said. “Lester hates veggies. He’s managing to stay alive on Fudgsicles and barbecue potato chips.”
The next day Duane bought some plywood, and painted it white. Then he rummaged in the trailer house until he found an old set of child’s paints that had once belonged to Barbi. With the paints he wrote several signs and stuck one by each of the four roads into Thalia. The last on
e he put up right by the garden itself. The sign read:
KARLA LAVERNE MOORE MEMORIAL GARDEN
Organic Vegetables Free to the Public
Please Be Neat with Your Picking
DUANE C. MOORE
He ran a similar notice in the local paper for three weeks. The response was immediate and gratifying. Since the garden needed all but full-time attention Duane had taken to working in it early and late and spending the hot hours in Dickie and Annette’s old trailer house, which was still parked at the back of the property. He had tried resting in the big house at first but found he could not be at ease there. Dickie and Annette had taken everything but one old couch, an air conditioner, and a few glasses out of the trailer—what they abandoned was exactly what he needed. But the best thing about the trailer house was that its rear window allowed him to keep an eye on the garden and observe the people that came to it. The trailer was a perfect observation post—no one need suspect that they were being watched.
The first people who visited the garden were not poor—most of them were neighbors he had known for years—but these first visitors either took nothing at all or limited themselves to a few tomatoes and an ear or two of corn. They paid close attention to the garden, though—it was clear that they regarded it with wonderment, almost with awe. Nine people came the first morning, all but two of them elderly neighbors.
Then, late that afternoon, a black family came—the only black family in Thalia.
“My lord,” the mother of the family said—she was a woman in late middle age. “Been a long time since I seen a garden like this, Mr. Moore.”
“Thanks, Gladys—I’m proud of it,” Duane admitted.
Gladys and her husband and grandchildren took mostly green beans and a variety of greens. The next day they came back and got more. They looked nervous when they saw Duane working, perhaps nervous that he might chide them for reappearing so soon. But he just joked with them a little and let them know they were welcome to take what they needed.
There were a few Hispanics in town, most of whom worked in the farming country to the east—it was not long before they began to arrive to check out the garden. They paid Duane many compliments and rewarded his generosity with modest smiles. They took corn, peppers, radishes, a few spring onions, and an eggplant or two.
Often old couples would pull off the highway and check out the garden—strangers, travelers, people on their way from someplace south to someplace north, or vice versa. These passers-through rarely took anything from the garden, but they didn’t treat it cursorily, either. Many of them walked slowly up every row, stooping now and then to inspect the quality of the vegetables.
“A garden this big is a passel of work,” one large-handed old man said. “Momma and me put up a garden nearly this size when we was younger, but hell, I wouldn’t be up to it today.”
“There’s things growing here that I don’t even know the name of, and I know the names of plenty of vegetables,” his wife said.
Though most any kind of person was apt to stop by and admire the garden and pick themselves a mess of this or that, by far the most regular users were the disadvantaged young white families of the town—roughnecks or pipeliners who had been laid off, food stamp mothers with two or three unkempt children with bewildered eyes. They all came to the garden tentatively, on the first visit, not investing much hope, as they might stop by a garage sale hoping to pick up a usable hot plate for fifty cents. Often they would mope around the garden for an hour or so, confused by the abundance, not knowing quite what to choose, perhaps not yet convinced that they could choose. Some Duane had to encourage by offering gatherings of whatever had just come ripe. He had overplanted tomatoes—he had enough, he felt, to feed the whole town, so he urged a pound or two of homegrown tomatoes on everyone who stopped by. The young mothers quickly became convinced that Duane meant what he said: that the food was free. They perked up a little, and made sure their children said thank you, when they got back into their cheap cars, laden with peaches and corn and snap peas, and drove off.
Soon young farmwives from the circle of farm communities just to the east began to visit the garden. These women were not so much poor as curious, eager to find out about vegetables they could try in their own gardens, when it came time to plant again.
Word soon spread to the nearby communities—Duane was even pestered by reporters and TV crews, but he refused all requests for interviews and hid out in the trailer house when the reporters became too persistent. He had a big garden, but it wasn’t big enough to feed the whole area. He wanted it to be a resource mainly for the local poor, who needed it most.
One day, to his surprise, Gay-lee and Sis drove up, with Shorty in the car. He had finally given up his room at the Stingaree Courts. Once he started his garden he went to the Courts less and less, until he finally came round to Marcie Meeks’s view, which was that it was absurd to pay forty-eight dollars a night for a room he never used.
He felt a little sad when he turned in his room key, even so.
When the women drove up Shorty hopped out of the car and ran around the outside of the house, lifting his leg on every second bush. When Duane walked over to Sis and Gay-lee and gave them each a big hug they both looked shy and a little scared. Neither seemed comfortable to be standing in the middle of nowhere, on the outskirts of a small town.
“Duane, you sure got a big garden,” Sis said. “My grandma, she used to garden like this—she grew every kind of thing that grows. But after she passed ain’t nobody had time to put in this much garden.”
“If I was a vegetarian this would be heaven, I guess,” Gay-lee said.
“Well, but you don’t have to be a vegetarian to enjoy a good garden,” Duane said. “I’m real glad to see you two. What’s been happening over at the Courts?”
Both of the women hesitated. They seemed tongue-tied.
“This my day off,” Sis said. “Gay and me just decided to get out into the country and take a little drive.”
“Is that where you live?” Gay-lee asked, pointing at the big house.
“No, I live in a little cabin about six miles out,” Duane said. “This house is where I used to live when my wife was alive and all my kids were living at home.”
Duane walked them through the garden, showed them what was good, and piled their car with his choicest produce before he let them leave. He knew Sis had many children—she could use all the vegetables she could carry. Though Gay-lee didn’t cook he insisted that she take some fresh peaches and a box of dewberries for her girls.
The gift made Gay-lee choke up.
“We miss you,” she said, wiping a tear.
“Sure do,” Sis said. “We don’t get too many gentlemen out at the Stingaree.”
“We don’t get any gentlemen, now that you’re gone,” Gay-lee said.
“You two are the first people ever to refer to me as a gentleman,” Duane told them, as he was putting a final sack of roasting ears into their car.
In response Sis came over and gave him a big tight hug.
“Well, you is one,” she said. “You is one even if you didn’t know it.”
“You may miss me but my dog don’t,” he said.
Shorty hopped in the front seat of Gay-lee’s car as if he had been riding in it all his life. He was riding in the middle, between Sis and Gay-lee, his paws on the dashboard, when the three of them drove away.
9
DUANE WAS DEEPLY GRATIFIED by the way the big garden was received. Particularly, he was pleased by the fact that everyone who took vegetables from it—young, old, and middle aged—took care to obey the sign and do their picking neatly. There was no wastage. Young mothers kept tight control of their little ones, so that few plants were trampled. Only once or twice had he even found a cigarette butt in the garden rows.
Karla, he felt sure, would have been very pleased by the offering he had made in her name. He liked to think she might have planted a public garden in his name, if he had been the one to die
.
In July the good slow rains ended and the temperatures began to climb. Despite constant picking the garden still flourished, but it began to need regular watering. Duane spent the early mornings and the late afternoons here and there in the garden with his hose or his watering can.
Near midday one Wednesday, when he was resting under the whirr of the air conditioner in the trailer house, he heard a car drive up. It parked, and two doors slammed, but Duane was in a half doze and did not immediately get up from the couch to see who was in the garden. But in a few minutes curiosity got the better of him—he was always interested in what kind of people came to see the garden. He got off the couch, splashed water in his face, and peered out his back window at the two visitors. Two women in khakis and shorts were on the far side of the garden plot. One wore a floppy hat with a large brim and the other a little mashed-down green cap of a kind he had seen only once before: the morning when he had spied on Honor Carmichael and her friend as they painted Jody Carmichael’s store.
The visitors were, in fact, Honor Carmichael and the same friend. Honor carried a large straw basket and would occasionally stoop down to inspect a vegetable—sometimes she would kneel down and sniff it. Her friend had a slight limp—she steadied herself with a cane. Duane could not remember that she had used a cane when the two were painting the store, but perhaps he had missed it in the early dimness.
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