Suspended Sentence

by Janice Morgan

  On another note, he said he’d called his boss to tell him he wouldn’t be able to work with the crew for a week. The boss said they were still waiting on a brick shipment and wouldn’t be pouring concrete on a new site until next week. So Dylan could go back to work when he got out. He felt lucky: he’d lose the income but not the job. We talked a bit about jail. I said at least he could read and occupy his time. He said yes, in fact, he was going to bring a book with him to read, a book he had started but hadn’t been keeping up with. It was called Recovery, the Sacred Art: the Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice.

  “Well, maybe it’s time to do that,” I said. “Time to slow down and pay attention to your spiritual life.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I’m exactly where I need to be. I’ll go to jail for seven days, and when I get out, I’ll pick up my life again.”

  “And you’ll be stronger. Well, I’ll be thinking about you.”

  “But don’t worry too much about me,” he said.

  What, me worry?

  Given the circumstances, I decided to pack my bags and visit John for a week. Now that it was August, he was back home again. In a short while, the semester would be starting up with a full round of classes for both of us, and this might be the only chance I would have to get away to see him. I could already imagine myself on the open road, heading east, my cares lightening. Of course, what I really wanted was a clear resolution to the problem—Dylan’s problem, which felt like my problem. Clear answers.

  I could already hear John’s voice on the topic of cars and driving. “Why do you feel you need to give him a ride around a small town?” he would ask. “Why can’t that guy use his bike or walk? It would take him ten or fifteen minutes.” But I looked at the situation differently. Since my schedule was freer now, I figured it was a good thing for Dylan to spend more time under my influence rather than someone else’s—like Jeremy’s.

  Being a cabbie wasn’t glamorous, but it did offer conversational time with my son that I wouldn’t get otherwise. Besides, I’d been reading Buzz Bissinger’s book, Father’s Day, about a dad taking a long road trip with his son Zach to reconnect. The son is autistic and he’s turning twenty-four, the same age as Dylan. Zach has an adult life ahead of him, and the dad has to turn a few emotional corners before accepting that it won’t be the one he once imagined for him. “Zach’s life will take on a shape of its own,” he finally admits. That summer, the way I saw it, my son and I were making our own kind of intermittent road trip, the one through the first year of Drug Court. And so we frequently found ourselves sitting side by side, crossing a different but vaguely similar terrain. After we got to where we thought we were going, what shape would my own son’s life take?

  But for now, an unexpected reprieve. OK, I’ll take it. Like when you’re climbing a steep mountain trail and you keep asking passersby, “How far is it still to the top?” Better not to ask. Better to just take a break. Look around and take in the cloudscapes, the views. Breathe for a while.

  CHAPTER 24: A GARDEN IN THE FOREST

  Once a King and Queen lived with a young prince in a small castle on the edge of a woods. The King and Queen, though they governed their affairs largely in common, had differences that came between them. One day the King left the castle to seek his fortune elsewhere. The Queen stayed at the castle with the young prince, and they were very close. But soon, the Queen took on many responsibilities in the world. The young prince, as he grew older, became restless and unruly. Eventually, the King came back to the castle to reclaim his son, and the two rode off on their travels to a distant place.

  Now, the Queen fell into great dismay. To avoid being alone, she took on even greater responsibilities during the week, and then fled to the big city on weekends to seek refuge and amusement. She met friends and made another life. While she was gone, a small forest began growing around the castle. The trees grew taller and more numerous; vines with heart-shaped leaves crept closer and closer, beginning to cover the doors and windows of her abode. One day, the Queen woke up in her castle, as if from a long sleep, to look around her. “The forest is approaching!” she exclaimed. “Soon, branches will be growing through the walls, and vines will be growing through the open windows of my chambers.” She pondered the situation to look for a solution. “Where will I find a woodsman to help me?” she wondered.

  By mid-August, I was beginning to wonder whether the landscape company would ever arrive to create the garden I had consulted them about earlier that summer. Now that I was making important transitions in my personal life, and with Dylan’s health and college career apparently back on track, I’d finally decided to put some order back into my front yard, where a small forest was fast encroaching on a neglected planting bed. I anticipated taking up gardening again, one of my favorite pastimes. First, however, I would need some assistance. The main landscaper had told me in May that it might take a while for their crew to arrive. When I called again in August, he told me the extreme July heat that year had set them back, and they had a long list of clients before me who wanted work done before late fall. I just needed to be patient; they would get to me eventually.

  Besides, the landscaper had visited my yard; he knew about the overgrown state of the front planting bed. Whole trees had grown up seemingly overnight due to distracted-gardener syndrome. Not to mention the proliferating clumps of ornamental grasses with their plumes, which did not observe the rules of staying in their designated places as part of the décor but cast their roots and seeds out in all directions. Then there were the long, trailing vines of Virginia creeper that wrapped around trees, shrubs, and anything else in their paths, making a person think twice about walking too close to them. Lastly, some tall, thorny weeds with prickly leaves added some unusual textures to the mix.

  Though a longtime lover of trees, grasses, and vines, I learned the hard way when I came to Kentucky that a homeowner’s best friends could end up being a chainsaw and an herbicide sprayer. Either that or you just mowed the entire yard weekly to keep the vegetation at bay. Creeping vines from a derelict planting bed could be an enormous problem. At first, their tendency to climb up the brick exterior of the house and wrap their curling tendrils around doorframes and windows charmed me. The vines would give my abode the aspect of an old English country cottage, decked with ivy. However, I soon found out these picturesque vines could be downright pernicious, infiltrating narrow spaces between windowpane and frame, anchoring themselves in place by inserting brush-like attachments. From there, they could grow, expand, and eventually break the seal of any window. Fortunately, I discovered this destructive tendency while pruning wreaths of them away from the house one day, thereby saving my precious windows from ruin in the nick of time.

  Of course, the vines in my yard weren’t growing into the window frames to be intentionally malicious. They were just quietly positioning themselves to search for more light to make more leaves. That was their growth plan. They were opportunistic entrepreneurs: expanding their inventory, reaching out for new markets, growing faster by the mile than even Dollar General. These green, photosynthetic conquistadors weren’t friends to trees, either. Instead, vines used their same brushy attachments on the bark of tall pines to boost themselves up toward the airy, sunlit canopy, meanwhile smothering the tree’s foliage with their own luxuriant verdure. Learning their sneaky ways, I knew it was imperative to give all groundcovers a good haircut at least twice during the summer—just to keep the house, the tool shed, or any other surrounding structures safe from their wiles.

  The landscaper’s professional gaze scanned the forbidding sight in my front yard, and he told me the obvious. Before any new garden could be installed, all the offending trees, tangle, and underbrush would have to be removed. When we discussed the price of the design installation, he told me I could save on my end if I could get my own crew together to do the prior cleanup work. That way, his crew could focus on preparing the soil and planting the garden itself. I nodded, but inside I was groaning. Where w
as I going to find workers to tackle this job? And since it was getting so late in the season, what if the landscaper never made it to my name on the list before next year?

  That’s when Dylan asked me, “So, Mom, do you have any work for me in your yard like you did last year?” He’d just been released from what he called his “recovery retreat” at the local jail, the weeklong sanction imposed by Drug Court. He explained that while he’d been there, the masonry crew foreman had hired another guy to take his place for the current job, so—while waiting for the next one to come up—he was looking for work. “Didn’t I do a good job for you before, helping to clear all that brush away in the backyard by the fence?” he added. That had been a major task for him and a buddy over a year ago; they’d used a chainsaw to cut down myriad privets that had grown thickly at the very back of the property, along with a few other uninvited guest trees around the house. Afterwards they cleared all the fallen wood by taking it to the curb. Things had shaped up nicely, and Dylan’s share of the earnings had gone toward the purchase of his moped.

  So now, yes, here I was again, needing serious yard work done, and he was available to do it for pay. I wanted the garden to move forward; it was a timely match. After short discussion, we arrived at a price per hour: $15. Dylan could see there would be plenty of hours; this would be a project to tide him over until the masonry crew hired him back for the fall. As for me, I already knew most people would not do this kind of hard, physical labor, or they would rent heavy equipment—a small dozer, for example. But Dylan viewed it as workout time. Now all those protein supplements and bench presses would pay off. We agreed I would keep a tab of his hours, and we would confirm them each day he worked.

  In August, the planting bed was full of tall, withered grasses along with assorted trees. Earlier in the summer, Dylan’s sponsor Arlo had come over to spray the grasses in anticipation of their removal. The drought of this particular summer had hastened their demise, but now they would have to be dug out of the dry clay soil. Several trees would have to be cut down as well: the protruding ironwood stump that lived up to its name in sheer toughness and the “dwarf” black pine, which grew tall enough now to completely block the view from my front window. Then there was the small clump of persimmon trees that dropped their waxy, gooey fruits every fall in heaping quantities in just those areas near the front walkway where any visitor would be sure to step on them. Even John, a confirmed defender of trees, wanted the persimmons to go, after innumerable shoe cleanings. Once the orange, squishy mess hardened on the bottoms of his running shoes, it was as troublesome to remove as well-baked chewing gum. Besides, two more persimmon trees down by the street could easily carry on the tradition all by themselves. And then there were the ubiquitous privets that cropped up underfoot and were soon waist-high. All had to go, all except for the tall hemlock tree on the northeastern corner of the mound; it was a sentinel guarding the house. Way back when the house was first built, this tree—a live Christmas hemlock—was the first one we’d planted in the front, and it had had to dig its roots down into some horrendous clay soil, some of it so gray it looked like something out of a cement truck. That the tree survived to grow into its present lofty form was nothing less than miraculous. For all I knew, those deep, penetrating roots helped to produce the soil that everything else around them could grow in.

  For the persimmons, I knew by now to hire a company to remove them, because of the sheer volume of wood to be cut and the stumps to be ground down below ground. Professionals had the equipment to do this job in half a day. That done, Dylan could move on with the rest. To remove the smaller superfluous trees that had moved in later, we rented a chainsaw again, this time for an afternoon. So for the first day of work on the project, Dylan spent several hours cutting them down, then sawing the wood into logs and branches small enough to be hauled away.

  The second day that Dylan was able to work on the feral planting bed happened to be the Saturday before classes started at the college. Over the phone, he told me he was still transitioning off an anti-depressant he didn’t like. The previous night, he hadn’t gotten to sleep until 4 a.m. Hearing this, I could only shake my head. There was always some issue with the meds he was prescribed; either they didn’t work as expected, or they worked for a while and then stopped working, or there were unpleasant side effects. Today, though, once he arrived, energy drink in hand, he said he was feeling better and ready to go. He told me he’d been gearing up for the new semester: got his books, a planner, was getting organized. Standing with him outside, I decided to work outdoors, too. After the gray rains of the previous day, this particular Saturday was clear, sunny, and refreshingly cool—only in the low 80s. Perfect for yard work.

  While I weeded and trimmed around my backyard roses, Dylan weeded the front dirt mound and then tackled one of the larger grass clumps. There would be plenty of those to dig out, including ones near the hemlock. They were all escaped ornamentals that had cleverly found ways to reinvent prairie life right in my front yard. Next, he took on the ironwood tree stump. It was one thing to take down a tree with a saw, but we knew the entire stump had to removed to prevent it re-growing from below. As he dug a hole around it, Dylan could see several live roots that had to be cut clean through to release it. Some were as big around as my arm. He took great swings with the heavy-duty mattock we had just purchased. It took a while, but eventually he covered the bottom of the wheelbarrow with short pieces of the severed root limbs.

  He called to show them to me; we could see there was live, white wood under the bark. The root chunks took on strange animal shapes as they lay randomly strewn against the weathered metal. The tree stump was a marvel; we had to admire it. Though part of it seemed dead as a doornail—in fact, was rotting—another part of its root system was still live and green. As Dylan remarked, if we hadn’t taken the trouble to get it all out, these roots would still be sending out small, leafy shoots, some of which we had already seen, ones that would eventually sabotage any new landscape plantings.

  During one of his breaks, we walked out to the street on one side of the yard and then walked over to a neighbor’s house to observe the space starting to open up from another angle. You had to get some distance to see the possibilities. Dylan stood next to me, feet splayed in a painterly pose, eyeing it over his thumb, like a young Monet. The proposed canvas offered a good wide space, anchored on one corner by the tall hemlock tree. The only trick was to somehow mentally erase all the unwanted vegetation within it, then imagine something else. At one point in its history, this had been a mounded planting bed. But now, the undulating front curve of the bed was blurred by intruding lawn. Then, too, after well over a decade, the raised effect was not as noticeable, either. Both of these features needed to be accentuated. That would mean digging a narrow, clean trench all along the front and side of the garden to provide a smooth line, then later on, adding topsoil to bring the whole mound higher and give it more of a feminine contour.

  As we talked about what needed to be done to rehab the garden, Dylan said he didn’t see any reason why he couldn’t do the whole job, not just the clearing phase. He could do the installation as well. Hadn’t he seen his dad construct garden landscapes for clients in several different states ever since he was a little kid? He understood how you started from a clean space, then put in any major structural elements—like boulders. After that, you prepared the soil for plantings. He knew about making a drawing, about how the garden itself could be viewed as a three-dimensional painting. He had the know-how and the strength to do the construction, while I had most of the tools he needed in the shed. Only, he would have to do the work in phases, since classes would be starting. He assured me he’d still have times in the afternoon when he could work and, of course, on weekends. After the clearing phase, he would re-dig the outline. Then, if the nursery would bring in topsoil, he was pretty sure he could borrow a tiller from Arlo. With that, he would work a mixture of compost and peat moss into the soil. Finally, he could put in the p
lants and cover the remaining soil. It would be a step-bystep process. I liked the idea, as it meant the garden could be done sooner rather than later. Dylan was motivated, and this would be an excellent project for us to work on together.

  As for the actual garden, I needed to figure out what plants to put into the space once it was cleared. I conveyed to Dylan what some of the possibilities were: small bushes and shrubs, maybe one specimen tree that would stay relatively small. After my experience with false dwarves growing into giants, I was intent on keeping the scale to the miniature side. I also wanted the garden itself to be minimalist, like a Japanese garden. As we walked along the rough, lumpy bed, now looking more like an Arizona desert with a few crater-sized holes in it, we both tried to imagine what would achieve this effect. Also important was a touch of color; I wanted roses. Without the persimmon trees, there would be much more sun on the west, and roses love sun. Dylan, who has a much better spatial sense than I, immediately liked the idea of planting some around the curved walkway to replace the tall, plumed grass clumps that had gotten out of control. Perfect. Then, we both liked the idea of placing an ornamental tree right in the center of the garden, which corresponded to the space between the front windows. We agreed the tree should have a horizontal growth pattern to fill the space gracefully.

  In the afternoon, we went to the nursery to get some mulch, see about topsoil, and look at plants. As we strolled among the greenery, we found what we were looking for: Japanese maples, blue pacifica junipers, some other low-growing evergreen types. When a sales assistant approached us, we took turns asking questions about the plants: how tall would they get, how wide, what kind of environment did they like? We especially investigated the Japanese maples from all angles. Dylan and I agreed that one nice specimen would harmonize with the house and hold its own near the giant hemlock. We found a small tree with an interesting shape we liked. The nurseryman assured me it would not get too tall, and that in any case, it would be slow-growing. “We’ll take it,” I said. The assistant put a tag around the slim trunk.