by Bob Tarte
Eager to see the expert at close quarters, I caught up with them in the backyard as Henry shook his head at the triangular bed just outside the basement door. “We’ve got problems, here,” he muttered. “The plants are too crowded again. You’ll have to give the roots more room. You’ve read Thomas Merton on the virtue of solitude? The soil doesn’t seem to have sufficient aeration, either. See that whitish color? That might be a case of excessive alkalinity, and different mulch could help. I’ll need to do a chemical analysis.”
“Watch where you step,” pleaded an agitated Linda. “That’s a Jacob’s ladder behind your foot.”
An arm’s length from the unsteady Henry, I surmised a possible reason for his lurching movements as an aroma of alcoholic spirits washed over me. A small man in his sixties, slightly stooped, he had the classic drinker’s nose with a latticework of veins, along with the telltale droopy eyes. “That’s one ladder you don’t want to step on,” I suggested.
“Saint John of the Cross composed a poem about Jacob’s ladder,” he told her as he wrested his notebook loose from the envelope. “It was either him or Hildegard von Bingen, but you’ll want to read Saint John of the Cross. I’ll bring him along next time.” He scribbled a memo to himself.
“I’d like to meet him.”
“Henry, this is my husband, Bob.”
His head snapped in my direction and he bounced in surprise, as if I had materialized at his side that instant. “A pleasure,” he told me. “The Catholic mystics embraced the concept of evolution as God’s consciousness at work in nature. You can see it in a garden. Before I leave today, I’ll take a soil sample of each flower bed and test them for you.”
“If you could just pull out some of the hostas for me and divide them, you could start working right now. There’s plenty to do here,” Linda said.
“It’s all about science.” He turned to me. “Science and religion make perfect partners.” He slurred the final s. I shot a wide-eyed look at Linda, but she ignored me.
“I wrote down some ideas on how I’d like to see the beds arranged, if you want to come inside,” she told him. “Would you like iced tea or a glass of water?”
“Caffeine is bad for my health.”
Sitting at the dining room table, he shuffled through Linda’s copious notes listing her goals for the various gardens, her design ideas, and plants she wanted to try. He set the pages aside and pulled out a sheaf of his own from his manila envelope, which showed signs of starting to tear along one side. “You’re a writer,” he informed me. “I’ve been working on a brochure to get my business started. Mostly, I do volunteer work at men’s shelters.”
He gave me a business card, which read, “Henry Murphy, Certified Master Gardener, Big Ideas for Every Space. The Purpose of Man on Earth Is to Glorify the Most High. Substance Abuse Counseling. Tax Preparation and Accounting Services. Leave a Message at the Just Around the Corner Bait Shop and Ammo Shack. Tell Them Henry Sent You.”
“That’s a lot to take in all at once,” I said.
“Wait until you see my brochure.”
Linda grabbed the first page of her notes, while Henry offered me a copy of the most confusing promotional sheet I had ever seen.
“Here are the things I would like done with each bed,” Linda said. “The plants that need thinning, the perennials I’d like to add, and suggestions for improving the soil quality.” Henry took the sheet from her and laid it on the table.
“So, what do you think so far?” he asked me.
His promotional sheet mixed claims of various areas of expertise—from gardening to business administration—with quotes from Thomas Aquinas and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. “Well, you might want to add something about your qualifications and the benefits you can provide your customers. And you would probably want to limit this particular piece to the subject of gardening. I’d downplay the philosophy.”
“Just a second,” he told Linda, when he saw she was about to speak. “I have to write this down while it’s still fresh in my mind.”
“Do you have time to do anything today?” she asked.
“I’ll take soil samples on my way out, and I may photograph some of your beds. If you don’t mind, I’d like to walk around down by your swamp to see if there’s a good place for planting a few cranberry bushes. I’ve always wanted to grow them. I won’t charge you for that, of course,” he chuckled.
“Why don’t you take Linda’s notes home with you and study them, so that you can start right in next time you come,” I suggested.
“That’s a good idea. And if you think of any more ideas for my brochure—either of you,” he added, so that Linda wouldn’t feel left out, “let me know. But you’ve given me plenty to work on.”
As Linda was seeing Henry out the door, Mark, the pest-control expert, called. She waved good-bye to the master gardener, then ducked back into the house to explain why the yellow jacket nest was no longer a problem.
“He said what?” I asked Linda after she had hung up.
“He said that raccoons don’t eat meat. I told him that we knew they did, because we lost several ducks to raccoons. He said some other animal must have been responsible, so I told him what Mrs. Martini had said about raccoons eating yellow jackets.”
“Did he know who Mrs. Martini was?”
“Martoni,” she corrected me. “I don’t know, but he was adamant that raccoons were vegetarians.”
I thought that this phone call put an end to the expertise for the day. Nearly an hour later, however, Linda hollered upstairs that I should take a look out the window. At first I thought I was supposed to see the cinder block – size woodchuck that had been hanging around the bird feeder. Then I noticed a section of brambles quivering on the edge of the swamp. The tremors reached a climax as an out-of-breath Henry burst through.
“Is everything okay?” Linda asked when she met him in the front yard.
“Just finishing my work,” said Henry, smiling despite the mosquito bites that peppered his face and arms. His shoes and cuffs were caked with mud, which he tried to shake off before stepping into his bumblebee car. “You wouldn’t believe the place I found for planting my cranberries.”
HE WOULDN’T HAVE found any space on my mother’s street. Cars lined the block, and I considered driving back home, parking in our swamp, and walking back to my mom’s. I was afraid there’d been another medical emergency until I noticed a cluster of yellow balloons tethered to a GARAGE SALE sign in front of the Teany house. A chubby man and an adolescent boy examined a pair of greenish dressers, while a frowning woman jiggled the headboard of the matching bed. A cat lay curled up beneath a wicker chair that had seen better days a couple of decades ago. Joan was just pulling out of Mom’s driveway, but she stopped when she saw me on the sidewalk.
“Are they gutting their house over there?” I asked her. “It looks like everything they own is on the lawn.”
Joan rolled her eyes and changed the subject. “She’s not doing well,” she told me in a low voice, though Mom was indoors with the windows shut. “I asked her if she wanted to go to the sale with me, but she told me, ‘It’s too gloomy a day to do anything.’ “Normally my mom would have been in the Teanys’ yard chatting happily with the neighbors about current events and people’s illnesses. But she had lost her motivation to do much of anything.
“Did you tell her it was her chance to see some really ugly bedroom furniture?”
“It’s not even what you’d call cloudy out.”
Joan waited for an elderly man in a station wagon to creep past the sale, trying to decide whether or not to stop, then headed back to work. I went inside, wishing that Linda were there to coax a chuckle from my mom with the story of our master gardener. My low-energy delivery didn’t leaven her weighty mood, though the saga of our yellow jackets reminded her of the time that my father had jumped off the stepladder while swatting a bee.
“Why is it the good always seem to die young?” she asked.
“Well, he
was eighty-four,” I pointed out, “but I know that doesn’t make it any easier.”
I helped her pay the bills at the dining room table while we shared a tea bag and commented on the chocolate chip cookies the family in back of her had sent over. “Yours are much better,” I pointed out. “Yours actually have chocolate chips in them.”
“Someday I’ll feel like baking again.”
I returned home in the throes of her slump. I couldn’t recall a single instance over the decades when she had ever acted glum before. Glumness simply wasn’t in her repertoire, and she had never coddled anyone else who indulged in it. As a melancholy teen, I’d often been admonished, “Don’t be such a droop.” In my college years, when I had complained about depression, she had offered the remarkable observation “It’s all in your head.” Emotional problems needed to pack up and relocate to the torso in order to merit consideration. So her development of head trouble worried us. Joan ate lunch with her almost every weekday. I usually stopped by three afternoons a week, and Bette Ann drove in from Fort Wayne for weekends as often as possible and phoned her every evening. But we knew that even if we could spend twenty-four hours a day with her, our presence was still no substitute for the loss of my dad.
I brooded about this as I retreated to bed for a nap. Moobie snuggled beside me without demanding to be petted. She had an instinct for knowing when people were upset. Unlike Penny, who would cringe beside my file cabinet at the first sign of a bad mood, or Stanley Sue, who would squawk indignantly if one of us started to cry, Moobie was a sponge for negative emotions. She absorbed people’s pain and transmuted it into purring. As I drifted off, I thought about how some people waited their entire lives for a cat as nice as her. And while I had dismissed her disinterest in our birds at first, it truly was extraordinary. I decided to let Linda talk me into keeping her.
The phone rang twenty minutes later. My mom’s unexpectedly cheerful voice reported the good news of finding a green rubber band on the floor of the kitchen.
“That’s really something,” I stammered. Raising myself on one elbow, I struggled to wake up. “You can never have too many rubber bands.”
“I found a red one on my dresser last night. And a paper clip, too.”
“I guess you’re all set for quite a while now. Two rubber bands and a paper clip.”
“They weren’t there before,” she said. “They were just like the ones that Dad used.”
It dawned on me what she was saying. Whenever my dad had practiced his weekly bill-paying ritual—originally at the bedroom card table and in later years at his desk in the sunroom—containers of rubber bands and paper clips had lay open and ready for use. I associated these with him to such an extent that if he had been a tribal leader in an indigenous culture, I imagined, his totem would have been a paper-fastening product.
“I had just cleaned earlier, and the rubber bands and paper clips weren’t there,” she continued. “Don’t you think he’s leaving these behind to let me know he’s watching from heaven?”
“That sounds exactly like what he would do,” I said, even though I didn’t think it was. Despite my flirtations with the hose demon, the book imp, the anomalous lemur, and their highly relative relatives, I was conservative when it came to interaction with the dead. And if my father did have the ability to communicate from beyond the grave, would he do his talking through bits of rubber and metal? His ghostly, cardigan sweater – clad outline in the darkened upstairs hallway was the route a traditionalist like my dad would have taken. But I was happy that my mom had chosen an optimistic explanation rather than simply deciding she had overlooked the rubber bands and paper clips earlier, or had seen them and forgotten. I leaned toward the forgetfulness hypothesis, because her memory had been misfiring lately.
A month earlier, my friend Bill Holm and his wife, Carol, had bought a sprawling house in an exurban development, enriching a farmer and his previously unexploited woodlot. To flaunt their undeserved prosperity, Bill and Carol had held an open house and invited my mom.
“I’ll bet cleaning this house is a lot more work than cleaning up your apartment,” my mom had told Bill as we hung around the kitchen peninsula, close to the appetizers.
“Well, we haven’t lived in an apartment in several years,” Bill reminded her. He made a Jackie Gleason “wow” face after he sipped his drink. “You and your husband had been to our house in Heritage Hill a couple of times.”
“That’s right,” said my mom as she gratefully accepted the gin and tonic he offered her. “Ooh!” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s strong. Just the way I like it.” After taking another swallow, she observed, “I’ll bet cleaning this house is a lot more work than cleaning up your apartment.”
“You can say that again,” Bill unhelpfully replied.
At the time, I chalked up her repetition to the strain of facing a social situation without my dad. But this hadn’t been an isolated incident.
“I think I found another rubber band on the bathroom floor last night,” she said, snapping me back into the present.
“It’s nice to know that Dad is saying hello in his own way.”
“Speaking of saying hello, I got a nice phone call yesterday from that friend of yours from school,” she told me.
I sat up in bed. An annoyed Moobie jumped down to the floor. “What friend from school?”
“That girl who was at the funeral home. I have her name written down somewhere.”
“Not Eileen? It can’t be Eileen Kucek.”
“That’s who it was,” she replied. “She called to say she enjoyed meeting me, and she wished we could have talked longer. I told her to come over some night and watch a television program with me, and she said she would.”
I could hear my mom’s wall clock ticking in the background. “That’s nice of her,” I said with some reluctance. “And that was all she called about?”
“She did say she wanted to get in touch with you. I hope you don’t mind. I gave her your telephone number.”
A wave of dread shot through me. “Why did she want to talk to me?”
“What was it?” my mom mused.
“Something about one of our classmates? She keeps in touch with a lot of people.”
She hesitated. “No, I don’t think that was it.”
“Something about another funeral?” I could just imagine her wanting to carpool to the cemetery. But that didn’t ring a bell with my mom.
“I remember,” she told me as a truck roared past our house, rattling the bedroom windows. “She wanted to give you a duck. She said it needed expert care.”
CHAPTER 4
A Duck Out of Water
The lack of a sound rather than a sound woke me up. I must have been sleeping as shallow as a canary when the car shot past our house with a hum of tires on asphalt. Then, as if an invisible hand had hit the pause button, the humming suddenly stopped, snapping my thin thread to the land of oblivion. An instant after surfacing to my normal state of semicrabbiness, I heard the squeal of brakes, the sharp crack of something breaking, and then another squeal. I lay in bed, heart thumping, hoping that I had misheard and misinterpreted.
“I think someone just ran off the road,” Linda told the darkened room as she threw off the sheet and pulled back the window shade. “I’d better call 911.”
“Wait until I have a look.”
I didn’t want to have a look. A spate of driver’s education films during my high school years had taught me that car wrecks tended to squash heads and lop off limbs in a disconcerting fashion, and the patch of Highway 21 in front of our house was a vortex for nasty accidents. Three times in the past ten years medical helicopters had flown in to rush unconscious victims to hospitals. Most of these accidents could be blamed on itchy motorists passing slowpokes who puttered along our winding, hilly, two-lane road at a mere sixty-five miles per hour.
Other vehicular mishaps were testaments to human ingenuity. One man had ditched a burning tanker truck loaded with diesel fuel ne
ar our mailbox, a drunken teen had rolled his car in front of our barn and hightailed it into the brush before the police arrived, a young mother had managed to slide her SUV into the lone tree stump at the end of our driveway one winter morning, and a groggy driver had left the road and landed in the woods near the spot where I now found myself once again directing a flickering flashlight beam.
“I didn’t find anything,” I told Linda as I came back in.
Neither did the sheriff’s car, whose spotlight had caught me gawking on the grass as he crept up and down a half-mile stretch of shoulder before departing with a roar of fuel-injected impatience.
“But something happened. I heard the brakes squeal, a cracking noise, then another squeal,” I reminded myself.
“The brakes squealed, there was a crack, then another squeal,” Linda concurred.
“You know, it was exactly one year ago today when we had that fatal accident.”
“It was?”
“No, but I thought I’d try to blame this on a ghost.”
Linda went back to bed. Too nerved up from the nonexistent accident to sleep, I plopped down on the living room floor on Linda’s faux sheepskin and promptly began to fret about my dad, worry about my mom, and fear that Linda might burst out of the bedroom and trample me in the dark.
My dad was foremost on my mind. The more I thought about him, the more he seemed to evaporate. I couldn’t even fix a clear mental picture of his face. I recalled how years ago he had briefly grown a mustache. It had taken me a few visits home to notice, then another few visits to realize that he had shaved it off again. I couldn’t even remember now when the mustache event had taken place, leading me to wonder if I’d dreamed the whole thing, or if the mustache imp had hidden his facial hair from me.