Backyard

by Norman Draper

  Marta began walking back toward her car. She tried to carry herself with the purposeful nonchalance of someone focused solely on the stroll that lay ahead of her. Deep down, however, she was troubled and confused. She wasn’t sure whether she should be reveling in a job well done, or berating herself for sinking to new lows in her service to Livia’s gardening gorgon.

  8

  The Complete Backyarder

  Over six years, the Fremonts had put body and soul, and credit card into their backyard. They sank more than $30,000 into scores of garden center purchases and in building their arbor in the back, the arched trellises, and an intricately set boulder wall, which they had later taken down, redistributing the boulders in various combinations around the yard.

  They weeded, planted, watered, and fertilized. Once the children had grown into teenagers, they were able to take the tire swing down from the ash tree, and the big, bare, trampled-on spot underneath it was now trying hard to grow fescue and Kentucky bluegrass for the fourth time, with mixed results. Other than that, the backyard had made the transition from jangling, unkempt juvenile playground to restful adult Zen garden.

  Mostly, they had been in accord as to how their backyard would look. Apart from the hideous compost compound, there was one jarring note for Nan. That was the five-foot-high wood carving of Miguel de Cervantes, whose Don Quixote was a hero of George’s, because, Nan figured, they were both such a mass of stupid delusions and strange heroic notions all endearingly mixed in with each other. They had paid an artist $2,500 against Nan’s better judgment to carve that figure into the stump of the silver maple they had had to cut down because its roots had been coiled around it when it was planted, slowly strangling the tree. The carving had been fashioned with a chain saw, chisels, and awls, sanded lightly, and painted in lifelike colors, which were fading now. The entire bloody thing was a constant irritant to Nan, who considered it gauche and stupid. She just couldn’t get the juxtaposition of something literary and symbolic and the Vermont Castings gas grill. She was also tired of explaining to visitors who it was and why it was there, which she didn’t fully understand herself.

  “No more compromises,” she had said once she beheld the finished product, firmly convinced of her own superiority in the realm of backyard conceptualizing and design.

  She sighed resignedly as she glanced at Miguel de Cervantes’s trim and spike-bearded form, with a quill pen in one hand and large book in the other, and his weird painted eyes, which always seemed to be looking at her. The good thing was that no further compromises had been necessary.

  The backyard was a seasonal thing; the winters in this particular part of the upper Midwest being far too frightful to allow any consideration of spending much time outdoors unless you did something silly, such as skiing or ice-skating. Once the mercury started regularly topping out at forty, George made a big to-do of putting on his sunglasses, shorts, green-and-gray Muskies home ball cap, Jethro Tull T-shirt, and flip-flops, mixing himself a gin and tonic, then heading out to the back patio to officially inaugurate the new season. That usually happened in early-to-mid-March. It was about the same time that Bluegill Pond thawed enough to film over with glistening water and sprout the CAUTION: THIN ICE signs planted in its shallows.

  The backyard flourished as human habitat from mid-April to early November, by which time the temperature had plunged, the light had gone, and all the summer life had had its fall color fling and been gathered up for compost.

  Nan and George figured November 14 to be the average date they retreated to the hibernating shelter of a spacious house and on that last day, they’d give the backyard a wake, sprinkling a small pile of leaves and withered plant detritus with their remaining gin and lighter fluid, then burning it at dusk, each reciting a few thoughts concerning the highlights of the season just past and a prayer praising God’s goodness for providing them with such an earthly bounty. Then, they’d go inside and prepare for the winter by knocking down a couple of shots of the drink they adopted for the long, dark season ahead: Glenlivet single malt Scotch.

  The Fremonts had taken no vacations of any particular note for the last four years. The last time was the trip to Hawaii—but the beaches at Waikiki, the volcanic fissures of the Big Island, and the enchanting rain forest of Kauai had left them feeling empty and unsatisfied.

  “You know where I wish I was?” said Nan as they dutifully clicked away with their cameras at a giant plume of molten lava that spewed skyward. “Sitting in the backyard, watching the roses open up, with a g-and-t in my hand.”

  “Yeah,” George said. “With a big slice of lime . . . Who needs all this lava stuff anyway?” So, much to the chagrin of their children, who had loved Hawaii, and had wanted to reprise that trip with others to equally interesting and exotic locales, that was pretty much the end of any traveling of note for the Fremont clan.

  On average, in the spring and summer, and into the early fall, Nan and George would spend six to seven hours a day, weather permitting, in the backyard. That counted mowing, planting, transplanting, watering, raking, fertilizing, mapping out changes and new features, and just enjoying themselves sitting on their patio, either alone or entertaining guests.

  The exceptions were Tuesdays and Thursdays, when afternoons were relegated to running errands. Other than those, a normal day would find George and Nan sipping their morning coffee on the patio and capping off an afternoon with a few strategically timed drinks—Sagelands merlot vintage 2005, of course, and the incomparable Bombay Sapphire gin. If the weather held up and the mosquitoes and yellow jackets behaved, George would fire up the grill in the evening. Then, they’d enjoy an alfresco dinner on the patio with whichever of their three children were free from variable summer work schedules or the lure of their interminable movable feasts with friends.

  It was generally between three and four thirty in the afternoon when George and Nan regretfully abandoned the backyard for the squalor of their respective offices. George would pound out greeting card doggerel for any and all occasions, and design inventions. He had sold one of those—The “Whirl-a-Gig Bubble Blower”—to a major toy manufacturer for $350,000 five years ago. Nan toiled away meditatively with knitting needles and yarn as a locally respected maker of custom purses. Her creations had even made their way up the chain from consignment stores to high-end department stores such as Cloud’s and Deevers.

  The $350,000 wasn’t going to last forever. Nan and George agreed that, with children entering college and a big mortgage still remaining on their house, they would have to ramp up their search for some more lucrative ways to earn money than making women’s handbags and banging out greeting card prose.

  They soon discovered that job prospects for people who want to reserve most of their day for backyard work and relaxation were limited. They would keep looking, they told themselves, at the leisurely pace that best fit their lifestyle. There was no rush; something would turn up. Besides, who had the time when the duties of the backyard grew so demanding! They made charts that plotted the dates of each plant’s blooming and each tree’s leafing, from the smallest impatiens to the loftiest silver maple, then compared them with the logs for the four previous years during which they had kept similarly detailed records. Those notebooks also contained dates and times of plantings, fertilizings, and waterings, as well as when and where the Miracle-Gro was applied.

  The Fremonts’ annual calendar started as soon as the snow melted and the agonizingly slow appearance of buds and flowers began. They watched the big thermometer nailed to the clematis-bearing trellis flirt with fifty, embrace it lovingly, then soar to a balmy sixty. Once the last killing freezes retreated into the past, George opened up the water valves and carried the hoses slung over his shoulder to screw into the outdoor faucets, and Nan surveyed the yard to determine which annuals she would plant this year.

  The bridal wreath spirea would need some severe trimming. So would the fast expanding dwarf Korean lilacs, but that would have to wait until after they blo
omed, which, at that time of year, would still be more than a month away. Nan would always inspect the concrete patio critically. She wished they could tear it up and replace it with a cedar deck raised maybe a foot off the ground. It was her pipe dream. Having just had the arbor constructed in the far back, near the woods, last year, they couldn’t afford much in the way of new construction, unless it involved a little job or two for Jerry Bigelow, their favorite neighborhood handyman.

  This was a time of slow change, with much backsliding. A hard frost struck in the middle of April, with the mercury tumbling to the mid-teens. The season’s final snow came on the last night of the month. It showered down in a blinding rush of quarter-sized flakes that piled up in the night to five inches, then melted suddenly with the sun’s powerful and blinding appearance on May 1.

  Spring showers started in late March, and the first thunder—a pusillanimous affair accompanied by low-wattage lightning—rumbled across the backyard on April 27. The leaves on the lilac bushes had started to come out by then. The buds on the silver maples and their lovelier kin, the sugar maple, were swelling. The grass cast off its deadened brown, though it was still not growing. Juncos still pecked at the detritus under the bird feeder; they would be flitting around on the ground another week or so before starting their journey north. Up above, the slaty, snowy gray of winter gave way to the jumbled, billowing cloud masses of May.

  During the course of a backyard season, birds, ducks, and all manner of small mammals searched for nests and valiantly attempted to keep the circle of life spinning. The backyard was a place for endings, too. George and Nan once found the body of a yellow-bellied sapsucker at the base of a hydrangea. Baby squirrels fell out of the trees to die broken-boned and squalling on the ground. Bad-tempered yellow jackets died in the jets of bug spray George squirted into their nests on August evenings.

  There were friends in the backyard, among whom they counted the chipmunks and birds, and the mallards from the lake that strutted, in mating pairs, or odd-number combinations of males and females, across the yard during the late spring and early summer. There were enemies, too: raccoons and rabbits, field mice, voles, and the swarms of mosquitoes that could only be warded off with a ring of citronella candles lit around the perimeter of the patio. There were things that were neither. A snapping turtle once dragged itself with painstaking deliberation across the yard looking for a place to lay eggs. They approached it, fascinated, but kept their distance; snapping turtles can snap off a finger as if it were a matchstick.

  Other, more menacing things passed during the night. Most notable was a teenager accused of stealing a car and fleeing from the police, whose flashlights probed against the walls of their bedroom. Strange voices awoke them to the knowledge that their backyard was not so sacrosanct that it couldn’t be violated.

  What other things passed that way they could only speculate. Slithering snakes, owls the size of dogs, deer coming up from the river valley to the south and following the creek to their neighborhood. Other people? They tried not to think about that.

  One night as the days edged toward the summer solstice, they were given no choice.

  9

  Things That Go Snip in the Night

  There was a disturbance in the backyard.

  It had been waking Nan up for the past three nights, and it was waking her up now. It was interfering with the usual life-force sense she had in the middle of a summer’s night: that of thousands of little flower souls charging themselves up to fulfill their next day’s brilliant destiny . . . with a bit of help from their human friend, of course.

  It was subtle. What exactly was it? The unrelenting movement of night toward dawn? A possum poking around at the orange rinds and onion skins in the compost pile? She strained to hear. Was it even a sound? Or was it something about the scent of the night that filtered through the screens of the open windows? Could be. George had often told her that she could smell a dog doing its business in St. Anthony.

  Awake, she could only hear the soft collisions of a million leaves in the night breeze and the distant and sporadic engine drone of interstate traffic.

  There it was again, this time unmistakably a sound, and an unnatural one at that. Their backyard was being violated. Something was out there that shouldn’t be. Nan shivered. After three nights of keeping her own fearful counsel, she determined that some help from what she hoped would be a stalwart spouse was required. She woke up George, whom she knew all too well was not as conversant as she was with the subtle ways of the night, and would have to be told outright what was expected of him. It was three fifteen a.m.

  “Listen!” she whispered as she shook him. “Listen!”

  “Listen?” said George groggily. “Listen to what?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I just know there’s something out there.”

  “Out there? Where?”

  “In our backyard. Go check, please. But be quiet and don’t wake up the kids.”

  “I could scream at the top of my lungs for ten minutes and it wouldn’t wake up the kids,” he gurgled. With that, he rolled over and adjusted the pillow with a deep sigh. Nan shook him again. Outside, the motion detector clicked on, flooding the patio with light that eerily illuminated the shades covering their windows.

  “George, the light just went on!”

  George sat up, rubbed his eyes, and gazed at the shades, which flapped against the windows.

  “Hmmm. Windy.”

  “Our backyard is being violated by something. Please go check it out.”

  George blinked rapidly at the shades, then reached under the bed for his Johnny “Smokestack” Gaines bat. It was a genuine Smokestack Gaines batting practice–used bat, not just some cheap imitation used as giveaways to lure kids to the ballpark. The name was burned in black into the barrel of the 36-inch, 32-ounce Louisville Slugger.

  George had bought it from a friend back in 1996, when Smokestack Gaines was just a rookie. Now, the aging star, two-time MVP, and shoo-in for the Hall of Fame was nearing retirement and poised to make another run at the home run crown. The bat was cupped at the top, tapered into a thinness at the handle that gave his lightning swing even more torque. A chip had been torn from the knob on the handle, which made this particular bat useless for Smokestack Gaines but quite a prize for the fan—George’s friend—who picked it up off the ground. He already had another Smokestack Gaines bat—this one undamaged—so he sold the marred one to George for $75. Now, it was worth $1,000, easy.

  So, what the hell was George doing keeping it under the bed as a homeowner’s weapon of last resort against an intruder? He had always meant to replace it with one of those metal bats the boys had collected during their years playing ball for the Livia Athletic Association, but he had procrastinated. Now, he was preparing to ruin his Smokestack Gaines bat by cracking it over the head of some idiot running around in the sacred backyard. Where was the justice in that?

  “Here goes,” he said, jumping out of the bed, Smokestack Gaines bat in hand. “Coming with?”

  “No, I’ll just lie here and pray for you.”

  George rubbed the grit from his eyes as they became accustomed to the gray semi-visibility of the dark. He plodded heavily down the hallway. An intruder! The full impact of the threat he was facing finally breached the wall of semi-somnolence that had kept him moving obediently ahead, and allowed him to open the back door. He stopped. What if it was an intruder?

  “Nan!” he whispered hoarsely.

  “What?” came the faint response.

  “What if there’s somebody in the house? Shouldn’t we just dial 911?”

  “There’s nobody inside,” said Nan in the loudest whisper she could muster. “There is somebody or something wandering around in our backyard. Or maybe it’s nothing. And what would we tell the police, that I just heard a weird sound? If you run into something, just hit it with the bat. Only make sure it isn’t one of the kids first.”

  They had seen lots of things activate the flood lamps�
�� motion detectors. Leaves whirling across the field of vision. Steam vented from the dryer in the basement. Bugs. Once, they saw a raccoon prowling among the shrubs and rose-entwined trellis at the far end of the light’s reach, and its eyes shone at them, two perfect orbs, mirroring the light, suspended in the black void for a moment until the full animal came into view.

  The scariest thing, by a long shot, was the nocturnal creature that had clung precariously to the bird feeder perch, too light to lever up the counterweight and bring down the squirrel shield.

  “What the hell is that?” Nan had said as they stared at it through the kitchen window. Its furred head moved jerkily and confusedly sideways, then up and down in the glare of the floodlights. “Squirrel of some sort?”

  “No squirrel. Squirrels are diurnal.” The tiny creature turned its face toward them, and they both gasped. It looked like the face of a tiny old man, deformed or mutilated into something gray, jerking, and mute.

  “It’s a baby opossum,” George said. “Gotta be. Night creature. They would eat those seeds.”

  They looked it up in their National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mammals, and discovered that it was a flying squirrel, which they had seen twice before, its shadowy form gliding from one backyard maple tree to another.

  All these sightings muted much of the panic the sudden burst of motion-activated light would have ordinarily triggered in them. But this was different. There was no opossum, no flying squirrel, no raccoon, no nothing that George could see through the doorway, though he was beginning to suspect that a flying leaf or twig might be the culprit.

  What was that snip? There it was again. Snip. And again.

  “Hey!” George shouted through the screen. “Hey!”