Ida coughed. “I bought them a few camping tents. Hardly a bribe.”
I took a deep sip of my mimosa. “So where do I come in? That is, if I were willing to entertain this madness for a minute?”
“The only category that’s up for grabs in the competition is Most Unusual Garden. That’s where you come in.”
“Most Unusual Garden. As in dead? Would that win? Or maybe Best Weeds? Or how about Most Likely To Harbor Giant, Venomous Snakes?
“We’re serious,” Erma said. I wasn’t certain she could be anything else. “You have the perfect space for a showcase—that darling little walled garden down at the bottom of your back lawn.”
“Huh? Ben hadn’t gotten to that when he died. I’ve never even opened the gate. It’s got to be a jungle in there. What was it originally?”
“A Shakespearean garden,” Mimsy said. She sniffed and ran her fingers under her eyes to wipe away the tears without smearing her mascara. “Dear Astrid was so like you. She was an English teacher, and she loved to read. She only chose plants that were mentioned in Shakespeare—either the plays or the sonnets. It was a perfect little garden, and it could be perfect, again. Look, Peggy, we’ve got all spring to clean up your garden and replant. By the time the contest happens, you’ll be ready with far and away the most unusual selections of any gardener in Bigelow County. You’ll certainly beat that stupid bunch of bonsai trees in Geraldine Matthews back yard down in Bigelow.”
“And your walled garden is quite a small area,” Ida said. “Not too much for a new gardener like yourself to handle, in terms of maintenance.” She pointed to the up-to-now silent member of the group. “Valerie is a professional landscaper. She can help lay out the beds and plan what goes where.”
I set my mimosa down. Took the situation by the horns. The roots. Something. “How is using a professional landscaper different from Ham pardoning a hedge-trimmer killer? Wouldn’t this be cheating, too? Besides, why doesn’t Valerie do her own most unusual garden?”
Valerie, who didn’t look nearly old enough to be a member, shrugged her silk-shirted shoulders at me. “Professionals can’t enter. But I can advise an amateur. I just can’t enter one of my own gardens.”
Everyone looked at me hopefully, and waited.
I must admit the idea of a Shakespearean garden intrigued me. All that stuff that Ophelia wandered around sticking in people’s faces before she jumped in the river. Rue? Rosemary? I’d have to go home and start reading. What was rue anyway?
Whoa! Halt! Stop! Ben had died in the zinnias. I wasn’t going to encourage my yard to kill anyone else. Had these women drugged the mimosas with something that sapped both my good sense and my will to resist? I had to get out of there before I committed myself. Or needed committing.
I stood up. “I’ll let you know.” My knees wobbled. I had no business driving down Ida’s driveway, much less up South Bigelow to Mossy Creek. “Uh, Ida, is there anybody sober enough to drive me home?”
Ida smiled. “I hope to shout.”
Her housekeeper poured me into the passenger seat of Ida’s favorite car, a silver, ‘58 Corvette convertible. “Where’s James Dean?” I slurred to Ida, as June slid into the driver’s seat. “Thanks for the party. Marilee will drive me back to get my car as soon as I sober up.” And after I recovered from what was probably going to be a horrendous hangover. I suddenly remembered why I never drink.
“We’ll be over to assess the walled garden Wednesday afternoon,” Ida said and waved with calm satisfaction as June drove me out of the yard.
I groaned and let my head fall back against the seat. Oh, God, what had I gotten myself into?
* * * *
The next morning I fortified myself with caffeinated Diet Coke, Excedrin and cheese toast, then dragged out my Shakespeare compendium and began to take notes.
By ten o’clock, I was bored out of my mind. It had been at least thirty years since I’d read all the plays. I vowed to re-read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at least, because the Mossy Creek Theatrical Guild planned a midsummer production of it and Anna Rose, the director, had asked me to give a little talk to the actors about the play’s history. But as for the rest . . . I could probably make it through them again—well most of them. I wasn’t certain about Titus Andronicus. But I would never in a million years be able to plough through those whiny sonnets.
I threw the book—the Rockwell Kent edition, so it weighed about ten pounds—across the living room. Dashiell snarled at me. “The hell with it,” I said and picked up an old Agatha Christie I hadn’t read in four or five years.
After lunch, I felt so guilty I put on my heavy rubber boots and walked down the back yard to Miss Astrid’s walled garden. They weren’t walls, really, just wrought iron fences covered in so much ivy they looked solid. I think I strained a trapezius muscle forcing the rusted iron gate open enough to slip inside.
What a sorry sight! Thank God the early-April day was too cool for the copperheads to be out of hibernation yet, because the tangle of dead shrubs and fallen tree branches were perfect hiding places. Around all four sides were raised beds that had once contained flowers, but now they held only winter-wilted weeds and dead things. Hopeless, lonely things, like me.
In a brick square at the center of the garden, beneath a small tree of some kind, sat a rusty iron table and four elaborate iron chairs. They all needed a good cleaning and a couple of coats of Rustoleum, but they were still pretty and had obviously been fine at one time.
I sank into one of the chairs. “Boy, talk about T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland. Great place to kill a victim in a murder mystery. You could hang the object of your deadly affections from the tree over the table, or feed the poor soul some poisonous mushrooms . . .”
People in mysteries were always being bumped off by poisons plucked from their flowerbeds. I knew from my reading that you could distill digitalis from Foxglove, but I’d never actually seen a foxglove and had no idea what one looked like. Or deadly Nightshade either, for that matter. Were poisonous plants easy to grow? Were they pretty?
I hadn’t a clue.
I came home from the Mossy Creek Library that afternoon with a backpack full of gardening books and books on poison plants courtesy of Hannah, the head librarian. Turned out that Foxglove was a pretty, spikey whitish-pinkish-maroon-flowered thing, and that deadly Nightshade had purply blue flowers that would look good in a bride’s bouquet. The books so engrossed me that I didn’t hear the telephone ring until the answering machine picked it up.
“Mother?” Marilee’s voice. “If you’re there, pick up. We want to hear all about the garden club party.”
As I lifted the receiver, I thought for the first time since moving to Mossy Creek, My daughter married a Bigelow. She is a member of the enemy camp.
So I told her I’d had a wonderful time and would probably never go back. Hah. Let her pass that on to Claude to be passed on to the rest of the Bigelows.
Actually, Claude Bigelow was a nice young lawyer. A little stiff, but charming. The trouble with Bigelows—the family—I’d decided, was that even when they were obnoxious—like Ham and Ardaleen—they were often successful and smart and hard to resist. Mossy Creek’s own die-hard Creekite newspaper publisher, Sue Ora Salter Bigelow, couldn’t bear to divorce John Bigelow, the good-looking, thirty-eight-year-old president of the Bank of Bigelow County. They slept together but didn’t live together. They were raising a well-adjusted teenage son, Will Bigelow, but pretended they weren’t a family.
Mixed marriages between Creekites and Bigelowans never ran smoothly.
Ben and I had just thanked our stars that Marilee hadn’t married an itinerant actor from her college infatuation with the theater. When we’d met staid, dependable Claude Bigelow, we were thrilled at his pedigree and assumed she’d loosen him up. Unfortunately, instead he tightened her.
“Here, Claude wants to speak to you,” my daughter said.
I closed my eyes.
“Good evening, Mother Caldwell,” Cla
ude said cheerfully. “Marilee is extremely worried about your being alone in that house all the time. You know you’ll always have a place with us down here in the city. Just say the word. We’d be happy to sign you up for bridge at the club and origami lessons at the senior center. My Aunt Ardaleen would love to introduce you to her circle of friends. None of them are readers, but—”
“The word is No, Claude, but thanks for the offer.” I’d as soon move into the lion habitat at Zoo Atlanta.
He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Listen, Mother Caldwell, I know Marilee is encouraging you to join the Mossy Creek Garden Club, but trust me, those Creekite women are eccentric and socially unpredictable.”
I made a solemn vow to deck my son-in-law the next time he called me Mother Caldwell. Right after I told him good bye, I phoned Ida Hamilton Walker.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m in. But you may not like what I want to do.”
Ida laughed.
* * * *
The amazing thing was that my fellow gardeneers of the Mossy Creek Garden Club not only loved my idea, they agreed to pitch in with things I hadn’t even known were available.
Eleanor of the Roses said, “Now, many of the plants you need grow wild or volunteer. First we have to find them, then we have to transplant them, and finally we have to coax them to live in captivity. It won’t be easy, but at least this early in the spring most of them should still be dormant.”
“Mushrooms will be harder,” said the eighty-five-year-old Eustene, back from seeing Mama at the nursing home. “They get downright ill-tempered if you try to make them grow where they don’t want to. They like shade and lots of wet dung.”
“A bunch of the plants, like the lilies of the valley, we can just order from the plant catalogs,” said Mimsy. “And I can let you have some of my iris and daffodils.”
“For pity’s sake, Mimsy! Iris and jonquils will be dead as doornails by late June,” said Erma.
“Oh. You’re right, dear.” She perked up. “Then how about a castor tree to shade the patio and some cannas? And Oleander? They’ll all look lovely against trumpet vine and English ivy growing up the wall. Oooh, Dutchman’s britches! We have to have some of that.”
About seven that night we ordered pizza and ate it on my veranda with sweaters pulled around our shoulders. At eleven Mimsy and Eustene were the last to leave. As Eustene started out the door, I asked, “This may sound rude, but just how old is your Mama?”
She laughed and waved her hand. “About the same age as dirt.” She leaned over close to my ear. “I’m her baby. She married young.”
My first day alone pulling grass and dead things in the walled garden, I came close to chucking it all until Valerie showed up with a half-dozen mystery book tapes from the library.
“You do have a Walkman, don’t you?” she asked.
“I use it when I walk on the treadmill.” I hadn’t been on the treadmill in months and had no idea where the tiny tape player was, but I wasn’t about to admit that to Valerie the Trim Valkyrie.
“It’s the only solution,” she said. “Working alone like this when it’s chilly and dreary gets old fast. To be followed by working alone when it’s so hot you can’t draw an easy breath.”
“When is it fun?”
“Maybe two days a year. But those days are worth the effort.”
Working alone wasn’t so bad with a mystery tape playing in my ear. Not that I was alone that much. Seventy-six-year-old Mimsy—the aged elf—and sixty-four-year-old Erma made me their project. It didn’t surprise me that Erma was strong, but Louetta could work us both under the table. Little by little, the bones of the walled garden emerged—naked, of course, but that was better than overgrown. Eustene dragged me out to the secluded corner of Ida’s dairy-cow pastures to dig up wild versions of the plants I needed and show me how to cosset them properly once I got them home.
“Eustene,” I said as I followed her—twenty years my senior—up a grassy hill with a canvas sack full of plants over one shoulder, “starting next week, you can visit me and your mama at the nursing home.”
I went to bed most nights so achy I prayed for a nice friendly tornado to keep me indoors, and considered buying liniment by the case.
Whenever Claude and Marilee would drop by, or when Claude sent his Bigelowan yard man to cut my grass, I’d lock the wrought-iron door on the garden and sit on the back steps reading until I was alone again.
“I’m glad you didn’t join the Creekites’ garden club,” Claude said. “Those women only cause trouble.”
I nodded innocently.
One day, I heard Marilee’s horn in the driveway. I barely had enough time to shut the garden gate on Eleanor and Erma and get myself up the hill to meet her.
“Mother, you’re huffing and puffing.” She put her arm around me. “Are you having heart problems? Are your ankles swelling? Why on earth are you so dirty? And what on earth is that smell?”
It was well-rotted goat manure for the mushrooms, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t trust her as that I knew she’d tell Claude, and everybody would sit around their Bigelow dining tables and laugh at me.
There’d be plenty of time for laughter when the state garden society judge arrived.
When we weren’t working on my garden, the gardeneers and I worked on the other members’ gardens. I discovered there were little wheeled carts to keep me off my knees and gloves to protect my hands. I refused to adopt Mimsy’s old-fashioned sunbonnet, but I did buy a big straw hat at the Wal-Mart in Bigelow. The stack of unread mysteries beside my chair grew daily. Dashiell took to sitting on them and lashing his tail at me.
One morning at seven, Ida called me. “Get to Eleanor’s. Pronto!”
I drove up to find I was the last member to arrive. “Who died?” I said as I got out of my Land Rover.
Eleanor began to keen.
God, somebody really had died.
Ida, who was dressed in an elegant blue dress-suit and had been on her way down to Atlanta for a statewide mayors’ conference, took my arm and whispered. “Root gall. Come on. This is serious.”
I already knew that roses had to be sprayed for aphids, watered just so, planted just so, and fed just so. Now I discovered that the real horror for rose growers was root gall—some kind of rot that not only ate the roots of infected roses but poisoned the soil around them. Infected roses had to be dug up and burned. Then the soil around them had to be disposed of as though it were loaded with Strontium 90.
Eleanor was no help. She sat on the ground and wept. “They did this!” she wailed. “Those Bigelow devils! I’ll give them tent caterpillars!”
There were only three rose bushes with gall, but that was a disaster because one of them was a brand new variety, Mrs. Ida Hamilton Walker, that Eleanor planned to unveil in Ida’s honor during the contest. “The roses are really so near to being blue you have to look real close to see the purple.” She wept. “One of the big rose wholesalers has already offered me a fortune for the budwood.”
“Is that the only one?” I asked, staring at a sickly-looking rose bush.
Eleanor sniffed. “I have three more in the greenhouse, but they’re so much smaller, they’ll never catch up in time.”
“All we can do is try,” Erma said and flexed her meaty biceps. “Now, where do you want us to bury this dirt?”
“In my heart,” Eleanor moaned.
* * * *
The next crisis came a month later. Again, Ida’s morning call: “Get to Mimsy’s. Pronto.”
Eleanor had wept about her roses, but Mimsy fumed about her herbs. “A pig! Would you believe it? It’s ten miles to the nearest pig farm. You can’t tell me that some of those juvenile delinquents from Bigelow didn’t tote a blasted porcine assault weapon over here in the middle of the night and turn it loose in my thyme! You know they say the evil Fang and Claw Society is still in existence. Stupid high school fraternity pranks! Should call it the Snout and Hambone Society.”
<
br /> “What pig? Where?” I asked stupidly.
Mimsy turned on me. I backed up a step at her expression. “That animal is somewhere between here and Bigelow dragging the weight of four loads of rock salt in its fat rear end.”
“You shot a pig?”
“If I could have found the box of buckshot, we’d be eating barbecue.”
“Have you called the police?”
“The chief says without the pig we don’t have any evidence. Let me tell you, if his daddy were still alive we’d be heading for Bigelow to do a little pork roast by now. Battle Royden didn’t need ‘evidence.’ He could smell a Bigelowan pig prank a mile away. Just because he couldn’t ever find that carnival elephant. . .” She trailed off into irate muttering.
I sighed. Police chief Amos Royden is a conscientious—some would say too conscientious—young lawman, unlike his legendary father. Amos is a stickler for real evidence as opposed to gut feeling, which was all Mimsy had to offer.
“Ooh, that man!” Erma said, revving up, again. “Ida, sometimes I think you ought to fire him.”
“Don’t be silly,” Ida said and quickly changed the subject. “Now, let’s see what we can do to repair the damage. And we’d better set up some electric wire around the garden so this won’t happen again. I’ll call Dan MacNeil at the Fix-It Shop.”
Sitting on Mimsy’s back porch that evening drinking iced tea, we agreed that we might very well be hearing the opening salvos of a war we’d have to fight alone. A war no man could enter. A war of gardeners. Women gardeners. Earth Mothers. We were all widows with the exception of Eleanor, and she wasn’t the save-me-you-big-brawny-man-you type. So I bought a heavy padlock for my garden gate and considered strewing broken glass around the outside, but was afraid I’d hurt one of the neighborhood cats. Ida bribed the Boy Scouts to take turns camping at her place every night. Erma swore she was such a light sleeper that she’d hear any intruder before he did any damage and “damage him, first, just like Mimsy did with the pig.” We believed her. Eleanor demanded that we mount a counter-attack on Bigelow roses, but we managed to restrain her.
Reunion at Mossy Creek Page 10