The Asparagus Along The Property Line
“I said out back, stay off the septic,” he said. “I thought she knew that meant by the garage.”
“I know.”
“I never told her what it was.” His voice cracked in the middle the way it did when he was fourteen. “It was just there. It was always just there. I never thought about it one time in my life.”
“Neither did I,” I said. “I’m the one that raked it bare.”
He put the heels of his hands in his eyes.
“I’m going in there right now and tell her,” he said.
“Chad. Listen to me.” I got up. It took a while. My knees had set. “She didn’t till Mom under. She tilled a patch of sticks. That’s every bit of what she saw. You go in there hot at midnight and you’ll have a wife crying over something she can’t undo, in a house she already thinks is more ours than hers.”
He did not say anything.
“Tell her what it was,” I said. “Tomorrow, in daylight, when you’ve slept. She ought to know what it was. Don’t tell her she did wrong. She didn’t.”
He looked at me in the edge of the lamp.
“You’re not mad?”
“I’m so mad I can’t see,” I said. “I just can’t find anybody to be mad at.”
He laughed, one breath of it, wet. Then he bent over the wheelbarrow and lifted the corner of the towel, like a man looking under a hospital sheet.
“Will they live?”
“Some will. Mom moved a dozen once, when the old lilac shaded the end of the row. She lost three.”
“How many have you got?”
“Forty-one pieces with buds on them.”
“Where are you going to put forty-one?”
I had not known until he asked. And then I did know, as plain as if she had rapped on the glass with her ring.
“Along the line,” I said. “My side. It gets the same sun.”
Between our two yards there is what is left of a fence my father put up for a beagle we had in the nineties: five cedar posts and a sag of woven wire. Chad looked down that line in the dark for a long minute.
“That’s fifty feet of trench,” he said. “How deep?”
“Eight inches. And a foot wide.”
He picked up his cooler.
“I’ll be over at six with Dad’s spade,” he said. “Go to bed, Meg.”
He was there at ten till. He had not slept much either, by the look of him, but he had the spade, the long-handled one with our father’s initials burned into the ash, and a thermos, and two fried egg sandwiches in foil.
We did not talk. I was off that day, and he did not go in until three. We ran a string of my own, three feet inside my side of the old posts so nobody could ever say otherwise, and he cut the sod and then he dug. Our ground is sand once you get under the topsoil. It digs like sugar. I came along behind with compost from my bin and laid two inches in the bottom.
Benny’s crew pulled in at seven on the dot. Benny watched us across the yard for a while. Then he walked over.
“That’s asparagus,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know it, ma’am. Not without the tops on it.”
“Nobody would,” I said.
Before he left that night there were six bags of composted manure stacked by my garage door that I had not paid for.