The Garden That Came Back

Thursday Tammy Rudd from the extension office, who runs the master gardener program, came out in a county truck, sent by Opal. She pushed a soil probe down through the cleared patch, pulled up a core like a brown candle, and smelled it. “Mrs. Grubb, you could grow anything in this. Give it a season and it’ll forgive you.”

“It isn’t the soil that needs to do the forgiving,” I said, which came out sharper than I meant. Then I asked if she would help me plant, and she said she would.

*

We set the work day for Saturday the sixteenth. Bud would bring the tractor, Ray his flatbed, Joyce from the youth group her teenagers, and somebody a pot of ham and beans.

I had asked for none of it.

I want you to hear that, because it is what I understand best now. For forty years I was the one who set a sack on the porch rail and drove off before anyone saw. And when I was the one on my knees, there were porches up and down that road, and what I had set on them had been quietly held for me. You cannot give for forty years and have nothing come back.

Saturday dawned cool and bright. By seven there were nineteen trucks in the lane. I counted. I could not help it.

The work went faster than I could have believed. Bud’s loader scooped the stone into Ray’s flatbed, and the teenagers peeled up the fabric and rolled it like carpet. Ray’s first load went to the Methodist church lot, which has had potholes since 2019. The second went to the lane up to the cemetery, the third to the Hollis brothers’ drive. Within two hours I understood that the limestone Megan paid nineteen hundred dollars for was being carried off to fill every low spot on three miles of road. Nobody wasted a handful.

By ten the garden was a long black rectangle of bare dirt again, and my feet were not on stone.

Then Joyce’s youngest, a skinny eleven-year-old in glasses, found the first asparagus.

*

He was working the south end, where the crew had been roughest. He sat back on his heels and said, in a voice that carried across the whole garden, “Mrs. Grubb? There’s something in here.”

I went. It took a minute, because my knees had had an opinion since Monday.

Where the fabric had lain over the old asparagus bed, a spear was pushing up from underneath.

It was pale, the color of candle wax, with a faint purple tip. Three inches long, and bent sideways like a hook, because it had come up under the black cloth and found no light, and instead of dying it had turned and grown along the underside, looking for the edge.

I got down on my knees beside it. There was one spear. When we looked, there were eleven.

Earl and I put that bed in in 1992, and the crowns lie eight and ten inches down, below any loader blade. The cloth and the stone had sat on top of them eight days, and they had not noticed. They had just kept coming.

“Well,” I said to that crooked spear. “There you are.”

I did not cry. But somebody behind me did, and when I turned it was Ray Pruitt, a grown man with a flatbed truck, blowing his nose in a red handkerchief. “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s the dust.”