The Garden Waiting by Mom’s Porch Steps

Tilling

Ginny’s tiller was a rear-tine Troy-Bilt from the 1980s, red and heavy, on a little flat trailer behind her Buick. We put in a new plug and fresh gas, and it started on the sixth pull.

That strip of yard by the porch had never been dug. It was fescue and clover over hard clay, with a ring of old bricks somebody had buried around a long-gone rosebush.

The first pass barely scratched it. The tiller bucked and walked and tried to run off toward the gravel, and I hung on with both hands while it threw clods against my shins.

“Set the depth bar down and let it chew,” Ginny called from a lawn chair she had set up in the shade of the maple. “Don’t fight it. Lean on the handles and let it chew.”

I made the second pass slower. By the third pass the ground was turning dark and loose and the smell of it came up around me, that green, cold, clean smell of new-turned sod.

My shoulders burned. My hands buzzed for an hour after I shut it off. Ginny laughed at me when I tried to make a fist.

“You’ve handled forty kids on a gravel road at seven in the morning, honey,” she said. “You can handle Vic’s tiller.”

Rose pulled in at ten with her old blue Ford backed up to the plot and a load of manure so rotted it looked like coffee grounds. We forked it off and spread it two inches deep.

Then I tilled it in, twice more. By three that afternoon the plot was a rectangle of black, fluffy dirt, deeper and darker than anything that had been there that morning.

All day, across the yard, Keith and his boy were standing posts. The auger on the back of his tractor chewed holes, and they set the treated posts and braced them with two-by-fours.

They did not come over. Keith looked our way twice. The second time, he took his cap off, wiped his forehead, and put it back on, and went back to work.

The one time he came over

On Thursday evening I was raking the plot level and pulling out the last of the bricks when Keith’s truck pulled up by the porch. He got out and walked over and stood at the edge of the dirt.

He looked at the plot. He looked at the walker, still parked at the bottom of the steps where I’d left it, and then back at me.

“You’re wasting your time, Tracy,” he said. He did not say it mean. That was what made it worse. He said it like he was telling me my tire was low.

“She’s not going to be able to live out here alone. The social worker at rehab said assisted living, after the fall. Corinne and I already looked at the apartments by the Walmart.”

Corinne is his wife. She is a nice woman. I could picture the two of them walking through those apartments, being sensible, and I could not picture Mom in one of them at all.

“Did Mom say that?” I asked.

“The social worker said it.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “She doesn’t want to hear it. She never wants to hear it. Somebody has to plan.”

“The machine shed roof came down in February,” he said, quieter. “You remember. The snow. The combine sat out under a tarp all winter and I had a mouse nest in the feeder house this spring that cost me eleven hundred dollars.”

I did remember. I had seen the shed with its back broken, the tin folded in the middle like a book.

It was true that he needed a barn. It was true that he had nowhere else flat and high near the power line.

“It’s still her ground,” I said. “You could have asked her.”

“She’d have said no,” he said, and for a second he sounded like the boy I grew up with. “She’d have said no and she’d have been wrong.”

I set the rake down. I did not argue. I said, “Then she’ll have one more summer,” and I went back to raking, and after a while I heard his truck door shut.