The Daylilies We Put Back on County C

The Digging

On Friday evening, after supper, Anton and I dug our own yard.

I had never split my lilies before. Frieda always did it for me, or showed me while she did it. I got the spade under the first clump and pried it up, and the whole thing came out of the ground like a big tangled fist of roots.

Anton held the clump steady while I set the spade in the middle and stepped down hard. It split in two with a sound like tearing cloth.

“Every piece needs a fan of leaves and some roots,” I said, mostly to myself. That was what Frieda always said.

We did it until it was too dark to see, and then we finished the last few under the yard light. Forty divisions, each one wrapped in wet newspaper and set in buckets in the truck bed.

When we were done, my back ached and my hands were black to the wrist. I stood there in the yard and looked at the holes along my back step.

“They’ll grow back,” Anton said. “That’s the thing about daylilies.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s the whole point.”

That night I prayed for good weather and for Frieda’s heart, in that order. Then I prayed one more short one for Mitch, though I am not proud of how short it was.

Saturday Morning

Saturday came up clear and bright. By seven the sun was already over the red barn, and the dew was shining on the corn across the road.

I put on my blue T-shirt and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. I took one of our old lawn chairs off the porch and walked it across the road.

Frieda was on her porch swing with her coffee, in her red cardigan, the same as every morning.

She looked at the lawn chair under my arm. “Are we having a picnic?”

“Something like that,” I said. “You’re going to want your cardigan buttoned. It’s cool down by the ditch.”

“The ditch?” she said. “Heidi, what are you up to?”

Before I could answer, a pickup came down County C from the south and pulled onto the gravel shoulder at the culvert. Then another one behind it. Then two more from the north.

Bonita got out of the first one. She had a spade over her shoulder and three buckets in the back. She waved at the porch.

Frieda set down her coffee cup very slowly.

More trucks came. Women from the plant. Men from church in their seed caps and work boots. The retired school bus driver with her husband’s post hole digger, just like she promised.

Elsbeth Zweifel came walking down from her place on the hill with her boy Gus beside her, and a teenage girl from church came up the road with a bucket. Gus is 11. He had a shoebox under his arm.

By a quarter after seven there were 30 people on the shoulder of County C, and maybe 15 trucks parked end to end, every one of them with buckets of lilies in the back.

Frieda put one hand on the porch rail and stood up.

She did not say anything for a long time. She just looked down the road at all those people and all those buckets.

I thought she might cry. I thought she might tell us all to go home.

Instead she pressed her lips together, pulled her cardigan straight, and said, “Well. They’ll need somebody to tell them how deep.”