The Daylilies We Put Back on County C

The Spade

Bonita was the one who moved first.

She got up off her knees in the ditch, slow, the way you do at 60. She brushed off her jeans. She picked up her spade, the one with the worn wooden handle that she had brought from home.

She walked up the side of the ditch to where Mitch was standing. She did not say anything mean. She did not say anything at all.

She just held out the spade, handle first.

Mitch looked at it. Then he looked at her. Bonita has known him since he was a boy hauling milk cans for his dad. She looked right back at him with her plain, steady face.

For a moment I did not know what he would do. I think he did not know either.

Then he reached out and took the spade.

He went down into the ditch. He knelt in the wet grass right next to me, in his work jeans and his good boots, and set his cap on the ground beside him.

“Where do you want it?” he asked.

I did not trust myself to talk. I pointed to the next empty spot, two feet down the row.

Gus came running with a clump from my bucket and held it out to Frieda first, the way he had done all morning.

Frieda took it and looked at it in the sun. Then she looked at her nephew, on his knees in her ditch.

“That’s Frieda’s first,” she said. “The plain orange. Your uncle helped me plant the very first one, right about where you’re kneeling, in 1984. You were 13. You rode your bike down here and asked what we were doing.”

Mitch stopped with the spade in the dirt. His face changed.

“I remember that,” he said. “I remember he let me dig the hole.”

“He did,” Frieda said. “Crown an inch under. Not more.”

Mitch dug the hole. He set the lily in with his big rough hands, careful as if it were an egg, and pressed the dirt down around it. Gus pushed the popsicle stick in beside it.

Nobody clapped. It was not that kind of moment. Somebody down the ditch just started digging again, and then everybody did.

The Rest of the Day

Mitch did not go spray his beans that afternoon.

He walked back to his tractor and pulled it onto the field approach so it was out of the road. Then he came back, and he dug until the last lily was in the ground.

Around noon he drove to his place and came back with his water wagon. He gave every single new clump in the half mile a good soaking, twice. He did it without anybody asking.

Then he did something I did not expect.

He walked the whole half mile with a spool of orange marking flags from his shop, and he stuck one beside every culvert post and field approach marker in that ditch. Every single one, so you could see them from a tractor cab a quarter mile away.

“So I can see them,” he said, when Frieda asked him what he was doing. “Without killing anything to do it.”

We finished a little before three. Twelve hundred lilies, all in the ground, all watered, every one of them with a popsicle stick beside it.

The people from the plant and the church packed up their spades and buckets. A lot of them stopped at Frieda’s chair on the way to their trucks. Most of them did not say much. They just touched her shoulder, or her hand, and she touched them back.

Bonita was the last to go. She bent down and hugged Frieda for a long time.

“Your mother would have liked this,” Frieda told her.

“She would have planted half of it herself,” Bonita said, and laughed, and wiped her eyes again.

Sunday

The next morning was Sunday. Frieda went to church like she always does, in the same pew she has sat in since 1962.

I sat beside her. Halfway through the service, the pastor asked if there were any prayer requests or praises.

Frieda did not raise her hand. But the retired bus driver did, from two rows back, and she said, “A praise for County C.” Half the church said amen. Frieda just looked at her hands and smiled.

After church, in the parking lot, Mitch was waiting by his truck. I saw him walk over to Frieda and say something I could not hear.

She listened. Then she reached up and patted his cheek, the way you would a boy.

When she got in my car to ride home, I asked her what he said.

“He said he was sorry,” she said. “And he said he’d like to help me split the old clumps by the mailbox this fall, if I’d show him how.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him I would,” she said. “I told him I’m not getting any younger, and somebody needs to know how to do it when I’m gone.”