The Tulips Along Pine Ridge Road

I gave the notebook to Gabe. He took it as if I had handed him a baby bird. He sat at the kitchen table with a clipboard and a ruler and drew the whole strip over, row by row, the way it used to look.

“Mom,” he said an hour later. “She left the end of it blank.”

“I know. She ran out of time.”

“I’m going to leave it blank,” he said. “Then somebody can decide.”

On Thursday I did one more thing, and I did it on purpose, with my knees a little unsteady. I walked up the hill and knocked on the farmhouse door, and when Colleen opened it I told her what I was going to do.

“We’re planting the strip Saturday at noon,” I said. “The garden club and the co-op are helping. I wanted you to hear it from me and not from the road. You’re welcome to come out. Nobody will say anything to you.”

Her face did not move. I will give her that, the woman has a jaw like a fence post. She looked past me down the hill at the stubble and said, “It is Harlan’s land.”

“I know it is,” I said. “That’s why I’m telling you before I do it.”

“Harlan hasn’t agreed.”

Dad was standing behind her in the hallway, on his cane, in his stocking feet. I saw his face. He looked at me for a long moment, and then he looked at his wife, and for the first time in two years something moved behind his eyes that I recognized as my father.

“Beth,” he said. “Do you need anything from the shed?”

Colleen turned to stare at him.

“Trowels,” I said. “If you’ve got any.”

“There’s six in the bucket by the workbench,” he said. “Take them all.”

The door closed. I stood on the porch for a minute with my heart going like a rabbit’s.

Saturday came in at thirty-four degrees with a hard northwest wind, bright and clear, the whole sky scrubbed blue. A hard frost had come the Tuesday before, not hard enough to freeze the ground, just enough to say that it was time.

That is how bulbs like it. Cold soil, not frozen. Dad always said Mom could tell the day by smelling the air.

I was out at the mailbox at eleven with Neil, laying out string, when the first pickup pulled onto the shoulder. It was Elroy Strand’s, a dented blue Ford with a hay feeder in the back.

Elroy is eighty. He farmed that ridge for fifty years and he stepped out of the cab with a cordless drill and a long bulb auger he had made himself out of a post-hole bit.

“Where do you want me, Beth?”

“Elroy, you don’t have to do that.”

“Dot taught me to put in a tulip in nineteen eighty-six,” he said. “I’ll put a thousand in if you let me.”

He put in over four hundred. I counted later.

The second truck came, and then another, and another. They came down the hill in a line on that county road, one after the other, parking nose to tail on the shoulder with their hazards on. People climbed out holding coffee cans and ice cream pails and paper sacks.

Some of them I knew. Some I had never seen. A woman in her forties I only half recognized said, “My mother is in the nursing home in Westby and she cried when I told her. She wanted me to come for her.”