The Tulips Along Pine Ridge Road

By noon there were forty people. By twelve-thirty there were seventy. At one o’clock I stood up from the culvert, brushed the dirt off my knees, and counted eighty of them, kneeling in a row in the ditch along a quarter mile of county blacktop, backs bent against the wind. In the sun, in their coats and seed caps and stocking hats.

Nobody gave a speech. Nobody had to. They just got down in the dirt and dug.

Pointy end up. Six inches down. Bulb auger, or a trowel if you didn’t have one. Press the soil in with the heel of your hand and move down a hand’s width. Daffodils in front, tulips behind. Gabe walked the line with his clipboard and his grandmother’s notebook open on top of it, calling out colors like an auctioneer.

“Reds at the mailbox! Pinks along the fence! The whites at the culvert, like Grandma had them!”

Lily worked at the mailbox, on her knees on a folded feed sack in her yellow rain jacket, tongue between her teeth. The red ones went there. She would not let anyone else touch them. When an old man in a Packers cap leaned over and offered to help, she told him politely, “No thank you, these are Grandma’s.”

“Then I’ll hold the bucket,” he said, and he did, for an hour.

Around one o’clock I looked up and saw a white curtain move in the farmhouse window.

She was watching. Of course she was. The strip ran straight down the hill from her kitchen, and for an hour she had looked at eighty of her neighbors on their knees in the dirt for a woman she had never met.

At one-thirty, the front door opened and my father came out.

He came slowly, with the cane, down the porch steps one at a time, down the drive and across the road. He stopped at the end of the row and stood there. The wind pushed his thin white hair around. People nearest him went quiet. Elroy Strand sat back on his heels and went quiet.

Then he bent, the way a man bends who has had a new knee for six months, one hand on the cane and one on the fence post. He picked a trowel out of the bucket I had left at the end of the row, and he got down on the ground. He groaned once, softly, and nobody laughed.

“Dad,” I said. “You don’t have to.”

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

He dug a hole. His hands were shaking. He set a red bulb in it with the root end down, and Lily, who had come up beside him, quietly reached over and turned it right way up.

“Pointy end up, Grandpa,” she said.

“Thank you, Lily,” my father said, and he did not look at any of us for a long time.

At one-fifty-five, Tessa stood up and cupped her hands around her mouth.

“One thousand nine hundred and eighty-four!”

There was a small ragged cheer. The Methodist women passed the cocoa. Neil was wiping his face with his sleeve and pretending it was the wind.

That was when the farmhouse door banged.