Issue 3:2 | Fiction | Deborah Huso

My Grandmother’s Garden

Deborah Huso

It was the photograph that finally did it—the one that showed the sunset blazing against the house, red fire against the windowpanes, yellow syrup consuming the usually whitewashed-clean siding. When she found it on the doorstep, neatly placed in the center of the threshold, caught gently under the wobbly screen door, she gasped, then shivered. It was her house, yes, but it was not. She looked about her. Everything was intact—the clean, fresh paint, glossy windows, even the curling “C” that scrolled across the front of the screen door.

Her hands trembled, but she managed to turn the knob, open the door, and clamber inside, folding her groceries onto the kitchen table with weakening, withered arms. Still, she clasped the picture, even as she fumbled through the Bible-thin pages of the phone book, looking for the Sheriff’s number. She found it, circled carefully in blue ink. But as she reached for the pea green rotary phone, it rang—no, trembled—under her hand, and she leapt easily two feet into the air, dropping the picture, which now slid of its own wicked accord under the refrigerator.

“Hello?” she answered, more weakly than she would have liked, stooping now, feeling for the picture with the tips of her fingernails under the fridge.

“I left you a picture,” said the voice, sickeningly familiar. “Did you get it? Did you get it?”

“I got it.” She was angry now. She found the picture again, and she rose, wincing as the arthritis in her legs and back whined against the movement. “What the hell is that?” she demanded raspily.

“Your house at sunset. I took it yesterday afternoon. Amazing, isn’t it? How it looks like it’s on fire?”

“It makes my stomach sick,” she hissed.

A pause on the other end. “Yes, well, I thought you might like to have it.”

“You thought wrong.” And she hung up, slammed the receiver into the holder so that the wall reverberated back to her the noise.

First it had been the tulips she’d ordered from Holland, their heads drooping like sick bells. Then the geraniums, brown from blossom to root. And later the tomatoes and cucumbers, all covered with nasty little black bugs that hovered around them dizzily, captivated by the smell that always accompanied the death—that sweet, sour, nose- crinkling odor of old urine.

Neighbors had stopped by to see if she was all right. They had never seen such death around her house. Always it had bloomed—snowball hydrangeas, towering calla lilies in orange and scarlet, pink dahlias the size of dish plates, yellow jonquils by the armful. “I thought you were sick,” said the old man from the next farm. “Never would Mary let the place go, I said, not unless hell froze over.”

And then when the trees started turning brown, first the redbud by the garage, then the maple by the garden, she had called the Sheriff. He was baffled, then moved when she told him of her gardens:

“These flowers, these vegetables—they have been my life’s sole joy. All winter when I sit here in the dark house as the snow gathers up around the windowpanes, I think of spring, waiting patiently in the brown paper bags down in the basement. It carries me through the lonely heart of bitter cold.

“And when the last snow melts, and the morning frost seems to thin, I gather the crusty brown bulbs into my hands and bury them deep into the black soil, the soil my husband and I plowed decade after decade, and I wait, watering them carefully, feeding them gently, watching for the first green shoot of life to pierce through the blackness.

“And when they fill out and bloom, soft, vibrant, and moisture-heavy, I think that life indeed still holds me, cradles me like a spring, dew-burdened flower. And I just look and look, the way one looks at grandchildren or newborns. It fills me up, feeds my age each season, promises me one more year.

“But this year, this year. . . .”

And her voice fell away, and the sheriff looked at her with the pity of one who knows the end of the story but will not speak it, the way one looks at and yet denies the certainty of the grave.

“I know it’s her, of course, but I have no proof. She’s always been jealous of my garden, you see. And when I told her, she couldn’t have those new tulips last fall, that they were too young to break apart, well, that’s when it started. That’s when everything started dying . . . and the smell.”

“You gotta try and catch her,” the Sheriff had said. “I can’t do anything without proof.”

“But she comes out at night, creeps around the garden, looking for some green shoot yet unburdened by her winter hands. I’ve sat by the window waiting. But she never comes those nights—it’s only when I sleep,” she sighed.

The Sheriff wrote it all down, shaking his head all the while, biting his lower lip. “I hate to see this happen, you know,” he said. “It ain’t right.”

“Well, I’m through. I’m not planting anything else for her to destroy. No new flowers. I’ve had it. Everything will just have to be brown from here on out.”

And the Sheriff had gone quietly in the patrol car, easing carefully past the house across the road, wondering if the evil lurking within was watching him depart, waiting for her next opportunity to strike and kill any semblance of spring yet breathing in her neighbor’s garden.

He had not been back since, but now she fumbled with the dial on the phone again, carefully picking out his number, but then pausing finally as the heavy rotary sound in the receiver died away and then gave way to the mechanical operator’s voice and finally the knell of a dial tone.

“What use?” she said to herself. “Is this evidence?” She peered at the picture again and trembled—not a tremble of fear or even disgust, but of chill. And not the chill of winter but the chill of some deep unfriendliness, some black chasm of hollow loneliness.

So this is what it is to be old, she thought. And she stood there, hunched over by the phone, holding the photograph carelessly in her timeworn, garden-battered hands. She dropped it without noticing, and it fell, swooping feather-like into the wide slats of the furnace vent on the wall below the telephone. And she fell, not suddenly, but something like an old and crumbling statue will as it hesitates before the inevitable, wondering perhaps, So this is it—I am going to fall now. Well, okay then, here I go.

And there wasn’t even really a sound, nothing more than the whoosh one hears in drawing a large fresh cotton sheet off the clothesline in summer.

She lay there, blinking up at the ceiling. Am I dead? And she blinked again, then turned her head and looked at the wall opposite her face. There—the photographs of redheaded and yellow-haired grandchildren, smiling, teasing her with their sweetness, a sweetness long since dissipated into adulthood, forgetfulness, and absence.

* * * * *

They all came to the funeral, some of them like predators, dancing about their prey ever so cautiously, darting forward with talons to gather the sweet, red flesh of death. She who had come to all of their baptisms, confirmations, graduations, and weddings, who collected albums of every formative moment in their tiny, insect-like lives lay before them, cold, withered, hopeless, sadly unremembered. They were all thinking of the house and what might be hidden within.

But my mother had the keys. She would not turn them over, she said. All things would be revealed with the reading of the will. One thing she took, however – the moss green, velvet-covered album that Grandma had always tucked carefully into the bottom drawer of the bureau in her rose-colored bedroom. There were the crinkling, black and white photographs of more soft yellow-haired children, stoical women with hair tightly drawn at the napes of their necks, clean-shaven men, all thin-nosed and bird-like in the eyes. She knew none of them. But they were important, more important even than the wedding portraits on the credenza in Grandma’s dining room, the baby pictures tucked carefully into Hallmark albums with the plastic pages guaranteed to protect your precious memories for life.

So that – that tattered album—was the only thing that didn’t burn.

Because the house burnt quietly to the ground the night after the funeral. No one, apparently, had seen it. The fire department had not been called. The neighbor across the road claimed she had slept through the whole thing. There was not, it seemed, a soul who could describe the conflagration. But it must have been something like sunset, when the whole sky looks aflame and wondrous, when the corn stalks stand like licks of fire and the dark soil the nurturing ashes. At least, that is how I imagined it.

The next morning, I expected only ashes—sorrowful, wicked blackness, as if the house, as if her life had never been. It would only make it easier for some corporate farmer to plow under the foundation and plant soybeans overtop. No one lived on farms anymore.

But this was not how it was. The house, yes, it was a cold, smoldering heap of ruthless dust. But around the perimeter of the baked foundation, sweet honeysuckle bloomed in twisting vines about the charbroiled, concrete remnants of a home. And tangled in its midst were gangly sprouts of petunias in deep purple and flush pink. Along the fence line that separated the yard from the grove, great white fluffs of snowball hydrangea drooped under the heavy weight of fresh petals, and brilliant flame orange dahlias bobbed their dish plate-sized heads in the humid breeze.

And I walked into the ashes, drawn to them like a mosquito to the warmth of mammal blood. The gray dust feathered about my shoes, immediately penetrated my white shoelaces, and clung like a thousand tiny cockleburs to my pants legs. I searched with ash-burnt eyes, kicked the indifferent gray fluff, turned over black shards with the end of a half-fried stick.

Nothing.

And I looked up, squinting against the steadily rising sun, settling my eyes at last on the farmhouse across the road and the center second-story window. There she was peering at me, as she must have peered at Grandma a thousand times. And I wished then that I had something – a gun, a baseball bat, a knife – anything I might take into my hands and use as a tool to strike her into the oblivion my grandmother now occupied.

My grandmother.

Doomed somehow like the stoic Scandinavians in the moss green album to have no name, no history but that of ancestor. Ancestor not known. Ancestor not understood. Ancestor not loved.

And then the flowers, rooted in the earth, replenished by death, born of bulbs my great-great-grandmother had buried in her own garden. Eternal as such innocent things will be.