The gardener may not be in Kansas anymore, but some of Kansas is still in him.
It was 5:30 in the afternoon and we were eating supper, right on time as always, around the kitchen table. We weren’t saying much, intent on the weather maps telecast on the small kitchen TV. The trees around the house thrashed, gripped in fists of air. The storm had been ratcheting up all afternoon and now was letting rip. Fierce storms are commonplace in western Kansas but this was different; clouds zipping east to west, currents of balmy air counterpunching cold gusts. The weatherman was particularly baleful. I hoped he was exaggerating, as weathermen do, especially when he said, “A massive tornado has just been sighted on the ground five miles south of Collyer, heading north at 55 to 60 miles per hour. Residents are strongly advised to take shelter immediately. This is a very dangerous storm.” I looked at my parents and my brother, each peculiarly nonchalant. Had they heard? The storm sirens started to wail. They heard that. I ushered my mother down the basement steps. We sat on the mustard-colored couch, in dim fluorescent lighting. A minute or so passed, as we listened to my father’s footsteps in the bedroom overhead. What was he doing up there? The math wasn’t complicated: 60 mph, five miles away. I ran upstairs.
We nearly collided in the hallway. He held a bottle similar to aftershave cologne and waved it back and forth, sprinkling drops of holy water.
“This is what my Dad did,” he said, sounding a bit embarrassed, and a bit defiant.
“I know.”
I heard the story more than once from Aunt Mary, how my grandfather deflected a tornado with holy water and his almighty beseeching. In the spiral notebook where she wrote her auto-hagiography, the tornado is sketched like a coiled question mark. Its route, the detour around the farm, mirrored it.
“We better get to the basement. Now,” I said.
Downstairs Dad took a seat on the wooden chair behind the grade school desk and fingered, almost imperceptibly, his rosary. Upstairs the weatherman was still hyperventilating, but we were paying attention to the wind batting the house, a big cat with a mouse. A new sound began, a pecking at the shingles: hail, coming down in chunks.
“There go the iris,” my mother said.
The hail thumped and thrummed, an overture. What did we have, a minute and a half? I half-closed my eyes and listened for the roar that survivors report, deeper and louder than this basso of nonstop thunder. Every object in the room seemed alert, electric with an allegiance to this place, a helpless solidarity. Nothing in this town on the plains, three-fourths blown away by history already, would be rebuilt if the tornado hit, certainly not this house where I grew up and where my parents hope to stay until they die. I wasn’t worrying about its loss, nor about my bodily welfare, nor my family’s. I was preparing for the demise of the trees, transported as saplings from the creek 40 years ago, cajoled over time and through pitiless weather into majesty.
The lights flicked off; the TV went mute; the siren faded in and out as the wind found another few notches of intensity. Ten seconds passed. A minute. We sat in near darkness, the sun still hours from setting. Then, abruptly, the hail tapered off and stopped, except for stragglers, last kernels in the popper. With a crackle the lights blinked on, then the TV, blasting static.
We went upstairs. Branches and leaves littered the lawn. The trees were all upright but relief was shallow. The wind had not slackened. My brother got the TV working. Current radar images showed a succession of storm cells, a vast conveyor belt of mayhem, stretching from Oklahoma to Nebraska. This was going to go on all night. The camera zoomed in on one particular disturbance, its lower edge exhibiting “suspicious cloud rotations.” It, too, was coming our way. The sirens kicked in again.
“I’m not going downstairs,” my brother said. “That’s in Gove County. That’s eight miles from here.”
Dear brother. He probably thought it was a government conspiracy. Or maybe commies. Or atheists.
“Downstairs,” I bossed my parents.
“Don’t hurry me, I’m going,” my father said.
This time my father sat on the couch with us as we waited. I felt his bony shoulder against my biceps. After a few moments it seemed that wind was all there was, wind and my brother’s footsteps descending the steps, three and pause, three and pause, until he reached bottom. There he stood holding onto the rail, gazing up at the open door as if that was somehow more sensible than sitting and praying; that it was braver, perhaps.
Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.
—Satchel Paige
Besides wrecking the iris, the hailstorm knocked every apricot off my parents’ two trees. Last year and the year before, the blossoms froze. The year before that worms got into the fruit but my mother carefully cut out the bad parts. The apricots were small and there were a gazillion of them, but she trimmed every one, and made great jam. You don’t waste fruit.
Back home in my tranquil garden, cosseted by our mild summer Bay Area weather, I am swimming in fat juicy apricots. I filled a wheelbarrow from my three trees trying to figure out a way to send some to Kansas. Despite efforts to keep ahead of the deluge, some, many, go splat on the ground. My neighbor Rita predicted that her new hive would inspire an upswing, but I didn’t expect this. The limbs are so laden some have snapped. I propped them up with a motley of makeshift crutches that give the tree a raggedy look. My neighbors, except for Rita, hide behind their curtains when they see me coming up the sidewalk with another bowl of fruit. Most of them have one or more fruit trees, plums, pears, figs, apples, persimmons, lemons. Nineteen times out of 20, the fruit is merely a sticky nuisance, if they pay attention to it at all. I should arrange a lecture tour featuring Mom.
Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer and becomes correspondence.
—Oscar Wilde
Last night I saw an opossum at the water bowl, a hefty one who looked like she could take care of herself. I was glad.
One morning last week, as the sun dangled pink and spooky above the horizon, dimmed by smoke from forest fires, I noticed on the patio, though it took time to register, a tuft of gray fur, beaded a clarion-red. Some nasty catfight, I thought. Not one of my cats, that was a relief, the fur too light. I hoped not the pug-nosed Siamese, Caspar’s buddy, who shows up every few weeks to scrounge a meal.
When I finally went outdoors, the sun was higher but not much brighter. A smoky smell laced the air, overlapping with another, immediate smell, more barnyard than garden. I noticed brown smears crossing the bricks and discovered, while hunting for a stick to scrape up the fur, multiple hanks of blood-matted fur, and under a pocket of circling flies, the liver, guts and severed head of an opossum.
I did what I had to, as fast as I could, scraped up and buried the mess and scrubbed down the patio with detergent, scouring away all trace of blood and shit. But the smell stuck to my nose. In the kitchen I pawed through the chaos drawer, finding a box of Traditional Monastery Incense, bought in Darjeeling eight years ago, unopened. Printed on the box: Tibetan Monastery Incense is unique in that it is the only incense prepared on the basis of the complicated directions prescribed by Advisor of Tibetan Medicine Incense burning for prayer offerings and for purification forms a major ritual of Tibetan Buddhism.” Purification is what I was after. The sticks were snugly bundled in a fibrous sheath, unexpectedly unyielding. I coaxed one out; it smelled musky, heavily woodsy.
Easily, the tip accepted flame and started smoking. I couldn’t say I liked the smell; it was overpowering, but that was the point. I waved the stick above the patio, scribbling in smoke an illiterate prayer, as prayers are. Like my father’s. It worked. The smoke masked the stench, diminishing shock and revulsion. But unease rumbled in the background, like thunder after lightning. I felt affronted. By the ugliness? The cruelty? Clearly concepts invented by humans; puffery. Something in me continued to refuse to look at what happened, would rather indulge in wishful thinking, emotional Disneyland. How long does wishful thinking work? Until it doesn’t. Until luck runs out. Until it’s your time. How about prayer? Shall we pray together for universal peace and plenty?
I looped and swerved the burning stick, a dance of sorts without one certitude that termites didn’t undermine, but the pulse in my body felt like an act of faith, temporal but real. Real enough, anyway. The smoke from the incense lolled amid the leaves of the apple tree, fingering swaths of sunlight like silk as if amazed that this too was here, this light in that moment.
The opossum I saw last night may have been the victim’s mother. It was a she. (Female opossums have 13 teats, an odd, in both senses, number.) I think it was the first time I ever really looked at an opossum, having been put off by their ugliness, their Chernobyl rat guise. But the longer I watched, the more she began to seem endearing, almost. Opossums are marsupials, but I couldn’t make out a pouch. How she would fit 13 youngsters into a pouch—she wasn’t that big—is beyond me, and fortunately, not my problem.
When I opened the door and came outside she treated me as if I was there and not there. She finished her drink, and waddled myopically across the patio and into the cover of the wild ginger and then back onto the deck where, with a connoisseur’s focus, she nibbled the apricots fallen there. My impulse was to rush at her and chase her off but indecision, then sense, intervened, followed by something better, a glimmer of communion between us; she, the pliers-nosed, 50-toothed, 13-teated creature and me (let her mutely supply hyphenated adjectives), sharing peace and plenty and not wasting a thing.
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Dispatches from Faro’s garden have appeared seasonally in The Monthly for more than a decade and were recently published as a collection by Ithuriel’s Spear Press. The book, entitled In Faro’s Garden, A Tour and Some Detours, is available at www.spdbooks.org, Amazon.com and Black Oak Books in Berkeley. R.E. Faro can be reached at farospace@sbcglobal.net. Visit www.infarosgarden.com.
