The gardener wrestles with a rifle, a brother-in-law, and dear old Dad’s ashes.
“Is this a plant?” my brother-in-law Ralph asks, suspending a spray of greenery like a dead pheasant. He knows he screwed up by uprooting it, but he can’t say it, and can’t apologize. And I won’t say it’s no big deal, though it is no big deal. The plant, a peppermint geranium (Pelargonium tomentosum), is a galoot so happy it doesn’t mind dry shade under a redwood, and I can re-root it easily if I want to. I’ll collect a few cuttings and toss the rest, but I’ll wait until he’s back in the house before I do it. I don’t want him to get the wrong idea.
I’m all astonishment that he’s even in the garden and to top it off, he’s trying to be helpful by raking the duff from beneath the redwood tree. Asking him to do this would not have entered my mind. Plants, he’s made it clear, are “out to get him.” My sister’s voice drips scorn talking about his allergies. If he’s with her when she visits a nursery, he won’t leave the car. He’s not a bad guy, but how Rachel digests this malarkey is beyond me. Twice this week, I guess in case I missed the wit the first time, he has said, “If I had my way, I’d pour some gasoline on it and toss a lighted match”—“it” meaning the garden Rachel fitfully tends back in Boise.
For someone so vulnerable, he has chosen the mustiest, dustiest job in the garden. I haven’t raked here in many transits of the moon, mostly out of lassitude but also because I figured the accumulation was good for the tree. I should stop him but I don’t. I am curious how far he will go, and intrigued by the prospect of this corner of the garden looking tidy after eons.
When Rachel told me that Ralph was coming with her, I was surprised, since he’s never come before. “He wants to,” she said, and I couldn’t say no. The purpose of the visit, so soon after Dad’s funeral, was to bring me the portion of the ashes I inadvertently left in Kansas atop the signal-less television set. I suggested mailing them, but Rachel wouldn’t hear of it.
My relationship with Ralph is as unflavorful as boiled potatoes. Rachel is our single point of tangency. After 20-odd years I still don’t know what he does; criminal investigation of some type. Maybe FBI. Like many middle-aged males, he practices withholding as if it were a form of cleanliness, and for Ralph, cleanliness left godliness in the dust long ago. His garage, a shrine to his two Harleys, is as pristine as a radiation lab.
I don’t know if they are expecting some kind of ceremony with the ashes, but if they are, they are going to be disappointed. After they leave, immediately after they leave—I’m not going to be someone who keeps the dearly departed on a shelf for decades—I’ll sprinkle them at the base of the persimmon, which looks like it could use some minerals.
Ralph rakes diligently, and not even the rake has much to say. I call him withheld, but the idea that he might be out here because he wants to bond, perhaps say something intimate or revealing, possibly even consoling, makes me cringe. The longer the silence lasts, the more impenetrable it seems, and gradually I relax. He is doing a fantastic job, give or take a pelargonium. No twig or leaflet gets left. He fills the green bin, then seven bags with duff. I conclude it was the untidiness that got to him.
“It looks better,” I say. “You did a good job.”
He is clearly pleased but uneasy, a boy for whom praise is disorienting. There’s something disarming about that, and it almost cancels out our history of mutual irritation, until he sneezes twice, and says, “I probably did myself in,” in a tone which suggests I should be, if not eternally grateful, more grateful than I am. “I better get back inside.”
At the back door he sneezes once more, the period on his death sentence. The screen door slaps shut. I picture him sprawled on the recliner wheezing and watching golf, covered head to toe in a fiery rash. Maybe he is hyperallergic; there are such people, and I ought to be compassionate, though it doesn’t make much sense that motorcycling on a freeway creates no issues while proximity to a daisy causes systemic havoc. We have in evidence three sneezes. Sneezing is rarely fatal.
Perhaps I’m allergic to Ralph, because now that he’s inside, my breathing gets easier. Not allergic to Ralph himself, but to the thoughts his presence generates, skirmishes in which there is no point even in winning. My garden is a reliable respite from this kind of mental commotion, a sanatorium of muted voices, and it is now, although the raked acreage beneath the redwood is disconcerting. It looks better, the way a gravel terrace looks better than a parking lot, but exposed, vulnerable.
One creature who finds the change to his unambiguous liking is Felix, the blue jay, who flits in to see what the grub possibilities are. I read recently of an experiment in Florida that demonstrated how mockingbirds, within two days, could distinguish who was out to harm them and who was friendly, despite potentially disguising changes of looks and clothing. Birds are not birdbrains. I’ve always had the fantasy that Felix and I have a treaty that governs garden rights and behavior. He doesn’t eat the blueberries. I don’t poison the grubs. I imagine that his unsentimental eye can read intent like an X-ray, and that, beneath my garden variety perplexities, I have a corresponding eye. It’s probably a crock. His heart is in his belly, I know, but I still get a little thrill thinking he waited for Ralph to go inside before he flew in, that he likes me better.
Birds are the opposite of time. They represent our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs.
—Olivier Messíaen
The summer I was 12, my cousin had a BB gun, and we’d shoot at the sparrows that nested in my uncle’s barn near the rafters. It wasn’t okay to shoot robins, but sparrows were fair game. Jimmy was a farm kid, and death didn’t hold much mystery. It was not the act of shooting that engaged him but the gun itself, which he carried with the reverence of an altar boy.
After Dad’s funeral, when his possessions were disbursed, the item that aroused the most heat was his rifle, a bolt action .22. My oldest brother and my two half-brothers wanted it. Ralph also expressed an interest, but deferred to the sons. The gun is in tip-top shape, but not particularly collectible. Dad bought it in 1941 or 1942. He wanted a Remington, but settled on a Marlin, one of the last available in that part of Kansas during the war. Possibly the last time it was fired was in 1973, the day my brothers and I went rabbit hunting, a bleak, windy November day. We did a lot of soil aerating in the process of terrifying a few rabbits, but no carnage occurred, I’m glad to say.
Jack wanted the rifle, he said, to pass on to his sons. Petey wanted it for its sentimental value—he remembers hunting with Dad—and Mike wanted it to shoot the woodpeckers that do “unbelievable damage” to his house in the sticks in Colorado. Bidding for it at the upcoming public auction was acceptable to all as a means of settling who got it.
Petey dropped out of the bidding when it became clear that Jack and Mike were out of his league in finances and stubbornness. The price increased in 50-buck gulps. Jack flagged at last, the oldest brother wrestled down by the next-oldest. Just when the auctioneer was about to pronounce “Sold” at a price of $3,050, when Mike’s sweaty hands could feel the heft of the barrel, I added a bid. I was thinking, if he’s going to shoot woodpeckers, he’ll have to do it with something other than Dad’s rifle. Mike still had some steam for bidding but it was leaking fast, anyone could see it, and soon I was the owner of a rifle I never knew I wanted.
But I did want it. Across my internal movie flashed the publicity still: me, the wayward son rehabilitated, the rifle draped like a victory sash across my chest.
The victorious moment faded, and I was caught in a twister of confusion that intensified the longer I held the rifle. Leaving the shed where the auction progressed, I went into the family house, now eerily stripped of every familiar thing. Even the curtains were gone, the windows letting in the pitiless July sun. I went into my parents’ bedroom, opening the closet. For some reason one suit still hung there, black, the one Dad lent me when I graduated from high school because the sleeves were too short on mine. I put the rifle in the corner, and slid the suit down the rod to hide it. There were footsteps behind me, echoing in the emptiness, even though the floor was carpeted. I turned, and saw Ralph.
“I’ll take that off your hands,” he said, “you don’t have any use for it.”
It seemed like a kind offer, almost. “You’re wrong,” I said. “I do have a use for it.”
A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind.
—Thomas Jefferson, writing to his nephew, Samuel Carr
The rental car is packed. Rachel is doing something taking forever in the bathroom, and Ralph and I are sharing manly exasperation. He has a way of assuming that anybody with intelligence feels the way he feels, period. This time, he’s right. What is she doing in there? The fussiness with which Ralph packed the car would lead you to think they were driving to Patagonia and not to the airport. Now even he has succumbed to the couch, and the wait.
I have my back turned toward him, facing outside to the garden. Felix is out there, a blue swatch in sunlit greenery. I just remembered my dream, buying the rifle, and Ralph asking if he could take if off my hands. I didn’t buy the rifle, Mike did, and he’s probably shooting woodpeckers about now. He’s a lousy shot, so that, at least, is mollifying.
At this moment, absurd as it was, the dream seems as real as anything else, beyond the obvious Freudian interpretations. Another thing about getting older is the border between deep-sleep dream and the rest of life gets murkier. This is not necessarily unpleasant, or even worrisome. The ego’s shenanigans are patently unreal, all the pageants and farces and melodrama.
At last, just when I am starting to worry that something is seriously wrong, Rachel comes out of the bathroom. She has tears in her eyes, and I can’t tell if they’re from emotion or from getting mascara in her eye, and there’s no time to find out. Ralph has bounced from the couch, inflated to his natural put-outed-ness, and in no time they are in the car. We say rehearsed goodbyes, insincerities served sunnyside up, like the eggs Ralph has every morning for breakfast. Why tinker with a good thing?
Then they are gone, and I come into the house, silence flowing into pockets where sound recently was. I take the plastic container with the ashes, shake it lightly to hear it say some last words, and go outside and walk a semicircle under the redwood tree, dribbling out the remains of my father, trying to figure out what I feel. All I can tell, I feel it’s a good thing to put them there, under the redwood. Then I overturn the first of the bags with the redwood duff, putting it back where it came from, when I hear the back gate open, look up, and there’s Ralph. Rachel has forgotten her purse. He looks at the bag, his eyes widening.
I won’t try to explain.
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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. Read Faro’s new blog, “Berry Picking,” at http://berrypicking.wordpress.com, contact him at farospace@sbcglobal.net, or visit www.infarosgarden.com.
