“Should we write some of this down?” she asked once.
“I’ve got it all in my head,” he said.
Afterward, she brought out a pitcher of iced tea and a piece of paper and they sketched out a plan for the garden, and he was right; he did remember everything she’d said.
“That’s a lot of planting for one person,” he said. “You could hire the work out. I could find some men for you.”
“I want to do it myself,” she said, “so it’s mine.” And from the way he nodded she knew he understood. So it was a surprise when he drove up to the house the next morning in an elderly pickup and rolled a wheelbarrow full of mulch off the back end of the truck.
“I have Wednesdays off at the Gardens,” he said. “I’ll start at one end of the bed and you start at the other, and we’ll get the job done twice as fast as you will on your own.”
And before she could say anything he was pushing the wheelbarrow to the far end of the garden.
They worked silently as the sun rose and burned off the morning mist. He was faster than she was, but she watched him and picked up pointers. When the sun was directly overhead they stopped and washed their hands at the outdoor faucet. He used a pocketknife for his nails. She used a scrub brush. She liked it that they were both fanatics about keeping their big strong hands clean.
She served him one of the two egg-salad sandwiches Millie had made for her lunch, and found some pickles and potato chips. He liked his iced tea super-sweet the way she did.
“Mrs. Garrison called you Li’l Bit,” he said. “What’s your real name?” She told him. He nodded as if he approved. “Margaret is real pretty,” he said. They went back outside into the hot sunshine and continued to work.
As the sun started to fade, she worried about Maggie and Peggy showing up; she wasn’t quite sure what she’d do if he was still there. But he stopped working, pretty much the way he’d started, with no explanation, and began packing up. He left without saying anything about coming back.
“Did Walter Bee come over to help you?” Peggy asked, when they were sitting on the porch.
“Yes,” said Li’l Bit, and added casually, “he seems very knowledgeable.”
“Dalt says he’s amazing. He knows as much as any of the horticulturists, and more than a couple of them, about grafting and breeding and all that. But he doesn’t have a degree. Dalt’s pretty sure he never even went to high school.”
“How did Dalt find him?”
“He just wandered in one day looking for work. He’s from somewhere in Alabama, that’s Dalt’s guess. Someplace in the backwoods. Probably dirt poor.”
“How did Dalt manage to deduce all that?” Li’l Bit asked, with more of an edge than she intended.
“The man had to sleep in the back of his truck when he started working. He couldn’t afford to rent a place until he got his first paycheck. But when Dalt offered him an advance he turned it down. Got real stiff-necked about it. You know the way country people can get.”
Li’l Bit thought about Walter’s sunburned neck, and every instinct told her Peggy was right; it could get stiff in a second if he even suspected he was being looked down on. Any friendships he had would be on his terms. Not that it would make any difference to her. She knew better than to expect him again. She wondered if Peggy had made Dalt pay him extra for working on his day off. She decided not to ask.
The next day, working in the garden seemed much harder than it had before. For the first time Li’l Bit noticed how the bugs bit. The red clay was heavier to shovel than she remembered it, and the humid air was heavier than the clay. The sweat poured down, her eyes hurt from squinting in the sunlight, and her back was sore. Since she took pride in being honest with herself, she knew why. But there wasn’t anything to do except keep working and wait for the time when she would stop listening for his truck coming up the drive. She never mentioned any of it to Peggy and Maggie.
At night, she scrubbed her hands clean and looked in the mirror, which was something she hadn’t done in forever, not more than the occasional glance. Because there was no reason; her mother had driven that point home years ago. But now she looked.
The years hadn’t improved her. On the other hand they hadn’t made her any worse, which was probably the bright side to being homely; you were fairly timeless. For a brief moment she thought about going to the drugstore and buying a lipstick, but she discarded the notion. If you looked like a horse the last thing you needed to do was make yourself look like a ridiculous horse. Better to keep your dignity. No amount of lipstick would give her a chin that balanced her nose. She would never have cheekbones that were visible to the human eye. She wasn’t fat, but her six-foot frame had filled out to what would charitably be called solid. The mass of frizz that was her hair would never be sleek, and it was still “the color of mouse,” as her mother had once said. Those who loved her would have to do so for her sterling character and fine mind. In her experience, that group did not include men young enough to be interesting.
She lay on her bed fully clothed and did not sleep. It might be admirable to see yourself clearly, and there was great pride in knowing you had never made a fool of yourself by imagining that you were what you were not. But just once she would have liked, with all her heart, to know what it felt like to be a woman men wanted to spoil.
The next morning was Saturday. She got up early, determined to stop wallowing. She showered, changed into fresh work clothes, and, using the sketch she’d drawn with Walter Bee, began making a list of plants she wanted to buy. She’d found a nursery about fifteen miles outside Macon that advertised itself as the Old Garden Center and claimed it sold “antique blooms.” It sounded like as good a place as any to start. She packed her lunch for the drive and was heading toward the garage when Walter’s truck pulled up.
“Found some old rosebushes,” he said. “Thought we might try to moss them off before you go buying any.”
The brown paper bag full of her lunch fell out of her hands to the ground. She left it there and forced herself not to run like a wild thing to get into his truck.
He drove her through the backcountry where the houses were old and many miles apart and the fields were laid out in neat blocks around them. Cotton tufts from the last crop had caught in the daisies and weeds that grew on the side of the road.
Then, abruptly, the tidy fields gave way to land that had gone back to wilderness. Wild vines and kudzu choked the trees that surrounded the property. The outlines of what had once been fields were barely visible in grass that was high enough to come to her waist. Walter pulled off the road onto what had once been the beginning of a gravel drive. In front of them they could see a blackened chimney rising above the broken remains of a huge fireplace and the stone foundation of a house. Climbing up the side of the chimney was a mass of pale-pink rambling roses.
“Don’t know how long that thing has been burnt down,” Walter said, “but I went up and took a look at those roses. Seemed like the ones you were reading about. Sal—something.”
“Salet,” she said. “They’re old Noisettes.” But she didn’t even see them. She was still too busy looking at him.
He grabbed a bucket of water with peat moss soaking in it from the back of his truck, along with his gun, in case there were snakes, and gave her a roll of aluminum foil and a bag of a powdery substance he called “root tone,” and they started beating their way through the brush to the old ruin. As they got close, the scent of roses came at them like a wall of perfume in the hot, still air.
Judging from the stone foundations, the house dated back to the time when kitchens were built separately from the main house. Charred beams and lumber lay almost buried in the ground; pieces of window glass embedded in the dirt caught the sunlight. The fireplace attached to the chimney had probably been a bake oven. A portion of rusted tin roof rested against it, weighed down with mud.
“Wonder what happened here,” Walter said, in a hushed voice. She wanted to tell him she was thinking the
same thing, but she just murmured, “Yes,” and watched him standing there in the hot sunshine.
They started working. “Mossing off” was a technique for rooting new plants from already existing ones. “I’ve done it with crotons when I worked down in Florida. Don’t know how it’ll take with roses, but it’s worth a try,” he said.
He showed her how to find a likely stem and then strip away the outer layer in a band that was about an inch wide, “wounding,” he called it. He spread a handful of wet peat moss out on the foil, sprinkled it with the root tone, and packed it over the band of bare stem, twisting the foil like the ends of a baked potato. “It’s late in the season, but we’ll come back in three weeks and see if we have roots,” he said.
She nodded, as if she cared as much about the roses as she did about the fact that he was going to be around for another three weeks.
When it was time to go, he clipped long stems of roses, dozens of them, and gave them to her when she sat next to him in the truck. Her lap was full of color, more shades of pink than she had ever known existed. She thought she’d never be happier than she was right then and told herself to remember it.
Walter came to her house every Wednesday and Saturday. Sometimes they got into his truck and drove to nurseries, where she spent money like a greedy kid let loose in a toy store. Sometimes they went hunting in old graveyards and abandoned houses for heirloom plants—mostly roses. Once they saw a tiny house that was almost completely blocked from the road by Betty Sheffield Supreme camellias. With Walter betting her she wouldn’t do it, Li’l Bit went up to the front door and rang the bell.
They spent two hours drinking terrible homemade wine and wandering through the garden while the woman who owned it regaled them with stories of the great-aunt many times back who came from Virginia holding precious camellia cuttings in her lap the whole way. They left with cuttings of their own wrapped in a damp tea towel that Li’l Bit mailed back.
After six weeks, the roses they had mossed off took root. Li’l Bit still viewed Walter’s presence in her life as a miracle. Every time he drove up in his truck, it was almost enough to make her believe in God.
She didn’t know where he came from, or who his people were, or if he even had any. When they had lunch he told her about the goings-on at the Gardens, and she told him about her volunteer work. She knew sometimes if a woman wanted a man to see her as more than a friend, she had to give him a little encouragement, and she would have risked it if she’d known how. But she didn’t have an inkling.
Then one day when he was getting ready to leave, he walked around the house to the back door. “We should put in a gardenia bush right next to the kitchen window,” he said. “Every woman should have a gardenia outside her kitchen so she can smell it while she’s cooking.”
She laughed. “It would be wasted on me, I can’t boil water. Millie does all my cooking.” She meant to be self-deprecating, and maybe a little funny, but once the words were out she wanted to kill herself. Because she could see him remember all at once that she was rich and that his boss’s wife was one of her best friends.
“That’s right,” he said. “You don’t have to do for yourself. I forgot.” Then he got into his truck and drove off.
When he didn’t come the following week she told herself he was busy. The week after that she told herself it was just as well he was gone before she’d had a chance to make a complete fool of herself. She made herself stop the nightly replaying of the fatal moment, when she had ruined everything, and got into bed.
In the middle of the night she was awakened by a sound like someone scraping the ground outside her bedroom window. She always opened the windows when the weather was warm and never thought twice about it. But now, suddenly, she was aware of just how alone she was in her big empty house.
She lay in bed trying to decide whether to get her baseball bat or make a run for Maggie’s place. Then a breeze blew in the window, ruffling the curtain, and the heady scent of gardenia floated in on the air. She got up quietly.
Walter was just finishing tapping down the soil around the roots of the gardenia bush he had planted when she came up behind him. He sat back on his heels to admire his handiwork and she watched him for a moment. Then he sensed her presence and turned his head.
“There you are,” he said, his voice soft in the night. “I saw you walking around in your room and figured you’d heard me.”
All she had on was her white cotton nightgown; she hadn’t even put on her robe and slippers. Her hair was out of the net the way it always was when she slept. She sat down next to him on the ground.
“I knew your hair’d be beautiful when it wasn’t all tied up,” he said, before he kissed her.
Later on, when they were in her bed, she only stopped him once. “I’ve never—” she started to say, but he put his finger to her lips.
“That’s fine, Margaret,” he whispered.
So she made love for the first time in her life. She wasn’t young and she wasn’t beautiful, and she had no idea if the man would be staying. But she had the perfume from her new gardenia bush floating in through her window.
Walter came to her house four nights a week and stayed with her. But he never moved in. And she never asked him to. He needed his own place for his pride, and if there was one thing she understood it was pride.
Over time she learned little tidbits about him that she hoarded like precious stolen things. He had been one of ten kids. They were tenant farmers who had to move a lot. He told her the first thing his mother did when they were in a new place was plant a gardenia bush outside her kitchen window.
They discovered the remains of two more terraces in her back lawn and dug them up. They rescued wisteria and honeysuckle from the ridge behind the house and old daffodils from the edge of the pond and put them in the restored beds.
It was all going so well, and then she decided she wanted to put in a garden outside her bedroom.
LI’L BIT BALLED UP HER MASS OF HAIR under a scarf—it hadn’t gotten any tamer now that it was gray—and walked to the window to look out at the perfectly manicured, enclosed garden outside. It was built on a semicircle against the side of the house, encompassing her old gardenia bush. In the center of the garden was a small circle of lavender and eight gravel paths that ran from the hub to the perimeter like spokes of a wheel. Formal, and much stiffer than the big beds they had already put in, it was the most ambitious project she and Walter had tried. If she had known then . . . but she hadn’t.
WHEN SHE FIRST BROUGHT IT UP, Walter was as excited about the project as she was. She had read about a parterre garden in one of her books by the ever-helpful Mr. Jackson Downing. It was a circular garden cut by pathways into equal pieces like a pie. At the center there was usually some focal point like a statue or a fountain. Li’l Bit proposed to make her garden a semicircle against the side of the house next to her bedroom. Her gardenia would be at the center, and she would put a small door in her bedroom so that she could have direct access. Her new garden would be a bastardization of a true parterre, but she wanted to maintain as much of the historical flavor as she could.
“We’ll put in a low boxwood hedge around the outside,” she said, when they started making the sketches.
“Have a tall one,” Walter urged. “The garden’s outside your bedroom, and it’ll give you privacy.”
“I think the correct way is to keep it low so you can see the flowers inside.” She was busy filling out an order form for some plants she was buying from a nursery in Connecticut, so she added, “Look it up in the book.”
There was a pause. Then he said, “We’ll do it your way.”
“I’m not sure I’m right. Look it up and read me what it says.”
If she hadn’t been so busy she might have seen the expression on his face. If she hadn’t gotten so comfortable with him, the silence would have put her on guard. But she was busy and she had gotten comfortable, so she said, “Try the big book on the shelf over the desk, the one
by Downing.”
Then she finally looked up and saw that his face was scarlet under his tan, and his black eyes had closed down. And all the times he had refused to write anything down because he had it “in my head” came back to her. She tried to remember if she’d ever seen him going through a brochure or a book or a magazine or a catalog. And without thinking, she blurted out, “My God, you can’t read.”
He just stood in front of her getting redder and redder and not saying a word while the silence roared around them. And because she wanted to make it seem unimportant, and because she was her father’s daughter, she said, “That’s nothing. I could teach you in no time.” And of course he walked out.
She waited three long nights for him to come back; then she got in her car and drove to Garrison Gardens. She found him in the greenhouse grafting azaleas.
“I think we should plant herbs in the bedroom garden,” she said, as if they had been talking about it earlier that morning. She wanted to be casual but nerves made her clip words so they came out snooty. “I’ve called that nursery outside Marietta, and they still have some lavender. Should we plan to drive there this weekend?” There was no response. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do if he turned her down.
“I really think this is something we should discuss. Neither of us should have the final say.” He was just looking at her, not saying a word.
Suddenly she was furious. After all the years of teaching herself to accept being alone, she had suddenly been given happiness. And now this bull-headed man standing in front of her with his stiff neck and his closed-off black eyes was about to take it away. “What you are doing is wrong,” she said, stumbling over her words. “It’s selfish . . . no, it’s criminal to throw away something that is so good, and . . . and you have no damn right! If you like being miserable, find another way. Don’t do it to me, because I don’t want any part of it.”
The Three Miss Margarets Page 19
