Weeds in Bloom

by Robert Newton Peck

  Mary

  IT WAS LATE.

  A few minutes after eight o’clock. Outside my Manhattan corner-office window loomed an inky December night, speckled by thousands of other little windows. Our business day was done. Except for me, all of our employees had hustled home; I was alone at my desk, grooming an advertising proposal for tomorrow morning’s client meeting.

  Even though my office door was open, I heard a timid knock. Three apologetic taps. Looking up, I saw her.

  There was Mary.

  That was all I knew concerning her name. Mary, a cleaning lady, hired by the giant office building to police up the dirt, litter, butts, and ashes of slick executives and svelte secretaries.

  “Not right now, Mary. Perhaps in about an hour. Please do the other offices and leave mine for last. Okay?”

  She never moved.

  Looking at her, I saw a tired face and a slumped body, aged beyond her years, no education, dressed in clothes that were close to cleaning cloths. Rags. One stocking had fallen and was collapsed above her shoe. Her entire appearance said charwoman.

  “Well?” I asked.

  There was an object in her hands. Neither a sponge nor a scrub brush. No mop. A second later I recognized an item oddly out of place. A book.

  “Mr. Peck, I … I gotta ask your help.”

  “What’s up?” I asked, more out of get-it-over-with speed than concern.

  “I got a problem.”

  “Yes?”

  Mary took a few steps toward me. “It’s about Anthony.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Anthony is my son,” she said. “He’s going to become an engineer. If he can make it through college. My boy’s got a chance.”

  “Good,” I said, without much sincerity.

  “Anthony, he’s my youngest. I got five. But the older ones won’t never amount to nothing. No future. They’ll be lucky to end up like me.”

  She advanced another cautious step.

  “What’s the book?”

  “Algebra. My son calls it math. But I guess it’s his weak spot. Comes hard for him. So for years now, I learned to do math too. We learn it together. Me and Anthony.”

  “Oh?”

  “This ain’t no beginner algebra. This is the hard stuff. Advanced, he says. I can’t understand it no more. My eyesight can’t keep up. So maybe my son’s going to fail.”

  Dropping my pencil, I stared at her in a sudden rush of respectful disbelief. Although shocked, I found the strength to speak.

  “Mary … you are studying advanced algebra?”

  She nodded, then slowly lifted the algebra textbook as though making a final offering to an altar. To make the bells ring in the chapel of a Christmas fable.

  “It’s … number 74.”

  I sighed. “Mary, it’s late, and I’m very—”

  “Please,” she begged. “I don’t got nobody else to ask. I’m stuck. Went as far as I can go. But unless I understand quadratics, I can’t explain it to my boy so he’ll graduate and be a somebody.” Her spine straightened. “An engineer.”

  I was silent. Mary continued.

  “Anthony … he’s sort of all the hope I got.”

  “What about your husband? They claim that men are more into mathematics. Could he help?”

  “Louie died. Took a cough, about ten years back. Doctor bills? You can’t believe what it cost me. So all I got to help me is you.”

  There it lay on my big walnut desk, a marketing plan for a new deodorant, one that society needed about as much as I longed for a second navel. At this speed, I wouldn’t catch a train to Connecticut and report home at ten o’clock. On a night when I’d promised my wife I’d help put up the Christmas tree. Family was coming tomorrow. But a spruce would have to wait.

  “May I look at the problem?”

  “Sure. You have a lot of brains. It’ll be a cinch for somebody like you, Mr. Peck. You got education. I don’t.”

  Mary’s assessment of my mathematical talents was far beyond coping, I feared. Because I was another Anthony. Math was murder, and I had been a perpetual victim. Gary Blake, one of my competent assistants, served as my numbers guy. Details. Stats. Figures on a sheet of paper danced for Gary. Why wasn’t he here when I needed him? Home, I mused, putting up his tree. The rat.

  “Let me take a squint, Mary.”

  She gave me the open book. Advanced Algebra. The equations seemed to be written in Japanese italics. Flipping back a few pages, I reinforced what little I knew with regard to solving quadratic equations. I mumbled the formula as I read: “X equals A minus B, plus or minus the square root of B squared minus 4AC over 2A.”

  It seemed to be a guideline to finding the value of an unknown X when given the three other values as constants. Armed with my brief refresher, I jumped ahead to problem 74. Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred. Or, to be more appropriate, the Lone Ranger.

  Glancing at my desk phone, I had the urge to call Gary Blake and order him to haul his freight over to Mary’s house to tutor Anthony. Gary would have to drop his tinsel and hustle out into a wintry night and perform his math magic for the fifth child of a scrubwoman.

  Call it Christmas. Label it anything you please. Like lunacy. There’s no logical explanation why I, the math moron, boned over an algebra problem. It was Greek. Yet desperation has a talent for knighting a serf into a scholar. It was amazing how much Mary (I didn’t even know her family name) had mastered of the finer points of factoring, even when so many values were parenthetical and, if you’ll allow, problematic.

  Perhaps, right around Christmastime, an algebraic angel beams down to tap a confused shoulder, to enlighten, to inspire with a competence beyond deserving.

  Mary and I did it!

  A merry miracle.

  Christmas, so it goes, is a time for gift giving. The gift I received that night, sweating over numerical values far beyond me (and cursing the ghost of John Napier), was later valued above any price I paid. Sometimes the most I can give is the least I have, yet everything that a Christmas spirit could inspire. I made a bell ring. Not a cathedral carillon. Merely a tiny tinkle from the curled-up toe of Santa’s elf.

  Never did I know whether or not Anthony graduated from college. Let’s fervently hope so. Perhaps because his mother’s name is Mary, as was the name of the woman who lived two thousand years ago, a Mary birthing a son who didn’t become an engineer.

  Only a carpenter.

  Wings

  IN VERMONT THERE WERE PECKS APLENTY. UNCLE CHARLES sired fourteen children, Uncle Edward begot ten, and my father, Haven, added seven more. As seventh, I was the runt among thirty-one.

  Townsfolk called us “uproaders,” an unflattering label for those have-nots who resided in gray unpainted shacks, along dirt roads instead of pavement. We called them “downhillers.” Perhaps in envy of their rich bottom land (compared to our rocks and stumps), indoor plumbing, electricity, and store-bought clothes.

  Although poor, my parents convinced me that we were comfortable off. More important, hearty harvests had blessed us with a bounty for which anyone ought to bow thankful. “Gratefulness,” my mother fervently insisted, “is our highest note in the hymn of prayer.”

  Miss Lucy, as Papa so often called my mother, was a model of compromise. Merchandise we couldn’t afford she branded as “a frill,” a luxury no God-fearing Shaker would covet. Once a week I was informed that Divine Benevolence had again beamed down upon us and our table.

  We ate chicken every Sunday.

  Our daily trio of meals was referred to as breakfast, dinner, and supper. Lunch was whatever a kid toted to school for a noon repast … in a dinner pail. I doubt that today’s students, seated in their million-dollar cafeterias, have the fun we enjoyed. How? Trading sandwiches! My sandwich was often a thick layer of pork-flavored baked beans between two slabs of homemade brown bread. Ah, but a noontime Sunday dinner was an event, due to the fact, I presumed, that fowl provided more sanctity than jowl.

  Guests, ever
present, were served first crack at the chicken. White meat. Breast. We youngsters made do with the darker thighs and drumsticks.

  Mama always ate a wing.

  No amount of persuasion could make her do otherwise, not even after I’d become a grown man, married, seated at her table with my wife, son Christopher, and daughter Anne. My mother ate one chicken wing while Aunt Carrie dutifully gnawed the other. Younger generations dared not dispute Vermont virtue. A man’s naught but a simpleton if he challenges the New England rigidity of his elders and betters.

  In countless ways, Miss Lucy and Miss Carrie were softer than winter bed quilts. Yet by necessity, granite-hard.

  They were sisters who lived their entire lives together under one roof, pulling more willingly than a yoke of Holstein oxen. Aunt Carrie was seven years older, and as time took a toll on her teeth, she eventual yielded to partake of the more pliant breast meat. But it took my mother’s influence to break the established pattern.

  Years earlier, I’d attempted the impossible by slyly helping myself to both wings, claiming they contained a certain nutrient to improve my (you name it) eyesight, hearing, or virility.

  No dice.

  The chicken wings were snatched, or eased, from my dinner plate and replaced by generous slabs and slices that appeared whiter than Queen Elizabeth’s bosom.

  Following Papa’s death when I was thirteen, Mama’s make-do resolve was made clear to me. Tough times had become even tougher, and the three of us feared losing our little five-acre farm. At mealtime, less and less food graced the kitchen table. Papa’s empty chair completed our emptiness. Added to this, my plate somehow held more supper than my mother’s or my aunt’s.

  We lost our farm to the bank.

  On a gray December day, a chilling and merciless north wind seemed to snap our spines as though we were three dead twigs. Mama, Aunt Carrie, and I loaded a few possessions onto a neighbor’s wagon and left our home forever.

  Until I reached age seventeen, when I enlisted in the United States Army out of desperation and the assurance there’d be money to mail home, Mama saw that I was fed.

  Truly a miracle she survived long enough to comprehend that I’d made my mark and become an author.

  About to deliver a speech out west, in the state of Washington, I called home only to learn of Mama’s death: 7 October 1976. Oddly, it was the most humorous talk I ever gave, maybe because it was all for her. A secret tribute. Someone drove me to the Sea-Tac airport, and I flew from there to San Francisco and took a red-eye to New York, where my driver carried me home to Connecticut.

  Unwashed, I changed suitcases and drove myself north almost three hundred miles to a tiny Yankee town, arriving barely in time for Mama’s wake.

  Silently waiting stood a score of elderly people, almost all farmers, staring as I charged irreverently through the funeral parlor door. Eyes that met mine spoke more respect for her than for me. Hands that held my hands had been thickened by a lifetime of labor. I was too spent to recall everyone’s name.

  There she lay, hands still a shiny red from decades at a sink, ringless fingers folded, wearing a very plain dress and looking like someone’s sugar-haired mom. Mine. Touching her a final time, I remembered how a mother rises upward and into Heaven.

  On the wings of a chicken.

  Part III

  Florida Years

  Ed’s Jewel

  HE WAS UP TO SOMETHING. BUT WHAT?

  As I was well hidden in a generous patch of Florida brush, I could watch this man’s unusual activity.

  Spying wasn’t my intent.

  Learning was.

  Hours ago and a mile behind, I’d parked a battered Ford pickup under the high shade of a large live oak. Nowhere near a road. Just a stretch of open Florida outback, griddle-flat and griddle-hot. All I toted was a pistol at my right hip, binoculars, a canteen half filled with spring water that was, probable by now, warmer than I was, plus a pocket notepad and three or four stubby golf pencils.

  Moving in closer to take a more intimate look, I now estimated the man’s age on the far side of seventy, twenty years my senior. His hair seemed to be a wet silver. He was barefoot. No shirt. I’d make a considered guess that he was wearing only a single article of clothing. A bib overall. No longer denim blue but a washboard gray, ragged at the bottom. Knees worn to white. Ditto the two straps that hung on thin shoulders.

  Up aboard Old Soup. Florida, 1977.

  Using a two-foot stick, he stirred the contents of a keg in circles, sometimes thumping the inside wood. Bending, he looked inside the keg and nodded.

  Leaving my shelter, I circled to where I could easily walk directly toward his face and not creep up from behind to startle him. “Howdy,” I said, waving a hand.

  Either he didn’t hear or didn’t care to, so I advanced closer and spoke louder.

  This time he looked up, squinted, then put down his mixer wand to shade his eyes. He probable noticed my sidearm in its holster, yet he didn’t retreat an inch. Or flinch.

  “Hot day,” I told him.

  His nod agreed.

  Coming to within twenty-five feet of him, I stopped, then unscrewed the black cap of my canteen. Before drinking even a sip, I held the olive-drab-covered U.S. Army canteen toward him, making sure to use my right hand. My left couldn’t draw a gun.

  “Thirsty?” I asked as I smiled.

  He shook his head.

  I drank a warm swallow.

  “You the law?”

  “No. I write books.”

  For a minute he held silent. Poking his stick inside the keg, he stirred three times around, then quit to study at me. “Nope,” he said, “you ain’t the law.”

  “How can you tell?”

  He spat. “You’ve no belly.” It didn’t make a smart of sense to ask questions about what he was mixing in the wooden keg. None of my business. After knocking back another shot of warm water, I twisted the cap back on and rehung the canteen to my belt. Left hip.

  His eyes watched my hands. “Your water’s cooking,” he guessed.

  “Sure is.”

  “There’s a boil yonder. Cool water. You happen to know exact what a boil is? Or are you city?”

  I knew. “Yes, it’s a very young spring. You’ll find a boiler in a forest, at a quiet place, among trees. Usual in shallow water, indicating that someday a spring might be gushering up there.” I shrugged. “That’s all I know.”

  There were questions I wanted to pose to this old gentleman, but didn’t. So far, all I’d asked was whether or not he was thirsty, a gesture more courteous than probing. Right now I was on his turf. The nearer an animal to its nest or lair, the tougher it’ll scrap. So I wasn’t fixing to crowd him or inquire more, figuring that the early questions rightfully ought to be his.

  “Well, if you come around here-parts to sell me a book, you’re wasting air.”

  Perhaps, in his way, he was implying that he couldn’t read, without actually confessing.

  “I knowed somebody was nearby,” he said. “The dog whined to tell me. You been here a spell.”

  Glancing about, I saw no dog.

  “She be lame. But her nose ain’t. She’s to the shack, guarding our dooryard. Don’t walk too good no more. Gimpy-legged. Can’t see neither. But smell? She’ll scent a bug through a bunghole.” He pointed back toward a stand of pine. “From yonder, she smelt you.”

  His pride made me like him. An aging man proud of an aging dog. In a way, he was bragging about her.

  “She’s a redbone.” He sighed. “Lordy knows, I don’t got me a whole bit to boast, but she be the best hunter hound that ever treed a coon, or tracked a possum.”

  “I’d like to meet her.”

  “Already she’s met up you.” Straining, the old fellow tried to heft up the keg, and failed. “Dang,” he said, “it’s too much.”

  Slowly, I approached him. “Just maybe the two of us might handle it. Where’s it go?”

  “Over yonder.”

  As I’m six foot
four and well over two hundred pounds, farm-raised and iron-pumped, I could have easily hoisted the keg to a shoulder. But there was no reason to show off to shame him. Seniors deserve respect. Together, we lifted it. I let him steer.

  “Here,” he said.

  After we grounded the keg and tilted it, dumping the mysterious elixir into a blanket of brown pine needles, he sprinkled a few needles over the lumpy mess to mask it.

  Straightening up, he said, “They’ll come smell.”

  “Who?”

  “Young tuskers.”

  “If a tusker comes, do you try to capture it?”

  To my surprise, he shook his head.

  “He’ll be prowling. He eats and he goes. But ever time, I dump the acorn mash closer to my pen. Eat and go. Eat some more. But final, he’ll eat free mash and tarry. Then me and my hound’ll both chomp on pork.”

  A tusker is a wild Florida pig. I’d seen plenty. No animal on earth is tougher, or more ornery. Even armed with a pistol, I wouldn’t want to face one. Some mature boars balance over five hundred pound. If you doubt, read Nine Man Tree.

  “I’ll tame ’em,” he said.

  I had to ask a short question: “How?”

  Lifting the empty keg, he said, “It’s sour corny mash laced with acorns. A pig can’t pass it by. They’ll turn lazy on free found. So shiftless and fat-backed they’ll not root for theyselves no longer. I git ’em so dumb they’ll depend to me. Once they do, they’re bacon.

  “Pigs think it’s charity,” he added. “Ain’t. It’s volunteer slavery.”

  Extending a hand to him, I said, “My name is Peck. Friends call me Rob.”

  We shook. His hand was harder than a gator claw, hooking around mine with a surprising strength.

  “Nocker. Ed Nocker.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Nocker.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “it sure is.” He cracked his first grin. “You want to greet my bitch?”

  “If it’s okay with her.”

  As we walked, Mr. Nocker carried the empty keg above his hip, on its side. The weight of his arm seemed to tote it suspended, without any hand to hold it. His walk was unsteady, as though every step was arthritic agony. Sometimes he would moan. Or grunt.