A Day in Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith

  “Josie, no!” I yelped. I struggled up—those things invariably attempt to trap me in a supine position forever—ran down the hill and caught the waistband of my granddaughter’s jeans just as she reached the top of the gate to my walled garden. She wriggled like a greased pig.

  “No, Grammie!” she howled as I hauled her off and set her down. “It’s my secret place. I want to play in there.”

  “No, you don’t, Miss Josephine Margaret. We have talked and talked about my garden. It’s Gram’s special garden, and it’s not a place for little girls.”

  I could tell by the set of her jaw that she wasn’t buying it. Josie has a special way of dealing with ‘no.’ She seems to accept, but a minute later, she’ll come back with, “But, Grammie, if we . . . then can I . . . “Another no. Another acceptance, and then another two minutes later another convoluted plan that will allow her to have her way. She doesn’t fight. She simply manipulates circumstances until she hits on a set that will work for whatever adult she’s conning at the time.

  I knew darned well that she’d keep on bugging me about my garden until I let her in. If I didn’t, then she’d climb over the gate when I was distracted. Next time I might not catch her before she managed it.

  As my garden stood at the moment, I couldn’t possibly allow her inside.

  I am not a born gardener. As a matter of fact, my thumb is as black as basalt. If plants actually react to human beings, mine must shriek when they see me coming. I am a retired English professor whose husband plumped the two of us down in a 1940s English Tudor house set on slightly less than two acres in Mossy Creek, and promptly died on me. I haven’t forgiven him.

  The little walled garden at the back of the yard had been the pride and joy of the old lady, Astrid Ogilvie, who lived in the house before we bought it. Astrid had been a leading light of the local garden club. After she died at ninety-six and we bought the house, they recruited me out of desperation. I warned them I make Rappacini’s daughter look like the Goddess of the Bountiful Harvest. All I really wanted to do was to sit in my paneled library with my grumpy old cat Dashiell and read murder mysteries, preferably British.

  Instead, I was co-opted to join the local garden rivalry between Mossy Creek and Bigelow. I thought and thought about what sort of garden to plant. Then it came to me. I had read stories in which the victim was dispatched by a distillation of foxglove or henbane or hemlock, but I had no idea what those plants actually looked like. So I planted my poison garden. All of my plants would make you very sick. A number would kill you.

  We won the contest that year, not precisely because of my unusual garden, but because the governor’s mother-in-law was disqualified for growing opium poppies on the lawn of the governor’s mansion. Somehow she blamed me, though Lord only knows why.

  In the next few years, the garden club coached me so that I could actually keep a small stand of Shasta daisies living outside my back door. Not thriving precisely, although Shasta daisies have been known to overrun an entire community. They not only riot through a garden, they commit rapine and pillage among less hardy plants. Mine were anemic, but alive. A distinct improvement over my excursion into philodendron, which shriveled and gave up the ghost no matter how often I watered and fed it. I’ve since been told that feeding philodendron is like feeding goldfish. Too little and it dies. Too much and it dies. My philodendron wound up in the garbage can and not in the toilet floating on its back like a dead goldfish. The end result, however, was the same.

  The plants in my poison garden, however, were positively thriving. They seemed to realize that both they and I were the pariahs of the gardening world. I had become quite fond of them. Foxglove and autumn crocus are beautiful, if deadly.

  You can see why I didn’t dare allow Josie, my one and only grandchild, to crawl over the gate to the poison garden and wander amongst the oleander and castor beans. Children that age eat anything they can stuff into their mouths. They do not understand the concept of toxicity.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon reading to Josie and keeping a weather eye on her to make certain she didn’t attempt to climb my gate again. When her mother, my daughter, Marilee Bigelow, came to pick her up, I didn’t mention the incident. Neither did Josie.

  The moment I waved Marilee’s car out of my driveway, I went to the garage for my big, wheeled garbage can, grabbed a hoe, a spade and my gardening gloves, and headed for the poison garden. The key to the gate hung from a wrought iron hook high on the stone wall just inside gate where I could reach it easily, but I didn’t think small hands could locate it. Obviously, that wasn’t sufficient to insure Josie’s safety. My hemlock and wolfsbane and autumn crocus had to go.

  In a way it was an execution. I certainly felt like an executioner. The plants were condemned for their very natures. I actually felt tears sting my eyes as I ripped and tore and rooted the poor things from their beds. By the time I finished I was drenched with perspiration, bitten by mosquitoes and midges, and aching as though I had lifted weights. I was also sobbing. Like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz, I kept chanting, “All my beautiful evil.” The dying plants seemed to reproach me from the depths of the trash can.

  I wheeled it up to the road where the garbage men would collect it. I certainly didn’t want to burn the plants. The fumes would probably fell half of Mossy Creek.

  Of course, it wasn’t that easy. It never is with plants.

  The following Friday when Josie came to spend the day with me, I took her by the hand, walked down to the garden, unlocked the gate and let us both in. I had no intention of allowing her to stay or to play there unsupervised, of course, but maybe if I demystified the place for her, she wouldn’t push so hard to make it her own secret place.

  I was astounded to see green shoots springing up in the raised flower beds I had built around all four sides of the garden. I had thought the cool nights of October would finish the job I had started. Evidently not.

  I had coaxed and cajoled my poison plants into thriving. They did not intend to stay dead. Even more worrisome, at their immature stage I couldn’t differentiate the mildly toxic from the deadly.

  I hadn’t been able to cut down the castor bean tree by myself. In October, the bean pods were falling. Josie was fascinated by them, but swore she wouldn’t go near them under any circumstances. I cajoled her into leaving the garden with a promise of milk and cookies.

  That tree had to go, and quickly. I co-opted my son-in-law Claude Bigelow, a stuffy Bigelow but better than most of them, to do the job for me. For some reason, he has decided I am in the final stages of decrepitude and falls all over himself trying to be helpful. I seldom let him, but that day he truly was a lifesaver. He cut down and hauled the dead tree away with him and treated the stump so that it wouldn’t reemerge on its own—something I would never have thought to do. He promised to find someone to grind it out of the ground for me after it dried out.

  Now, if I can just get him to call me plain ol’ Peggy instead of “Mother Margaret.” Makes me sound as if I run a nunnery.

  Next, I had to find a way to keep my nasty little beauties from reemerging.

  I didn’t want to salt the earth the way the Romans did at Carthage. I wanted my garden to grow again, but wholesomely. If Josie wanted her secret garden, then she must have it. Somehow.

  I am not by nature a grandmother any more than I ever was a mother or a gardener. For one thing, I came to both late. I am not one of those women who has a child at eighteen, then becomes a grandmother at thirty-six when her child has a child at eighteen in her turn. I finished my Ph.D. dissertation before I got pregnant, and I worked as an English instructor at one of the local community colleges while my daughter matured. She and her husband waited until she was thirty-one to produce Josie.

  I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to keep up with Josie as she grew up and I grew older, so I had recently taken up bicycling and
doing Pilates twice a week at the gym in Mossy Creek. I was in better shape physically than I had been in twenty years. As a matter of fact, the present day me could probably have beaten the stew out of the me I had been at thirty.

  Still, redoing that garden was going to be more than I could handle alone.

  So I called in the troops. I assembled the “gardeneers” of the Mossy Creek Garden club in my den by promising them frozen daiquiris.

  “Herbs,” Eleanor Abercrombie said. Eleanor grows superb roses. Obviously she thought they were beyond my capability. She says each one is like having another child because they require so much work. “Definitely herbs.”

  “Some herbs,” Mimsy said. Since Mimsy grows a magnificent herb garden, I had every intention of following her lead. “No pennyroyal or valerian or laurel.”

  “Or feverfew,” Erma said. “I think you’re safe with basil and oregano.”

  “And garlic.” That from Mimsy.

  “Some kinds of garlic. Wild garlic is terribly toxic.”

  “The best thing would be to grow vegetables,” said Eustene Oscar. “Simple things a child can enjoy watching grow and then can eat. Carrots, radishes, zucchini—they’re all simple.”

  “Josie would consider those completely inedible,” I said.

  “If she grows them, she’ll eat them, I guarantee it,” Eustene said. She should know. She has plenty of grandchildren. “You can grow tomatoes. All children love tomatoes and they are relatively foolproof even for you. Maybe even a watermelon vine on the sunny side.”

  The ladies of the club did not wear hats with flowers or lace collars or liberty print dresses or wear white cotton gloves. They wore serviceable duck shorts or jeans and t-shirts with such slogans as “Gardeners do it with flowers,” and “Beer is for slugs, not people.”

  Throughout the meeting, all eighteen pounds of my grumpy old cat, Dashiell, glared at us from the top of one of my bookshelves. He is a Maine Coon cat who does not like visitors. He prefers solitude and silence. The only noise he enjoys is the sound of the can opener.

  Josie adored him. He tolerated her. Her parents did not approve of mixing pets with young children, so he was the only pet she had access to. Somehow, even at three she understood that she must be gentle with Dashiell. She never rubbed his fur the wrong way or pulled his ears or tail. In return he rewarded her by curling up on the foot of her little trundle bed when she napped or slept over.

  Josie realized even before I did that our happy relationship necessitated keeping as much as possible from her parents. When my daughter gave me detailed instructions about Josie’s regimen, I generally nodded agreement, then Josie and I did what we liked. Chocolate cake at lunch didn’t seem to bother either of us.

  Josie never told on me, and I never revealed the havoc she’d created when she knocked an entire canister of flour onto the kitchen floor and poured a glass of milk on top of it, or had a temper tantrum and screamed herself blue in the face when I refused to give her Rocky Road ice cream as her entire dinner. That happened when she was two. When I ignored her, she gave up in disgust and never tried that again.

  This tacit entente between us, however, made it incumbent upon me to see that so long as she was under my care, she was safe.

  I thanked the garden club ladies, accepted gratefully the books on growing herbs they lent me, sat down to read up on things like black cohosh, and promptly fell asleep. Later that evening, Ida, the mayor, called me. “Herbs are okay, Peggy, but what you really need to plant are wildflowers. They’re so easy, even you can do it.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “You know what I mean. You buy packets of wildflowers—lots of packets. Then you mix up the seeds in a coffee can—two parts sand to one part wildflowers. Then you broadcast them. Josie will love that. If they don’t wind up in the flower beds, who cares?”

  “I’d have to wait until spring.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Wild flowers do best if planted in the fall. They winter over through snow, ice, and weather that would kill most plants, then come spring and summer they emerge happy and healthy as all get out.”

  “So I could plant them now?”

  “You should also plant some bulbs—jonquil and wild iris, for example. I would suggest you take Josie down to Tom Anglin’s store and let her pick out packets of seed. Eustene says she’ll volunteer one of her boys to cultivate your beds and mulch them. Then you just mix and toss. How does that sound?”

  “Perfect.” Surely wildflowers would crowd out any noxious seedlings that tried to rear their ugly little heads. So that Saturday, Josie and I went to Mossy Creek Hardware and Gardening to choose our packets.

  Josie loved the idea so much she went hog wild. With the help of Tom’s assistant, Mr. Rufus, she nearly filled one of the baskets they keep down there. While I selected some bulbs that looked fairly standard, she gaily flung in packets of anemones, ageratum, bachelor’s buttons—on down the alphabet.

  Even at three she could read Dr. Seuss and most of the Sunday comics with a bit of help, but she wasn’t up to big words like “coreopsis,” so she chose by the photos on the packets. I didn’t want to disabuse her of the notion that any plant I cared for would look remotely like the photos. Time enough for that come spring.

  Josie was running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It was all I could do to keep up with her. I couldn’t yell at her. All her squeals were happy ones.

  Finally, however, I had to say, “Josie, that’s enough!”

  She gave me two sets of ‘but Grammie’s,’ and I saw her surreptitiously grab a couple more packets of seeds, but by and large, she took it well.

  She wanted to plant immediately, of course, but I explained that we had to rake and hoe (and incidentally, yank out any remaining bits and pieces of my poison garden), and that we’d plant on the following Saturday.

  By the time I put her down for her nap, I needed one considerably more than she did. I knew she was disappointed, because from her bedroom, I heard her very quietly singing “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” to herself over and over again. The song was Josie’s combination mantra and teddy bear. She sang it to herself when she was tired, or bored, or frightened.

  Eventually her singing petered out, and I knew she was asleep. I also knew when Dashiell deserted my lap and meandered into Josie’s room to snuggle up the crook of her knees.

  The following Saturday, we planted. Josie had a high old time flinging sand and seeds as hard and as far as she could into the raised beds on all four sides of my walled garden. I tried to remember to call it “the wildflower garden” instead of “the poison garden,” but old habits die hard.

  At the center of the garden was a large square brick patio on which sat a wrought iron table and four wrought iron chairs. From the tossing Josie did, I suspected we’d have plenty of wildflowers growing in the spaces between the bricks come May, but I didn’t really care, so long as Josie could play there safely.

  We didn’t actually have to water the garden. As a matter of fact, the heavens attempted to float the darned thing away. Whenever Josie came over, the first place she wanted to go was to the garden to check on the progress of her wildflowers. I told her that the shoots would die in the first hard freeze, but that they’d come back in the spring.

  We had a remarkably warm autumn, so the little shoots really got going. About a month after we broadcast them, I noticed something odd about Dashiell. At first I didn’t pay much attention, but as the days went by, I came to the conclusion that at his age, he might be experiencing a nervous breakdown.

  Dashiell has always been an indoor cat. Even if Dr. Blackshear and I didn’t both believe that the outdoors is dangerous for cats, Dashiell has no front claws, so he couldn’t climb a tree or defend himself against a Rottweiler, and he’s so fat that he couldn’t outrun a turtle. He has always been completely c
ontent in his indoor domain.

  The closest he has ever come to considering the outside as a remote possibility happened last year when a demented male cardinal insisted on banging its head into my French door over and over. I’m not certain whether Dashiell wanted to kill and eat him simply because he was a bird, or because the continuing bonk disturbed his nap. In any case, he sat just inside the French door and chittered at the bird in impotent fury. I hope the poor thing didn’t breed, because no doubt his offspring will be brain-damaged. Eventually, after mating and fighting season, he left, and Dashiell settled back into his somnolent existence.

  Now every evening, he took to sitting beside the French door with his tail thrashing, gurgling and chattering with impotent rage. Maine Coons have long fur, and Dashiell’s tail puffed up to the size of a feather duster. Several times I peered out, but could see nothing. The one time I took a flashlight and opened the door, Dashiell actually tried to edge past me to get outside. The door bopped him on the nose, and he was furious at me for the rest of the evening.

  I decided there must be a possum or a raccoon or even a couple of squirrels invading what he considered his territory.

  Then one evening, I heard a bloodcurdling shriek and ran in from my kitchen to find Dashiell nose-to-nose with a yellow cat that made Dashiell look like a kitten. Only the glass separated them. Thank God it was safety glass, because both combatants launched themselves at one another with a thud.

  I hesitated to grab Dashiell. He’s been known to attack anything that touches him when he’s concentrating, which he definitely was.

  The minute I banged on the door and shouted ‘shoo,’ the semi-lion ran away into the dusk. For a solid hour Dashiell stalked around the house with his fur fluffed out and his tail high.

  Over the next few days, I began to notice that Dashiell spent most of his time at that window, and all too often, his tail was lashing. I took to taking extra care when I went out onto the back porch because Dashiell had developed a mania to get outside.