by Neil Hetzner
WARM WINTER’S GARDEN
By
Neil Hetzner
Smashwords Edition
Copyright Neil Hetzner©July 2011
Warm Winter’s Garden
All Rights Reserved.
AUGUST
1990
Chapter 1
Bett Koster did not know what to do. For her, who almost always knew what to do next, that was a very strange feeling. Her sense of uncertainty was so strong that she had a whispery urge to take her hands from the steering wheel, to heave her body out from under the confines of the seat belt, to inhale enough air to calm the boiling in her stomach, and then to wait. It was a very strange sensation. She reminded herself of Queenie, their blue tick hound, zigzagging along the beach snuffling the sand to find a trail. She could not put things in order. First things first. That rule had been a part of her life for as long as she could remember.
All right.
The first thing was for her to drive home. The second thing must be to pick the eggplant. They certainly needed her attention. It had rained on Friday and Saturday. Sunday had been one of those late August New England days with deep blue skies and gusty dry air bringing just a hint of fall crispness down from the north. It had been one of those days when it seemed as if the months were suits of playing cards and, somehow, one of the Septembers had gotten mixed in with the Augusts. The front had moved through late on Sunday night. Today, Monday, was hot and muggy. If she didn’t pick the eggplant soon, the fruit would soak up the rain and turn its solid, sea spume-colored flesh into soggy pulp. Bett thought that a young, blackish purple, smooth as enamel eggplant was one of God’s great gifts, but a soft, spongy, seedy, eggplant was a pretty worthless thing except, perhaps, as a convenience store vegetable.
Pick the eggplant. Cut it into quarter inch slices. Oil, then, grill the slices. Layer the tiger-striped slices with extra virgin olive oil, herbed vinegar, chopped garlic and fresh basil leaves. First things first. Pick some basil; pinch its buds. Basil had a desperate drive to flower, then, fail. The plants had to be deadheaded every other day if they were to grow to their potential. Turn the grill to low, oil whole eggplant, prick them with a fork, then, roast them until they collapsed in upon themselves. Chop the pulp and mix it with roasted walnuts, garlic, salt and pepper, fresh oregano, olive oil and lemon juice for eggplant caviar. Freeze the extra pulp in the empty yogurt cups which, along with cottage cheese and sour cream containers, had been saved throughout the year for harvest time.
Bett forced herself to look far down the sunlight-dappled corridor of Dana Road. Yellow shards of late afternoon sun cut through the green of the swamp maples and scrub oaks, the nearly black green of the twenty-foot high rhododendron and the canopy of sumac whose leaves had already begun to turn red from cooler nights.
First things first.
The first thing was to focus her attention on her driving. She narrowed her eyes as the road left the shadows of the woods to pass by the dark brown earth and lush green squares of the Danner’s turf farm. The turf farms of southern Rhode Island, with their perfect flatness and precise outlines, were one of the few physical aspects of New England that reminded Bett of growing up in Indiana. Looking out across the golf course-manicured grass to where the harvesting equipment was peeling sod and turning it into giant green and brown jelly rolls, she recalled fields of newly sprouted timothy hay on the rich fields of The Chimneys.
In the halcyon days of the late Twenties, when people had felt as exhilarated and exuberantly wealthy as they would again in the mid-1980s, her grandfather had bought two forty hundred acres of black loam, Eel River bottom farmland. He had named the place after the matched chimneys that rose high above the run-down ante-bellum brick farmhouse.
Grandfather, who Bett had called Opa, German for Grandpa, from the time she was a baby until he died when she was just past forty, was a small-town jeweler. Opa always rose at five fifteen a.m.. He would have walked the ten blocks from his home to his store long before most of his customers were awake. He used the quiet hours before the store opened to do the delicate hand engraving for which he was famous. Working in a space so crowded with nameless things— wood-handled things with sharp points, and small wooden saucers filled with brightly colored waxes, brushes so fine it was hard to imagine a use for them, vises, and additions to vises, and pieces of gold chain, slivers of bright springs from watches, watch gears, some as large as dimes but mostly smaller than a nail head—that it seemed impossible that he could find the space to move his hands, Opa would carve the sentiments of a lover into an engagement ring in a script so small and curlicued that it was difficult to decipher the message. He would finish the ring and begin a monogram to fill the center of a large sterling silver tray. From the tray he might turn to a locket.
When the store opened at nine o’clock sharp, Opa would sell Elgin pocket watches to the railroaders who worked on the B&O, Pennsy, or Wabash lines. He would push his jeweler’s loupe up from his eye to sell Wallace sterling or Wedgwood china to the carriage trade. At one o’clock he would leave the store in the hands of his assistant, walk the ten blocks home to the large lunch that Oma would have prepared, then, in the summer, after loading Bett and beer into the Packard, drive the six miles into the countryside to work his new, sweet-smelling land.
In her grandparents’ photo albums there was a picture of Opa with a brown Budweiser beer bottle held high in one hand and a half dozen enormous tomatoes cupped in the other. A hoe handle rested against his white-shirted paunch. While Opa’s eyes were lost in a squint against the hard light of summer, the rest of his face was brightly painted with joy. Despite the starched white shirt whose collar had been stripped of its batwing bowtie, despite the high-topped kangaroo skin boots, despite the fine dark gabardine pants that were made from cloth sent for from London, despite the long, sleek Packard, despite the stately tuck-pointed farmhouse, despite all the contrary images that could be found in so many of the family photos, Opa had been no gentleman farmer. Bett knew at the earliest age that in his soul Opa was a peasant. He knew the earth at a level beyond reason, and he loved and respected its myriad ruled unruly ways more than his profession, his religion and most, if not all, of his family.
On hot June afternoons, her ears ringing with the drone of horseflies hovering over the mounds of manure that had been shoveled along the perimeter of the two acre house garden from a horse-drawn wagon, Bett had used her short-handled hoe to intercut the sticky, straw-filled manure into the only slightly less sticky loam. It would take all the strength in her arms to blend the two. After a dozen or twenty strokes she would use the blade of the hoe to gather the mixture, as thick and rich as fudge, into a mound, then, thankful for the respite, she would drop to her knees. While her body rested on the warm, soft cushion of the soil, she would pat the earth into its final form as a flat-topped hill for cucumber, squash or melon seeds.
Bett took her eyes from the road to look at her fat brown arms. Although Opa never had seemed to be watching her and never had embarrassed her by asking, he always had known when the hoeing, whether for planting or weeding, had gone on so long that her knees quivered and her shoulders were hot in pain. From down the row he would call out in a vaudevillian German accent, “Vonderkind, is your vistle dry?” “Dry as Oklahoma,” she would reply. The two of them would plant the blades of their hoes deep into the churned earth. As they walked down the lane with its powdery tire tracks separated by a rise filled with dusty burdock and sheared off milkweed plants, Opa would teach Bett about the sights and sounds and smells around them.
At the end of the lane, where a tangle of wild grape acted as sentinel, they would turn onto the crunch of the gravel road. They would walk a block down the caramel-colored gr
avel road until they came to the section where Oma insisted that oil be sprayed to keep down the dust. To avoid the smell of the oil, they would leave the road to walk a narrow path through the high grass before coming to the sagging zigzag of the split rail fence. Opa would step over first, then, hold Bett’s hand as she would tightrope walk along one or two sections of the silvery rail fence that wandered along the front yard of The Chimneys. In the side yard, Opa would lift the thick wooden lid from the cistern. As she knelt down alongside the black hole, Bett’s sweaty face would be chilled by the up-rushing air. In a wire basket at the end of the rope which she was entrusted with drawing up would be two bottles, each with a white porcelain stopper, a red rubber gasket and a wire bail around the neck. The larger bottle held the white foam and amber fluid of Oma’s lager. The smaller bottle would be filled either with the dark vanilla and sassafras flavoring of root beer or the golden, throat burning volatility of Oma’s ginger beer.
In a tight harmony developed from repetition over several summers’ long weeks, grandfather and granddaughter would cup a hand around the neck and squeegee the cold well water from the bottle and use it to cool heated brow and cheeks. After retracing their steps to the garden, they would lean against the rusting frame of an old tedder, whose corroded tines had spread no hay in decades, extend their arms, flick the bails, pull the stoppers, dodge the spray, and, then, catch the bottle’s boiling foam in their parched mouths. Eyes would grow big and noses catch on fire. Opa would belch a sound as long and low as a bear’s growl. He would point the neck of his bottle at her in a silent toast. She would make the same toast back. To Oma. To bounty. To us. To life. Opa would point the bottle at the rows and mounds of the garden and give her a satyr’s leer that flaunted his lust for The Chimney’s fecundity.
As she rode toward home and all its duties, Bett could feel the fermentation that once had given rise to the ginger-flavored belches whose length and volume had so pleased her grandfather. There had been perfect summer days when, with the heat still shimmering above the earth and with elongating shadows rushing toward them as the sun dropped behind the row of elms at the far end of the field, she and Opa had belched together in simple, satisfying harmony. They would catch each other’s eye and pledge themselves to secrecy. Don’t tell Oma. They would upend their bottles and suck the last foam from them before returning to their shoulder aching, leg quivering, skin reddening, sweat dripping joyous labor.
By pushing her spine back against the car seat Bett managed to make a small belch, but rather than ginger, it tasted like of brackish water. Unlike a thousand other belches in her life, this one held no satisfaction. She told herself to stop thinking. Just get home and pick the okra.
As a young mother with four children, it had always seemed to Bett that no matter how much okra she planted, there were never enough pods ready on a single day for a meal. Neil and all of her children, even Dilly, loved okra, but Bett herself still winced at the thought of eating it. She never had liked the scratchiness of its fuzzy skin on the roof of her mouth nor the feeling as its slippery round seeds burst between her teeth. Even though the kids were no longer around to eat it, Bett continued to grow okra because it had been Opa’s favorite vegetable. Growing it now, as a homage to Opa and those healing days at The Chimneys, gave her great satisfaction. As a vegetable, okra was for someone else; however as a plant it stole her. With its ten-inch wide palmated leaves, its eight foot height and large custard yellow trumpet blooms, okra, along with hollyhocks and sunflowers, was one of the most imperial of plants. First things first. She should pickle some pods with hot peppers to make the Texas fingers that Neil loved to eat with cheddar cheese and crackers.
There wasn’t time to think of everything. The next few days and the upcoming Labor Day weekend would rush by in a blur of arrivals and departures, distracted hugs and kisses, soggy towels and sandy grandchildren, beach baskets of squished sandwiches and bruised fruit, car loads of shopping, a constantly running washing machine trying to keep up with the limited clothing of the visitors, and ripening tomatoes, high up on their staked vines, demanding to be picked before they burst open and oozed red pulp and slick seeds. And Peter. Each time she had talked to her only son since Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait she had heard a tightness in his voice that worried her. It reminded her of canning. The ominous sound of the pressure cooker. But, stop thinking. Get home first. Home, then, the eggplant, then, the okra. No, first, the basil, next, the eggplant and, then, the okra.
Bett looked down at her hands tightly gripping the steering wheel. Although her nails were cut as short as a man’s and the skin on the backs of her hands was deeply tan, and although, by loosening her grip and sliding her palms along the indentations of the wheel, she could feel the pads of her calluses, and although the yellow of her wedding rings cut deep into the flesh of her finger and could no longer be removed, even with dish-soap, she thought that her hands looked too small and too soft to be able to accomplish the things that needed doing. As her car passed under the overhanging branches of a stand of old maples, the flashing of the shadow and sunlight, as fast as the black and yellow stripes of sun coming through a window fan, made her hands appear to be shaking. Her breath caught in the back of her throat a split second before the trees ended and full sunlight was restored. The intense light caused the diamonds on her hands to dance with scintillating energy. More precious than the four large diamonds, each representing a child, which Neil had given to her on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and the small solitaire of her engagement ring, which had belonged to his mother, was the wire thin band of her wedding ring. Shoveling snow, raking leaves, washing dishes, doing laundry, mopping floors, ironing, kneading dough, hugging, kissing, patting and an encyclopedia of other house-works had worn much of the ring away. The ring had never left her finger since the day that she and Neil were married.
Bett looked up from her rings in enough time to avoid the misshapen carcass of an opossum whose grey fur was dyed red in death. First things first. In all the rush of the next days, she must make time to collect the seed pods from the hollyhocks. The tightness around her eyes loosened at her memory of the hollyhocks at Opa and Oma’s in-town house. The small strip of yard which separated the carriage house from the wide board white fence along the alley had been given over to hollyhocks. In one album there was a picture of Bett holding cookies in one hand and Oma’s hand in her other. Oma towered over Bett and the hollyhocks in the background towered over Oma. Although she could not remember the occasion of the photograph, Bett could easily recall the wonder of the pink, red and burgundy blossoms reaching ten feet into the air.
The first autumn after she and Neil moved from Indiana to Brownford, an old mill town in the hills of western Massachusetts, they had received a set of eight Meissen egg cups from Oma. Each of the egg cups had been individually wrapped. Inside each cup were several of the peculiarly shaped hollyhock seed pods that always reminded her of a priest’s biretta. The seeds of Oma’s seeds had been producing flowers in Bett’s gardens for almost forty years.
Old-fashioned, single bloom hollyhocks were Bett’s favorite flower; double bloom hollyhocks were among her least favorite. She had plenty of both because her son Peter thought hollyhocks were hollyhocks. Every few years, when he couldn’t think of what else to give to her on Mother’s Day, he would buy a trunkful of plants. Invariably, there would be two or three double hollyhocks. After she had thanked him for his thoughtfulness, she would have to spend from July into October collecting the pods from the offending stalks before they had the chance to scatter their unnatural seeds. As she didn’t have the heart to uproot a volunteer and as it proved impossible to collect every double blossom seed pod, Bett had become resigned to having Oma’s beautiful pink, cerise, red, cream and burgundy blossoms, so carefully collected and tended over the years, mix with the fecund sog of the doubles. Bett had never been able to understand what kind of person, whether scientist or plant lover, would want to stretch the genetic boundaries of a hol
lyhock so that it produced a profusion of flowers that better belonged on a carnation or mum. The deeper colors of the doubles were so rich that they dyed her hands and stained her khakis when she collected their pods and protected their unwelcome stalks by tying them to the fence. Worse, the double blossoms so quickly turned to pulp. After a shower or a day or two of muggy weather, the blossoms were like the rain-soaked aftermath of a tissue flower homecoming float. Soft, soggy, and bleeding color.
Although Bett normally planted hollyhock seeds in the fall, she thought this year she should collect the seeds and put them into labeled jars. Just in case. That way there would be no need for arguing. There would be plenty of seed to go around for her children.
Bett thought that children were like hollyhocks. Their colors mutated over time. They became what they became. The outside world hit the inside. No one could guess the result. Less than a year in Vietnam had changed Peter more than all the years he had lived with them. The DES had altered Nita in so many ways. It seemed so random. Engrossed in the capriciousness of parenting, Bett was forced to hit the brake pedal hard at the sharply curved merge of Dana Road and Route 1. The tires squealed against the hot asphalt. First things first. The cleome seeds had to be gathered by color. The light green feathers of the fennel would have to be snipped so that it could be made into the pesto that was so good with scallops and shrimp. There should be time to collect the seed heads, which resembled a burst of fireworks, and harvest the seeds that she used in tomato sauces and Christmas cookies. At season’s end, she could pull up the plants, lop the stalks into eighteen inch lengths, then, bundle them. Few things tasted better than just-caught bluefish grilled over sweet smoking, water-soaked fennel stalks. The rosemary, sage and lemon balm needed to be dug up from the herb garden, potted and brought inside if they were to survive the winter. The glads needed to be dug, the bulbs dried, and the old corms picked off before they were stored. As soon as there was a hard frost, the dahlia roots would need to come in to be stored in the root cellar in cantaloupe crates lined with newspaper. Neither Neil nor the kids would know, so she should label the crates by color. Then, she needed…
