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Pappi Tomas | My Father's GardenMy father was not a serious gardener, but he was serious enough about his garden. From cracked rake handles and wasted strips of molding he fashioned stakes for tomato plants. He cut apart plastic gallon jugs for covers against rodents and frost. He sprinkled lime and sprayed on fertilizer, weeded, cultivated, trimmed, watered. I often found him rooting in the garage for some gadget or scrap to use on his garden.
My mother helped. She had to. She was home all day while my father, an optometrist with his own local practice, had only evenings and weekends to tend the narrow plot along the east fence of the backyard, nearly hidden from view by four stout spruces. I was also asked to help. Ordered is more like it. I hated any kind of yard work, but I especially hated working in the garden, small as it was. I resented my brother and sister for being young enough to weasel out of it. But most of all, I disliked the fear I had of things which were strange to me. I didn't know which plants needed the most water, so unless my father told me specifically, I watered everything the same, sometimes too much, sometimes too little. I knew by his reaction. Did you water the garden already? meant too little. Those beans'll have enough to drink for a week meant too much. And weeding drove me crazy. For every grubby prickly handful, there was another bunch I had missed, crowding the plant stems like people around an injured man. I was also frightened of worms, the pinkish wrinkled end—-head or tail, I never knew which—squirming like the tentacle of some horrible creature about to split the earth. Worst, though, was when I stepped on a plant. I felt so clumsy and guilty and sure my father would see it and yell his head off that I did everything I could to hide my blunder. I slanted the snapped stem against a nearby leaf, buried it in the dirt, sometimes ripped it from the ground altogether to fling under one of the spruces.
One season he asked me to help at the very start, in early spring, when the air was dank and still cold but the ground soft enough for a shovel. The annual turning of the soil. A ceremonious occasion, apparently, but I could not have cared less. At first I sulked because I didn't know how to do it. "Push the blade in deeper," he said. "Make sure you don't miss any." How deep? Miss any what? But once I got the hang of it, I enjoyed the work, the heavy feel of moist ground in the shovel, the blade scraping softly against buried gravel when it broke the soil. I liked my father's approving voice. "That's perfect. Good job." He rarely sounded like that when I helped him tinker under the car, or under the bathroom sink. He had no patience for those jobs, his shoulders aching in some cramped space, his diabetic body dizzy and cranky with too much insulin; it seemed I could never hold the flashlight still enough, or find a certain wrench quick enough. Maybe gardening, work we could enjoy stretched in the open air, was not so bad.
That same day, Mr. Elkins our neighbor, whose back yard butted up against ours, stopped by the shared fence to chat with my father and watch me work the shovel in and out. "Got a strong boy there, Ray. Nice of him to give his father a hand." Though I hated his poor old ugly dog Patches, who lacked a lower fang, barked like a buzzsaw, and seared a hole in the fence with his hot blue cataract eye, I liked Mr. Elkins. He was old and wiry, with white, white hair, and only friendly words to say in an easy Southern drawl. He reminded me of my Grandpa, my mother's father, who also haled from the South, though Grandpa was tall and sturdy-looking, almost bald, with a voice that boomed. They both had nice-looking gardens, Grandpa's perfect square behind the garage, such as you'd expect from a stickler for order like him, and Mr. Elkins' meandering plot which lay like a tossed blanket along the same fence as my father's leafy ribbon.
And if you heard my father talk, you would have thought their gardens were gifts from the gods.
"Just look at this tomato." Being short, he had to stand on tiptoe leaning over the fence to hold one of Mr. Elkins' Big Boys, which for some apparently supernatural reason were plumper, heavier on the vine, imbued with a deeper red—across the board bigger, in a number of subtle ways, than my father's Big Boys. He lifted the fruit as high as the stem allowed, placing his heels—shod as always in beige suede loafers—back in the dirt, and then offered to let me hold it too. I felt silly, but it was indeed a treat to hold that weighty tomato, taut like the skin of a balloon, cool from the juicy inner meat, yet warm with afternoon sun. I also felt like a trespasser, not that Mr. Elkins would have minded. It was probably something in my father's tone when he called me to the fence to hold this, touch this, marvel at the rare color of that—something hushed, secretive, as if he wanted to show me a baby rabbit and not an admirable zucchini.
If it wasn't Mr. Elkins' tomatoes it was Grandpa's green beans. "What do you do to these things, Jake?" he said as if asking a magician how to do a trick. "Just water, Ray," Grandpa told him as he picked some into a small wooden box. My father ran his fingers through the mound of husky spears, green and dark like tree-shaded grass, now and then holding one under his nose to sniff like a cigar. Or it was his friend Mr. Sorano's fig tree, which the man, years older than my dad, buried every winter against the cold so that the following year a pale green egg carton might show up on our kitchen table filled with the fleshy seed-filled fruit, oozing sweet red juice. "Aren't they beautiful?" my father would say. They were.
Why he made such a fuss over other people's vegetables I will never know. His were not so shabby. Maybe he was only flattering these men, one gardener complimenting another. At any rate his tomatoes looked firm and dusky enough to me; sliced thick and served, as I liked them, with a dollop of Thousand Island dressing, they were as tender and sweet as anything I knew. And there were bulging zucchinis, some as big as clubs; and head after head of rice-paper-soft lettuce; and long snappy green beans. He might talk himself down, but when he came in through the back door with a bushel basket full of bounty, an extra bounce in his step, cheeks flushed with bending and lifting, I knew he was proud of himself. "Look at all this," he said after every harvest.
He was most vulnerable when visiting the house where he grew up. His own father, my Grandpap, and Grandpap's old friend, Lucci, who lived a few houses down, both had attractive well-tended gardens. Especially Lucci's, of which I was once given a tour when I was quite young. I saw tall weathered trellises and vines keeping back the sunlight. Big red-and-green baskets, tough cardboard boxes, all juice-stained and dirt-dusted, full of fat squashes, magnificent gleaming tomatoes, cucumbers, peaches, ruffled stacked-up greens. The smells were sweet, tangy, bitter, sharp, shifting in the air like transparent butterflies. And Lucci, the most authentic of my father's Italian friends, his swarthy sun-toughened skin, joyful mouth, big nose and squinched eyes, looked for all the world like a ripe old wizard stroking tenderly the fruits of his magic.
After these visits my father plunged into his gardening with a renewed zeal. Instead of curling onto the sofa after dinner to let the evening news lull him to sleep, he was out pulling weeds and inspecting leaves for signs of pests. He found some idle dirt and for some unfathomable reason planted spearmint, which did quite well, though no one had much use for it. "You chew on it," he said, like a salesman making a pitch, demonstrating on a few sprigs himself, "to freshen your breath." His crowning achievement was an elaborate chicken-wire fence that plunged nearly a foot into the ground and reached over the plants like a cage, all to keep a certain rabbit (or rabbits) from his broccoli and bean shoots. The "rabbit problem" brought him much grief. "How can I grow anything with these goddamn rabbits?" he said. "Look at Elkins' broccoli. Why don't they eat his shoots?"
The nights he worked late at the office, he was particularly grouchy, especially over garden work assigned to me, his grudging helper.
"How come you didn't water the garden like I asked you?"
"I meant to. I was at Rob's. I forgot."
"How could you forget?"
I offered to unwind the hose and make good on my obligation under the darkening sky, but by then he was too crabby. "No, I'll do it. Go back to your friends."
The garden was certainly a point of pride with him. "I'm the only one who cares about this garden," he said dramatically, "the only one." He was wrong, of course, because my mother, whose flower bed along the south fence met his garden in the corner like two roads converging, picked up the slack—as she did elsewhere—after finishing her own kneeling work. One thing was true, though: no one cared about the vegetable garden in quite the same way. What did he see in those plants, in the blossoms, in the bulging fruit? Certainly something that went beyond a fresh addition to the dinner table. Was it those wise older men, and everything they knew about growing vegetables and keeping them healthy? Was it Grandpap's garden and the Catholic shrine of bricks and painted stones that watched over it like a saint? Or Mr. Sorano ducking out of sight behind the greenery that skirted his yard like a barely tamed jungle? Or Lucci's produce piled high like a private market. Perhaps he saw the Italian countryside, the short, robust, playful men and women gibing back and forth in a language neither he nor his father had ever learned, of which he spoke only bits and pieces, like someone hanging onto a song he doesn't know but nonetheless adores. Perhaps he saw himself, woven vine-like throughout it all, these men, that distant land, sprouting firm blossoms of rustic tradition, growing long lusty branches of wisdom.
"If I just had a few acres," he often said, "I could plant a whole crop of beans. I could plant corn." He even went so far as to buy a few acres, six to be exact, down an oily dirt road in a neighboring township, as yet undeveloped. He drove the whole family there and we tromped like explorers through the brambly overgrowth, smelling the heady outdoor ferment, stopping at a wild blackberry patch to pick every shiny, bruise-colored gem we could see. It was a wild place, growling with twisted fruit trees and runaway vines and shoulder-high grasses, like a continent away from our clipped, airy backyard. The black juice seeped into our fingers, into our pores, maybe into our heads.
Certainly into my father's head. In some out-of-the-way strip mall he found a suitable, no doubt affordable, space for a second optometry practice. He could see it all: his business, little by little, growing and multiplying itself like a lush, healthy plant, sustaining the kind of lush, healthy life he seemed to want so badly. "You watch," he said, "we'll have a farm, animals, even the dirt bikes you guys keep bugging me about." My younger brother and I stared into space dreamily, not at the farm or the animals, which only meant more work for us, but at those dust-covered bikes, churning the ground, tearing the air with their gorgeous engine staccato. My mother just stared.
She had every reason to look concerned. Whether it was my father's fault, or some unforeseen quirk in the local economy, the new practice failed. And like a blight it took the other one with it. Now he had only the degree he had earned in Chicago the first years of his marriage, some equipment to sell, and all his experience looking into eyes. He would always find work, yet it would not be the work he wanted. Rather, the kind of work his father had once done at the Ford factory in Detroit. My father's was more handsomely paid of course, and gussied up with the title of doctor, but not so different at heart. He would not, the only of three sons to attend college, be the self-made man he had always dreamed about. He would work for a company, stay in this modest suburb, earn a good living. A mediocre life.
And he had his diabetes, which he could always count on to be there, and to worsen each year. He had us, too: my mom, still watching him with a tense brow and each morning fixing him a fine hot breakfast; our new sister April, who brightened his hours with innocent laughter; me and Keith, who made him proud playing soccer, playing violin and cello at school, and who continued dreaming under the surface and off to the side, imagining that our father was not as sick as all that. Eventually his right eye blurred, his kidneys began to fail, his blood pressure went on wreaking silent havoc in the fragile deltas of his veins. He looked gray. Each year feeling a bit worse; each year farther and farther away from his old hopes.
I imagine all these disappointments, or the expectation of them, and possibly other frustrations and pains I will never know, were cluttering his head the day he killed the rabbit. This was before his eye went bad because his aim that day was right on, like an experienced hunter.
My brother and I were in the back yard kicking the soccer ball, one of us shooting, the other tending the side of the garage which matched the dimensions of a real goal almost perfectly. Our father was in the garden. Our sister was around too. It was a hot, bright, cloudless day.
The ball whacked against the garage, leaving yet another of those round, pentagon-patterned marks. "Son of a bBitch," we heard him say, sure he was going to scold us again for messing up the white paint he had slathered on just a few weeks ago. We braced ourselves as he came bounding from between two spruces in khaki shorts, a thin white tee shirt, dark socks and loafers—his back-yard uniform—dodging as if a hornet was on his tail. The truth was, he was on the tail of something himself. So focused was I on the expected tantrum, I only glimpsed the small, agile shape, brown and furry, several leaps ahead of my father's short-legged step. It whipped like a frayed rope in a dog's teeth, then zigged skillfully underneath the last spruce, a few feet from my mother's flowers. At that moment my father could not have cared less about soccer balls or paint jobs.
"One of you get me the pitch fork from the garage. And bring a broom." He said this urgently, without looking at us, hunkering down on the short scorched grass to see under the tree, the way Grandpap kneeled over a game of bocci to measure a close point. Still surprised and not fully clued in to what was happening, we stared at him, and at the dark, needle-carpeted space. He wheeled his head around suddenly and shot us a hot, impatient look. "Come on," he said. "It's going to get away."
I found the tool he wanted, a simple three-pronged fork, painted green, at the end of a long wooden handle, like the red plastic tridents you could buy from the drugstore around Halloween if you planned to go as the Devil. He grabbed it from me and then instructed my brother to poke the broom under the tree, which he did after considerable objection. Neither of us wanted to help. But he was too angry, too wrought up; we could not have disobeyed.
The rabbit bolted into the back yard and we all chased after it, looking foolish, as if chasing not a rodent but a pet of ours escaped from its cage. All the bugs, the worms, the droughts and frost, the rival gardeners and rival animals, all the natural and invented circumstances that bored and withered my father's dreams must have gone into his arm as he hurled the pitchfork much like a spear, a motion so perfect and primitive, like an arm extended into space, it was exciting to watch. My sister, still around, let out half a whimper and half a shriek, then ran inside the house and shut the door. My brother and I looked the other way.
As it turned out, my father was a clumsy shot, because the rabbit was still alive. I was disgusted and afraid but too curious to miss it all. Wide-eyed, pinned to the ground like a bug under glass, it palpitated silently, something pink and glossy bulging from its flank. Inside the house my sister cried louder. "Why do you do these things, Ray?" my mother yelled. I wonder if even he knew. He seemed possessed, agitated, anxious to clean up his mess, but outwardly cool as a cucumber, his face fixed.
I must have been in shock, because the next thing I knew he had already been to the garage and returned with a flathead shovel: someone had to end the poor thing's life. I had never imagined a rabbit could make such a sound. I would much rather have let it die there in due time, patiently, quietly breathing on the grass. Anything but to watch my father, grave and precise, sink the shovel into the ground as if to start a hole, not to truncate a life.
I thought I had already seen the worst parts of my father's personality, his cruelty, his impatience, his pride, but here was a part I had not yet imagined—my father as a killer. Children kill, too. They pierce beetles with refracted sunbeams. They step on toads. They slingshoot squirrels and birds from their roosts. And they know what they are doing. They understand that something powerful and mysterious—life—has succumbed to their influence. It has ceased to be (apparently), while they themselves continue. It's the boy children who seem most often to indulge this sadistic impulse, this exploration of power as physical force, as will expressed through might. Most go no further than hurting small animals, which is some consolation, while others graduate to larger prey. Some say boys are born this way. Maybe they are. But they must also learn a thing or two from watching their fathers.
Another boy might have picked up his own pitchfork and gone after his own rodent quarry. Something in this boy's nature allows him or encourages him to do this. I was a different sort of boy. I did not admire my father's dexterity, his natural aggression. I was stunned, heartbroken, fearful, sickened. I turned away from the limp, severed animal, but also away from my father, who had suddenly become a stranger to me.
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