Backyard (7 page)

What an expert Dr. Sproot was! Over the years, she had been such a sisterly helper to her in her early gardening efforts, and had selflessly shared her encyclopedic knowledge of all things botanical without charging so much as a cent.

Things had changed, of course. Dr. Sproot, always the domineering sort, had gotten more so. And so strange! Marta traced it back to when her husband, Mort, died. Mort was struck down in the prime of life six years ago by a stroke that killed him right before their very eyes, as Dr. Sproot was guiding her on a tour of some of her new creations. It was his death that had freed Dr. Sproot to be the true Nazi the good Lord intended her to be.

Mort was a lush and a lout. In that, he was an insurmountable obstacle to Dr. Sproot's ambition of worldwide horticultural domination, and he did manage to contribute to the community's well-being by tamping down Dr. Sproot's baser nature. He was the only person Marta was aware of who could actually intimidate her.

Mort was a big, blustery Bluto of a man. He belched a lot and wore shirts perpetually stained with WD-40, ketchup, and something else that kept dribbling down from his mouth and dripping off his chin, and which no one but Mort could identify, but he wasn't telling. There was the scent of flatulence and grain alcohol that always seemed to follow Mort wherever he went. It easily overpowered the muted but pleasant fragrances that suffused Dr. Sproot's gardens.

Mort had no interest in the floral world whatsoever. He would regularly ravage Dr. Sproot's gardens by running over the edges with his lawn mower, because he couldn't tell a weed from a weigela shrub. This had created some tension in the childless Sproot family. Still, Dr. Sproot put up with Mort's behavior with a meekness that never ceased to amaze those who were well acquainted with the rude, bossy side to her personality. When Dr. Sproot got her degree, Mort scoffed. When she placed third in the first of two annual Big Turkey River Regional Desert Plant Contest competitions, he sneered, even though the third-place prize was a lovely, suitable-for-framing photograph of a giant saguaro cactus with a watering can somehow attached to one of its spiky arms. Marta shook her head sadly at the thought of it.

Maybe Dr. Sproot was scared of him. Maybe she needed someone to push her around the way she pushed others around. Whatever the psychology involved here, she had always been trying to please Mort. That had involved buying sheer undergarments decorated with lace merganser heads, and Dr. Sproot's attendance at the monster truck rallies over at the St. Anthony Hippodrome. Not even that could smooth over the roughhewn, slovenly obnoxiousness that was Mort Sproot.

It was on Mort's sixtieth birthday that Dr. Sproot had made her startling discovery about him. She had decided to surprise him by coming home early from work with a couple six-packs of his favorite beer. She surprised him, all right. She found him cowering in their bedroom, his face all dolled up with makeup and lipstick, and wearing a pair of her pantyhose, her pink, perky, push-up bra, and a pair of frilly, light-blue panties that he must have bought or scrounged from somewhere because they certainly weren't hers. Plus, he smelled all foo-fooey.

Marta chuckled and felt her face flush. Jasmine Bell, a licensed family counselor who had worked with the Sproots and who had no business telling her such things had told her anyway because they were neighbors and friends, and had known Dr. Sproot since they were kids.

Dr. Sproot and Mort mostly ignored each other after that. They dealt with their deteriorating domestic situation in their own self-destructive ways. Mort took to drink even more so than he had before.

A self-righteously aggrieved Dr. Sproot no longer felt obligated to kowtow to Mort's whims. On weekends, weekday nights, and saved-up vacation days, she threw herself into her gardening with a new, tireless zeal that put all of her colleagues to shame, but added a good ten years of strain to her face and thinned her hair. That was when she invented the coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend. Marta believed it to be a truly revolutionary step forward for gardening in Livia, though such a combination had never been quite her cup of tea. Dr. Sproot had dug up more than two-thirds of her existing gardens to make way for the new find. Marta marveled at how she could bring such an energy and breathless resolve to an act of sheer destruction. It was also then that she followed Dr. Sproot's good advice to hire a couple of guys with a backhoe to dig up her deep-rooted Joe-Pye weed. She had planted it five years earlier and it had flourished. After listening to Dr. Sproot, she agreed that it was a hideous blot on her gardens.

Two years after the ladies' underwear incident, fate struck in the form of the stroke.

Marta had been summoned by Dr. Sproot that day to witness the progress of the coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend, and arrived to find Mort downing one beer after another and playing with the propane tank attached to the backyard grill. The next thing they knew he was slurring his words and stumbling around in a semi-stupor. Typical Mort. He had taken to inhaling propane on top of his drinking, which, Dr. Sproot had to admit, made him act a little less like a brooding wannabe axe murderer. Besides, if he was willing to poison his organs and shrivel his brain, well, who was she to stand in the way of his cheap-thrill jollies, especially if they were to have the happy consequence of significantly shortening his life span. What you did was just ignore him when the fumes and alcohol took hold.

A dull thud signaled that Mort had fallen onto the relatively soft carpet of thick rye and fescue. There was some writhing, a groan, then stillness.

“We'll just let him sleep it off right there on the ground,” said Dr. Sproot, who, despite Marta's protests, continued to direct her attention to a particularly impressive specimen of coreopsis. When Mort didn't get up after twenty minutes, and wasn't snoring either, Dr. Sproot calmly walked over to his supine form. After examining it, she walked just as calmly back to Marta.

“He's quite dead,” she said, her eyes sparkling as she emitted a gravelly chuckle. A sneer rippled across her lips. “Now, Marta, I want to show you my new yucca bed and how yucca can be used to accent your coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend.”

Marta shuddered at the thought of it, and how that stroke had unleashed the psychotic bitch in Dr. Sproot. She shoved her pencil and notebook in her pants pocket and adjusted the sunglasses. Poor Dr. Sproot, thought Marta. Such a sad, sad life. Such a frail individual irreparably broken by years of straining under the yoke of a foul-smelling, burping flower hater, and here I am balking at doing her a little favor or two. Still, did she have to get so mean and threatening over a little bit of hot tea?

Marta was halfway through the backyard. That meant the only escape, should someone pull into the driveway, was to make a quick dash into the woods, then somehow claw her way through those thickets to the road. She pulled the hood of her cowl across her face and tightened the drawstrings, so that only her forehead, nose, and sunglasses-hidden eyes were visible. It certainly wasn't the kind of thing she would normally wear on such a hot day, or on
any
day! And why did they have to make the bloody thing out of wool? For that matter, why, in God's name, did she have to wear it? Wouldn't a scarf and the sunglasses have done the job just as well? Marta wondered whether Dr. Sproot had come up with the disguise in part to further debase her, and turn her into a freak of nature, a true laughingstock. Still, she supposed it was better than being recognized, and there was that Fremont boy who had given her a ride home that day.

A pickup truck clattered by. Marta froze, turning her back to the street and stretching out her sleeve-covered arms crookedly. She hoped this posture would make her look like a small tree to the casual observer.

Once the truck was gone, Marta began to rush her job. She scuttled toward the back, searching for anything new that Dr. Sproot would need to know about. Catching the sweet smell of the dangerous angel's trumpets, Marta inhaled deeply. She wished dearly that she could come back sometime simply as a welcome visitor to drink in the wonders of such a divine backyard. She threw back the hood of the cowl to get some fresh air, and photographed the angel's trumpets. They had spread out since she had last seen them, and were pointing yet more deadly and fascinating blooms directly at her.

A car door slammed. Marta took off full-tilt, camera flapping at her side and her robes billowing awkwardly behind her. She dove into the woods, fought her way through the underbrush, and emerged, breathless, at Sumac Street. Making sure that no one was coming, she laid her camera on the ground, pulled her bulky steam bath of a disguise over her head, rolled it up, and wedged it under her arm.

There were some new things here to report to Dr. Sproot. She would be especially interested to know that the angel's trumpets had grown and were still blooming wondrously. She'd want to carefully examine the roses to determine the quality of the blooms as well as the likelihood that they would still be in full flower when the contest rolled around. There were those new sprouts.

Marta began walking back toward her car. She tried to carry herself with the purposeful nonchalance of someone focused solely on the stroll that lay ahead of her. Deep down, however, she was troubled and confused. She wasn't sure whether she should be reveling in a job well done, or berating herself for sinking to new lows in her service to Livia's gardening gorgon.

8

The Complete Backyarder

O
ver six years, the Fremonts had put body and soul, and credit card into their backyard. They sank more than $30,000 into scores of garden center purchases and in building their arbor in the back, the arched trellises, and an intricately set boulder wall, which they had later taken down, redistributing the boulders in various combinations around the yard.

They weeded, planted, watered, and fertilized. Once the children had grown into teenagers, they were able to take the tire swing down from the ash tree, and the big, bare, trampled-on spot underneath it was now trying hard to grow fescue and Kentucky bluegrass for the fourth time, with mixed results. Other than that, the backyard had made the transition from jangling, unkempt juvenile playground to restful adult Zen garden.

Mostly, they had been in accord as to how their backyard would look. Apart from the hideous compost compound, there was one jarring note for Nan. That was the five-foot-high wood carving of Miguel de Cervantes, whose Don Quixote was a hero of George's, because, Nan figured, they were both such a mass of stupid delusions and strange heroic notions all endearingly mixed in with each other. They had paid an artist $2,500 against Nan's better judgment to carve that figure into the stump of the silver maple they had had to cut down because its roots had been coiled around it when it was planted, slowly strangling the tree. The carving had been fashioned with a chain saw, chisels, and awls, sanded lightly, and painted in lifelike colors, which were fading now. The entire bloody thing was a constant irritant to Nan, who considered it gauche and stupid. She just couldn't get the juxtaposition of something literary and symbolic and the Vermont Castings gas grill. She was also tired of explaining to visitors who it was and why it was there, which she didn't fully understand herself.

“No more compromises,” she had said once she beheld the finished product, firmly convinced of her own superiority in the realm of backyard conceptualizing and design.

She sighed resignedly as she glanced at Miguel de Cervantes's trim and spike-bearded form, with a quill pen in one hand and large book in the other, and his weird painted eyes, which always seemed to be looking at her. The good thing was that no further compromises had been necessary.

The backyard was a seasonal thing; the winters in this particular part of the upper Midwest being far too frightful to allow any consideration of spending much time outdoors unless you did something silly, such as skiing or ice-skating. Once the mercury started regularly topping out at forty, George made a big to-do of putting on his sunglasses, shorts, green-and-gray Muskies home ball cap, Jethro Tull T-shirt, and flip-flops, mixing himself a gin and tonic, then heading out to the back patio to officially inaugurate the new season. That usually happened in early-to-mid-March. It was about the same time that Bluegill Pond thawed enough to film over with glistening water and sprout the C
AUTION
: T
HIN
I
CE
signs planted in its shallows.

The backyard flourished as human habitat from mid-April to early November, by which time the temperature had plunged, the light had gone, and all the summer life had had its fall color fling and been gathered up for compost.

Nan and George figured November 14 to be the average date they retreated to the hibernating shelter of a spacious house and on that last day, they'd give the backyard a wake, sprinkling a small pile of leaves and withered plant detritus with their remaining gin and lighter fluid, then burning it at dusk, each reciting a few thoughts concerning the highlights of the season just past and a prayer praising God's goodness for providing them with such an earthly bounty. Then, they'd go inside and prepare for the winter by knocking down a couple of shots of the drink they adopted for the long, dark season ahead: Glenlivet single malt Scotch.

The Fremonts had taken no vacations of any particular note for the last four years. The last time was the trip to Hawaii—but the beaches at Waikiki, the volcanic fissures of the Big Island, and the enchanting rain forest of Kauai had left them feeling empty and unsatisfied.

“You know where I wish I was?” said Nan as they dutifully clicked away with their cameras at a giant plume of molten lava that spewed skyward. “Sitting in the backyard, watching the roses open up, with a g-and-t in my hand.”

“Yeah,” George said. “With a big slice of lime . . . Who needs all this lava stuff anyway?” So, much to the chagrin of their children, who had loved Hawaii, and had wanted to reprise that trip with others to equally interesting and exotic locales, that was pretty much the end of any traveling of note for the Fremont clan.

On average, in the spring and summer, and into the early fall, Nan and George would spend six to seven hours a day, weather permitting, in the backyard. That counted mowing, planting, transplanting, watering, raking, fertilizing, mapping out changes and new features, and just enjoying themselves sitting on their patio, either alone or entertaining guests.

The exceptions were Tuesdays and Thursdays, when afternoons were relegated to running errands. Other than those, a normal day would find George and Nan sipping their morning coffee on the patio and capping off an afternoon with a few strategically timed drinks—Sagelands merlot vintage 2005, of course, and the incomparable Bombay Sapphire gin. If the weather held up and the mosquitoes and yellow jackets behaved, George would fire up the grill in the evening. Then, they'd enjoy an alfresco dinner on the patio with whichever of their three children were free from variable summer work schedules or the lure of their interminable movable feasts with friends.

It was generally between three and four thirty in the afternoon when George and Nan regretfully abandoned the backyard for the squalor of their respective offices. George would pound out greeting card doggerel for any and all occasions, and design inventions. He had sold one of those—The “Whirl-a-Gig Bubble Blower”—to a major toy manufacturer for $350,000 five years ago. Nan toiled away meditatively with knitting needles and yarn as a locally respected maker of custom purses. Her creations had even made their way up the chain from consignment stores to high-end department stores such as Cloud's and Deevers.

The $350,000 wasn't going to last forever. Nan and George agreed that, with children entering college and a big mortgage still remaining on their house, they would have to ramp up their search for some more lucrative ways to earn money than making women's handbags and banging out greeting card prose.

They soon discovered that job prospects for people who want to reserve most of their day for backyard work and relaxation were limited. They would keep looking, they told themselves, at the leisurely pace that best fit their lifestyle. There was no rush; something would turn up. Besides, who had the time when the duties of the backyard grew so demanding! They made charts that plotted the dates of each plant's blooming and each tree's leafing, from the smallest impatiens to the loftiest silver maple, then compared them with the logs for the four previous years during which they had kept similarly detailed records. Those notebooks also contained dates and times of plantings, fertilizings, and waterings, as well as when and where the Miracle-Gro was applied.

The Fremonts' annual calendar started as soon as the snow melted and the agonizingly slow appearance of buds and flowers began. They watched the big thermometer nailed to the clematis-bearing trellis flirt with fifty, embrace it lovingly, then soar to a balmy sixty. Once the last killing freezes retreated into the past, George opened up the water valves and carried the hoses slung over his shoulder to screw into the outdoor faucets, and Nan surveyed the yard to determine which annuals she would plant this year.

The bridal wreath spirea would need some severe trimming. So would the fast expanding dwarf Korean lilacs, but that would have to wait until after they bloomed, which, at that time of year, would still be more than a month away. Nan would always inspect the concrete patio critically. She wished they could tear it up and replace it with a cedar deck raised maybe a foot off the ground. It was her pipe dream. Having just had the arbor constructed in the far back, near the woods, last year, they couldn't afford much in the way of new construction, unless it involved a little job or two for Jerry Bigelow, their favorite neighborhood handyman.

This was a time of slow change, with much backsliding. A hard frost struck in the middle of April, with the mercury tumbling to the mid-teens. The season's final snow came on the last night of the month. It showered down in a blinding rush of quarter-sized flakes that piled up in the night to five inches, then melted suddenly with the sun's powerful and blinding appearance on May 1.

Spring showers started in late March, and the first thunder—a pusillanimous affair accompanied by low-wattage lightning—rumbled across the backyard on April 27. The leaves on the lilac bushes had started to come out by then. The buds on the silver maples and their lovelier kin, the sugar maple, were swelling. The grass cast off its deadened brown, though it was still not growing. Juncos still pecked at the detritus under the bird feeder; they would be flitting around on the ground another week or so before starting their journey north. Up above, the slaty, snowy gray of winter gave way to the jumbled, billowing cloud masses of May.

During the course of a backyard season, birds, ducks, and all manner of small mammals searched for nests and valiantly attempted to keep the circle of life spinning. The backyard was a place for endings, too. George and Nan once found the body of a yellow-bellied sapsucker at the base of a hydrangea. Baby squirrels fell out of the trees to die broken-boned and squalling on the ground. Bad-tempered yellow jackets died in the jets of bug spray George squirted into their nests on August evenings.

There were friends in the backyard, among whom they counted the chipmunks and birds, and the mallards from the lake that strutted, in mating pairs, or odd-number combinations of males and females, across the yard during the late spring and early summer. There were enemies, too: raccoons and rabbits, field mice, voles, and the swarms of mosquitoes that could only be warded off with a ring of citronella candles lit around the perimeter of the patio. There were things that were neither. A snapping turtle once dragged itself with painstaking deliberation across the yard looking for a place to lay eggs. They approached it, fascinated, but kept their distance; snapping turtles can snap off a finger as if it were a matchstick.

Other, more menacing things passed during the night. Most notable was a teenager accused of stealing a car and fleeing from the police, whose flashlights probed against the walls of their bedroom. Strange voices awoke them to the knowledge that their backyard was not so sacrosanct that it couldn't be violated.

What other things passed that way they could only speculate. Slithering snakes, owls the size of dogs, deer coming up from the river valley to the south and following the creek to their neighborhood. Other people? They tried not to think about that.

One night as the days edged toward the summer solstice, they were given no choice.