Special Garden

Percy spent all morning thinking about it; dreading it but knowing it would have to be done. So when the early afternoon sun was warmest and he knew it would make him sweat some as he worked he walked outside with his little bucket filled with the gardening tools he would need. He wasn’t a gardener really but he’d watched her so often he knew what to bring.

The entire length of the left side of their house had been something of a neighborhood legend the last several years. Mrs. Haggerty had often called it always in bloom and during holidays, Easter especially, Tallulah would cut bouquets of lilly’s and roses; handing them out on the sidewalk as if they were Halloween treats. The garden that began as the desperate hope for a woman who no longer felt whole or loved or human that beauty could still exist in the world and that she could be its creator. “And she had,” Percy thought as he stared down at the dry cracked soil, shriveled stalks and dead vines that now remained where blooming color and life had been only three months before.

“Fuck.” He lightly exhaled as he sat down in front of the decaying mess and remembered that first day, almost eight years ago now, when his wife, Tallulah, had finally and mercifully declared she had suffered about enough of his selfish self-pity and her own wallowing self loathing.

“My tits are gone Percy; they sure aren’t going to grow back.” She had said with the bloodshot eyes from her binge drinking from the night before that also seemed to hold the building luster of defiance in them that had been absent for so long.

“You do what you have to do.” She had continued, “stay down in the basement playing with your goddamn trains and watching MASH (she said sarcastically referring to the disturbingly large volume of porn tapes he had in the basement innocuously labeled as the old T.V. drama) for all I care.

He remembered thinking then to himself for the first time since the operation and long hospital stay that my wife is not sick. She is not going to die. He had looked up at her and found her standing in a long white sundress with her thick brunette hair twisted back in a ponytail with a bright red scrunchy and a little green bucket in her hand with little spades and trowels sticking their little gardening tool heads up over the lip.

“Do what you have to do,” she had repeated. “I’m going to do some gardening.”

And she did just that, all that day in fact. She had one before, a garden along the front left side of the house because it captured the best sun. It was before she brought home the news, before she had gotten sick. It had been plain and normal but she had tended it with pleasure and pride but between the surgery, then the chemo and the furious landslide into the lonely darkness they both had fallen into afterwards the garden never really stood a chance and had become nothing more that a long patch of dry dead earth.

So she had grabbed the keys and an hour later returned with a truckload filled with things of petals and color and life. She spent that entire day toiling away in the ground and he had watched.

He sat back from the window and watched her lightly water the dirt, turning it from dusty brown to a rich black.

He watched her till the earth, then create wide, strategically placed holes for planting, and then gently place her flowers of hope in them. She would then knead the wet soil, almost caressing it, into place and then rise up gently, wipe her perspiring brow and step back to take in the placement for final approval.

She did this with each one and she had purchased several dozen. He watched her as she did this. He watched the brown mane of her hair his hands hadn’t felt for too long as it became playfully disheveled. He watched her long delicate fingers that hadn’t felt him for too long as they worked the soft earth. When she stood he watched the outline of her long and slender legs as the sunlight flowed through her thin white dress and Percy felt desire and shame in equal measure.

The late afternoon sky turned red and yellow as the sun went to sleep and he watched her for awhile longer as she proudly watered her creations with the garden hose; the freshly planted colors bright and new and dripping with water. He went upstairs then but paused briefly in the kitchen to leave a note on the table for his wife which simply said: Come to bed. Don’t bother taking a shower.

She had come to bed that night smelling of flowers, and earth and sweat and Percy made love to her while he whispered things in her ears only two people in love can truly ever say to each other. Afterwards they ate cold chicken in bed and softly talked about grief, and shame and loss. The spoke to each other about these things, their own frailties and failures and then they made love again.

The next day Tallulah went out early and returned with all the bits of nature people landscape gardens with. Old stones, rustic little wooden trellises and weather beaten railroad ties and she spent the day filling in the empty spaces of her garden like she was putting a puzzle together.

That evening Percy made love to her again and would in fact, while their garden grew, make love to her every night for the next seven years.

Even when she became sick again they made love each night and when the relentless bitch disease had taken to much from her physically; when she once again was forced to return to the hospital, they made love still. With their eyes and their words and the light touch of a hand on a clammy forehead they still made love.

Then one day during an early spring shower she died. That was two months ago and he sat now at this dead parcel of dirt and decay that hadn’t been touched in over half a year.

He rose slowly to begin his work.

The dead things were an affront and had to go quickly. He raked the withered, hollow stalks and vines away with ferocity and gathered them all up in large green plastic bags to be put out with the trash the next day. Then he watered the hard soil until it became black and moist. He dug small planting holes to the map he had already plotted out in his head and then he walked to the garage.

Percy returned with two small rose bushes. One red, one yellow. Then he brought out some perennials and a then a hibiscus to go next to one of the trellises; then a purple bougainvillea for the other trellis.

He worked the earth, carefully placing each offering into its new home, and sometimes he found himself crying. He wept not as much for her death as he did for those wasted days and months so many years ago. He cried for the time when he couldn’t bring himself to touch the only person he had ever really wanted to touch because he had thought her changed and broken instead of saved and given back to him, like a gift from death.

But then as he worked he would also laugh. The memories of millions of seconds of joy and love flooding into his mind like they had just happened; knowing they would never happen again. He worked most of the day and when he was done stepped back to take the garden into full view.

It was not a special garden. It was plain and normal and although would grow to be lovely would never, ever truly be beautiful. Not like hers was. He accepted this with a small smile as he wiped the sweat from his forehead. No, nothing would ever be as beautiful as that again.

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