The Farm, Part II
My Mother’s Garden
a short story by
Brock Taylor
When I was a girl I had three parents, the usual set plus my maternal grandmother. Nanna lived in a little stone cottage across the ravine that was made accessible to the house by a stout eighty-foot bridge. Of the three of them I’d have to say that Nanna had the most influence on me as a child.
My mother, Erika, was a plump, passive woman. She hadn’t always been so, but that is what she became. In the old photograph album that I pored over tirelessly with Nanna on cold, winter evenings, evenings in which I heard the family saga serialized, told and retold and embroidered upon, I saw that my mother had been a tall reed of a girl who’s hips had spread and who’s waist had thickened with each year past puberty. It was a family joke that my father had chosen her for her strength rather than beauty, and, given what they did together in their early years, built the farm, my mother driving as many nails as my father, I’ve always believed it. The passivity came later, and was simply her response to what life threw at her, a defense mechanism, but also a kind of wisdom. My grandmother couldn’t have been more different.
While my mother was largely silent with never a harsh word or rebuke for anyone, Nanna’s eyes were sharp and critical and her tongue a terror. Although she spared no one, my mother and myself included, most of her vitriol was spent on our men-folk and men in general. Her father had been a bum, her husband a pig and a drunk, my father was an automaton, and my brother Nils Junior, or Neil, as he became, a lazy good-for-nothing. Looking through her photo album, she couldn’t turn a page without launching into one scandal or another, her uncles, her brothers, her nephews, every image, whether smiling or stern, standing alone or with his arms wrapped around his mother, sister, or sweetheart, evoked some dastardly memory. If they weren’t rogues, lechers, or pirates, they were fools.
Nanna was dark, short, and thin as a rail. My father called her a wop or a spic when he was in his cups, but she denied any southern blood. Her father had been dark, as the old tintypes attested, and her lack of stature she attributed to the malnourishment she’d suffered in her father’s house, being starved nearly to death for being female. Nevertheless, she was a huge woman, her presence and opinions dominating any gathering she chose to attend. Fortunately, I suppose, she didn’t choose to attend many. Rather, she kept to herself and her memories, and only ventured across the bridge to visit my mother in the afternoons when she would find her alone or in the company of her small children. Her only friend seemed to be my Aunt Hedvig, who was married to Uncle John, and lived next door, next door being a mile down the road. Strictly speaking Uncle John was my second cousin, but he had the age and bearing of an uncle, so that is what we called him. Nanna would visit with Aunt Hedvig about once a month, and occasionally I was allowed to accompany her. I loved the formality of it, the china teacups, the crocheted doilies that covered every surface, and how we’d all dress up for the occasion. The conversation was always the same, barbarous men stories and gossip about my poor mother and her wretched children, myself always graciously excluded.
I never thought of my mother as poor, nor of my siblings as all that wretched, but I listened intently and held my tongue. Even if it was all fiction, it was interesting. I learned early on not to take these stories back to my mother for confirmation or denial. That just stirred up resentment and caused the visits and stories to dry up. Instead I just treated it all as a vast, delicious, malicious fairytale in which everyone I knew played a role.
Although the reasons that Nanna didn’t care for my big sister Clara Eve were enumerated with regularity, I never felt that I had the whole picture. I couldn’t figure out how the enmity had begun. Even as a child I could see that it was a vicious cycle they were in, with my grandmother’s rough dismissal of her causing Clara Eve to behave as badly as she admittedly did. My natural fondness for my sister, who’s room I shared (and it was always just that, her room that I shared) was, over time, replaced by awe at her audacity, outrageous backtalk, and flagrant disobedience, but I never ceased to feel sorry for her. My earliest memories are of her tantrums and my longing to bring her into the security of the love that I felt bathed in. Not that she’d have joined me even if she had been welcome. Clara Eve was a fighter striking out at everything, but I always thought that the anger that drove her had to have been inadvertently nurtured by the very women who so pampered and sheltered me.
One of my fondest memories of my grandmother is sitting with her on her little porch in the late afternoon, each of us in a rocking chair, she gabbing away, smoking cigarettes. The wonderful thing about it was that when she smoked little wisps escaped from her left ear. As she got older and grayer she developed a definite dirty yellow stain in the hair above that ear. When she was a young child back in Sweden she’d contracted a serious ear infection and, rather than pay for a doctor, her father had called in the veterinarian. The old codger had decided that the ear just needed to be drained, so with a darning needle he’d poked a hole right through the eardrum and into her sinuses. The ear had drained, all right, and my grandmother lost half of her hearing in the process. She showed me once how she could stick a cigarette into her ear, pinch her nose, and calmly smoke the whole cigarette, expelling the smoke through her mouth. The trick kept me squealing for a week. When I begged her to repeat the trick for my mother or sister, she frowned at me and pretended she didn’t know what I was talking about.
Smoking was one of the many causes of friction between Nanna and my father. He, who had smoked a pipe since he could afford tobacco, would tell her bluntly that ladies didn’t smoke. Nanna, with smoke pouring out of her ear like a locomotive on a steep grade, would retort that what was good for the goose was good for the gander, and he should mind his own business. This would generally send him off to the barn where he’d hole up in the hayloft for a couple of hours with his pipe and a bottle of rye whiskey. My mother would watch all this with doleful eyes then set about doing the dishes.
My grandmother wouldn’t eat with us, saying time and again, that there was not a single item in my mother’s kitchen that she’d put into her mouth. The reason we were all so fat, she’d say, even though the only fat person among us was her daughter, was our disgusting American eating habits. I took this just as part of the fairytale, but in the end, like so much of the rest of what she said, I realized there was some truth to it. Nanna lived essentially on dark bread, fish, oatmeal, vegetables, and caffeine, all of which, or the makings of which, my mother dutifully lugged across the bridge after her weekly shopping trips.
If one is to believe my grandmother, her husband turned his dairy farm over to their two loutish sons then drank himself to death leaving her high and dry. Her sons divided the land, herd, and buildings between them and deposited her into the care of their sister. Nanna was only fifty at the time, but it’s a man’s world, and she owned nothing and wasn’t about to find herself another man to cook for, so she put up with it. She had never liked her daughter’s choice of husbands, finding him too serious, too self-righteous, too male, and she had made no bones about it. Now suddenly she was sleeping on a cot in the room next to him, sharing with her granddaughter, being expected to eat dead cows and chickens, and not being too quiet about her feelings. It wasn’t long before her son-in-law realized that this was a long-term proposition, and he built her the cottage, complete with a kitchen, running water, and a sun porch that didn’t look down over the lovely ravine and across to the farmhouse, but was, instead, on the far side with a view of cow fields. For privacy, he’d said. So, my grandmother had her own kitchen and looked after her own meals, and was thankful, at least, for that.
*
With each passing year my mother grew stouter. By the time she died, in her late sixties, she looked more like a refrigerator than a person, but she never lost her ability or willingness to work. All the time I lived at home she kept a kitchen garden right out the back door. It wasn’t the best place as far as soil and sunlight went, but she said that convenience made up for it. She grew all the usual stuff: potatoes, onions, and carrots, peas and beans, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, cabbage, corn, and squash. My siblings and I were farm kids, and one of our chores was helping with the garden. We weeded all summer long, using a hoe between the rows and squatting and pulling by hand those closer in, then helped with the harvesting and processing in the fall. I remember my big brother, Neil, digging potatoes with me scrambling around him, picking through the soil as he turned it over. We’d fill maybe half a dozen burlap sacks.
In later years, when I was in my teens, she added in more exotic plants, leeks, eggplants, and sweet peas and giant Russian sunflowers around the perimeter. They made the garden prettier and a bit less utilitarian. We didn’t harvest the leeks, or not many, but left them through the winter, cold wilted piles, then the following year they would flower into wonderfully spiked spherical shapes that my mother would bring indoors to dry.
Of the forty acres we lived on, about half an acre was front yard. It was pretty boring, just lawn with a couple of cherry trees between the house and the fence that ran along the gravel road. Neil and Clara Eve left home one after the other the same year, leaving me an only child. I don’t remember my mother having much reaction to the flight, to her reduced family. About all that happened was she started digging up the front lawn. One day I came home from school and there she was with a shovel scooping out big chunks of grass, shaking the dirt off the exposed roots, and tossing the sod into a wheelbarrow. As far as I know she didn’t ask my father for any help, nor was any offered. She said she wanted to plant some flowers.
From just off the front deck she created an arc about eight feet wide that stretched all the way to the driveway, maybe a hundred feet. It took her almost a month to dig out all that lawn. After school I’d go out and lounge on the grass beside her. She didn’t want any help. She seemed quite happy, sweating and humming to herself. She didn’t want to talk either. Talk and work didn’t mix in my family. But I think she enjoyed my company, and I liked it too, some vicarious good will in all that expended energy.
I can’t remember all the stuff she planted, but there were tall flowers, like cosmos, delphiniums, daylilies, and dahlias, and low flowers that spread into a blanket over the years, violets, pansies and primroses, maybe periwinkle. Interspersed were flowering shrubs: azaleas, rhododendrons, forsythia, quince, and witch hazel. In the fall she planted bulbs: snowdrops, daffodils, gladiolas, and tulips. Gradually the whole half-acre became planted with not a trace of the former lawn, a continuous sea of graduated color that could be navigated by circuitous trails of stone and brick. When it seemed that she must finally be done she put in a hedge of red-twig dogwood right along the fence line and down the driveway, effectively enclosing the garden. My grandmother watched it all with bemusement and talked about surrogate children and the like.
I certainly knew all about my mother, at least everything my grandmother had to say about her, which was plenty. How she’d had the energy of both of her big brothers combined, and could have whipped either of them had she had a mind to. How it was her brothers that had corralled my father into marrying her, just to get her off their hands, and nothing my grandmother could say or do had any effect once she’s set her mind on it. Her hormones and maternal instinct were both in overdrive and if my father needed a mule with a good back, she needed a husband to give her babies. There was no stopping the two of them, at least, nothing a mother could do.
When the first baby girl was born dead my mother was only nineteen, and it was like someone had hit her between the eyes with a two-by-four. She was stunned and the reality of it twisted her life into a corkscrew. She cried and screamed and broke precious objects. Again, there was nothing her mother could do, her words and hugs just fluff in a hurricane. But she was strong, my mother, and she pulled herself out of her grief and confusion, decided it was a fluke, a freak occurrence, a rock on the road, and it was behind her. She resumed her life, dented but whole.
A year later, when she pushed a second lifeless daughter from her womb she went berserk and all her mother’s and husband’s strength could not control her fury. And, fury it was, fury, overwhelming by far the grief and disappointment and shame. Fury that life was not as it should be, that the universe did not play fair, that God was a lie, and love was useless, meaningless. Not her husband’s love or her mother’s love, but her love. Her love for her child, for her life-to-be. Meaningless, useless, pointless. A husk, like herself, utterly empty.
And so she ran back to her mother’s womb, deserting her husband, voiding their life and plans, ran, screaming, from the emptiness of existence back to her mother’s skirts and her brothers’ abuse, and it took a long year for my father to win her back. Not that he ever really did.
My grandmother had been raised a Lutheran, of course, and she had married one. That, she told me, had been her first real mistake. Until she had married she had just been a victim, but with that conscious choice of a man who promised to take her to America, who provided an escape from the terrors of her family home, she had blundered. Blundered because he was a card-carrying, bible-thumping Lutheran, the symbol of all she thought she was escaping. Not that there had been much choice in their village. So, her children were raised in that dour religion in spite of her, and took to it, especially the boys.
I was raised without religion, in that we didn’t attend church or Sunday school or prayer meetings. There was no bible reading in the evenings nor grace before meals. Nevertheless, our house was haunted by God. Both my parents had come from strict Lutheran childhoods and, even though they no longer overtly believed, in moments of excitement or confrontation telltale words and phrases would slip out, just enough to burden us all with that omnipotent presence. One day I asked my grandmother if she believed in God. She puffed on her cigarette and nodded her head grimly. Oh yes, she believed in the bugger all right. It was obvious to her that the large male God of her father and husband was a reality. What other explanation was there for the male dominance of the world? Women were clearly quicker, smarter, more far-seeing, more emotionally and sexually secure; wiser, in short. A man’s testosterone-driven intellect drove him to find his pleasures in drinking, fighting, rape, and war. By all rights and logic it should be a woman’s world with men relegated to the only constructive thing they did best, heavy labor. The only possible explanation for man’s idiotic dominance and woman’s ignominy was a male God’s large thumb on the scales of justice.
I think my mother found little solace in her mother’s religious theories during that year of crisis. With her childhood acceptance of a God of Love and Mercy, always a bit tenuous anyway tempered as it was by the stern God of Work and Forbearance, shattered and scattered as so much dirt beneath her boots, revealed as a grand lie laid upon her by her duplicitous parents and the conniving pastor and his coven of hags, she was not ready to just roll over and accept a more cynical version of the same treachery. Instead she hunkered into the oblivion of depression, closeting herself in her childhood bedroom, ignoring her husband’s pleading and tears and fits of anger, ignoring her mother’s condolences and wise words, ignoring her father and brothers in whatever they did or tried to say, and rising only to strike out in rage against the well-wishing pastor and his trembling and righteous emissaries who spoke of forbearance and God’s will.
Over the months she grew thin, lost her vigor, and, eventually, as she ebbed, so did her fury. She told me that it was like the tide leaving her soul, leaving a vacuum that was gradually filled, like a breath of fresh air, by a calm despondency. Her grief at losing her faith merely evaporated, and it was like they had never existed, neither the grief nor the faith. Her grief at losing her babies, the grief that had enveloped her to the point of drowning, the grief she could not imagine surviving, slowly shrunk to a hard little tumor in her chest whose pain she treasured as a fond memory. All the rest of her life when she sat she would press her left hand against the ribcage below her right breast as if assuaging some pain, and that’s exactly what she was doing as she followed her memory and longing and imagination through whatever melancholy and joy they found for her.
My mother returned to my father and her luck seemed to change. She had a daughter who lived, Eva, then later, after the war, a son, Nils Junior, named for my father. It was during the winter before Nils Junior was born that my grandfather died, puking out his guts in a cold rage, and my grandmother took up her new residence, where she stayed until the end of her days. Mother and daughter, they lived together for all but eight years of their lives, and during those eight years were only five miles apart. My grandmother outlived her daughter by three months, one death, no doubt, precipitating the other.
There must have been a profound attachment between them but I never saw it. On the surface their relationship was one of tolerance, my mother quietly enduring her bossy, interfering, opinionated mother, and Nanna tolerating her stubborn, yet docile, and ever-widening daughter. Nanna played midwife at all six of my mother’s deliveries, so she was front and center at all the family tragedies. With the first two stillbirths she had silently delivered the grim package to my father who was pacing the living room rug in nervous anticipation, then crawled onto the matrimonial bed to wrap her dumbstruck daughter in her scrawny arms. The successful birth of Eva was an occasion of hysterical relief more than joy, although that followed, and tears of rapture and jubilation flowed like rivers in the little farmhouse for days to follow. Neil’s entry into the world was even tenser, it such a thing is possible, as Eva’s mental deficiencies had been long in evidence, and both parents were wondering if they were capable of producing normal, healthy offspring. My grandmother told me that my father seemed to graduate to womanhood with the birth of his son, becoming gentle and loving and happy for the first time in his life. She had never seen any of these qualities in a man before and it gave her pause. He had remained in that state of grace, more or less, for five years, even through the blow that would fell his wife, turning her into a simpleton the following year.
That’s how Nanna described it, but my mother was never a simpleton.
June fourth, June fourth, that sorry day. Even though it happened three years before my birth I still mourn it every year. No wonder my sister Clara Eve hates us all, because it is her birthday, yet we mourn it like the passing of a beloved king. I am told that my sister Eva was slow, slow to walk and never really learning how to talk. She communicated through smiles and tears, sulks and tantrums. June the fourth was her birthday and, given her condition, it was made more of than other children’s birthdays. That year she was to be seven, and there was a party planned, the neighborhood kids were coming with gifts and candy, and a cake had been not-so-secretly baked that would have seven bright candles for her to blow out. Her grandmother had taken her to town to pick out a party dress, all pink and frills, and she was so excited her heart seemed ready to stop. Her mother was big with child and over the preceding months Eva had many times curled up around that big belly and listened with excitement to the life within and felt the kicking limbs. But as her birthday dawned she was awakened by her mother’s cries of pain and nobody had any time for her on her special day. By mid-morning, after a whispered conference in the kitchen between her grandmother and her father, she was told there would be no party that day; that another baby was being born. Her father bounced her on his knee and promised it another day, then he ran out to tell the neighbors to stay home.
Eva threw an all-day tantrum, an apoplectic fit of screaming and thrashing that no amount of cajoling or rebuke could stem. Nils Junior, only a year old at the time, took up the chorus, and between the two children and his wife’s distracted and worried cries at regular intervals in a long, hard labor, my father was beside himself with indecision and frustration. He carried both children outside, one under each arm, for they were both struggling too hard to carry any other way, and around the front lawn and into the orchard, but to no avail. He wanted to be with his wife, or nearby in case he was needed, but he worried that the screaming children would negatively affect the birth, so, until they quieted down, he resolved to stay away. In the afternoon it began to rain, so he took his charges into his mother-in-law’s cottage. The baby finally settled down to sleep on the bed and Eva’s voice grew hoarse and quieter. By dusk, with his son still asleep and Eva sobbing sulkily he returned to the house just in time to hear the cry of his new daughter. He put Eva down and ran into the bedroom, shedding his frustration and anxiety like a coat of mail. Tranquility in the eye of the storm. His wife held tiny, pink Clara to her breast and her mother sat beside her, mopping her sweaty brow. My father bent and kissed his wife on the cheek then went to the door and called the sulking Eva to greet her new sister. Eva shuffled in then quickly poked the baby hard with her bony little fingers before turning and bolting from the room. “Let her go,” said my mother to my father. My father found her at four the next morning at the bottom of the well.
My grandmother said… My grandmother said… It’s not important what she said because it wasn’t true. A great black flood of grief rose up in my mother, inundating her again in an unfathomable despair deeper and darker than her dead daughter’s well. She didn’t leave her bed, but curled into herself, shunning her new baby, her son, her husband and mother. She wept quietly for three days, refusing all comfort, while her mother bottle-fed the infant, spoon-fed the toddler and ignored the husband, all the while trying to coax her daughter back to life. Then, on the morning of the fourth day my mother’s eyes were clear. She took the baby and put her to her swollen breast, then got up and washed the sheets. A transformation had occurred. My grandmother says to near idiocy, but I say to serene acceptance. That was the only mother I knew: unassuming, imperturbable, understanding, undemanding, uncritical, uninvolved, removed, efficient, and quietly loving and compassionate. I believe that that day my mother somehow made her peace with life and found in it, instead of the uncertainty and terror of the great pendulum swinging between joy and despair, a clarity and surety that escapes the rest of us.
*
Years later when I was grown, lived in a distant city, was married, to my grandmother’s disgust, and had children of my own, I would visit my three parents at regular intervals. My father and grandmother grew more crotchety with every passing year, and my mother more serene. Most visits were in the winter, for Christmas, and we’d take my children sledding or skating. One old neighbor still kept horses and a sled they could pull, and he would take us out into what remained of the forest to pick out a tree. My mother’s garden, largely asleep under its blanket of snow, had a beauty about it in that season that I grew to love, the shrubs wrapped in burlap against the killing wind, the beds bumpy with the fall’s spade work, made white velvet, the red-twig dogwood hedge and sometimes the witch hazel, if it was a mild winter, bringing surprising and such joyful color. The rhythm of the plantings, their harmony and structure made bare, like a skeleton quietly preparing to put on flesh, the symmetry of my mother’s dreams as she had dug over the years, her evolving plans made manifest, all lay before the discerning eye as if awaiting a caress. But the best visits were in the summer when the two of us could potter around the beds, pulling weeds and deadheading the shrubs, watering and talking. “Don’t you hate these never-ending weeds,” I said to her once when we were down on our knees. “No,” she replied. I remember I stopped and looked up at her, wondering what was going on in her head. She smiled at me. “Weeds are part of the garden too,” she said, then she put her beefy hand around a dandelion and deftly yanked it out by the roots.
My mother didn’t mind talking, but she rarely initiated a conversation and was not inclined to keep one going, so talking with her often became a question and answer session. On those summer visits we’d often sit on the cedar deck overlooking her by now famous garden. There were comfortable wooden lawn chairs that my father had built, and we’d station ourselves with iced tea, she with her hand nestled quietly under her breast. Maintaining a half-acre garden is a big job for anyone, never mind an old woman, which she was by then, and I guess that she spent about six hours a day on it, except in the wintertime when it was under snow for a few months. “Isn’t it getting too much for you?” I’d ask her every year, to which she would scoff, “What else would I do? Besides, it gives me pleasure.”
“Why?”
“Things growing up, things dying down.”
“Doesn’t it make you sad, seeing them die in the fall?”
She shook her head. “They don’t die, they’re just turning around.”
“What’s your favorite flower?”
“The daylily,” she said without hesitation.
“Why the daylily? Such a common flower.”
“It blooms all summer long, but every bloom lasts only a day.”
“Why do you like that?”
“It’s like you and me, Dear. Here today and gone tomorrow.”
Over the years I came to understand that it was the transience of the garden that she liked so much, that she was contemplating, savoring, all those hours she spent in it, or looking at it. And ‘looking at it’ is the wrong term. My mother didn’t look at the garden; she watched it, because for her it was in continuous change. Appreciating that took a great subtlety of eye and of mind. The plants, of course, were always growing or dying back, flowers were blooming or fading, petals unfolding or falling, but also, the shadows of the stalks and flowers never ceased to move, whether due to the breeze or the progress of the sun, the dampness of the soil and the dew on the morning leaves were in constant, subtle change. Worms and insects borrowed their temporary homes in the soil, aphids infested the roses and were farmed by the ants, birds raided the spring planting and the fall harvest of seeds, butterflies and hummingbirds tirelessly visited every blossom. For my mother the garden was a living metaphor for life.
I think she pitied me my ignorance, my clumsy striving to understand her. Once, in her last year, she turned to me, it was almost sunset and the red in the sky behind me reflected in her pale face, and I suddenly noticed there were tears tracking down her cheeks, tears I’d never seen before, for I’d never seen my mother cry. It was with a great effort that she spoke, that she brought herself to utter these simple words. “The beauty of the garden,” she said, “is its emptiness. Can’t you see? There’s really nothing there.”
Taos
October, 2000
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