All Over Creation (19 page)

 

“Amen,” intoned Geek.

He put down the catalog and looked around the group. It was New Year's Eve, and the Spudnik was parked in a truckstop off I-80, near Ogallala, Nebraska, where they'd stopped to score some fuel before turning south. Luckily, they'd found a Kentucky Fried Chicken that was just about to dump their fryers, so they topped up the tanks, ate dinner, and settled in for the evening. Geek was reading through some material that they'd picked up at an organic-farming collective in Iowa, when he'd come across the catalog.

“Seeds, are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

Y was standing on one foot in the middle of the Spudnik, facing the dashboard, doing Vrikshasana—the Tree pose. His hands were raised over his head, palms pressed together, index fingers aligned and pointed toward the roof. The bare sole of his foot was pressed against the inner thigh of the leg he was balanced on. “I don't know, Geek,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed at a spot near the transmission. “What are you thinking?”

Geek held up the catalog again. “L. J. Fuller.”

“What about him?”

“He's the one!” Geek looked around the room for support. “You don't think this dude's amazing?”

Frank shrugged. He was holding a skein of yarn looped between his two hands, and Charmey was winding the wool into a ball. Lilith was knitting a sweater. The air smelled of wet wool and incense and sodden fried chicken.

Geek jumped to his feet, rocking the Winnebago. “Seeds, it's time to wake up!” he yelled. “We have found our
guru!
”

Y lost his balance and his foot hit the floor with a thud.

Lilith put down her knitting. “Geek, what are you talking about?

“Our master. Our guru. This is him. The one we've been waiting for! A humble seedsman, but a visionary. A born leader of men.”

“Get real.”

“No. I mean it. He's perfect.”

Y moved into Warrior One—Virabhadrasana, lunging forward on one leg and raising his arms overhead into a V. “Dude's a major Christian. All this God shit is way too heavy for me.”

“But that's the whole beauty of it! Don't you see how amazing this is? He's an icon! Totally salt of the earth. The American farmer making a lonely stand, defending his seed against the hubris and rapacious greed of the new multinational life-sciences cartel. In Idaho, no less! It's Mr. Potato Head's cloning ground, his place of origin!”

“So?”

“So I don't know. It's mystical, that's all. Like some sort of friggin' harmonic convergence. Liberty Falls? Power County? Like, can you believe how wild that sounds? What a mind-fuck!”

“What's your point, man?” Y asked, coming into Mountain pose, then sitting down on the floor.

“I just have a feeling, is all. I think we should check this dude out.”

“I thought we were going down to someplace warm.” Y lowered himself onto his back now for Shavasana—the Corpse pose.

“Trust me,” Geek said. His eyes were blazing, his voice hushed and urgent. “We must go west, Seedlings. I have a feeling. We're heading for something dynamite!”

His words hung, twitchy and volatile, in the close air. Suddenly Charmey threw down the ball of yarn and scrambled toward the bathroom. She slammed the thin door behind her, and they listened as she started to retch.

“What's wrong with her?” Geek asked.

“It's the KFC,” Lilith said, tossing her knitting onto the table. “The smell kind of kicks off her morning sickness.”

third

I have thought often lately that if it had not been the potato it would have been something else, for I was determined before that time to find the vulnerable spot in Nature and make her my co-worker . . .

—Luther Burbank,
The Harvest of the Years

She called it her “seed money,” not knowing that the idiom already existed in English. For Momoko it simply described the small amounts of cash she earned from her mail-order seeds, carefully culled, to send to me over the years.

At first she must have worked alone. As I remember, Lloyd had always been a bit disparaging of my mother's garden. It wasn't that he disapproved of seeds per se, but he was a large-scale potato farmer, a monoculturalist, so you can imagine how nervous all that diversity must have made him. Over the years, as he watched her garden grow, Lloyd thought her frivolous for planting what seemed to him to be a confusion of flowers, fruits, and vegetables.

Of course, it hadn't always been so. In the beginning, when the potato operation was still small and he needed her help in the fields, Momoko grew mostly functional foods, which appeared on the dinner table. This he could understand. He could appreciate a bit of greens or a squash now and then, and he approved of her economy. But after the potato operation grew to a scale where he needed hired help and her labor was no longer necessary, and then I was born, and then I left, somewhere during this time and thereafter, Momoko's garden began to change. She began to branch out, and soon there was an extravagance of blooms, in sizes and colors and shapes Lloyd had never seen. And vegetables whose names he did not know. And fruits with strange pips.

You can imagine his unease, growing denser every year, in tandem with the garden's lush perimeters. Pressed, he could not say why. Of course, no one was pressing him to do or say much of anything, especially not Momoko. Not since the night in February when they woke to the groan of the stair, lay side by side, listening in the dark to the sigh of the porch door closing, complicit in the mounting silence.

“Go,” she said. “Bring her back.”

But he hadn't.

That night Momoko more or less stopped speaking to him. She moved into my bedroom, where she lived for close to a decade. After his heart attack she took care of him, preparing his meals and bringing them to his bedside and later, when he was better, leaving them on the kitchen table. But she didn't eat with him. She didn't talk to him, more than was absolutely necessary. She closed herself inside my room and whispered and stared up at the stars.

Under his window, her garden grew.

In '77, after bankrupting his neighbor, Lloyd recovered his fields and enough of his health to enable him to farm and prosper for the next several years, until 1980, when prices bottomed out and he took a beating like everyone else. Still, he thought as he struggled along, he was doing better than Unger, who by this time was dead.

But his luck didn't last for long. In 1983, when I was graduating from college, he had a second heart attack, and a bad one. Knifelike, it cut cleanly through his ties to the world. He leased his remaining acreage to Will and gave up on spuds.

The potato habit was a hard one to break, and the transformation happened slowly. One of the things Lloyd loved about potatoes is that they stayed alive. I remember going with him to the cellars at harvest, when the crop was being loaded in, and he swept his arm across the vast tumbling mountain of tubers.

“Look, Yumi! They're alive. Living and breathing.” Then he explained how cloning worked and how every potato was capable of creating endless offspring out of chunks of its living flesh, and I felt so proud, like I was a little chunk of his. I can see why he was excited. In a very real sense a potato plant is immortal—the Russet Burbanks that Lloyd, and all of Idaho, grew were literally chips off the old block of Luther's original. There is something divine in this potency, but it needs care and protection. Unlike grain, Lloyd would say dismissively, which can be stored indefinitely, there is an art to storing potatoes. They come out of the ground at about fifty-five degrees and are transported to the cellar, where the temperature is slowly lowered, half a degree a day, until it reaches a careful forty-five. The breathing rate of the potatoes slows. Usually they can stay that way for almost a year before they start to wither and die. Of course, that is the problem with living things—they have a life span that cannot be exceeded.

When compared to the succulent, rollicking poetry of potatoes, the farming of seeds is a dry and persnickety task. For a spudman like Lloyd, seeds are superfluous. But during that first year of his recovery from the second heart attack, as he watched Momoko cultivate her garden, he realized that for her, seeds were the sole objective. She tended her plants, allowing them to ripen, to flower and die—and only then did she get down to business: shaking the seeds from their brittle pockets or teasing them wet from their flesh, drying them and sorting them, measuring and labeling them, and slipping them into envelopes for dissemination by the U.S. Postal Service to destinations around the world. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night. . . . She was more reliable than the birds and the bees, and with a far greater reach.

Her customers wrote her letters. He discovered the correspondence in my old desk, where Momoko conducted her business. Each of the sheets had been carefully read, and the difficult words were underlined and translated into Japanese.

 

They were heartwarming letters, but Lloyd found it disconcerting to realize that his wife had a set of connections and friendships, a whole world, about which he'd known little or nothing.

Bedridden again after the second attack, he watched her, first from the bedroom window and then from the parlor, through the heavy drapes. Later, when the weather warmed up, he shuffled out to the back porch and kept an eye on the top of her straw gardening hat as it moved through the dense foliage. Finally, when his legs got stronger, he followed her into the garden.

At first, afraid of seeming invasive, he kept to the outer edges while she moved up and down her rows. Then, when she didn't appear to mind or to notice, he began to meander around the beds. Even the air here was different—thicker and humid and very much hers. He was careful not to crowd her, observing where she was working so he could stay on the opposite quadrant of the garden plot. He felt like a lesser piece in some large board game—if she was the queen, he was not even a castle. But as he skirted the edges, he noticed she was watching him, too, ducking behind a trellis of peas or turning down a row when he looked her way.