All Over Creation (29 page)

O, Mr. Burbank, won't you try
and do some things for me?
A wizard clever as you are
can do them easily.
A man who turns a cactus plant
into a feather bed
Should have no trouble putting brains
into a cabbage head.

—Anonymous, quoted in
A Gardener Touched with Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank

Every seed has a story, Geek says, encrypted in a narrative line that stretches back for thousands of years. And if you trace that story, traveling with that little seed backward in time, you might find yourself tucked into an immigrant's hatband or sewn into the hem of a young wife's dress as she smuggles you from the old country into the New World. Or you might be clinging to the belly wool of a yak as you travel across the steppes of Mongolia. Or perhaps you are eaten by an albatross and pooped out on some rocky outcropping, where you and your offspring will put down roots to colonize that foreign shore. Seeds tell the story of migrations and drifts, so if you learn to read them, they are very much like books—with one big difference.

“What's that?” Ocean asks at this point in the story. She loves stories. Laps at their shorelines, licking them up like an incoming tide.

The difference is this: Book information is relevant only to human beings. It's expendable, really. As someone who has to teach for a living, I shouldn't be saying this, but the planet can do quite well without books. However, the information contained in a seed is a different story, entirely vital, pertaining to life itself. Why? Because seeds contain the information necessary to perform the most essential of all alchemies, something that we cannot do: They know how to transform sunlight into food and oxygen so the rest of us can survive.

Of course, this is what planting is all about—the ancient human impulse to harness that miracle and to make it perform for our benefit. To emulate the divine author and tease forth a new crop of stories from the earth.

Spring comes late to Liberty Falls, but by March the farmers are already chafing at the bit, surveying the fields and mapping spring rotations, checking over equipment and inspecting their seed. They scan the skies where the clouds meet the horizon, as though by looking hard enough they could stave off the cold air masses that flow down from Canada. They stare at their fields, kicking at the frozen sod as though by the force of wishing they could make the earth thaw. They wonder what luck, good or bad, God has in store for them, but mostly they are filled with a wild, irrational hope. They are ready to resurrect the year.

I was tired of winter, too, and making plans to transplant my little seedlings. If we went home soon, I might still be able to teach the remainder of the semester, but if I stayed away any longer, this school year was lost, and with it all pretense of an academic career. Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can score a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays on time and doesn't cheat or abuse you, then it's in your best interest to show up consistently from year to year. Neither job gives you health insurance or benefits. Harvesting potatoes might pay slightly better in the short run, but teaching gives you the warm satisfaction of nurturing young minds, at least inside the classroom. The minute you step outside, however, this satisfaction is undermined by the college administration. The nontenured faculty form a downtrodden, transient underclass, inferior in every way to the landed professorial gentry.

I knew I had to get back, but as the days passed, I couldn't seem to make the decision to leave. When you're caretaking someone who is sick or waiting to die, you get hung up in a morbid limbo, waiting for something to happen, to release you back into your life. Not that I was doing much caretaking. Y and Lilith were looking after Lloyd. Not that Lloyd was showing any signs of dying.

“Where's Melvin?” he said. “Just get me downstairs. I can move about fine once I'm down the stairs.”

“Dad, you're supposed to be taking it easy.”

“The year doesn't wait. We have to get going on those transplants.”

“It's early. It's still freezing outside.”

He waved his hand in my direction, like I was an annoying fly to shoo away. “Gotta start the leeks.”

Geek was helping Momoko with the starts, and Ocean was pitching in. From time to time the boy Frankie would show up, which meant Phoenix would deign to join them. They'd stand around the potting table in the greenhouse, making exotic mixtures of peat, sand, grit, lime, and leaf mold. Geek was planning to concentrate on the soybeans, planting out all of the forty-odd varieties in my parents' collection, to make sure that the seed was still viable and to build up the stock.

“They're pretty!” Ocean said. She had been making little paper pots out of old newspaper and filling them with soil, and now Geek gave her a sack of soybeans, labeled JEWEL. She took out a bean. It was shiny yellow with a black saddle. She poked her finger into the soil and made a hole, dropped in the bean, and patted the hole closed.

Geek watched approvingly. “Kids, did you know that more than half of the soybeans planted in America are genetically engineered? And a third of the corn, too.”

“So?” Phoenix asked.

“So? That's over sixty million acres! Nature's own varieties are slowly dying out. Soon all we'll have are genetically modified mutants.”

“Mutants,” said Phoenix. “Cool.” He high-fived Frankie. There was only three years difference between them, and Phoenix thought Frankie was just about perfect.

While the rest of them planted, I drifted in and out, sniffing into the corners of the house and the outbuildings. It felt so strange, being back in this place where I'd abandoned my childhood. What did I expect to find now? A little-girl-shaped shadow, perhaps, covered in cobwebs at the back of some forgotten closet. But she hadn't left a trace. The storage room where the seeds were kept was dark and cold. There were rows of shelves covered with old boxes of all different kinds: shoe boxes, kitchen appliance boxes, but mostly old Kleenex boxes—my parents really went through the Kleenex. The boxes were filled with reused envelopes, in turn filled with seeds. The envelopes were ancient, too, with canceled postmarks and the addresses crossed out. They must have saved every envelope they'd ever received, because there were thousands, each one carefully slit across one end, filled with seeds, then taped shut and labeled. Or at least some were labeled. Many were not.

In the dim light Momoko crept around the shelves, shifting boxes from side to side, pulling out envelopes, and tipping out the seeds. “Dr. Wyche's Kentucky Wonders?” she muttered. “Large Mottled Lazy Housewifes? Gollie Hares?”

“Phaseolus vulgaris.”
Geek nodded. “She's doing the bush beans.”

He followed Momoko around with a video camera, filming an inventory of the seeds and plants, trying to help her identify them. Sometimes she'd get the names right, and sometimes she wouldn't. She got very upset when she forgot. One day she sat down on the floor of the storage room and started banging her head with a muddy fist.

“What is
name?
What is
name?
” Over and over. It was just some damn pea, but she couldn't remember, and she just sat there in all that dirt, smacking herself until I grabbed her wrists and held them.

“Mom,” I said. “Stop. It's okay.”

She looked at me with tears in her eyes. Her white hair was smeared with mud.

“What is
your
name?” she said.

“Cut it out, Mom.” I thought she was joking.

Geek helped me get her upstairs to Lloyd's room, and he talked her down, but after that, Y brought Lloyd downstairs every day and sat him in a wheelchair in a warm corner of the greenhouse so he could help out for a few hours. She was a lot calmer then. Lloyd sat there triumphantly with a plank on his lap and a marker and a pile of labels, carefully writing down the names of things. His hand was so shaky you could barely read the letters.

One day Geek sent Phoenix to the storage room to locate some soybeans—Amish Greens or Beijing Blacks or Agates. Momoko was in there with a miner's light attached to her forehead, and even though she was pretty deaf, she must have heard Phoenix come in. She raised her face, and the beam from the lamp cast shadows on her sunken cheekbones, illuminating her ghostly white hair. She scared the shit out of him. He stepped back, knocking over a shelf of lettuces or something, and she started cackling like it was the funniest thing she'd ever seen. After that, whenever she saw him, she yelled “Boo!” But he'd get her back, pretending to talk without making any sound, just moving his lips. “What?” she'd say, cupping her hand to her deaf ear and shaking her head in frustration. “More louder, please!”

Mostly we all tried to keep her out of the storage house. She seemed happier poking around in the dirt, planting things, and nobody wanted her to start that head-banging business again. Every day was different for her. We tried to give her more good days than bad.

Geek set up his hammock in the corner of the greenhouse, and I took to hanging out with him in the evenings, after the kids and my parents had gone to bed. I'd lie there in the humid warmth, strung between two posts, watching him plant things. He had rigged up some drip-irrigation tubing to connect with an old glass beaker, which he suspended above the hammock and filled with ice cubes and a powerful blue drink made with rum and pineapple and curaçao. The system worked on gravity feed, and I'd swing in the hammock and sip the cerulean liquid from the tip of a miniature hose, controlling the rate of its flow with a nozzle. He had downloaded some old Hawaiian music off the Internet: “Sweet Leilani,” “Blue Hawaiian Moon.” The tropical lyrics tugged at my heart. The twang and wow of the slack-key guitar, the gentle sway of the hammock, the humid air—intoxicated by these, I could almost forget I was in Idaho. But never for long. Something always happened to bring me back.

 

 

She was in the living room with a handful of index-card labels and a roll of tape. She was looking around at the furniture, as if a secret were hidden under a cushion or in the upholstery. I watched from the doorway as she wavered, trying to decide. Then she darted toward the TV and labeled it RUG. My heart sank. She put CHAIR on the sofa. She had TABLE in her hand as she headed for the floor lamp.

I was thinking, So what if she's losing her words? What do they matter? The names of things are arbitrary constructs, mere social conventions, as easily changed as the rules of a child's game, and why should one encryption of reality, mine, be more valid than hers? But even as I thought this, even as my heart was aching with dismay and sadness, I couldn't help but make the correction.

“That's the lamp, Mom,” I said. “Not the table. The table's over here.” I peeled the index card off the shade, but she dashed over and snatched it away from me.

“Damé!”
she said. “No!” Her voice was hushed. She pressed it back onto the dusty fabric surface until it stuck. She stepped back and looked at it, once again satisfied. The lamp was a table. All was well.

I took a deep breath, trying to realign myself to this new groundless-ness.

She gave a dark little chuckle. “I gonna teach him lesson,” she said.

“What?”

Her voice was low, conspiratorial now. “You know that Nix? He is very bad boy. He play some tricks on me, moving all the labels. So now I trick him back. I move them first, then she think he did it.”

“She? Who is she?”

“His mommy. When she catch him, boy, oh, boy, she get plenty mad!” Dumbstruck, I stared at her. She flipped through the remaining labels in her hand, studying them, then looked up at my face, as though seeing me for the first time.

“Who are you?” she asked blankly.

She wasn't joking.

I left her there and walked out to the porch. The coast was clear of children. I lit a cigarette and smoked for a while, then crossed over to the greenhouse. When I got closer to the building, I heard Ocean's high-pitched chatter, interspersed with Geek's voice, explaining something. They both looked up at me from the hammock where they were rocking. Chicken Little was cheeping on the ground below, scruffy and preadolescent, her first pinfeathers poking through her baby down.

“Come in,” Geek said. “Join the party. You look like you need a drink.”

“I was looking for one. Is the bar open?”

“It can be.” Geek vacated his place in the hammock for me. I climbed in next to Ocean. She sniffed the cigarette smell on my clothes but decided not to say anything, and I was grateful. She snuggled in next to me, happy to have me there.

“Hello, my sweet Puddle,” I said.