Gardens

Back when we were still a whole family, my father always had a garden on the west side of the house. It started small; a few tomato plants and some sweet corn- the usual Kansas garden dwellers. At times my three older brothers and I would sit on the back porch and shuck corn for Ma to cook, snapping off the tips of the ears that had been eaten by worms and throwing them in a pile with the husks in the yard beyond us. I’d sit close to the edge so my bare feet would be in the grass which felt progressively cooler the deeper I buried my toes within it. Sometimes my brothers would “miss” and smack me in the back of the head with the rotten ends. I’d put up a fight, but there wasn’t much I could do, being the youngest and the only girl.

The summer after my oldest brother graduated, married some chick he met two weeks prior, and they moved across the country, Dad added peas to the garden. My other brothers and I spent hours shelling peas that year. Ma’d always complain about her freezer full of peas, tell Dad he’d better figure out what to do with them, find her another freezer, or find another Ma. The whole family got so tired of peas that Ma had to sneak them into meals; mash them into potatoes, add them to every casserole. When Dad found some in his birthday cake, he sent my brothers and me down the road with bags of peas to give to the neighbors. He didn’t plant many peas the following year.

When my second oldest brother graduated he didn’t know what to do, so he joined the Army. That year, Dad doubled the size of his garden to add pumpkins; pie pumpkins, carving pumpkins, and those warty looking pumpkins that people buy out of sympathy. Come fall, Ma was baking pumpkin pie every day; so many that she’d drive around on Sunday mornings and drop them off at all the services in town. Every Saturday at the nearest gas station, Dad had my brother and me manning the bed of his pick-up truck he’d fill with pumpkins. I’d hold a piece of cardboard that said “PUMPKINS” and my brother held one that said “$1,” both scribbled in black marker. After a few weeks, my brother’s sign changed to “FREE.” When Halloween came around, our driveway was lined with jack-o-lanterns. Their faces got simpler as you drove towards the house because we got tired of carving them. The last two both had one eye each and small rectangles for mouths. One day when my brother and I got home from school, Ma told us that the brother in the Army got killed by one of those roadside bombs. Dad never grew pumpkins again.

The night of my last brother’s eighteenth birthday, he and his buddies got real drunk and raced their trucks down the main strip in our town. My brother hit and killed the old homeless Indian that had roamed our county for years as he was crossing the street. My brother was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. That summer my Dad planted sunflowers in the garden where the pumpkins used to go. They were those real tall sunflowers that produced lots of seed. As they matured, the weight of their heads caused them to sag in disappointment. I don’t think Dad liked the look of them much because they didn’t stand like that for long. He and I cut the heads off and hung them in the trees for the birds. The corpses of those sunflower heads swayed from the branches until the winter winds dropped them in the yard and dad hit them with the mower the following spring.

After I graduated, I moved a few hours away so I could go to college that coming fall. After I moved, Dad added a garden on the east side of the house that he filled with flowers; Forget-Me-Nots, Purple Coneflowers, Yarrow. That was also the summer Ma left him and went to live with her sister in the next county over. Ma said Dad spent too much time in those damn gardens. She said she couldn’t stand the way the sunflowers hung in the trees. She said she’d never touch another ear of corn or a pea. One weekend I came home to visit and found Dad lying on his back in the garden of flowers with a ring of Forget-Me-Nots braided around his head. When he saw me he said I was all he had. I grabbed his hand and pulled him to his feet. I said that wasn’t true and we spend the rest of the evening sitting on the back porch shucking corn and shelling peas with our feet in the grass below, while the birds ripped the seeds from the sunflower heads hanging above.