Thoughts While Turning Soil
Lea Camille Smith (Mount Washington Valley of New Hampshire, USA)
This is how I started a persuasive essay in college once: Worms are the original horticulturalists. They succeed at what almost every gardener tries and fails to do: leave the soil better than we found it. Even with opposable thumbs and the contemplative mass between the ears, humans still find ways to make it worse. They sprinkle electric blue fertilizer around new plantings to bolster the growing process, sever the mycelium layer that connects trees together in a sophisticated game of string phone, and plant monoculture rows of the same crop with the same wants year after year.
//
When I was ten, my father looked at me over Botany for Biologists, the book he assigned his BIO l01 students. It was almost charity at that point, that he still taught that class. We were outside in our small backyard, he in a lawn chair with a glass of unsweetened iced tea, no lemon, me, with my kid-sized shovel, digging at nothing, marveling at the small hole I’d uncovered while New York traffic inched by beyond our fence. I squatted down and slid my hand underneath the roundish shapes in the dirt.
“Did you find some worm poop, Kev?”
I looked from my hand to my father, and back again.
“The technical term is worm castings, but I say call it like it is.”
I let some of the dirt fall out of my hand and compacted the remaining material between my thumb and pointer finger.
“Worm poop is nature’s fertilizer,” my father continued, “worms move around underneath the soil, eating the dirt and enriching it with minerals, enzymes, and good bacteria. Then, they poop it out. Voila,” he said, putting his book down, “the world made better by shi−”
My mother had emerged through the back door with a white headband wrangling her hair and signed with her hands that dinner was ready. Even after she had gone completely deaf from a viral infection when I was six, my father still censored himself when she was around, a hopeful preservation of normalcy.
//
Fifteen years later I’m thinking about worms again at work. While digging a hole for a new rhododendron planting at the local hospital, I’ve managed to cut one in half with my shovel. I examine the two halves, checking to see if I’d cut closer to the tail end or the head. If cut in half closer to the tail end, an earthworm can regenerate and continue its life. If cut near the head, where the essential organs are, they die. I’ve done the latter, this time. It isn’t my first kill, and it won’t be the last. But killing a fellow colleague never fails to upset me. The part of my mind that I am most afraid to enter is the part that often wonders what the worms have done in a year underneath my father’s headstone.
I bury the two worm halves in an inch of soil, patting it down, and stand up. I do so too fast, and my vision blurs for a moment. I close my eyes until it passes. When I open them again, I’m looking through the window of the hospital. Two bodies lean on each other, steadying, a third, stands at a podium with a computer, relaying. The person wearing the blue bandana starts to lean away from the other and turns to look out the window. No eyebrows. I stand next to a tiny grave, with my shovel in my hand, building the new garden outside of the oncology wing.
A few months prior, this hospital charged me almost two weeks’ pay to tell me I had sufficient amounts of vitamin D, and an insufficient amount of everything else, and that, according to the doctor whose finger went into my anus, my prostate was normal. He said it was a good thing I was starting the checkups early, given my family history.
Now the hospital pays me to overhaul their entire front garden, which lines the oncology wing. Perennials were scattered years before by the local garden club, then left to flourish into a tangled mess of plants that were supposed to be there, and plants that were not. I am left to deal with the unruly weeds. And yet, weeds are my job security, and because of them, I hope to break even with the hospital.
This is what happens after five years of gardening: Someone might say, it’s like herding kittens. I say, it’s like raking leaves in the wind. I have permanent dirty spots on the outsides of my pointer fingers, where my thumb rubs when I grab plant material. I’ve gone out with a few women who locked onto my hands with theirs and then didn’t call me back. I try not to think too hard about whether there’s any sort of correlation. If you think too hard about anything, it starts to unravel.
If you don’t think too hard about something, it stays unopened, taut, tied up. So when you see your father in a woman’s face in the oncology wing window, it’s as if some unseen hand has reached out to tug ever so gently on the fraying string holding you together.
At noon I eat a ham sandwich in the car, tasting little more than sodium. I’m parked in a back lot near the emergency department. An ambulance wheels around the corner and stops underneath the concrete canopy. The back of the vehicle is in full view. Two EMTs jump out of the truck and open the back, where another one appears, steadying a gurney. There’s blood on the sheets and everyone but the body in the bed is moving fast.
The sandwich feels like a brick in my stomach, so I put the last bite back in the bag. My boss calls as I’m getting out of the car.
“Kevin,” she says.
“Kev isn’t short for Kevin, Susie.” The person on the gurney appears to stare up at the sky.
“Right, I know. I’ll remember one of these times. Just keep reminding me,” she chuckles. “I have a strange request from Hank, my contact at the hospital.”
“Yeah?” The gurney disappears behind sliding doors.
“One of the nurses got in touch with him a half hour ago. Something hit one of the windows by the new garden, a bird or something, and he figured since you’re already out there, you could check it out?”
“Sure,” I say, “I’m just finishing lunch.”
“Good. Probably a good thing to do that first.”
“A rhododendron is planted, a worm dies, and a red stained person is suspended somewhere in between,” I say.
“What?”
“It’s just another day, you know? Never mind. I can take care of the bird.”
“You New Yorkers are strange.” The ambulance pulls forward and disappears around the corner.
The hawk appeared to have broken its neck on impact and then fell behind a hedge. The oncology windows are confusingly large. A stage for the disease to catwalk its models down. Look what I can take, it seems to say through the glass. I crouch underneath the hedge, take a flat metal shovel and with a gloved hand, roll the bird with its lolling head onto it.
Someone coughs near me. A tired-looking woman stands ten feet away from the window where I saw the browless woman and her daughter. They’re smiling out of it now, looking at the newcomer. A friend or family member, probably. The woman is holding a stack of papers with words written on them in black marker. Sorry I can’t come in today, says the first sign. She sneezes, wipes her nose on her sleeve, and drops the sign to reveal another one. Daryl and Karl send their love. Drop. We’re all rooting for you. Drop. I. Drop. Love. Drop. You.
What was my excuse for not writing to my father when he was in the hospital?
I take the bird and walk quickly to the edge of the woods beyond the employee parking lot. It’s mid spring but I’m suddenly and profusely sweating. I lay the bird on the forest floor. It stares at me with one beady eye, as if taunting me to walk away without ceremony. It was easier with worms. You can’t see the disappointment in them. I walk away.
//
For years, cancer grew like weeds in my father. The abnormal plants which multiply uncontrollably and infiltrate healthy gardens until they are unrecognizable.
At first, I didn’t realize that I missed our late-night chats at the kitchen table. But I felt my father pulling away and did not know why. I’d lost a lot of sleep at the kitchen table with my dad during early college summers, listening to stories and facts about how tree rings can help us in determining the Earth’s past climate, and how our modern culture has done a “piss poor” job of maintaining the natural landscape. In the early hours of the morning, my father would finish off his black coffee and look at his watch and fake an exclamatory jump and ask me what mom would think if she knew we were still awake at two in the morning with stacks of books and large slices of her zucchini bread on the bare table. It was in those moments that I decided that I wanted to feel, smell, and touch the world my father had illuminated for me every evening.
Then, he started going to bed when my mother did. I continued to sit at that table until the early hours of the morning, waiting for something of which I am not completely sure. But I kept reading, I kept learning, and my father kept getting sicker.
//
The final memory of my father before I fled north like a coward: finding him on the carpet four years ago. Blue and seafoam green woven carpet that was spotted wet with something else. Urine, maybe, I’d figure it out later. He was face down, his monogrammed over-the-shoulder bag still halfway down his arm, a few botany magazines sliding out. It must have just happened. Mom was teaching ASL at the school all day and I’d been out with friends.
“Dad,” I said. “Dad,” kneeling on the ground.
He lay, breathing deep, unaware of the stress in the conscious world. Dad, who was up at 4:10 every day without fail; dad, who taught at the college for an entry level wage out of the goodness of his heart, dad; who taught me after hours, now face down on the floor. I called 911, I alerted my mother, I waited for them to come. Then I left.
Superman had crashed in front of me. And in that dust cloud came the realization that my father would never join me at the table again.
But that’s no excuse for going to New Hampshire and attempting to hide at my job in the gardens like a pink flamingo, miles away from a bedside I couldn’t bear to stand vigil when my father’s prostate waged war on him for the final time.
//
If I had gone to my father’s funeral, this is what I would have said: There is a time in the summer, given ample and consistent rain, where the plants will grow and change at such a pace that I stop each time I visit my weekly clients to make sure I’ve come to the right address. Every week I find ferns bowing deeper into pathways, brushing against my ankles, which I don’t mind but sometimes my clients do, and so I take them away and lay them in the woods; every week I come to find that the Nepeta has leaned farther back, its flowers heavy, and it looks like it’s time to go, but if you look closely into the middle, there’s a second growth, a second round in July; every week I come to find that a Hosta has sent up a scout in the form of purple or white bell-shaped flowers; every week, the daylilies have bloomed and died and repeated this cycle over and over. Everything grows and everything changes and everything dies and yet they will return next year and bloom again and die again and that is the beauty of the perennial. I prefer them over annuals, which do not come back once they are gone. The world changes around perennials and every year they come back, every year they go through their cycle and are not bound by anything but sun and rain and possibly something I did correctly with my shovel but really, they would be fine without me. Unfortunately, humans are much like annuals.
Thank you.
If I had gone to my father’s funeral, my mother would not have written to me the following week: I’m the silent one, not you.
//
The late afternoon sun warms the air as I finish my day at the hospital. A siren rings as another ambulance pulls up the drive a few hundred feet away. Then I see them. The woman in the bandana, and her daughter. Their faces both turn to the window. They have the same nose, same grey eyes, same lines of stress. The daughter looks at the newly planted rhododendron. She taps her mother on the shoulder. They both gaze at it for some time, at the changes that had taken place when they weren’t looking.
The thing about my name: Kev is short for Kevlar. That material used in things like aerospace equipment, boats, and protective vests. It’s supposedly bulletproof. I don’t necessarily know a time when I felt that way, maybe when I was digging in the dirt all those years ago, when dad tried to share every bit of ecological knowledge with me at any given moment, and mom still approved of my decisions. Then again, no one really called me Kevlar. It was only when I was younger, when I was still getting tucked into bed each night, when my father would say, listen to this, Kevlar, and read to me. Not from Grimm, not from Seuss, but from plant scientists. I went to bed each night in those times with a head full of Latin words for the weeds growing in every cracked sidewalk in SoHo. Ailanthus altissima, Fallopia japonica, Digitaria sanguinalis. Before I drifted off, my father would slide his hands underneath my shoulder blades and pull my sternum towards the side of his head, so his ear was over my heart. If by some strange circumstance, my father and I were frozen in time, stood upright, and observed, it was as if my father, crouching at my chest, was trying to use me for protection.
The worms might get cut in half closer to the tail end, dust themselves off and continue as stewards of the soil. We’re not like that. We can leave the kitchen table and the books and the zucchini bread earlier than usual and not tell our sons that we’re feeling ill. We can leave them wondering. We can also be the sons who don’t ever ask what’s wrong.
Lea Camille Smith is an MFA student at Stonecoast, a fiction editor for the Stonecoast Review, and a freelance writer. She resides in the Mount Washington Valley of New Hampshire. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Island Ink, Maine Organic Farmers' and Gardeners' Association, MWV Vibe, and the Conway Daily Sun.
