How Stuff Grows
By Michael Ippen
They gathered their boys, the younger barely out of diapers, and moved to an island. For a job he never expected would become a career. For a job that drained his strength, until there was little left for his children. But it paid the bills and made mortgage brokers smile. They found a house they could just afford, if they were careful, but being careful was his superpower, so they were okay, by and large.
Except for the job that slurped the marrow from his bones like a starving hound.
It was a nice house, older, but with ‘good bones,’ or so the realtor said. It sat at the end of a dead end road, quiet, but laid bare to the street and neighbours. One of many farms subdivided by eager children wanting to cash in when the parents died or were sent to live out their days in a home. Too much lawn, no flowers, but he walked the corners of the lot and made a map in his head of what he could do to improve things.
When their daughter was born the following spring, he planted a tree.
Not a large tree, only a small stick of flowering cherry, its three whippy branches clutching the promise of pink blossoms tightly within their green wood. He dug a deep hole in the furthest corner of the property, just behind a weather-worn fire hydrant the city seemed to have forgotten. The tree needed companionship, so he planted a small hydrangea close to the cherry. And beside that a pair of sturdy rose bushes. He imagined next April, when the air would be full of fragrance and the blooms would bring delight to his children as they stood beneath falling cherry petals.
Next spring he planted a hedge: a row of stocky, golden bamboo to fill the bare border shared with the neighbour he’d smiled at from time to time but hadn’t spoken to as yet. He placed each heavy clump just far enough apart that the plants would have to stretch to seek out the others’ company; new growth, emerging javelin-sharp from the earth, would form an unbroken row of thickening, jade stems, each crowned with fronds that rippled over, under, and against one another in the least summer breeze. Giant hands congratulating each other for a job well done.
Four years after the bamboo hedge was planted he found the strength to start building a fence. The cherry tree was in full bloom. Tall now, and proud, alongside the hydrangea and thorny roses. Together they’d turned the once-bare corner into a fearsome barricade, while the bamboo out back had become a jungle of nodding, dozing spires teeming with sparrows and juncos and hummingbirds who nested safe from the family of racoons that washed their supper in his birdbath. The houses around his had all but disappeared from view, and passers-by on the dead-end street had to crane their necks to glimpse his displays of tulips and dahlia.
Spring came late the following year, so it was nearly May when the spent cherry blossoms launched from the inverted umbrella of knobbly branches in an unseasonably bitter wind. But he was out in the garden all the same, the tails of his red flannel shirt flapping loosely about his waist as he dug the final post holes for the high fence that would enclose the last corner of his yard from the neighbourhood. He fitted the gate with a clumsy, bent latch he’d found still attached to a piece of tangled wrought iron someone had dumped by the side of the road. So excited by the find he’d used the back of a wrench from under the backseat of his pickup to hammer it off the iron and bent it even more, but it was serviceable and performed its locking and unlocking function with little complaint. Happy, perhaps to be nailed to a fresh cedar post still full of scent from the mill that sawed it. The sound of the latch sliding home behind him was comforting every time he entered his backyard.
* * *
Everything grew. Two arbutus seedlings, gifts left by birds heading south, appeared the year after the blizzard and shivered in November storms, dutiful sentinels on either side of the driveway. In the hot, dry summers they grew quickly, their branches forming an arch twenty feet above. Friends joked that if he weren’t careful the driveway would soon be unusable. He shot them a look that suggested this wasn’t news to him.
Year after year he persisted. Planting and building, shaping and reshaping, until, wherever he stood in the garden, the wind through the trees whispered you are safe, and the birds that came to the many feeders and bird baths — lovingly placed where others might have set kitschy statues — sang out throaty blessings of Home! Happy home! until, one day — finally — he believed them.
Inside his green fortress he built raised beds that overflowed with tomatoes, chard, garlic, raspberries, potatoes, and carrots. He picked so much rhubarb he had to build a stand at the end of the driveway with a sign that read Free! Help yourself! so that the growing family’s surplus bounty did not go to waste. Cucumbers swelled on the vine in the sun. The blueberries that punctuated their bowls of vanilla ice cream were fresh and sweet and never lasted longer than a day after ripening on the branch.
Then his oldest son announced he was moving away. He wanted to start life with his own special partner in his own special place. The crocus had just arrived: a carpet of purples and mauves and whites and yellows, like spilled paint on the dark, wet earth. He didn’t know what to say, but he shook his son’s hand and wished him well. He returned to the garden. Something, somewhere, needed tending.
The arbour he’d built when his daughter turned ten groaned beneath an evergreen clematis that had only borrowed the roughened cedar frame in order to reach the house, where it had fixed itself with a tenacious grip and flowered boastfully every summer afterward, even as it swallowed two stuccoed walls. He took out his loppers and began to trim the lower growth. What was needed was a little clarity, to make room for something new.
Then his second son went away. To school in Toronto, as if none of the schools nearby were good enough. He told his son how proud he was; how much good he would do in the world; such was this boy’s natural inclination. He retreated to the little bench set in a postage stamp piece of lawn and watched sparrows and finches quarrel over the millet that spilled from a feeder hanging from the lowest branches of the cherry tree. At his feet, the three mosaic tiles his children had created some summer long past were caught in a wedge of sunshine that slipped through the twisted copper elbows of arbutus.
He squinted, brushed the side of his foot against the lawn that was always trying to engulf the triangle of tiles. The one beneath his shoe was his Toronto-bound son’s: a red T-Rex dinosaur, livid against a white field. What else would a seven year old boy want to make, given the choice? It was a beacon beside his sister’s pale yellow butterfly and his brother’s pale blue boat. How many times had he trimmed this patch of lawn, preserving these images from invasive, green fingers?
When his daughter married and moved to Vietnam he stopped going into the garden. His wife reminded him — gently — of the weeds and the pruning; of empty bird feeders and overflowing vegetable beds, and the scarlet runner beans drying on their vines. She knew how much he loved his garden; how much he cherished what he’d brought to life. But the juice wasn’t in him, seemingly. He avoided looking out the windows, keeping the curtains drawn or hurrying past with his eyes on his slippers. He spent his days reading the paper from cover to cover or watching old hockey games and police show reruns on the extra cable channels he’d ordered for his new, flat screen TV.
Summer came but did not change his mind. The house was so empty, so quiet: childish sounds no longer leaked through closed bedroom doors, banished to memory alone. On the rare days he ventured beyond the property he backed the car out quickly, his eyes locked on the road beyond the driveway, not even sparing a glance for the empty bird feeders rocking on warm, island breezes.
The birds looked elsewhere for sustenance.
Perhaps they’d followed his children.
THE END
Author Bio: Michael was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. His first novel, “The Raven Effect,” was self-published in 2011. His novel of the Armenian Genocide, “Saint Illuminator’s Daughter,” was self-published in 2019. His short fiction has appeared in Island Writer, Halfway Down the Stairs, and Commuter Lit.