Welp, here goes. Wrote this for class last year, but I like how it turned out. Comments welcome.
Herb's Herbs
I stood on the back porch for a moment, looking around the backyard with a contented smile on my face. The air was clean and clear in the way it often is after a rainstorm, the sharp smell of ozone fading away to be replaced by wet earth, and the morning sunlight was faint and watery through the clouds that remained. There was even a little birdsong. It was peaceful, natural, without the hubbub and drama of human interaction.
The yard was overgrown and weedy, patches of mud scattered haphazardly about. I had spent the last week on my hands and knees, digging around in the underbrush and collecting in a pail all the things I found; among my finds were toy cars of both the metal and plastic varieties with mud clogging their wheels, glass marbles, the head of a plastic doll, a few shards of metal that I cut my index finger on when picking them up, bits and pieces of glass, enough aluminum cans to make a dollar, a half-buried Whiffle ball.
Now it was time for weeding and digging out pebbles and rocks. My trusty metal pail sat at the edge of the porch, half-filled with water; my gardening gloves were lurking by the door next to my spade and the folded-up lawn chairs. Putting on the gloves, I dumped out my pail and walked out to one corner of the yard, the mud sucking halfheartedly at my boots. My wife would complain about the mud on my jeans later and ask why I couldn’t have a less dirty hobby, but she was always complaining, bless her heart. Why New England, she had asked plaintively. Why not Florida? Why not somewhere warm? And then she had gone on to deride my idea of an herb garden in the back, saying that the soil was likely too rocky and too acidic and it was too cold and the whole thing was a hopeless venture.
Well, I had tested for acid and it was okay, and other people had gardens that weren’t doing too badly. Even if I didn’t use the entire backyard it would be nice to weed it all and trim it back a bit, make the whole lot a bit more presentable. I was sure that even she would like that. If she liked it enough she would probably start inviting friends over to look, though, so I would have to be careful to make it all my own.
I didn’t really want to wear the gloves while digging about, but after running across the metal shards I had become wary of what lurked in the dirt. Damp earth stuck to my jeans as I knelt and began digging with gusto, pulling out the dandelions and crabgrass and tossing them in the pail, unearthing stones that were pitched in with clangs as they hit the sides. The damp earth made it that much easier to pull everything out; one of the reasons why I had waited until after the storm. Naturally, the other reason was that it was still cloudy and I wouldn’t have to have a hat covering my balding head. I didn’t like hats much.
Pressing against the fence, I slowly worked my way across the yard, lost in my dirt-filled fantasies. I had recently acquired a book on gardening and one of the neighbors had a lovely assortment of flowers—Mary admitted that she loved the colors, but that was as far as she would go, or could go without openly encouraging me—and they said they would give me pointers on just about anything I asked.
The air was pleasantly damp but threatening another drizzle, and when I pulled off my gloves and checked my watch I realized it was nearing noon; I had been at my work for three hours now. How time flew. My back protested as I straightened, reminding me harshly that I needed to take breaks more often.
I left the gloves by the door along with my boots, walking through the house in my socks; Mary would not appreciate mud tracked over the carpet and to be honest neither would I. Gardening was an outdoor hobby and I agreed with her that it should stay outside. The natural exception was the potted plant sitting on the kitchen counter, but that didn’t really count.
I could see Mary from where I stood, the back of her head visible over the top of the chair where she sat watching television and knitting. She had recently cut her hair into a little bob, neatly styled and combed smooth despite her saying that the humidity in the air made it knotty and unmanageable. And she had stopped dying it black a few weeks ago. The gray was starting to creep back in, making her hair more salt-and-pepper on the top than black, although she would never admit that. It’s silver, she would say.
I was surprised to see her quiet for once, and knitting. Perhaps the phone was broken, that she couldn’t call our son Robert, or her friends Linda and Josie back home.
She heard me opening the fridge. “Eat the apples, dear,” she called, glancing over her shoulder. “They’re ripe.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going to buy any more apples if you don’t eat the ones that we get, Herb,” she said reproachfully. “The last time you let three go bad.”
“I know.” I got out the milk and poured a glass, putting back the container in exchange for the bread and a packet of sliced ham, drinking my milk as I made the sandwich.
Mary sighed and turned back to the television. Thankfully she didn’t talk, knowing that I wouldn’t care about the goings-on of her old friends, and she would tell me what Rob was getting up to later this evening like she always did. I watched the screen from the kitchen—some game show I didn’t know the name of—and quietly ate my sandwich, finishing the milk in a gulp and putting the dishes in the sink. To make Mary happy I also grabbed an apple from the fridge and ate that too, then headed back outside.
“Wear a hat,” she called after me. I closed the sliding door. It was still cloudy; a hat wouldn’t be necessary. Boots and gloves back on, I returned to where I had left the pail and spade, resuming my weeding.
Maybe it would rain some more later. I wouldn’t mind that—another break to stretch my back would probably be best, and give me a chance to browse through the gardening book a little more. I was still undecided about what I would plant, and hoped that it might be able to give me advice on what would grow best. I wanted mint, but perhaps the soil wouldn’t be the right kind for that.
I loved mint. Just to have some that I could crush in my hands and breathe in would be a delight. If I couldn’t grow it here it would be a small blow, but perhaps I could buy a potted mint plant and have it in the kitchen with the other plant. It was nice to have a little greenery in the house, and Mary would probably start looking for recipes for mint tea and similar things, just to put it to good use.
I had to take another break fairly quickly after I started again so I could stretch my limbs and empty out the pail; it was full at this point, so I hauled it across the yard and dumped it in the wheelbarrow. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to empty that of water and got splashed on my jeans. The weeds floated forlornly at the top, the rocks sinking to the bottom and turning the water a murky brown. I stared at it for a moment, then drifted back to where I had left the spade, and set my empty pail on the ground.
I finally reached the other corner of the backyard, and it was there that I unearthed my strangest find. The top of it was visible first, brown and beige, and I dug away at it expecting another rock, my surprise at how large it was growing as I dug and cleared away damp dirt. Only when it was fully uncovered did I realize what it was, and set it gently on the ground to consider it, leaning back on my heels.
It was a small skull, like a child’s, and stripped bare of flesh—there was no telling how long it had been buried there in its forgotten grave. Mud clung to the pits where there had once been eyes, a nose. I figured there must be a jawbone in the earth as well, but I had not dug it up, and the skull looked rather lonely without it, staring back at me without the trademark grin.
You heard about this sort of thing every so often on the news. Someone taking their dog for a walk in the woods stumbles across the half-buried body of a child, or construction workers at a new site unearth ruins thousands of years old.
“Which are you?” I wondered. Had it been buried for ten years? A hundred? A thousand? Was my herb garden the place of a horrible murder or a sacred ritual site? Perhaps the skeleton was plastic. I didn’t dare touch it to find out.
There was a tarp somewhere. In the garage, maybe. I could cover up the site until I figured out what I wanted to do. Getting to my feet with a groan, I hurried away in search of the blue plastic, folded up and dry in its hiding place. It took me a few minutes before I saw it, and it crinkled a little when I picked it up and returned outside, arms full of tarp.
The skull was still there when I returned. I sighed.
“What do I do with you?” I asked it as I began unfolding the tarp, listening to it crinkle. Mary would have a field day. Robert would be called first, then Linda and Josie, then everyone else she still had the numbers to, then the local newspaper, then the national newspaper, then the tabloids. And the police in there somewhere too. And that wasn’t counting the neighbors. Slowly I covered the entire corner, wondering if there was even a complete skeleton under my feet. Maybe there were others.
I used rocks and pebbles from the pail to pin it down, and when those ran out I returned to the wheelbarrow, took off my gloves, pulled up my sleeves, and fished out the largest rocks, putting them in the pail and lugging that back across the yard to pin down the tarp.
Mary would ask what the tarp was doing there. What could I tell her?
How many construction workers—maybe not now, but in the past—had hidden the bones they had come across? How many hikers had decided that the stick only looked like a femur and moved on? Were there skyscrapers built on potentially historical places and hallowed ground?
I just wanted a garden.
