The Summer Garden

approximately 2200 words

This story is in progress and not ready for reviews.

The Summer Garden
by
Max Griffin

         

         Tom’s footsteps crunched on the Summer Garden's gravel path.  Unbidden memories suffused his soul and brought with them unwelcome yearnings.

        A light, June breeze rustled through the canopy of trees and tousled his hair.  Lazy flecks of sunlight wove magic over the garden's blooms.  Scents of cedar and sandalwood mixed with the ambrosia of hyacinths to trigger thoughts of his former home and his former family.

        It was strange to have those memories here. His spouse, Drake, had crafted the garden as their refuge, a quiet place for reflection, solitude, and communing with nature.  Tom’s lips quirked upwards.  The garden was so unlike Drake, whose dark visage and stormy personality had set Tom afire when they’d first met, years ago. The garden was Drake’s creation, his gift to Tom.

        The Summer Garden became the heart of the life that they, Drake and Tom, had created together.  It was nothing like the dusty Oklahoma ranch where he’d grown up.  Drake was nothing like the rigid, judgmental parents who had banished him.

        Tom pushed a low-hanging blue cedar branch aside, and needles prickled his skin.  The disquieting longing for his past pecked at his soul.

        He knew what he needed to do.

        That night, after dinner, Tom rinsed dishes in the sink and loaded the dishwasher while Drake cleared the table.  Drake handed him a pair of wine glasses and said, “You’ve been quiet tonight.  Is there something on your mind?”

        Tom bit his lower lip.  “I walked through the garden this afternoon.”

        Drake raised an eyebrow.  “You walk through the garden every afternoon.”

        “For some reason, today it made me think about my parents.  My brother and sister.”

        Drake nodded, his blue eyes penetrating Tom’s soul.  Tom could lose himself in those eyes.  Drake murmured, “It’s been a long time since you’ve talked about them.  Years.”

        “I know.  But something today, something in the garden, called to me.”  He swished the wine glasses with water and loaded them in the dishwasher.  “I was thinking I should visit them.”  There.  He said it.

        “It’s a four hour flight, and then another four hour drive to get to the ranch.”

        Trust Drake to be practical.  “You don’t have to go.”

        Drake cupped his palms over his mouth and inhaled.  When he spoke, his hands muffled his words.  “You want to go alone.  By yourself.”  It wasn’t a question.

        “I’m sorry.  But I need to do this.”  Tom couldn’t look him in the eye.

        Drake squeezed Tom’s hand and sent warm comfort pulsing up his arm.  “If you need to, then you need to.  Go.  It’s all right.  I’ve got plenty to keep me busy here. I’m giving finals tomorrow, and it’ll take a few days to grade them.”  He released Tom’s hand and returned to the dinner table and dirty dishes.  “I’ll worry about you, though.  It was pretty bad the last time you were there.  What if they don’t want to see you?”

        What if, indeed?  “It’s not about them.  It’s about me. At least I’ll have tried.”

        Drake didn’t respond, but his eyes asked the unspoken question, tried what?  After all this time, Tom couldn’t say.  He just knew he needed to go.


         

***

                

        Three days later and four hours west of Tulsa, Tom maneuvered his rental car between red buttes that thrust fingers perhaps two hundred feet skyward.  He adjusted the air-conditioning vents to blow blessedly cool air on his face and squinted against the brassy late-afternoon sunlight.  A lonely dwarf-like tree squatted on the otherwise barren landscape.  Ahead, black asphalt stretched in a straight line to infinity.  Other than the barbed wire fence and telephone lines on the right-of-way, there was no sign of human presence.

        Tom slowed at a dusty side road.  He pulled off the highway, stopped, and heaved a deep breath.  A weathered sign reading God will not be mocked stood askew on a metal fencepost.  A dozen feet farther another announced Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.  He narrowed his eyes and gave a little snort. His family's twisted version of welcome signs still marked the drive to their homestead.  He firmed his mouth and drove on.

        Telephone poles stood at hundred-foot intervals to the right of the road, and more signs popped up along the way, signs with faded paint and tinged with red dust.  Advertisements for the Lord’s wrath, like the old Burma Shave signs that once dotted Route 66.  A whole sequence of them, every couple hundred feet or so, listed things God found abominable. Cussing. Working on Sundays.  Women wearing pants. He was a pretty picky deity.  After a few dozen of these, he passed a final set of signs.

         
        But if you obey not the voice of the Lord God
        Then you are an abomination
        The Lord will strike you down with flames and firey heat
        Your dead body shall be food for birds of the air and beasts of the earth
        Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.

         
The only thing missing was Burma Shave at the end.

        After that final comforting thought about vengeance, less than a mile ahead, the road ended in a set of low-lying structures.  The family homestead.

        Doubt gnawed at him.  Still, he’d come this far.

          He pulled to a stop behind Pa's battered, 1960 Chevy pickup.  The sheet-metal shed standing to the left of the house sheltered a late-model Ford SUV and a dusty sedan with a bashed-in left rear door.  They must belong to Momma, or maybe to her and Betty Sue, his older sister.

        The ranch house looked as if it hadn't been painted since he and Pa had given it a coat during the Reagan Administration. Red grit dusted the windows, and scraggly, brown bushes huddled next to the foundation.  Broken-down wooden steps led to the front porch, and one corner sagged where the foundation had failed. A forlorn splash of color, Momma's flower garden, flanked the steps.  It was too hot and too late in the Oklahoma growing season for the delicate hyacinths he remembered.  Instead, she'd managed to persuade hearty marigolds to eke out nourishment from the sandy soil.

        He stepped out of the car and into the hellish midsummer heat.  To the right of the ranch house, an improbable circle of green wheat, over a thousand feet in diameter, waved in the gentle wind.  The faint chuff, chuff of the center irrigation system broke the silence of the prairie.

        He'd forgotten how oppressive the solitude here felt, how its relentless force smothered you.  The land stretched to the horizon, with not another homestead or suggestion of human habitation in sight.  An occasional distant tree dotted the vista, but except for the irrigated wheat field, the road, and the telephone poles, the homestead might have been in the desert of an isolated planet.

         The front door opened, and a corpulent, middle-aged woman wearing flip-flops and a shapeless sweatsuit stepped onto the porch.  She put her hands on her hips, scowled, and said, "Tommy Lee Baker.  What in blazes are you doin' here, boy?"

         Tom grimaced.  "Nice to see you, too, Betty Sue."  He thought about asking his sister whether God still thought women wearing pants was an abomination like the sign said but decided instead to be nice.  Not that being nice would matter to her.

         "Don't you go changin' the subject.  You tryin' to make trouble, like usual?"

         "Trouble is the last thing I want."  He paused to think.  "How's Momma?"

         "She's takin' care of Pa, like the Lord intended.  She don't need no distraction from her duties."

         "Does she know I'm here?"

         "Don't make no difference what she knows.  Ain't no business of yours, neither."  She waved at his car.  "You can jest git yourself in your car and go back to Babylon, or California, or whatever hell-hole you crawled out from."

         "I came to see Momma.  And Pa, too." 

         She shrugged.  "They don't want to see you."

         "If that's true, I deserve to hear it from them." 

         Silence.

         "Believe it or not, Mary Sue, I came to see you, too."  He let his gaze roam over the homestead, pausing at tiny wooden cross standing over a plot of marigolds blooming to one side of the vehicle shed.  "I came to pay my respects to Bobby, too."

         "Too late for that.  No one wants you here, least of all our brother, God rest his soul."

         A voice, feeble but familiar, warbled from inside the house.  "Mary Sue, who you talkin' to?" 

         An elderly woman, shriveled and hunched, her iron-gray hair twisted in tight bun, peaked from behind Mary Sue.  Despite the heat, she wore a plain, ankle-length wool skirt and a long-sleaved black blouse buttoned tight against her neck.  Her eyes, sunk deep in her wrinkled face, widened when her gaze landed on Tom.  "Tommy?  Is that you?" Her hands trembled as she hugged herself.

         Shock at her appearance made him hesitate. What happened to the strong, capable woman he remembered?  "It's me, Momma."  He took a hesitant step toward the porch.  "Can I give you a hug?"

         She looked at his sister and didn't move.

         Mary Sue said, "She don't need no hugs, least ways not from you."

         Tom opened his arms.  "How about it, Momma?"

         She took a step toward him, but his sister grabbed her arm. "What you thinkin', Momma?  Pa wouldn't like it."

         His mother twisted free.  "It ain't your place to say what your Pa would or wouldn't like, girl."  She opened her arms.  "Come to me, boy."

         Tom stepped onto the porch.  The stairs creaked under his feet. His sister moved to block his way.  "Pa can't speak for his self, least ways not no more.  But we don't need him sayin' it to know he wouldn't like it."

         His mother stepped around his sister and embraced him. When she clasped her arms about him and he hugged back, she felt fragile, like she was made of sticks that might break under the slightest pressure. 

         He gave her a gentle squeeze, then pulled back to look at her.  "It's good to see you, Momma."

         "You, too, boy.  You look fit.  A blessed sight for these poor eyes."  She firmed her lips.  "Your Pa, he ain't doin' so well, son."

         A cold ball formed in Tom's belly.  "What's wrong with him, Momma?"

         She gazed at him with liquid eyes. "The fire's gone out in him.  The doctor said he had a stroke."

         His sister snorted. "That heathen so-called doctor don't know nothin'.  Pastor Jake, he came and prayed over Pa.  He said Jesus came to quiet his soul and prepare him for heaven."

         A stroke.  That didn't sound good.  "Can I see him?"

         Mary Sue scowled. "No spawn of Satan is gonna defile his rest.  I forbid it."

         Tom's mother turned to her daughter and spoke.  Her voice was firmer now, more certain.  "Pa's voice is gone, and maybe his mind, too.  Don't matter if it were Jesus or a stroke what took 'em, he's not fit to head this household no more."  She turned to Tom.  "You're the eldest male.  You're the head of the family now, and it's our duty to follow you.  It's your duty to lead us."

         Mary Sue snorted. "I ain't followin' no faggot no where.  No way. He's an abomination."

         His mother said, "God brought him back here after all these years for a reason. Who's going to tend to the crops or nurture our souls if not him?  It's God's will, and you know it."

         God's will be damned.  He asked, "Momma, how long has Pa been sick?"

         "I found him layin' all twisted up in the wheat field three days ago. He wouldn't wake up, and he was too heavy for us to get him to bed."

         Mary Sue broke in. "I called Pastor Jake, and he helped us.  Put Pa to bed and prayed for divine guidance."  She glared at her mother.  "She called the county, and them's the one ones what sent that so-called doctor. He weren't even an MD, jest a bone doctor."

         Three days ago.  It had to be coincidence that was the day memories of home and family had accosted Tom as he walked in the garden.  Couldn't be anything as superstitious as 'God's will.'  From what his sister said, the doctor must have been an OD. Still, a qualified physician.  "What did the doctor say, Momma?"

         His sister answered.  "He wanted us to send Pa to Oklahoma City, to the university hospital.  For tests, he said.  And for physical therapy.  We aint got no money for none of that. 'Sides, Pastor Jake said he needs to be in his home, where his womenfolk can take care of him, not in that den of iniquity."

         Of course. His sister and their ignorant Pastor thought medical science was dubious. He also knew better than to ask about public assistance.  Not that Pa or even Momma would be likely to accept it.  "I can pay for his care. I'd like to see him."