Betty's (Little Basement) Garden (30 page)

“Long time no see, stranger,” Judi said, her tone a little testy.

Betty set the empty basket back onto the stack. “Oh, it hasn't been that long.”

“Damn near a month since I last saw you at the house,” Judi replied.

“I'll see your month and raise you a week,” Renée countered. “The last time we crossed paths was right after the A.A. potluck in early June.”

Betty was still amazed how Renée always seemed to time events in her life in relationship to the various A.A. or other addiction meetings that continued to rule her daily existence.

Helen piped up. “I can't really remember when I saw you last,” she scowled. “Ever since I had that damn nasal polyp removed, everything's a blur.”

Betty suddenly felt as if she were back in Texas in 1969, being confronted by the insufferable girls who didn't win the Homecoming Queen title. From somewhere deep inside, the cattiness she had long abandoned re-emerged. “Well, Helen, at least you're enjoying that beautiful scarf Renée so generously gave you.”

Helen adjusted the green and black, paisley sheer scarf around her neck. “Yeah. I dropped some food on it the other day but I can't find the damn stain in all this confusing design.”

Yes, Betty mused. Naming her difficult plant “Helen” was a good choice.

Renée bristled. “Enough with the scarf, for God's sake,” she mumbled.

Several vendors moved toward them, returning baskets to the table. The shrill voice of one of the activists blared forth on the megaphone, drowning out any chance of further conversation. It was the first time Betty was actually thankful for the group's timely intervention.

“I do expect you to see you at Roger's annual summer party in early August!” Judi yelled above the ruckus. “Please don't disappoint me on that one.” Her voice was visibly desperate. “It's a goddamned tradition, like it or not! But we also have your birthday before that.”

The megaphone chanting by the activists gained auditory steam. Betty had already promised to spend her birthday with Jeff at his house. Now was the perfect time to launch that announcement. And yet, she faltered. “I'm going out of town for my birthday weekend,” she yelled above the noise. “Couple nights away to…reflect.”

The women looked at Betty as if she just told them she was heading to Trinidad, Colorado for a sex change operation.

Helen leaned closer to Renée and spoke in a stage whisper. “What in the hell is she doing?”

“Ditching us!” Renée declared, grabbing a basket and heading into the market.

“Bitching us?” Helen asked, also grabbing a basket and following Renée.

It was just Judi and Betty. And the incessant blare of an undernourished broad screaming on the megaphone about tolerance.

Judi slid a basket toward her and moved closer to Betty. Her face was shaded in sadness. “I liked the way our friendship used to be. What happened to the Betty I've always loved and depended on?”

Judi walked into the crowd as a group of families descended around Betty, grabbing baskets and making their way into the market. In the midst of the crowd and unremitting noise from the activists, she thought she heard her name called out. Betty turned but all she saw was an ocean of people. She started to walk out when she reached for her list. In that instant, she realized she'd left it in her basket. Her heart began to pound as she thought about what was written on that list, along with her gold-embossed name and phone number shining at the top. Betty pushed through the crowd to the table but someone had taken her basket. She stood there, shell-shocked, as her worst fear was taking form. Which one of them grabbed it and saw that list?

Jeff called later to check in. She didn't tell him about the debacle at the market, because she knew exactly what he'd tell her and she didn't want to hear it. But there was also a bit of shame involved that she didn't speak up and tell her friends about him. Perhaps because of that, she told Jeff she wanted to be alone that night. But as night approached and twilight swallowed the light, she wished she hadn't been so hasty in asking for solitude. That vexing sense of being unmoored wrapped around her body, as her worries were set adrift in murky water. The phone rang and she checked the Caller ID, desperately hoping it was Jeff again. But the return number showed only: Private. She let it ring through to voicemail but the moment her recording said, “You've reached the Craven residence,” the caller hung up. It wasn't unusual to get hang up calls but then again, it wasn't normal for Betty to leave a handwritten list in a basket outlining “Cannabis Supplies” with her phone number and name on it. She started to walk away when the phone rang again. She stood there nearly dazed as that damned word, Private, glared on the Caller ID. Betty reached for the phone and then pulled away, letting it go to voicemail again. And just like the first time, the minute her voicemail recording began, the caller quickly hung up. Her mind did somersaults, going over the possibilities of who could be on the other end. Her friends' names all showed up when they called, but surely Judi and Renée knew how to switch it over to Private if they wanted to hide their name. But why would they do that? Perhaps the person who picked up the list was harassing her? Paranoia suddenly arrived on time and decided to stay for the night.

Betty checked all the doors and locked all the windows as a hot wind blew outside. It was, as they say in Colorado every summer, “the warm before the storm.” She puttered around the house, looking in on the three new G-13 girls and telling them how beautiful they were. Before the lights went out at eight o'clock in the bloom room, she dutifully checked for any sign of a bud, even though it had only been seven hours since the last time she looked.

Pellets of rain began striking the sliding glass door as Betty bid her girls a goodnight. As she firmly closed the bloom room door, a clap of thunder hit hard above the house. Twenty minutes later, as she was leaning over, transplanting the clones into their pots, a deluge began to fall that drowned out the adagio playing in the veg room. By the time Betty got back upstairs in the kitchen an hour later, the wind was whipping violently, sending gusts of perhaps 40 mph across the backyard. The old canopy elm stood strong, but several of the larger branches bent against the raging storm. When she walked into her bedroom, the largest branch that always tapped her windowpane was making creaking noises that sounded like an old bureau scraping against a wooden floor. There was a blinding flash of lightning, followed by a huge boom of thunder and the lights went out. Betty inched across the bedroom until she found the flashlight in her bedside table. Outside, it was like a war zone as smaller branches from the elm tore off the tree and slammed against the house.

Betty swung the flashlight to the bed where Ronald slept quietly. Checking him, she saw he was sound asleep, unaware of upheaval just a few yards outside his domain. Betty slid under the covers, bracing herself for each pounding crack of thunder. One particularly shocking explosion of sound was punctuated by a punishing fracture that caused Betty to sit upright in bed. Turning on the flashlight, she cast it toward the window. Something looked different, so she got up and moved toward the window in measured steps. As the glare of lightening flashed across the backyard, Betty saw the damage. The old branch on the tree had cracked off the trunk and was lying across the backyard. Little by little, more of the smaller branches followed suit, piling up like dead soldiers on the suburban battlefield. There was nothing she could do but stand there at the window, watching the destruction unfold, hoping the old tree wouldn't come down completely.

It took another half hour before the storm subsided to a continuous rain. Betty retreated back to her bed, clutching the flashlight as if it were her only beacon of salvation. Somehow, she finally fell asleep but hovered close to waking as the sounds of hard rain occasionally roused her. About two hours later she awoke, and in the coal black room, saw high-beam streams of light crisscrossing above her head. Throwing back the covers, she grabbed her flashlight and found her Beretta Tomcat in the bedside drawer. Her heart pounded, as a million thoughts raced through her mind, none of them cheerful or ending well. She turned off the flashlight and inched toward the large window in the bedroom, peered out and saw three figures in her yard shining their lights into the basement. The power was still out, and her head reeled with the genuine possibility that some nefarious group was using this opportunity to break into her house. Visions of Molotov Cocktails and marauders, intent on stealing her plants and assaulting her, spun through her mind. Straight away, she told herself that someone of ill repute had found that list with her phone number, called the number to see if she was home, figured out where she lived and decided to make their move.

She glanced down again and clearly saw the three figures moving around her yard. They were dressed in all black. The glint of one of their flashlights appeared to show the quick image of a gun.

“Go around the front!” she heard a male voice announce.

Betty's gut clamped down. One of her worst fears was happening. She could dial 911, but then the jig would be up, and it would be plastered all over the papers that Betty Craven's house was broken into by thieves trying to steal her cannabis plants. The mere thought of that story on the front page of the
Paradox Press
sent her downstairs, Tomcat at the ready and waiting like a vigilante for them to break down her front door. Just when she thought her heart couldn't stand it any longer, she heard footsteps walk across the garden pathway and up to the door. She braced herself against the credenza, raised the gun and said a prayer.

Betty held her breath as the shadow of one of the intruders crossed in front of the front door. She steadied the .32 with both hands. Suddenly, one of them pounded rapidly on her front door five times.

“Police! Open up!”

Betty froze. What in the hell was happening?

“Police!” a man's voice yelled.

Betty laid the Tomcat on the credenza and walked to the door, opening it slowly.

Three cops stood outside, flashlights cast toward her face. She moved her hand to her eyes, to shade against the extreme glare. “I'm Betty Craven. What's going on?” she asked breathlessly.

“We got a 911 call regarding a domestic disturbance,” the officer stated.

“That wasn't me,” she said, but her voice was shaky and scared.

“Ma'am, if you need some help, please tell us,” the second officer demanded, shining his flashlight into the living room window.

“No, really sir. I didn't make the call.”

“Are you Theresa Hamilton?”

Betty's mind spun for a moment. “No…Jerry and Theresa live across the street.” She pointed to Jerry's house.

The lead cop turned around. “Sorry to bother you, ma'am. With the power out, it wasn't easy to see the address.”

With that, they turned and walked with great purpose across the street to Jerry's house. Betty strolled toward her driveway and watched, as the scene unfolded against the red, blue and white flashing lights atop the police cruisers. In astonishment, she watched the cops drag an extremely drunk Jerry out of his house, in nothing but his ball cap. She couldn't hear exactly what he was yelling, but she could tell his words were slurred. “Bitch” and “slut” were two of his favorites, as the officers cuffed him. His wife, Theresa, stood in the front door light, holding her hand over her left eye and bawling.

“Keep him away from me!” Theresa screamed, her voice echoing into the damp, summer night. “I'm filing a restraining order, you son-of-a-bitch!”

Betty stared in disbelief. As she walked back inside, the irony that she wasn't the only one on the block with a little secret didn't escape her.

The following day she called Jeff, who promised he'd show up after work with his chainsaw. Fortunately, the power came back on by 2:00 am, allowing the grow lights to pop back on so they didn't go off their cycle. Betty adjusted the timers and breathed a sigh of relief that everything – at least at that moment – was copasetic.

Buddy was also called into action to replace missing shingles on the roof from the wind and tree damage. When Jeff arrived, Buddy was still there, diligently repairing a bent gutter crushed by the tree. Betty went out to meet him and was shocked to see him drive up in an old Ford pickup with a bashed-in passenger door.

“You own a truck?” she asked, kissing him as they walked through the back gate.

“No. I just rented it to impress you,” he replied with that familiar sly smile, as he carried the chainsaw into the backyard.

Buddy looked up and nodded to Jeff, wiping his brow.

Betty put her arm around Jeff. “Buddy, I didn't formally introduce you before. This is my very good friend, Jeff.” She kissed him quickly on the lips as if to punctuate her statement.

“How ya doin'?” Buddy said before going back to work.

Jeff fired up the chainsaw and leaned closer to Betty, speaking above the roar of the saw. “See? That wasn't so hard?” He kicked a branch out of the way. “'Very good friend,' huh? Baby steps, Betty. Baby steps.”

Betty insisted on giving Buddy twenty chocolates for his long hours of labor, figuring he'd be in need of pain relief and a good night's sleep after climbing around all day on her roof. Jeff stayed the night, and that wonderful feeling of being moored to a safe harbor resonated within her. They made love before dinner, and then sat out in the backyard, amidst the freshly cut logs, and enjoyed an orgy of organic offerings from the farmers' market. Twice, she nearly mentioned the missing list to him, along with the strange hang-up calls, but stopped short each time. Instead, she regaled him with tales of her false bravado, as she crept downstairs with the Tomcat the previous night. After a space of silence as they watched the sun set behind a luminous cloud, Betty finally told him about finding the pound of cannabis stashed in the attic.

“I saw Frankie in a dream,” she related with hesitation. “I see him a lot that way. He placed his palm right over the area in the wall where the cannabis was hidden.”

Jeff took her hand and kissed it. “It's almost as if he purposely put it there so you would find it later. Kind of like he knew you'd be needing it.”

“How is that even possible?”

“I've stopped asking questions like that, babe. The older I get, the more I question how much free will we really have. When you look back on your life, you can easily see the points that led you toward the things or people that brought you closer to your purpose. I think a lot of us have a soul's purpose in this life. Somewhere deep down we recognize it, but I think we fight against it in order to maintain some mind-numbing social standing, or to carry out the expectations of others. I've always felt that when a person is depressed or restless, it's because an inner voice is trying to bore through and tell them they're off track and not paying attention to the reason they were born. When you're doing what you love and it loves you back, you know it in your heart. The mind will screw you every single time, and will make you question what your heart knows is right.”

“Frankie told me to ‘pay attention' when I saw him before he died. He says the same words to me when I dream about him. I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to be paying attention to.”

Jeff looked at her. “You're not?”

“If you know, please tell me.”

He chuckled. “I'm not in control of your destiny.”

She looked into his eyes. “Are you part of my destiny?”

“I don't know. You haven't told me yet.”

Two weeks later, Peyton called Betty to let her know it was time to harvest twelve of his plants. “It's going to be a long day,” he warned her, after asking her to show up at eight in the morning. She was there five minutes early as usual, and along with her pristine titanium trimming scissors, she brought breakfast crêpes and a cooler filled with arugula and pine nut salad, a roast beef and red pepper quiche and
non
-cannabinized chocolate cake. When Pops unpacked the cooler to put the food in the refrigerator, he did a little jig of joy.

“That's a high compliment, Betty,” he told her. “Pops usually does that dance only when the new phone book shows up.”

He brought her down into his basement and into a separately draped area, cloaked in darkness. Peyton explained what he had done during his pre-harvest ritual. He took the plants earmarked for harvest and flushed them thoroughly with fifteen or more gallons of water, to pull out any accumulated salts in the soil. He then gave them a tablespoon of blackstrap molasses, mixed in one gallon of water. (Betty recalled that during the entire bloom cycle, it was beneficial to add a regular treat of molasses to the nutrient regimen. It built a thriving herd of microorganisms in the soil, which returned the favor by unlocking the available nutrients and nourishing the developing buds.) After Peyton doused the soil with the blackstrap molasses rinse, he waited three days, keeping them under the bloom lights. He explained that this helped trigger the final thrust of sugars in the plant. After that, he put the plants into a completely darkened room, which hovered between sixty-eight and seventy degrees Fahrenheit, for forty-eight hours. During that time, he deprived them of water. While it sounded torturous, Peyton explained it put the cannabis plants into “survival mode.” They know they are about to die, so in a last ditch effort to excel, they release an increased amount of resin into the bud and surrounding leaves. “It's like the last gasp before death,” he told Betty. “And in that gasp they give up everything, so we can benefit from their sacrifice.”

“Sounds religious,” Betty offered.

“Nah. It's
spiritual
. Everything about this plant is spiritual. And magical. Haven't you noticed that, Betty? How the magic – all the stuff you can't explain – tends to seep into your life the more you nurture and use the cannabis plant?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Actually, I have noticed that.”

“Isn't that a beautiful thing? You can't explain it to anyone who hasn't had the good fortune of knowing this plant from birth to death. It reminds me that there's a loving God. I don't think you can be an atheist and grow good cannabis. I can always tell if I ingest cannabis grown by an atheist. It still might work, but it's missing part of its heart. Does that make sense?”

Betty nodded. “Amazingly, it does.”

In keeping with Peyton's reverence for his cherished plants, he demonstrated how he brought each one out separately, and before removing the first branch, thanked it for everything it had given him and everything it would provide to others who were in need.

“It knows it's about to die,” he whispered to Betty, getting somewhat emotional. “But it's not afraid, because deep down it knows, from the moment it's born, it has a noble purpose in death.” He turned back to the four-foot-tall, fragrant, resinous beauty. “Thank you. You've been a faithful friend. I hope I've been the same to you.” And with that, he clipped several of the lower branches off the rootstalk.

Betty actually felt herself choking up as his clippers cut through the hard, fibrous stems. There was such finality to it all, but the necessary death heralded a fruitful afterlife.

They carried the plant upstairs, and seated under the brilliant rays of the summer sun in Peyton's fenced backyard, they proceeded to patiently trim the sticky buds. First, they removed the larger fan leaves. The leaves closest to the resinous buds often had a generous spray of white “sugar” on them, compliments of whatever the buds spit out. Peyton set those aside, along with the healthy larger fan leaves, for one of his patients, who found that extracting the juice from the leaves and drinking it in shot-glass doses reduced her lupus symptoms. “There's no high from the juice,” Peyton told Betty. “Even if you juice a raw bud, there's no high. You gotta use heat to convert the THC into its psychoactive form.”

The trimming lesson continued for the first hour. There were new terms to learn. A “tight trim” removed nearly all the smaller leaves that protruded from the individual buds, going so far as to painstakingly work the tips of the scissors around each resinous flower. A “loose trim” was more forgiving, leaving the sugar-saturated leaf tips around the bud, while removing any dead or dying growth. Peyton always opted for a loose trim, because he didn't want to miss any of the strongly beneficial compounds found in the surrounding leaf tips.

Then there was “wet trimming” versus “dry trimming.” Wet trimming was what they were doing – harvesting the plant and immediately cutting and pruning the buds, as opposed to cutting the plant down by the rootstalk and hanging it to dry, before coming back a week or more later to trim. Peyton had done one dry trim in his life and said he would never do it again. “It's like trying to cut through a kudzu patch in Florida, in the middle of August. Good damn luck!”

As with anything Betty put her mind to, she quickly picked up the proper technique and proudly showed off her buds and “their cute little haircuts.” It took them nearly ninety minutes per plant to meticulously trim and hang the stems in an outdoor shed Pops helped Peyton build expressly for drying the buds. They dropped the fresh, healthy fan leaves into paper bags and stored them in the refrigerator for delivery to Peyton's lupus patient. As the hours passed, one thing became blatantly clear to Betty: it was like working at
The White Violet
, surrounded by chocolate. At first, you think to yourself how incredibly wonderful it is, and then the reality of making and handling all that chocolate becomes somewhat overpowering and an assault on the senses. She felt the same thing after six plants and nine hours of head-down labor. The novelty wore off fast, and the reality of how much work was involved became clearly apparent. She only took breaks to grab some food, use the bathroom, stretch and remove the brown “finger hash” that accumulated on the edges of her titanium blades and fingertips. Peyton showed her how to carefully roll the brown, gummy concentrate off her fingertips. Then he employed a clean razor blade to remove it off the used blade. Finally, he gingerly rolled the sticky resin into a ball, placed it into a plastic baggie and labeled it. Ingesting or smoking that, Peyton assured her, was not for beginners, as it had a higher THC and CBD content. However, if someone needed heavy pain relief, it was the quickest way to “get from point ‘A' to hallelujah.”

Peyton illuminated Betty with the critical final process of drying and curing the bud. After hanging in the darkened shed for up to ten days, the bud was ready when the stem could be easily snapped. The dried buds were then meticulously snipped off the stem, placed in glass mason jars no more than three-quarters full and stored in the dark. “Light and air are two enemies of dried bud,” he instructed her. But there was more. Once a day, the jars had to be “burped,” which entailed gently shaking the dried buds back and forth, and then opening the lid for several minutes to allow any moisture to escape. If the bud was too dry, one could place a single, healthy, fresh fan leaf in the tightly sealed jar overnight. Another option was to put an apple slice into the sealed jar. The next day, the apple would be removed after it had imparted both moisture and a pleasant scent to the curing buds. But nothing was guaranteed until the cannabis was completely cured, which could take up to five months for certain strains, or as few as three weeks for others. “You can't be sure until it's dried and cured,” Peyton advised Betty, rattling off one of his original cannabis rhymes.