Warm Wuinter's Garden (46 page)

Harm came. It roared through a life like a
tornado. A mindless force. It threw lives over, snapped long held
assumptions, bent and twisted dreams and hopes, and uprooted faith.
Then, it, the actual force itself, was gone. Swept past to another
place, another’s life. And one was left standing amidst the
wreckage. With a choice. Stay shocked. Frozen like a statue.
Holding tight to memories. Or, forever parsing shoulds and mights
and maybes. Or, one could move. Bend. Bend over. Pick through the
debris. Gather. Sort and save. Salvage.

Harm could be planned for and protected
against, but not prevented. That was the first and, ever and
always, the hardest lesson for any person, but especially a parent,
to learn. Constant care and sleepless protection could not prevent
harm from digging its sharp dry fingers into a child of any
age.

Harm couldn’t be prevented. That parent’s
nightmare. That most hellish truth couldn’t be denied. It was the
simplest rule. Life’s first law. Harm was inevitable.

Bett finished picking out the row of beans.
The beans and grilled salmon drizzled with basil oil and potato
salad with new potatoes, peas and peapods in yogurt. The Fourth
meant salmon. She would snap beans with Nita and listen hard to the
small voice, fighting fear so fiercely behind the placid face.

Bett stretched to put the basket as far from
her as possible. She reached behind, found the rubber armpit guard
of her crutch, and, using another new skill she was mastering,
maneuvered it so that she could use it to push the gathering basket
closer to the edge of the garden. She winced when a sharp pain shot
through her buttocks and up her spine as she let too much of her
weight shift onto her stump. She took a deep breath and held it
until the pain’s claws slid back into their sheaths.

Make a spread of smoked blue fish, blue
cheese, chopped fennel fronds, walnuts and cream cheese. Dilly
wouldn’t help. Two, three, four of the ingredients were bad. Serve
it with celery and endive leaves rather than rye bread or crackers.
That might tip the scale. What a funny girl. She wasn’t mean, just
bossy. And lost. A lost boss needing a job. What a funny love they
had. So deep it hurt. But they could never talk without irritation.
Sometimes, they could hardly be in the same room together. But,
still, mother and daughter. Loving mother and loving daughter. If
only Dilly could learn that the only real protection from hurt was
joy. Harm’s antidote, joy, unlike harm itself, wasn’t random. Joy
could be learned because it was the certain effect of specific
causes. Give to give, not to get, that brought joy. If only Dilly,
who so wanted joy, who sought it from all around her, who thought
it could be extracted, could learn that. Mercy brought joy.
Clemency for self and others. Peter was learning. Slough off memory
and forgive because mercy cut, and might be the only thing that
could, the grapples from the past. Courage, fear filled acts of
courage, birthed joy. Nita poised. Standing still and trembling. If
she could but jump. Gratitude brought joy. Remembering the gifts of
grace. Sight and sense and common sense and…

Bett rolled onto her stomach. Already she had
found that from there she could push herself to an awkward kneeling
position, and then, after balancing most of her weight onto her
left haunch, she could plant her crutches so that she could use
them to draw herself up. In her violent heaving to bring herself
onto her knee, a hand broke the stem of a newly weeded fennel
plant. Its clean perfume filled the air. She sighed then laughed at
her clumsiness. Her callused fingers slid down the fennel’s base.
She twisted the slender stem from its roots. She braced herself and
began to twine a crown. Two earwigs skittered from their nest. She
brushed them from the shoot. She finished twisting the fronds into
a circle. She drew the crown to her mouth and trimmed a hanging
sprig with her teeth and savored its sweet spiciness.

Bett tried to put the crown on her head with
two hands as if it was a coronation, but she found she couldn’t
keep her balance. She threw out her scarred right arm and used it
to wedge herself upright.

As Bett placed the plait of green on her
stubbly head she whispered,

“
And he who battled and subdued,

A wreath of fennel wore
.”

Bett pulled herself up on her crutches and
haltingly made her way down the row with the wreath askew on her
head.

What now? What next?

Find Neil and hold him. Have him hold her.
Repair wounds.

Bette stood for a moment and looked at the
lavender bells hanging from the eggplant and the straight stalks of
the okra and the dusty green leaves of the basil and, against the
white stucco wall, the profusion of reds and pinks and whites and
purples of the nodding hollyhocks flowering early after the long
warm winter. She saw a basil plant had budded. Angling a crutch and
hopping back a step for better balance, she bent over and pinched
back the buds.

“Not so fast,” she whispered.

Bett straightened up, trapped a crutch under
her right arm and beat a slight tattoo against the flesh where her
breast had been, then, struck with a thought, she tipped an
imaginary bottle in a toast to the hollyhocks and all else she had
watched grow and change in heat and cold, in wet and dry, in late
springs and early frosts, in tended and untended conditions.

“Oh, Opa, what a grand garden this all
is.”