Backyard (11 page)

13

Revenge of the Spurned Gardener

D
r. Sproot didn't appreciate her coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend mocking her. It wasn't so much that she could communicate with her flowers as it was knowing when she was being made a fool of, whether by animal, vegetable, or mineral.

The way they were acting! Just look at them! Going to pot after all she had done for them. Why, it was mutiny, that's what it was! Clearly, today, every bloody flower in her gardens was treating her like the world's biggest gardening sap. How could that be?

Here were the coreopsis, all curled up and tinged with brown. And the salvia! Wilted! The hollyhocks were getting duller by the hour. The dahlias looked lackadaisical, uninspired, washed-out.

And as for the wretched yuccas? Why, she had pricked her finger on one of their pointed tips, then sliced her thumb on the edge of another. Dr. Sproot dropped her watering can and pulled back from her flowers in disgust mingled with fear.

“What on God's green earth is happening here?” she muttered. “Am I not the master of my own gardens? Is this the payment I receive for such hard work?”

She inspected every shoot, every leaf, every stem, every blossom, armed with magnifying glass, tweezers at the ready to crush every pest that might turn up, but found nothing. No bugs. None of the usual signs of blight. Nothing indicating the damage resulting from too much sun or too little.

She took soil samples and did her own chemical analyses. Every test from every section of her gardens showed her topsoil to be in flawless, nutrient-rich condition. She read and reread the instructions on every bag of specially-prepared dirt and fertilizer she had applied and found she had followed them to the letter.

At her wit's end to figure out what was happening, Dr. Sproot turned to Cleon Broadmind, an old acquaintance from childhood with whom she had occasionally exchanged Christmas cards and a few brief telephone exchanges. Cleon had gotten various degrees in horticulture and now served as one of the experts-in-residence at the state university extension service. Cleon, who had had a crush on Dr. Sproot during high school, and who was now divorced, eagerly agreed to personally inspect Dr. Sproot's gardens, especially upon learning that she was widowed.

When he arrived the next day, he noticed that Dr. Sproot looked much more drawn and haggard in the face than he had expected. But she still had that trim shape, and so tall! Had she grown since he last saw her? Amazonian! Cleon noted with delight the continued presence of pronounced curves in the hips and the nice way Dr. Sproot filled out her form-fitting jeans.

“Gosh, you look great, Phyllis,” he gushed, taking her limp, cold hand into his own and squeezing it.

“I didn't call you to exchange compliments,” said Dr. Sproot, yanking her hand out of his clutches. “And I did not intend it to be a social visit. I called you to give me your professional opinion about what the Sam Hill is happening to my gardens.”

Not utterly immune to the charms of the opposite sex, Dr. Sproot nevertheless could not find anything to admire in this particular specimen. He was overweight, borderline obese, with a good-sized gut lapping well over his belt. He was bald. He had a bulbous, veiny nose that was approaching uncomfortably close to hers. Cleon had obviously gone to pot over the intervening forty-five years or so since she had last had day-to-day contact with him. Even so, there had never been that much raw material to work with. In high school, he was a stubby little greaseball, a moonstruck wallflower who was always annoying her with weird notes and longing gazes. Besides, he was four inches shorter than she was, an unacceptable differential for her in any prospective beau. She eventually had her boyfriend—a basketball player named Johnny—slap him around, and generally scare the crap out of him, and that ended that.

“Come outside,” she said. “And please do address me as
Doc-tor
Sproot, as that is my official title.”

“Okay,” said Cleon with an ingratiating smile. “Dr. Sproot it is. I'm a doctor, too, you know.”

Same old stuck-up bitch, Cleon thought. But not bad looking in a withered sort of way. Figure's still there, and that's what matters.

Walking around in the yard, Cleon found his old affections, half-buried and semi-forgotten for all those years, bubbling up again. It was the way she walked—sort of slinky-like—and the way she talked in that hard, uncompromising way that screamed out dominance. She looked so strong in the arms and legs and buttocks. Pictures of Dr. Sproot as no one had ever seen her before started forming in Cleon's tortured psyche. He saw her as a gaunt, powerful, primitive warrior who tied him to a rack with prickly, skin-gouging rope and lovingly caressed his ample, naked back with a few choice strokes of the cat-o'-nine-tails while singing out, “Does it hurt Daddy to do that?”

Put her in a studded, sleeveless leather jacket and spiked, crackling leather gloves. Give her a pair of stiletto-heeled stomping boots she could pull all the way up to the crotch, and a chastity belt made of iron with a skull and crossbones on it that he would burst blood vessels trying to rip open. Then, you've got the perfect woman. The woman of his wildest dreams. And now, a very available woman after all these years of secret subliminal yearnings.

“Well?”

“Well?”

“What do you make of all this?” At this point, lost in his reverie of Dr. Sproot as his personal dominatrix, Cleon could only gaze disinterestedly at all the vegetative carnage around him.

“Looks bad,” he said.

“I KNOW it looks bad, Cleon. WHY does it look bad?”

After asking some perfunctory questions of Dr. Sproot, and satisfying himself she had done all the things she should do to create a healthy home for her flowers, Cleon found he was at a complete loss to explain anything except his passion for her, which he would be more than willing to expound on for the rest of his life.

“Do you love your gardens?” he asked.

“Do I
what?
”

“Do you
love
them? You must coddle them. Tell them how much you care for them. Play soft music to them. Caress them. Stroke them. Stroke them again. And again. Let them know you're always there to keep them secure and safe.”

Dr. Sproot was aghast.

“I certainly don't do anything of the sort!” she snorted. “If I had wanted to oversee a bunch of brats, I would have had children. And I decided not to have children because I hate the idea of having obnoxious little persons running around pestering me with their fickle affections, their yammering conversation, and their tantrums. Isn't it enough that I do what's necessary for any garden to flourish and apply the latest in scientific methods and my own inspiration to their health and well-being?”

“Well, then, have you tried screaming at them and humiliating them? How about whipping them, or slicing their buds just enough to cause endurable pain. You could grab them in hand and squeeze, squeeze, squeeze them until they think you're going to crush the very life out of them. But then you stop. It's the kind of treatment that can create excitement in any organism, present company not excepted.

“And maybe if you could dress in a certain way when you care for them that could perk things up a bit. Say, going topless, or wearing a loose-fitting, wiggly bra made from chain links and old hubcaps.”

“What?” screeched Dr. Sproot, raising her arm toward the salivating Cleon as if to ward off an expected blow. “How dare you unleash your putrid perversions on me! Out! Out! Out, you quack!”

With that, Cleon scuttled across the yard toward the fence and fumbled with the latch on the gate, half hoping that Dr. Sproot would follow and whale the living daylights out of him. Instead, she just stood there and glared as he slunk through the gate to his car, reveling in the rather modest helping of humiliation she had dished out.

 

Dr. Sproot's shame and despair over her gardens were such that she turned what few friends she had away from her door. Same for those craven acolytes accustomed to turning to her for advice or inspiration.

Finally, one day, her gardens looking more than ever like brittle, rusted, and corroded metal, it dawned on her.

“Edith Merton!”

That could be the only explanation. The black arts of Edith Merton. Dr. Sproot shook her head in disbelief. After all, Dr. Sproot was a woman of science who had gotten a B- in biology and B in chemistry in high school. She subscribed to
The Homebound Scientist,
which she now made a mental note she would have to renew because the last issue came Thursday. Every gardening move she made was testament to what you can see, touch, and smell, and apply chemicals to. But what else could there be to explain all this? The flowers were perking up now, but only to laugh at her, pointing their wretched, decomposing blooms directly at her to highlight the object of their scorn.

Good God! thought Dr. Sproot, something's turning my gardens into mobs of horrid little people.

“This is Edith Merton's doing,” she whispered.

She hardly dared admit it to herself, but what other explanation was there? Edith Merton casting her spells. Edith Merton, gardening witch!

On the surface, Edith Merton was a middle-aged businesswoman, who, with her husband, Felix, owned Mertons' Liquors on 34th Avenue and Mertons' TV and Appliance Mart on Jursfeld Street. Mostly, she kept the books in the store offices and left all the customer dealings to Felix and his sales and repair staff. From all accounts, she dressed normally, and was a dues-paying member of the Livia Business Fellowship. She walked her springer spaniel punctually at six ten p.m. every day, rain or shine. She had no tattoos or body piercings. As far as people could tell, she never even dyed her hair.

Edith Merton cultivated a modest little garden that gave her great pride, but which, otherwise, could
not
be taken seriously.

She had some snapdragons, which she interspersed with Dusty Miller and milkweed. A few morning glories. A smattering of ornamental grasses. All contained within one eight-foot-by-ten-foot patch of front yard bordered by a wall of decaying railroad timbers. For years, her flowers were perpetually drooping underperformers, sadly under-watered because, when you kept the books for a couple of small businesses, who had time for plant care?

It was last year that things changed. Something had supercharged her garden into healthy, brilliant vivacity. The morning glories and snapdragons were glorious. The dusty miller had grown to gigantic size, threatening to overreach the modest gardening plot. The milkweed was lustrous, and the ornamental grasses had truly become living ornaments.

Edith's newfound talents as a gardener had led her to seek membership in Livia's most prestigious gardening club, the Rose Maidens. It was the club for which Dr. Sproot served as secretary/treasurer and president emeritus.

The officers of the club had scoffed at the very notion of admitting Edith Merton to their hallowed ranks. Despite her recent successes, she didn't come close to meeting even their minimum requirements, and she had no gardening pedigree. Besides, their president, Dawn Fisher, hated snapdragons with a zeal that the members were led to believe was connected to some traumatic episode of her childhood. Some said that Dawn had once pinched a snapdragon to get that dragon effect. The effect she got was a bee popping out of the flower and stinging her on the upper lip, which had swollen to three times its normal size.

Dawn had torn up Edith's letter of application. She sent back a curt note of refusal cosigned by all the other officers.

Edith Merton did not take this rejection lightly. She barged in, uninvited, during one of the club's monthly meetings and demanded admittance. When snubbed by the absolute silence of the members, she stormed out, knocking a potted Boston fern off its pedestal, and swearing that she would somehow get back at “you dried-up, old-biddy, gardening bitches.”

Lately, Livia's gardening snoops, among whose ranks Marta Poppendauber could proudly count herself, had been hearing disquieting rumors about Edith Merton. It was said that she had been pursuing a blasphemous study of necromancy and communing with spirits of the dead. Livia's dead. Mostly, she restricted her practices to household pets, specializing in crickets, turtles, goldfish, and guinea pigs, but occasionally stretching herself to handle opossums and mourning doves. Rumor had it that she had even made the big jump to dogs, cats, and Shetland ponies.

All of this was harmless enough from a gardening standpoint except for one recent development: Edith was branching out, practicing her newfound black arts on her own gardens, which flourished as never before. By funneling the powers of flora long gone into those that still lived, she felt she could control the destiny of any flower, any vegetable, any plot of cultivated land. She had actually acquired a couple of customers for this new service, and was charging them for it, but surreptitiously, because how many people would want to buy their microwaves or fifths of vodka from a store co-owned by a professional witch?

The scary thing about all this was that Edith had those old gardening scores to settle. When Marta warned Dr. Sproot about all this in an oblique and mysterious way that indicated she really didn't put much stock in it, Dr. Sproot had hooted in derision. But now, faced with inexplicable blight and pestilence, and with a major contest and her future as Livia's preeminent gardener at stake, Dr. Sproot was forced to face new, not-very-scientific gardening realities.

A quick drive over to Muffy McGonigle's house was all the evidence she needed. Muffy was the outgoing president of the Rose Maidens. At any given time of day or night, she could be seen outside in her woven straw hat, inspecting and reinspecting her gardens for the slightest blemish and so much as a single dandelion or strand of stray fescue. It surprised no one when Muffy suffered mild heart attacks on the occasion of early, hard frosts ravaging her mums in September 1996 and October 2005.