Duane's Depressed (40 page)

“You could get a pet,” Duane suggested.

“A pet ain’t as good as human company,” Rag insisted. It was true that she was drinking a lot. She and Bobby Lee had formed the habit of playing video games with each other—sometimes their games raged deep into the night. Though Bobby Lee had
eventually broken down and acquired a prosthetic testicle, it hadn’t made him any less shy with women.

“I think I
could
have sex,” Bobby Lee said often. “But the thing is, I can’t get up my nerve to try.”

Then he joined a health club and became an exercise addict, lifting weights, climbing StairMasters, rowing on rowing machines, playing racquetball with all comers.

“I can’t figure out why you exercise so much,” Duane said one day. Bobby Lee came to the cabin to visit with him at least twice a week.

“You work hard all day,” he added. “Then you go to a damn health club and work harder. What’s the point?”

Bobby Lee pondered the question for a long time, before answering. The hair at his temples had turned white; otherwise he was almost bald.

“I guess it’s because all those machines are so clean,” he said, finally. “We’ve got machines at the rig but they’re oily and greasy or muddy and yucky. But those machines at the health club are spotless. I mean, spotless. They clean those suckers every day.”

“I don’t care how clean they are, they’re still just machines,” Duane said. “Dickie pays you to work with the dirty machines and then you turn around and give your hard-earned money to a damn health club just so you can get all sweaty and smelly working with a clean machine. I don’t guess I get it.”

“There’s not much to get,” Bobby Lee said, a little sadly. He was prone to low spells, during which, without warning, his spirits would plummet to serious depths.

“I guess I go to health clubs for the same reason people go to art museums,” he added.

“Art museums?” Duane asked.

“Sure,” Bobby said. “People go to art museums to see pretty pictures and I go to health clubs to see those pretty machines. You know, they’re even so clean they gleam.”

“Now I’ve heard everything,” Duane said.

8

I
N THE SPRING AFTER
K
ARLA’S DEATH
Duane raised a splendid garden behind the big house. Discouraged by the tragedy and the overpowering heat wave that followed it, he let the previous year’s hasty garden burn up. Blister bugs got into the greenhouse and ruined the tomatoes; the drought and the heat took care of everything that had been planted outside. Even the peaches on their four nice peach trees shriveled up before they ripened—the birds got most of them. Duane, trying to hold the family together, discovered that he lacked the energy to hold the family together and garden too. Now and then in the late afternoon he would go out and make a stab at weeding the garden, but about the only things he took from it that summer were a few good onions and a bucket or two of unblemished peaches.

The problem of the garden nagged at his conscience all summer. He remembered that Dr. Carmichael had been particularly interested in his attitudes toward the garden—they had been probing those very attitudes not long before Karla got killed and he left therapy. With Karla alive he hadn’t fretted about the garden too much, because it was her responsibility as much as his; and Karla was, if anything, the better gardener. Once she was killed the whole responsibility became his, and the fact that he immediately failed at it and let the garden burn up was one of the things that troubled him most from day to day. The children had no interest in helping him, and somehow it didn’t
feel right just to hire a gardener. It was
his
garden, and Karla’s. Hiring a gardener would have destroyed the whole point; though, when he thought about it, he couldn’t easily say why. If hiring a gardener for a few weeks would save the garden, why not do it?

Duane could formulate no clear answer to that question—perhaps he hesitated out of nostalgia. He and Karla had always gardened together—they both took great satisfaction not only from doing the work but from discussing the success or failure of this crop or that with each other. Karla was always eager to test the latest horticultural products or techniques—she and Duane spent many pleasant hours drinking margaritas on their patio and discussing their eggplants or their rutabagas. One reason they both looked forward to the summer months was because the gardening absorbed them and brought them together. In a way it was to their late middle age what sex had been to their youth: something they never got tired of; something, even, that kept them feeling like a couple.

So, after the accident, one of the most difficult adjustments Duane had to make was to accept the fact that he would never have Karla to garden with again. He would have to go it alone or not go it at all. If he had been blessed with a wetter spring or a cooler summer he might have adjusted in time to at least make a respectable job of it, but the elements were unforgiving and his energies drained by the effort to comfort his family and deal with the daily crises that Karla had once dealt with as competently as she had once dealt with the blister bugs and the tomato plants. He gave up, and the garden burned.

When spring came again—the spring after Karla’s death—Duane determined to do better. He didn’t hire a gardener, but he did pay a competent young farmer to plow the garden plot. As soon as the weather was warm enough for planting, Duane began. In the greenhouse they kept a huge pile of seed catalogues, more of which arrived every week. Duane took a sheaf of seed catalogues back to his cabin and pored over them at night, looking for new varieties of vegetables to plant. He sent off his orders and seeds began to arrive. When the time came to plant he was ready, and from then on, every day until full summer, he
worked in the garden, carefully keeping watch over every plant. In the last few years he and Karla had become more interested in organic gardening—after some thought Duane decided to keep this year’s garden fully organic. He planted three varieties of corn, he planted kale, he planted leeks, he planted three kinds of tomatoes and eight kinds of onions. One corner of the garden was reserved for herbs.

This year, as if repentent, the spring provided him with an ideal combination of warm days and slow rains. The garden flourished, and so did the weeds, although no weed was long safe from Duane’s hoe. There were a number of gardening buffs in Thalia, people he and Karla had compared notes with over the years. Though busy with their own gardens, some of these neighbors would drop by in the late afternoon to admire Duane’s vegetables, by far the greatest variety to be found within the city limits of Thalia. The one who came by most often was Jenny Marlow, Lester’s wife. Jenny loved to garden, but had had a hard time satisfying herself in the last few years because of Lester’s many legal problems.

“Every time I think I’ve finally got a good garden going, we have to move to a smaller house,” Jenny told Duane. “We’re just living in four rooms now. I don’t know how much smaller these houses can get.”

Duane admired Jenny. She had carried on gallantly although her husband was a nearly insane person who had been jailed twice and might yet be jailed again. It could not have been easy to be the wife of a man who was constantly the butt of local jokes, but Jenny held her head up, did her job, and stood by Lester unwaveringly. Despite her troubles she preserved a serene demeanor.

One day in June with a nice little drizzle falling, Duane and Jenny walked up and down the long rows of his garden, admiring this vegetable and that. Standing amid the green abundance Jenny looked at Duane sadly for a moment. Though they had never discussed it Jenny seemed to understand that he had made a special effort with this year’s garden as a way of showing his devotion to Karla’s memory. The wonderful garden was Duane’s way of paying tribute to his late wife.

“I guess you miss her like I’d miss Lester, if he died,” Jenny said, putting her hand on his arm for a moment.

“Yes, I do,” Duane said, though he was guiltily aware that he was not telling the whole truth. He
did
miss Karla, sometimes acutely; but the fact was that it was easier to miss her than it had been—at times—to live with her. Alive, her energy, her questing was so unceasing that it was impossible to ignore it—for long stretches Karla went through life as charged as a naked wire. It was easy to love her but hard to find quietness with her. Often he had not had the energy for the level of engagement Karla wanted; often he just reached a point where he had nothing to say. Being a widower was not a better state, but it did take less energy. He could think of himself a little while working in Karla’s garden.

But he didn’t want to talk about complications of that nature with Jenny—perhaps she sensed them anyway, guessed that there were times when he
didn’t
miss Karla, when he was happy just to be working alone in the garden, or walking at his own pace along the country roads.

There were aspects of widowerhood Duane just did not want to get into, particularly not with someone as smart as Jenny Marlow. He was grieved, but he wasn’t devastated, and he liked to think that Karla would have understood that and considered it a healthy attitude—the attitude he liked to think
she
would have had if he had been the one to smack into the milk truck. Karla too would have been grieved, perhaps devastated for a time; but she wouldn’t have been stopped. “Shoot, we’re all just passing through,” she liked to say—it was one of her favorite expressions. If he had been the one to pass on through, Karla, in time, would have coped.

“This is the biggest garden I’ve ever seen, Duane,” Jenny said. “Who are you going to feed all this stuff to? You’ve got more food here than five families could eat, and there’s not a single one of your children at home. There’s just you.”

The question Jenny asked was one that had begun to nag Duane himself. Who was he going to feed all these healthy vegetables to? He might occasionally drop off a few vegetables with Dickie and Annette, in Wichita Falls, and of course any of the
children were welcome to drop by and pick what they wanted, but the fact was they never did. Both Julie and Nellie had rich boyfriends who fed them in the best restaurants in Dallas or Nashville or Los Angeles or New York or wherever their airplanes took them. Jack was in Montana and Rag had died in the winter, a victim—in only six weeks—of cancer in both lungs. The last time Duane visited her in the hospital she expressed amazement at the swiftness of her own demise. “This stuff’s got me nearly killed off before I even knew I had it,” Rag said. “Reckon it was the smoking?”

“I have no idea what it was,” Duane said.

“If there’s shopping malls up in heaven maybe I’ll meet Karla and we’ll go on a spree,” Rag said. “Sonny Crawford lost both feet and he’s still stumpin’ around. I guess you can spare both feet but you can’t spare both lungs.”

Once Rag was buried Duane closed and locked the big house and sold all the unwanted cars his children had left in the driveway or the carport. The big house, filled with life for some thirty years, was now only filled with shadows.

The fact that he had a huge garden, but no one to feed the vegetables to, was an irony he had been thinking about even before Jenny Marlow mentioned it to him.

“I think I may just open it to the public,” he told Jenny. “There’s poor people in this town who would be glad to get these vegetables.”

“I think that’s a fine idea,” Jenny said. “And you know what, I may be one of them. Can you spare a little kale?”

“You can have a little of anything,” Duane assured her. “Or a lot of anything, for that matter.”

“I don’t need a lot of anything,” Jenny said. “Lester hates veggies. He’s managing to stay alive on Fudgsicles and barbecue potato chips.”

The next day Duane bought some plywood, and painted it white. Then he rummaged in the trailer house until he found an old set of child’s paints that had once belonged to Barbi. With the paints he wrote several signs and stuck one by each of the four roads into Thalia. The last one he put up right by the garden itself. The sign read:

K
ARLA
L
AVERNE
M
OORE
M
EMORIAL
G
ARDEN
Organic Vegetables Free to the Public
Please Be Neat with Your Picking

D
UANE
C. M
OORE

He ran a similar notice in the local paper for three weeks. The response was immediate and gratifying. Since the garden needed all but full-time attention Duane had taken to working in it early and late and spending the hot hours in Dickie and Annette’s old trailer house, which was still parked at the back of the property. He had tried resting in the big house at first but found he could not be at ease there. Dickie and Annette had taken everything but one old couch, an air conditioner, and a few glasses out of the trailer—what they abandoned was exactly what he needed. But the best thing about the trailer house was that its rear window allowed him to keep an eye on the garden and observe the people that came to it. The trailer was a perfect observation post—no one need suspect that they were being watched.

The first people who visited the garden were not poor—most of them were neighbors he had known for years—but these first visitors either took nothing at all or limited themselves to a few tomatoes and an ear or two of corn. They paid close attention to the garden, though—it was clear that they regarded it with wonderment, almost with awe. Nine people came the first morning, all but two of them elderly neighbors.

Then, late that afternoon, a black family came—the only black family in Thalia.

“My lord,” the mother of the family said—she was a woman in late middle age. “Been a long time since I seen a garden like this, Mr. Moore.”

“Thanks, Gladys—I’m proud of it,” Duane admitted.

Gladys and her husband and grandchildren took mostly green beans and a variety of greens. The next day they came back and got more. They looked nervous when they saw Duane working, perhaps nervous that he might chide them for reappearing so soon. But he just joked with them a little and let them know they were welcome to take what they needed.