Warm Wuinter's Garden

By

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Neil Hetzner©July 2011

Warm Winter’s Garden

All Rights Reserved.

AUGUST

1990

Bett Koster did not know what to do. For her,
who almost always knew what to do next, that was a very strange
feeling. Her sense of uncertainty was so strong that she had a
whispery urge to take her hands from the steering wheel, to heave
her body out from under the confines of the seat belt, to inhale
enough air to calm the boiling in her stomach, and then to wait. It
was a very strange sensation. She reminded herself of Queenie,
their blue tick hound, zigzagging along the beach snuffling the
sand to find a trail. She could not put things in order. First
things first. That rule had been a part of her life for as long as
she could remember.

All right.

The first thing was for her to drive home.
The second thing must be to pick the eggplant. They certainly
needed her attention. It had rained on Friday and Saturday. Sunday
had been one of those late August New England days with deep blue
skies and gusty dry air bringing just a hint of fall crispness down
from the north. It had been one of those days when it seemed as if
the months were suits of playing cards and, somehow, one of the
Septembers had gotten mixed in with the Augusts. The front had
moved through late on Sunday night. Today, Monday, was hot and
muggy. If she didn’t pick the eggplant soon, the fruit would soak
up the rain and turn its solid, sea spume-colored flesh into soggy
pulp. Bett thought that a young, blackish purple, smooth as enamel
eggplant was one of God’s great gifts, but a soft, spongy, seedy,
eggplant was a pretty worthless thing except, perhaps, as a
convenience store vegetable.

Pick the eggplant. Cut it into quarter inch
slices. Oil, then, grill the slices. Layer the tiger-striped slices
with extra virgin olive oil, herbed vinegar, chopped garlic and
fresh basil leaves. First things first. Pick some basil; pinch its
buds. Basil had a desperate drive to flower, then, fail. The plants
had to be deadheaded every other day if they were to grow to their
potential. Turn the grill to low, oil whole eggplant, prick them
with a fork, then, roast them until they collapsed in upon
themselves. Chop the pulp and mix it with roasted walnuts, garlic,
salt and pepper, fresh oregano, olive oil and lemon juice for
eggplant caviar. Freeze the extra pulp in the empty yogurt cups
which, along with cottage cheese and sour cream containers, had
been saved throughout the year for harvest time.

Bett forced herself to look far down the
sunlight-dappled corridor of Dana Road. Yellow shards of late
afternoon sun cut through the green of the swamp maples and scrub
oaks, the nearly black green of the twenty-foot high rhododendron
and the canopy of sumac whose leaves had already begun to turn red
from cooler nights.

First things first.

The first thing was to focus her attention on
her driving. She narrowed her eyes as the road left the shadows of
the woods to pass by the dark brown earth and lush green squares of
the Danner’s turf farm. The turf farms of southern Rhode Island,
with their perfect flatness and precise outlines, were one of the
few physical aspects of New England that reminded Bett of growing
up in Indiana. Looking out across the golf course-manicured grass
to where the harvesting equipment was peeling sod and turning it
into giant green and brown jelly rolls, she recalled fields of
newly sprouted timothy hay on the rich fields of The Chimneys.

In the halcyon days of the late Twenties,
when people had felt as exhilarated and exuberantly wealthy as they
would again in the mid-1980s, her grandfather had bought two forty
hundred acres of black loam, Eel River bottom farmland. He had
named the place after the matched chimneys that rose high above the
run-down ante-bellum brick farmhouse.

Grandfather, who Bett had called Opa, German
for Grandpa, from the time she was a baby until he died when she
was just past forty, was a small-town jeweler. Opa always rose at
five fifteen a.m.. He would have walked the ten blocks from his
home to his store long before most of his customers were awake. He
used the quiet hours before the store opened to do the delicate
hand engraving for which he was famous. Working in a space so
crowded with nameless things— wood-handled things with sharp
points, and small wooden saucers filled with brightly colored
waxes, brushes so fine it was hard to imagine a use for them,
vises, and additions to vises, and pieces of gold chain, slivers of
bright springs from watches, watch gears, some as large as dimes
but mostly smaller than a nail head—that it seemed impossible that
he could find the space to move his hands, Opa would carve the
sentiments of a lover into an engagement ring in a script so small
and curlicued that it was difficult to decipher the message. He
would finish the ring and begin a monogram to fill the center of a
large sterling silver tray. From the tray he might turn to a
locket.

When the store opened at nine o’clock sharp,
Opa would sell Elgin pocket watches to the railroaders who worked
on the B&O, Pennsy, or Wabash lines. He would push his
jeweler’s loupe up from his eye to sell Wallace sterling or
Wedgwood china to the carriage trade. At one o’clock he would leave
the store in the hands of his assistant, walk the ten blocks home
to the large lunch that Oma would have prepared, then, in the
summer, after loading Bett and beer into the Packard, drive the six
miles into the countryside to work his new, sweet-smelling
land.

In her grandparents’ photo albums there was a
picture of Opa with a brown Budweiser beer bottle held high in one
hand and a half dozen enormous tomatoes cupped in the other. A hoe
handle rested against his white-shirted paunch. While Opa’s eyes
were lost in a squint against the hard light of summer, the rest of
his face was brightly painted with joy. Despite the starched white
shirt whose collar had been stripped of its batwing bowtie, despite
the high-topped kangaroo skin boots, despite the fine dark
gabardine pants that were made from cloth sent for from London,
despite the long, sleek Packard, despite the stately tuck-pointed
farmhouse, despite all the contrary images that could be found in
so many of the family photos, Opa had been no gentleman farmer.
Bett knew at the earliest age that in his soul Opa was a peasant.
He knew the earth at a level beyond reason, and he loved and
respected its myriad ruled unruly ways more than his profession,
his religion and most, if not all, of his family.

On hot June afternoons, her ears ringing with
the drone of horseflies hovering over the mounds of manure that had
been shoveled along the perimeter of the two acre house garden from
a horse-drawn wagon, Bett had used her short-handled hoe to
intercut the sticky, straw-filled manure into the only slightly
less sticky loam. It would take all the strength in her arms to
blend the two. After a dozen or twenty strokes she would use the
blade of the hoe to gather the mixture, as thick and rich as fudge,
into a mound, then, thankful for the respite, she would drop to her
knees. While her body rested on the warm, soft cushion of the soil,
she would pat the earth into its final form as a flat-topped hill
for cucumber, squash or melon seeds.

Bett took her eyes from the road to look at
her fat brown arms. Although Opa never had seemed to be watching
her and never had embarrassed her by asking, he always had known
when the hoeing, whether for planting or weeding, had gone on so
long that her knees quivered and her shoulders were hot in pain.
From down the row he would call out in a vaudevillian German
accent, “Vonderkind, is your vistle dry?” “Dry as Oklahoma,” she
would reply. The two of them would plant the blades of their hoes
deep into the churned earth. As they walked down the lane with its
powdery tire tracks separated by a rise filled with dusty burdock
and sheared off milkweed plants, Opa would teach Bett about the
sights and sounds and smells around them.

At the end of the lane, where a tangle of
wild grape acted as sentinel, they would turn onto the crunch of
the gravel road. They would walk a block down the caramel-colored
gravel road until they came to the section where Oma insisted that
oil be sprayed to keep down the dust. To avoid the smell of the
oil, they would leave the road to walk a narrow path through the
high grass before coming to the sagging zigzag of the split rail
fence. Opa would step over first, then, hold Bett’s hand as she
would tightrope walk along one or two sections of the silvery rail
fence that wandered along the front yard of The Chimneys. In the
side yard, Opa would lift the thick wooden lid from the cistern. As
she knelt down alongside the black hole, Bett’s sweaty face would
be chilled by the up-rushing air. In a wire basket at the end of
the rope which she was entrusted with drawing up would be two
bottles, each with a white porcelain stopper, a red rubber gasket
and a wire bail around the neck. The larger bottle held the white
foam and amber fluid of Oma’s lager. The smaller bottle would be
filled either with the dark vanilla and sassafras flavoring of root
beer or the golden, throat burning volatility of Oma’s ginger
beer.

In a tight harmony developed from repetition
over several summers’ long weeks, grandfather and granddaughter
would cup a hand around the neck and squeegee the cold well water
from the bottle and use it to cool heated brow and cheeks. After
retracing their steps to the garden, they would lean against the
rusting frame of an old tedder, whose corroded tines had spread no
hay in decades, extend their arms, flick the bails, pull the
stoppers, dodge the spray, and, then, catch the bottle’s boiling
foam in their parched mouths. Eyes would grow big and noses catch
on fire. Opa would belch a sound as long and low as a bear’s growl.
He would point the neck of his bottle at her in a silent toast. She
would make the same toast back. To Oma. To bounty. To us. To life.
Opa would point the bottle at the rows and mounds of the garden and
give her a satyr’s leer that flaunted his lust for The Chimney’s
fecundity.

As she rode toward home and all its duties,
Bett could feel the fermentation that once had given rise to the
ginger-flavored belches whose length and volume had so pleased her
grandfather. There had been perfect summer days when, with the heat
still shimmering above the earth and with elongating shadows
rushing toward them as the sun dropped behind the row of elms at
the far end of the field, she and Opa had belched together in
simple, satisfying harmony. They would catch each other’s eye and
pledge themselves to secrecy. Don’t tell Oma. They would upend
their bottles and suck the last foam from them before returning to
their shoulder aching, leg quivering, skin reddening, sweat
dripping joyous labor.

By pushing her spine back against the car
seat Bett managed to make a small belch, but rather than ginger, it
tasted like of brackish water. Unlike a thousand other belches in
her life, this one held no satisfaction. She told herself to stop
thinking. Just get home and pick the okra.

As a young mother with four children, it had
always seemed to Bett that no matter how much okra she planted,
there were never enough pods ready on a single day for a meal. Neil
and all of her children, even Dilly, loved okra, but Bett herself
still winced at the thought of eating it. She never had liked the
scratchiness of its fuzzy skin on the roof of her mouth nor the
feeling as its slippery round seeds burst between her teeth. Even
though the kids were no longer around to eat it, Bett continued to
grow okra because it had been Opa’s favorite vegetable. Growing it
now, as a homage to Opa and those healing days at The Chimneys,
gave her great satisfaction. As a vegetable, okra was for someone
else; however as a plant it stole her. With its ten-inch wide
palmated leaves, its eight foot height and large custard yellow
trumpet blooms, okra, along with hollyhocks and sunflowers, was one
of the most imperial of plants. First things first. She should
pickle some pods with hot peppers to make the Texas fingers that
Neil loved to eat with cheddar cheese and crackers.