The Midnight Gardener
By Richard
Dean
For
two weeks
after she died, Martin Quinn’s wife talked to him from inside the decorative
urn on the mantlepiece.
Not
literally—Martin
wasn’t crazy. He knew that Alison was no longer capable of anything, including
speaking, since the version of her inside the urn was about four pounds of inert
ashes. But Martin would decide to watch CNN for a couple of hours, or wake from
a doze in his usual chair, or simply walk through the living room on his way to
another part of the house and he would hear Alison’s voice.
“Oh,
Martin,” she
would say. “You can’t just leave me here, between the nice picture of us and
the ugly dog ornament you got me for our anniversary, the one it took me years
to admit I thought was horrible.” Or she would say, “Look, Martin: I’m sorry.
No one saw this coming, least of all me. I mean, we knew neither of us was
getting any younger. We knew the blood pressure and cholesterol numbers could
be lower for both of us. But still: a grand mal seizure on a Monday afternoon in
the middle of the weekly grocery shopping? Who could have seen that coming?”
She
was right,
disembodied voice or not. Martin remembered what the doctor had said. Like a
bolt of lightning. He followed this up with the classic line delivered by
doctors and police officers the world over when informing relatives of a loved
one’s death: she didn’t suffer. It
was an ‘ignorance is bliss’ kind of thing, Martin supposed, a way of giving the
person left behind some small measure of comfort.
So
ill-prepared
had they been for that particular lightning bolt that they had never quite
gotten around to those tedious and somehow macabre chores of making a last will
and testament, or of discussing funeral plans. A day or two following Alison
Quinn’s Monday night swan song in the dairy isle of their local Safeway, Martin
had a vague memory of a phone call with a young man at Mason’s Funeral Home
in Chamberlain. The young
man had talked
to Martin about various options and their variously eye-watering costs and he—Martin—had
agreed to the young man’s suggestions with no qualms and very little memory of
the specifics after the fact. With no kids and no relatives to attend the
service, Martin had sat through the short ceremony at the funeral home a few
days later in a daze of grief that he wondered might never leave him.
There
was another
vague memory of a taxi ride home to a house that now felt like an echo chamber,
and two days after that there was a UPS delivery. Martin had unboxed and
unwrapped the delivery. Inside, cocooned in bubble-wrap, was a fancy vase. It
was blue with gold trim. Martin frowned at the vase, thinking it must have been
some ornament Alison had ordered, until he saw the Mason’s Funeral Home
business card in the bottom of the cardboard box. Not a vase, an urn. His wife
had just been express delivered to his doorstep.
“Make
sure you
dust me, Martin.” Alison’s voice came from its place on the mantlepiece. “Me,
and the picture I like.”
*****
It
started to
affect his sleep. He would get into bed, close his eyes with a familiar sense
of anticipation of Alison about join him, and that part was probably normal
enough, but then he would hear her voice from the living room: “Martin? Are you
going to sleep now? Are you leaving me in here? Martin?”
Earplugs
did not
work. Ambien didn’t work. Sleeping in the spare bedroom with the door shut and
the radio on did not work.
“Martin?”
she
would call from the living room. “Are you asleep?”
He
wished like
hell they had talked about funeral
plans. Maybe cremation had been a mistake. Maybe burial would have been a
better option, offered some closure
(and, he thought, in a dark and now sleep-deprived part of his mind, he
wouldn’t be able to hear her all the way over from the town’s graveyard, and at
least he could’ve gotten some goddamn sleep).
*****
The
solution came the
next morning while he was mowing the lawn. He was thinking about pulling the
weeds from Alison’s flower bed when had had finished with the grass. Alison
loved the garden – had loved it,
anyway – and she would not have been the least bit happy to see the disarray
her carefully tended flowerbeds had fallen into under Martin’s short tenure as
the Quinn’s one and only gardener.
“I’ll
bury the
ashes,” he said aloud, sounding surprised. No one was around to hear him
talking to himself, and probably wouldn’t have heard him over the drone of the
mower, anyway. “I’ll bury the ashes. That’s perfect.”
He smiled broadly, his first genuine smile since Alison had died.
*****
He
drove to the
garden centre and picked up compost, two sacks of mulch and five azaleas - one
for every decade they had been married.
The
day had turned
out hot. When he got home, he put on the straw hat he knew Alison would have
reminded him to wear if she had been there. He smiled when he did it.
*****
It
felt good to
work, to feel the strain in the muscles in his arms and back and to be able to
focus on a task. Sweat dampened his shirt and the cotton band inside his hat. Dirt
got under his fingernails and stained the knees of his old jeans. He dug, he
raked, he used Alison’s little fork to pull out the stubborn roots and to prize
out the small rocks. After a couple of hours, he retrieved the urn from the
mantlepiece and got creakily down on his knees in front of the holes he had dug,
each one about ten inches deep, evenly spaced across the ten-foot-wide
flowerbed that separated their lawn from the public sidewalk. Five holes for
five azaleas. Five decades. Fifty years.
He
took off his
hat, wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.
He
had not looked
inside the urn, but he had seen such things on TV and in movies, so the gritty
grey contents were not a surprise when he opened the urn. He set the lid to one
side, next to a pile of salvaged daffodil bulbs, and held the urn in his right
hand, tilting it slightly over the first of the five holes.
He
felt that he
should say something, or should have thought to bring the little portable
speaker outside so he could play one of Alison’s favourite songs. The idea that
he could still do that – put the urn
down, go inside, fetch the speaker (and maybe even the single book of poems the
Quinn’s owned so he could read something she would have liked) - occurred to
him, but the moment felt caught in time, irreversible, inevitable, begun.
Instead,
he
continued to tilt the urn and said the first thing that came to mind.
“I
still love
you.”
Alison’s
voice did
not speak to him from inside the urn. Martin didn’t need it to.
*****
He
sprinkled the
ashes evenly between the five holes. He put a layer of compost on top of the
ashes, then planted the azaleas. The plants had dark red flowers and were
bristling with unopened buds. Martin thought they would look fine when they
bloomed. He packed more compost around the plants and then spread a layer of
mulch over the soil to keep the moisture in. All through this, he wiped tears
from his now slightly sunburned cheeks without being aware he was doing it,
leaving dirty smears like warpaint.
At
five o’clock he
fired up the garden incinerator and threw in the weeds and dead flowers he’d
pulled. He gathered up his tools and put them down next to a small patio table
where he’d kept an oft-refilled glass of Mountain Dew through the day,
intending to put everything back in the shed when he was finished. He sat in
the chair and took off his hat to fan his face, and enjoyed the feeling of
contentment in his body and mind. He was hungry – starving, in fact – and
thought it would be nice to eat outside (not because of his wife’s voice
nagging him – he knew that issue was now resolved) but because it felt right,
like a last meal in her presence.
He
made sandwiches,
dumped out two bags of tortilla chips on the plate next to them and got a can
of Miller Lite from the fridge and went and sat back outside to sit at the
little table. He ate the sandwiches quickly and washed them down with the beer.
It was ice cold, the can beaded with condensation.
Martin
admired the
five azaleas and smelled the clipped lawn and even enjoyed the mild sweet smell
of the plants burning in the incinerator and did not draw any similarities (at
least, none his conscious mind would allow to fully form) with the much larger
and infinitely more macabre incinerator downtown, at Mason’s funeral home.
He
started to doze
off, a result of the exertion and the second beer, and decided that putting
away the tools could wait until tomorrow. He went inside the house, planning to
lie down for five minutes, then he would shower, brush his teeth, and go to bed
properly.
*****
Martin
awoke,
disorientated, to the sound of a car alarm.
No, he thought, not a
car alarm. And what’s that other
sound? Laughter?
Had
he left the TV
on? No, the TV hadn’t been on all day - he’d spent all his time outside, in the
garden.
He
swung his legs out
of bed and looked at his watch. So much for a five-minute rest—it was a quarter
past ten at night.
He
realised the
sound was what passed for music these days and it was joined by a voice and then
that laugh again, shrill and grating.
Martin
got up on
legs that felt swollen and not entirely in his control and went to the window.
In
the light cast
by the single street lamp he could see two figures. One was standing still on
the lawn. The other appeared to be dancing amongst the azaleas.
*****
Martin
rushed
through the house on annoyingly uncompliant legs, his mind racing. Was he
dreaming? Was this a joke? Had he imagined seeing people in the garden?
Martin
clattered
through the screen door and then froze. Two people were in the garden. Older
than teenagers, Martin thought, but not much. One of them held a phone in his
hand. It was the source of the music, which did
sound quite a lot like a car alarm, maybe one set to a steady bass beat and
heard in a terrible nightmare. The young man was rhythmically kicking his feet
in time with the beat in what looked like an Irish jig performed while on acid,
uprooting the third azalea in the row, scattering soil, daffodil bulbs and his
wife’s ashes all over the lawn and the sidewalk. The second person was the one
producing that shrill donkey bray of laughter. He wasn’t kicking up the
azaleas. He was urinating in a long stream into the ones that were still
planted.
Martin
rushed
forward, staggering in his shock and his aching body still not fully awake and
functioning properly. He tried to shout something at them, but produced only an
inarticulate wheeze. His hip bashed into the little patio table where he had
sat to eat his lunch, scattering the hand tools and the now-empty urn. The
latter landed on the patio slabs and detonated with a declamatory crash.
That
got the
attention of the one urinating. He turned and saw Martin, who was now on his
knees with a runner of drool like a silver strand of spider web coming from the
corner of his mouth. He pointed at Martin, shook his penis and laughed. He had
a tattoo running up the side of his neck and wore shorts that hung around his
buttocks and a t-shirt draped over his shoulders like a small white cape. The
other one, the dancer, hadn’t noticed Martin. He had stopped his activity long
enough to light a joint and then resumed his kicking, flicking, destructive
dance-act.
The
sense of shame
and helplessness Martin felt in that moment was like nothing he’d ever felt
before in his life. It was even deeper and more concentrated than his
grief. He tried again to yell at the two of them, but only emitted a low howl.
Martin
was not
thinking in any structured way when he picked up the little three-pronged
gardening fork that had fallen off the table. He wasn’t really thinking when he
drew his arm back (really put his shoulders into it, despite how much they
ached) and let it fly.
The
fork sailed
end over end on a straight trajectory and hit the dancer square in the
forehead. Bizarrely, it stuck there. The dancer stopped dancing. He dropped the
phone and the joint fell from his mouth. His eyes crossed as he tried to look
up at the handle of the fork. All three tines had imbedded themselves in his
forehead. He opened his mouth and a not-word (“Guzzzzzzz”) came out,
then he fell forward like a felled tree. He
landed face-first on the lawn, driving the tines of the fork all the way in up
to the hilt. His feet kicked spasmodically, as though still committed to
finishing his dance routine, scattering dirt on the sidewalk.
The
one who had
been urinating in the soil Martin had so diligently sowed with plants, bulbs
and his dead wife’s ashes, looked dumb-founded at his friend. Then at Martin. Then
back to his friend.
Martin
got shakily
to his feet.
The
urinator said,
“Ruben?” then snorted laughter, presumably thinking this must all be part of
the fun. Then he shook his head and looked at Martin again, his piggy eyes and
acne-splattered face squinting with indignant anger.
The
one called
Ruben—the dancer—had stopped moving. His friend—the urinator—screwed his face
up in a look of impudent malevolence, as though he were the one who had had his
life rudely interrupted by Martin, not the other way around. He took a step
back, planted his foot like someone about to set off on the one-hundred-yard
dash, then charged at Martin.
Martin
assumed he
was planning to simply plough into him, possibly straight over him. He thought
briefly of those old Road Runner cartoons
where Wile E. Coyote ends up flattened as thin as a piece of paper and barked
out a surprised laugh.
The
urinator had
barely taken two steps before his feet got caught in an uprooted azalea. They tangled
together and sent him sprawling. He put his hands out to break his fall, but
that didn’t stop his chin connecting with the lawn hard enough for Martin to
hear his teeth clash together. One tooth actually flew out of his mouth and
landed on the grass when his head bounced up from the impact.
Martin’s
days of
playing football were long in his past, but when he had played, he had been the
kicker. Without thinking about what he
was doing, he unleashed the kind of kick that he had used to send the ball
sailing through the air and through the posts.
And the crowd goes wild, Martin thought, his foot
connecting with the side of the urinator’s head, which jerked sideways under
the force of the kick. Martin heard a noise that was somewhere between a snap
and a crunch, and the urinator did not move after that.
Martin
stood on
the lawn, breathing hard, hands on his knees with the two young men lying
amongst the litter of uprooted plants, bulbs, soil and ashes.
*****
The
whole
encounter with Ruben and his urinating friend probably lasted less than a
minute. It took another minute for Martin to stand up, walk over to the toppled
chair, set it back on its legs next to the little table, and sit down. Then, he
waited for the heart attack he was sure was coming.
A
voice (it was
his own this time, not that of his dead wife) spoke clearly inside his head: This
is it. This is how you go—a coronary two weeks after your wife’s
seizure. As his head swam and his vision narrowed to a dwindling point of
light, he decided that he was okay with that.
Eventually,
though, the darkness receded, and his focus was redirected to pain: administering
the goal kick that ended the urinator’s life had turned his hip into a molten
ball of lead. If nothing else, it made him realize he wasn’t going to die. At
least, not right there and then.
He
sat looking at
the mess all over the lawn, and may have sat there until morning if a phone
hadn’t started to ring and startle him out of his daze.
Martin
limped gingerly
across the lawn and saw the edge of a phone poking out from underneath Ruben’s body.
He had dropped it and then fallen on top of it. Martin used his finger and
thumb to pull it free. The screen was lit up, the ringtone similar to the
‘music’ they had been listening to, the caller ID on the screen said simply ‘CUZ’.
The ringing stopped, then a second later the display changed to: ‘Missed call
from CUZ’. Above that, the time was displayed: 23:45.
Martin
did not
hear sirens in the distance. No one appeared at the edge of the lawn and asked,
‘what the hell is going on here?’. The Quinn’s nearest neighbour, Clem
Osbourne, old even by Martin’s standards, was mostly deaf and only seen outside
on rare occasions. There was no CCTV in the area (including those pesky,
invasive doorbells) and because their road was a cul-de-sac, there was no
through-traffic.
Martin
figured he
had two choices: call the police and wait for them to arrive and arrest him, or
get to work tidying up the mess. The mess—including his wife’s earthly remains.
That
thought
decided him.
He
picked up the urinator’s
phone, tried to figure out how to turn it off, then spied the garden
incinerator. He fired it up and soon the hot, acrid smell of melting plastic
and hot metal replaced the soft, smoky aroma from of the weeds he had burned earlier.
He gingerly patted down Neck Tattoo and found a similar phone in the pocket of
his shorts. He fed that into the incinerator, too. The phone emitted a muffled
‘whoomph’ sound when its battery exploded.
He
used the small
trowel to carefully dig up the remaining plants (exhume was the word his mind
insisted on using for this act) and put
them to one side. He put all the daffodil bulbs that weren’t broken into a
small pile, then took the shovel and dug a trench across the entire length of
the flowerbed – about ten feet long, a little over a foot wide, and about three
feet deep. He piled the excavated soil up in a long mound on the sidewalk.
The
work seemed to
loosen the terrible ache in his hip and, much like when he had started his
gardening project that morning, he felt the work once more gave him purpose. He
worked through the midnight hour, dragging the bodies in to the trench one
after the other, placing them end to end, where they fit neatly.
It
went well; the
only really bad moment was when Martin had turned Ruben over and seen how the
fork was embedded in his skull. He thought about pulling the fork out, and
quickly decided he could buy a new one and save himself from that experience.
Martin
covered the
bodies with a layer of compost from his plentiful supply, then replanted the
azaleas, filling the spaces around them with the daffodil blubs and rest of the
soil and compost, using a broom to sweep dirt and ashes from the lawn and sidewalk
into the flowerbed. When he was finished, the result was a raised flowerbed
that might also have raised the eyebrow of a discerning gardener, but which –
in Martin’s opinion – didn’t look overtly like a grave.
He
used the hose
to clean off the sidewalk and water the plants.
He
was exhausted.
He picked up the broken pieces of the urn and put them in the trash, went
inside the house, stripped off his dirty clothes, and for the first time since
Alison died, he slept deeply until the following morning.
*****
He
awoke stiff
(that hip; it was worse than his
arms, shoulders and back all combined) but a hot shower and three Tylenol took
the edge off. He dressed in fresh clothes, put his dirty stuff in the washer,
and went into the kitchen to make breakfast.
He
filled the coffee
machine, turned it on, looked out of the window at the garden. What he saw made
him freeze.
Not dead, he thought. Ruben
was, for sure, but maybe not the other one—Neck Tattoo. He wasn’t
dead and he’s woken up—dug himself up—and I’ll have to
kill him again and plant
the azaleas for a third time—
But
it wasn’t Neck
Tattoo standing on the sidewalk and looking at the unusually high flowerbed. It
was Clem Osbourne, looking older than the grim reaper and somewhere between preposterous
and piteous in his oversized baseball cap and suspenders that held up his baggy
old-man trousers.
Martin
took a
breath, hands on the kitchen counter, let it out, and went outside.
“Morning,
Clem,”
Martin said, hobbling past the patio table and the chair. God, his hip hurt.
“Oh,
good morning,
Martin,” Clem said. He was very deaf and spoke as though everyone else was,
too. “Azaleas!” he exclaimed, using his walking stick to point.
Seeing
his work in
daylight for the first time, Martin thought that the five plants looked in
pretty good shape considering what they had been through.
“Yep.
They were
Alison’s favourite.”
“Terrible shame!” Clem shouted. “What
happened to her was a terrible shame.”
He gestured with his walking stick again. “Those beds are very high, Martin.
What are you hiding under there?”
Martin
felt the
blood drain from his face, but then he saw Clem was smiling. He had a goofy
kind of smile, like a little kid’s, and Martin smiled back.
“Fertilizer,”
Martin shouted. He looked down and saw a white shape on the green grass. A
human tooth. He stepped on it, put his hands on his hips and smiled at Clem
again.
“Terrible
shame,
what happened,” Clem said. “But she’s at peace now, isn’t she?”
“Yes,”
Martin
said. “Yes, she is.”
The
house behind
Martin was silent, and in the Quinn’s garden, the flowers were growing.
### THE END ###
