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 ###