Do not disturb the dew. Some nights the world weeps. Late-morning light, before the sun grew uncomfortable, was deemed the best time for gardening, and Miriam would, as she said, work hard on behalf of her friends, moving her ministrations from shade to shade. No longer were her enemies droning noisily through the night air, or — in her husband’s language of fear — were they vaguely whispered to exist behind bushes, royal beards, or in government bureaus. And she had allies: ladybugs to eat aphids, lacewings to go after whiteflies. Some of these otherwise züchtig Mädchen carry parasites into the garden, she’d say — I have to watch out for that — but mostly they fatten on potato beetles and similar bad behavers. But you aren’t growing potatoes, Joseph would protest, on behalf of the gorgeous black-and-gold insect as much as the welfare of the tuber or, choosing whatever the argument seemed to require, in defense of the onion’s thrips or spinach’s leaf miners, or any errant vegetarians that might come searching among the flowers, such as the squash’s modestly gray bugs, cabbage’s maggots, or the carrot’s weevils. Ya, but our neighbors are. Better the nasty things should die here. The poor potato (or corn ear or bean pod), Joseph joshed, is born just to be eaten by somebody. God saw to that, Miriam said with satisfaction. God made aphids, too, and … —and (he said with emphasis, trying to prolong his indictment), but Miriam would break in anyway— … so that ladybugs would have something nice to dine on … —interrupting with redoubled pleasure because she had scored a goal. Joseph was then left to finish their contest by lamely naming codling moths and cutworms because God had also designed them. Each of us eats, and each of us is edible. Miriam made her pronouncements as if they were pronouncements. This irritated Joseph, who thought the tone only suitable to speakers with a certain status, a status that was due his professorial position.
Upon her plants she loosed a vociferous stream of advice. Pointing to the bleeding heart that was prospering in its place across the yard, she would address a flower in front of her that was flimsy and order it to do as Marlene was doing or Roberta across the way: Look at that stream of red hearts — like fat fish. Spend yourself on bloom! Do as Clem Clematis does: Be blue!
When Joseph wasn’t meeting a class, he and his mother would sometimes exchange shouts about their business, pro and con and up and down. Joseph called his announcements “Reports from the Ruins of Reason.” Miriam merely bellowed, as routinely victorious as any Caesar. She took her midday meal resting on an overturned pail and looking wan as a beaten soldier, sore-footed and weary, while Joseph munched his sandwich — lettuce and liverwurst — searching the columns for a story and flinging bread crusts from his window. More reports from the ruins of reason. This, he would cackle, is for the birds.
Digitalis, or Foxglove, impossible to duplicate.
Sometimes, when a gentle breeze made the blooms bob, and a cardinal lit on the top of their holly tree like a Christmas decoration, performing its territorial song, its tail pulsing with the effort as if it were pumping each note through some designated distance, perhaps as far as Joseph’s even loftier perch, then the professor would be tempted to descend and walk about in the garden, though Miriam thought he did so like a health inspector, his hands clasped behind his back, promising not to touch but bending slightly to be nearer the fragrance of a flower or the wrinkled leaf that spelled fungus.
It was just that he worried over their welfare, Joseph insisted. How is Clem this morning? Miriam maintained that her son didn’t believe she could do anything really well except cook and expected the garden to fall over dead of black spot, larval infestation, or webworm at any moment. That wasn’t true, Joseph felt, but he knew that it was Miriam’s habit to pick black-spotted leaves off her rosebushes one by one or routinely to rake them up from the ground around the plant if they had fallen and then to burn her collection at a safe distance from all things as if they were the bedclothes of plague victims.
Train the beetles to munch the black spots, Joseph suggested, whet their Japanese appetites, redefine their Asian tastes, but his mother was never in the mood to humor him when the garden was involved. Let them make nice lace of the leaves, was his final advice. Do you notice how they never eat the hard parts but leave the veins. Remarks of this kind would rile her, because what she got from her garden was not only reprieve and renewal but romantic transportation to the old days — by wagon back then … plodding horses … sing-alongs … cider … the redolent hay — when Rudi Skizzen had begun his love affair with her round wet eyes and when, as Nita Rouse, she had barely recovered from her childhood. They eat everything but the skeleton, Joseph said, and he was not alone in his opinions. They go clean to the bone, the way you eat a chicken’s thigh. That’s what, according to Mother Nature, they’re supposed to do, he’d add in a tone of triumph. Miriam always threw up dirty hands as if to ward off his words. Am I then — your good son — evil, too? Because I chew my food? Professor Skizzen received a scornful look instead of an answer that might have been maybe.
I’d rather think about the good people, not the wicked ones, Miriam could be counted on to say. Look how that primula lies on the earth like a kiss on a loved one’s cheek. She would smile then, because she knew such sentiments embarrassed him, and reach out with her arms in tribute to the flower’s intense yet tender blue, its velveteen allure. They are as pure and innocent as I was before I became a washerwoman, when we lived in the low hills on the farm, ach, how the day would break, as clear as birdsong. Whereupon Joey would point to the shrill green leaves the primrose possessed, almost prehistorically indented. Miriam would agree that the plant was medieval and had been sewn into tapestries in order to stay in bloom forever.
Yet it was Joey who was the tenderhearted observer of the scene, worrying about everyone’s health and suggesting remedies he had seen in old books for this or that perceived ailment; while it was Miriam who ruthlessly rid herself of anyone weak, ripping the plant from the earth, not hearing, as Joey did, its pathetic scream. It is not individuals we are growing here, but families, she insisted. I worry about the clan they come from, the kind of plant they are, not about this Hans or that Kurt or my Heinrich. Still, she named them all and lectured them all and threatened them with failure and removal very much as the professor was forced to hector and chide his students according to the system in favor with his college.
Joseph, who had cultivated snobbery as an essential professional weapon, was always surprised by Miriam’s eagerness to learn the Latin names for the plants she grew and to insist upon their use, so that when Joey spoke about the primroses she would correct him with “Prim yew-luh,” emphatically broken into its pronounceable parts. If he complimented her Jacob’s ladder, she would respond with “Po-lee-mow nee-um.” When he admired her patch of lilies, she told him what he loved was called Lil ee-um and that they were the belles of summer. Then it was Joey’s turn to complain that there were too many “um”s. It’s a Latin ending, she would say with a pleased growl of disgust, because she loved to correct her professor. As they crossed the garden on a grassy lane dotted here and there with the projecting ends of quite-white rocks, Miriam recited the names she had learned, halting by the beds where the named were flourishing: Hettie Hem-er-oh-kal is, Rudy Rud-bek ee-uh, Hortense Hos tuh, Gail Gay-lar dee-uh. Connie Ko lee-us.