Bones in the Garden

The gate over Alice’s flower garden is still there, and the cheerful little hand-painted sign proclaiming “Welcome All!”  is there, too, though it is half burned away. The garden itself has grown back, in recent years. But no one goes inside anymore. Just beyond the entrance, past the spray of Chamomile standing like a handful of snowflakes against the green grass, past the bobbing Asters and bold yellow Black-eyed Susans, there are bones.

The woman who tended the garden was a Mrs. Delores Gibbons. She used to tell people that she believed the garden had been there since the Native Americans. Maybe even before. This was back when people talked about the magic in the garden, back before it was Miss Alice’s. Delores was always out in it, tending the flowers, chatting with people who stopped by, helping the out-of-town visitors find where they needed to be—which was usually somewhere inside the flower garden.

Sometimes a family would roll up in their new Model T and she would hustle off, beaming and welcoming them to “the garden.” She never called it her garden; she understood that while the law would regard it as property she had bought and owned, it had a wildness, a beauty, an individuality that was beyond her.

The people who went inside were people with some need, some ache in their existence that would not be satiated. It wasn’t always families that visited. Sometimes it was an older woman, bent and aching. Sometimes it was a man, shamefaced, with his hat pulled down over his eyes and his ears red with embarrassment. One day it was a young couple and their baby, the mother wan-faced and bleary eyed, the father strained and white.

Whatever the trouble was, they went inside in distress and came out restored, whether in soul or body. They weren’t always cured the way they thought they needed; you might go in wanting relief from your arthritis and leave ready to make peace with your estranged brother. Dolores herself had met her husband there, among the Black-eyed Susans. “He handed the garden on to me when he died,” she would say, smiling, “Said he wouldn’t trust it to anybody else.”

One afternoon Mrs. McAllister, Dolores’ neighbor picked her way down the grass path, inhaling the fresh summer air. Some children frolicked in a stand of dill, the feathery leaves wafting gently around as they rustled past, giggling and Mrs. McAllister found her neighbor half buried in a stand of fern, out weeds.

“Dolores! Yoohoo!”

Dolores stood and greeted her.

“I was wondering if I might borrow a cup of sugar,” said Mrs. McAllister when a short, pink cheeked child of about ten shot out of the dill patch and cannoned into Delores’s legs.  “Mummy!” Alice cried, “I wanted Janet to give me her doll and she wouldn’t and now I’m mad at her! How come everybody else gets to be happy here, but I don’t?”

Delores tousled the girl’s mound of black curls, “Alice, you know the garden doesn’t work like that. It gives you what you need. It heals body or spirit; it doesn’t provide things.”

The child gave a stamp of her foot. “But I’m not happy and it’s supposed to make me happy!”

“You can’t control the garden, dear,” Mrs. Gibbons said, putting her arm around the child. “It doesn’t always give us what we think it should. Now, how about we go back to the house with Mrs. McAllister and I’ll get her a cup of sugar and you some lunch?”

Alice obediently trotted behind us. Delores did not much mind Alice’s outbursts of frustration at the garden, but in the collective opinion of the neighborhood at large, it did not bode well. The general feeling was that as Alice grew, her mother would influence her in the right direction.

But when Alice was not quite twenty, Dolores died, and there was no more guidance from her mother to be had. Dolores was buried in the town cemetery, beside her husband, and Alice came into full possession of the garden.

For a few months, it seemed that while the garden was slightly weedier, and the grass edges not so neatly trimmed, it was generally unchanged by its transition into Alice’s hands. Alice could be seen in it on a regular basis, perhaps not bringing all of her mother’s vivacity and cheer, but after all, everyone said, it is hard to have lost both parents so young. She had grown into a beautiful young woman; short like her mother, and full figured, but with snapping black eyes, a pert little mouth, and her cascading mound of black curls. 

And then one day Mrs. McAllister looked out of her kitchen window and saw a bald, bare patch, and Alice standing in it, attacking the ground with a trowel. Drying her hands, Mrs. McAllister hurried outside. “Was there something wrong with the Asters?” she asked, breathlessly, coming up behind Alice.

She turned around and scowled “Mrs. McAllister,” she said, “I can do what I please with this garden. I’m not its servant, as you all seem to think.”

Somewhat taken aback by her lofty, cold tone, Mrs. MacAllister smiled nervously, and said, “I was merely inquiring after the asters, dear.” She said, mildly. “Of course it’s your garden.”

Then she waited in silence until Alice burst out with: “It’s wasteful! It ought to do what I want it to. If I want it to make me happy in a certain way, or give me something, it should do it! I’m the gardener, aren’t I? Why should some stupid plants decide what I get and don’t get? I don’t like how higgledy-piggledy this all is. There should be some order. I’m putting in some brick edging. And I’m planting some proper rose bushes, not these wild rose brambly messes over here, to make people well again.” The wild rose section was known to frequently heal ailments. “And I’m putting in more lavender in this section for people with mental disorders.”

Mrs. McAllister wrung her hands. “But dear,” she said, “It’s magic; it’s not an herb garden. You can’t pick what does what. Wild roses don’t cure people anywhere else. And what about the Fairchild family last year? They stopped arguing for the first time in years in amongst the roses.”

Alice glared at her. “It’ll work like I want it to work,” she declared. And she turned away.

But it didn’t work. Nobody knew for sure when it stopped working—was it after she tore out the wild roses and planted a more cultivated variety? Or was it when she cemented and troweled a brick path into place? Or when she replaced the hectic glory of the wildflower patches with neat, orderly rows of marigolds? Whenever it was, by the time Mr. Donnor went for his weekly arthritis cure on Thursday, he left as cramped and aching as he went in. At the barbershop the next week he delivered the woeful pronouncement—Alice had ruined the garden.

Alice pretended she didn’t care. Her pert little mouth was tightening into a sour little frown, and there were heavy lines between her eyebrows. Who knows, maybe at that point she could have restored the garden? Given what happened afterwards, it seems like she might have. But she did not.

She was beautiful, as I said, and she had never struggled to find a date for a dance or a party. None of these boys had particularly interested her until she met Danny. Danny was six feet of blond, movie-star good looks. Unfortunately, what became immediately clear to everyone except Alice was that he had the morals of a movie star to boot.

They dated for a year before Alice went to the theater with friends and found him locked in an embrace with a strange girl in the flickering light of the movie. The row they had was the talk of the town for weeks after, because most everybody heard it, they were loud enough.

But next week they were going out together, Alice glowing and beautiful in a red dress, Danny suave and charming and acting like he hadn’t just been nagged and cried at for a straight week. After that, it was a pattern. Alice would rein him in; Danny would sneak off to see some other girl. There would be an argument. They would make it up. Alice would go around smiling and simpering before Danny decided to chase some other girl. All her mother’s friends tried to convince her to break it off for good with him, but she just tossed her head and refused.

“He’s changed. He loves me. We’re going to be together forever.” She would say stonily and dare anybody to go further with her snapping black eyes.

Mrs. McAllister, still worried about her friend’s daughter, did insist on carrying the conversation further. “But dear…has he made any promise? Does he want to get married?”

She was unsettled by the wild light in Alice’s eyes and the strange quality to her voice as she said, "He will marry me.”

Mrs. McAllister went away from that conversation disturbed. “I really felt that the child was…unhinged,” she told a friend.  

Alice’s final desperate attempt to bind Danny to her came one night after they’d been out to dinner and a movie. On the way home she said, “Danny, love, let’s stop by my garden and walk some. It’s a nice night.”

He didn’t object, so in a few minutes, they were strolling along, her heels clicking on the bricks, her hand tucked into his arm, swinging her purse with a dreamy look in her eyes. The moon lit them both in blue. There were many tendrils of grass running out into the gravel, and other plants growing in the shadows that did not belong in the segmented garden plots she’d created. She’d been too busy with Danny to bother with the garden for weeks. Nobody came and visited any more, anyway. But it was her garden, and tonight, tonight it would work.  

“What are you thinking of, love?” She murmured, looking up at him with adoring eyes.

He shrugged, paused, and said, “Honestly, Alice, I suppose this is the best time to tell you; I’ve taken a job out in Kenya.”

“Kenya?” Alice bleated, and then: “I sure would miss you. Would you miss me?”

“Yeah, it’s been great, doll, but it is what it is.”

They strolled on, Alice glancing up at him repeatedly, watching his face. She steered them towards a patch of freshly tilled earth. She’d dug out the more “sophisticated” plants she’d planted there and replaced them with the Black-eyed Susans her mother loved. The Black-eyed Susans that had been where her mother and father met and fell in love.  Finally, when they were standing in the patch of flowers, she turned to face him and ventured, “I would be willing to go with you, Danny…”

He let out a bark of laughter so loud the crickets briefly stopped. “No,” he chuckled. “Not in a million years.”

Alice’s eyes flamed, but she held in her temper, trying to keep him talking long enough for the garden to work. It would work. It had to work. “It’s dangerous, then.”

“No, from what I understand I’ll be doing pretty well for myself. Come on, Alice, we both knew this was never going to be long term. It’s been fun.”

She withdrew her arm from his and glared at the flowers all around her. “Well?” She snapped. “Hurry up about it?”

Danny chuckled again, nervously this time. “What are you…are you talking to the flowers?”

“Listen to me,” she hissed at the Black-eyed Susans. “You gave my mother love, didn’t you? Well you’re going to give me love, too. You never once did what I wanted, and now you’re going to, or I’ll burn you to the ground.”  She fumbled in her purse, there was a hiss, a curl of smoke, and a lit flame danced at the end of a match.

Danny jumped back but her other hand snaked out and she grabbed him with iron fingers. “This is not between you and me,” she said between clenched teeth to Danny. “You just stay right there and in a minute, you’ll feel differently about leaving me. I promise.” She let the match drop on the bricks and it fizzled out. "Next one goes somewhere more flammable!" Her eyes were wild in the light.

“Are you crazy?” Danny shrieked.

“Do it!” She screamed at the garden and, tearing another flame out of her box, threw it in a patch of Black-eyed Susans. There was another rip and hiss. The Black-eyed Susans, unweeded and with the dry grass of late summer went up in a rush of flame and smoke

“You’re supposed to fall in love with me now!” Alice screamed at Danny, who was struggling to get away. “It isn’t your fault, it’s the garden’s fault!”

A falling cinder hit Alice’s skirt and burned her. She screamed, rounding on it, and let Danny go.

“And now you won’t even protect me?! I’m as good as she was!” Alice screamed at the garden, beating at her flaming skirt.

Danny stumbled away from her, coughing on the smoke, and immediately in front of his eyes a path opened through the flowers, parting like grass skirts. He ran.

Alice turned back around to see him gone, and the path still open, there to guide her out. The fallen branches caught, crackling and hissing. But Alice narrowed her eyes at the path opening before her and shrieked. “You are alive! You simply choose to never—ever—ever—ever do anything for me!”  And with that, she threw a match onto the path itself.

Everything was lit orange and hot, and the smoke was thick and heavy with all the green things burning. Alice’s skirt caught fire again. She tried to beat it out, but it wouldn’t smother, and then she stumbled, coughing, and the other side flamed up and her arm seared with pain as her sleeve caught—

--

Mrs. McAllister had seen the blaze from her kitchen window and called the fire department. By the time they had come, the garden was a mass of flames. Mrs. McAllister stood at the garden gate, as close as she could, the heat making her apron billow, tears streaming down her face. “Alice? Alice!”

When the firemen had reduced the garden to a blacked, steaming mound, they turned to Mrs. McAllister. “And you say Alice is in there?”

“I never saw her come out.”

The police had already gone looking for Danny. The fire chief walked through the gate, but the moment his boot touched the black earth he groaned and doubled up, retching. It quickly became apparent that none of the firemen could go onto the garden grounds without suffering severe cramps. Finally, they all stood in a ring outside of it, as the smoke cleared.

“There.” The fire chief said, and the other men murmured and nodded. They’d seen the charred mass, human shaped, in the flattened embers.

That was all anyone ever saw of the last of Alice’s remains. Her pastor held the funeral service at the edge of the garden. And as the years passed, the garden gently grew up around her in its natural form and hid her from view. Now it sits, untended, a reminder of hubris for the entire town, and the poppies and daisies bob in the wind.