Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

Michael Boni’s disbelief changed to dismay.

“Get the shovels,” Constance said.

Michael Boni went to the truck, and when he returned, he handed both of the shovels to Constance. The stable hand was a well-scrubbed college girl, someone who knew her days dealing with manure were numbered. She looked at Michael Boni and wrinkled her nose.

He raised his hands in innocence. “She said I only had to drive.”

The girl rolled her eyes and said to let her know when they were done.

Constance shuffled over to the pile. The first shovel entered with a horrible sucking sound.

“Fine,” Michael Boni said as he dragged his feet over to join her.

He tried to keep his eyes elsewhere. The smell wasn’t as bad as he’d expected, but he tried not to think about it. The consistency of the stuff was the worst part. If he wasn’t careful, half of it would stick to the shovel. Or worse yet, fall on his shoe. Unlike Constance’s, his weren’t made of rubber. But he found that if he used the shovel as if he were stabbing a pizza in the oven — jerking it back at the last second — the stuff slid right off, mostly.

“So tell me again why your son can’t help you with this stuff?” Michael Boni said as they were driving home afterward.

Constance was leaning back against the headrest, her eyes closed.

He was tired and sweaty, and all he could smell was the stables.

Her eyelids fluttered as they hit a bump. “Clifford has certain ideas about what old ladies should and shouldn’t do. His main idea is I should babysit his granddaughters.”

Michael Boni had seen the girls only in passing. They were maybe ten and fourteen, and he never knew what to say to them.

“It must be nice to be able to spend time with them,” he said.

Constance rolled her head to the side and gazed at him in disappointment. “They don’t want someone watching over them any more than I do.”

In the rearview mirror he saw that the pile of manure had slid toward the gate, like a wave frozen midcrest. Whose job was it going to be to clean it out?

“Did my grandmother ever talk about me?” he said.

“She said you made beautiful things.”

Michael Boni tried to remember what his grandmother might have seen of his work. Of course, it occurred to him now that he’d never made anything for her.

It must have been seven or eight years ago. He recalled having been in the neighborhood, a sleigh bed in the back of his pickup. He’d been working on it for months, and that was the day he was making the delivery. He’d stopped in, and his grandmother had made tea, which he hadn’t touched, and they’d sat together in mute discomfort.

When it was time to go, he’d invited her to come outside. As they walked to the truck in the driveway, he remembered telling her about all the work he’d done. For once, he didn’t bother to hide how proud he was, pointing out the rosettes in the headboard and the bed’s four feet, which had taken him days to carve by hand. At first it didn’t seem as if she were going to say anything, but then his grandmother rose to her toes and touched the cherry wood, which he’d sanded till it was smooth as glass.

“Your grandfather,” she said, “he was handy, too.”

“Handy?” Michael Boni repeated. Without another word, he climbed into the cab and shut the door. He was a craftsman, an artist with wood. He was so annoyed he couldn’t even bring himself to wave goodbye.

“Are you asking if you’re done serving your penance?” Constance said now, rolling down her window.

Michael Boni nodded.

“No.”

After the manure, it was as if Constance were planting magic beans. She dropped seeds into the bed, and they seemed to shoot up on contact: lettuce, cabbages, greens, peppers, beans, and peas. Michael Boni watched her sometimes from the window while he tacked and sanded. But he was careful to stay on his side of the street. He’d finally finished the table, two weeks behind schedule. Now a contractor he’d worked with a few times before had hired him to build an entire kitchen’s worth of cabinets. Michael Boni knew, even without judgmental looks from Priscilla, that he couldn’t afford to fall any further behind. But it was hard to see Constance out there for hours at a time, bending, lifting. She was seventy-something, after all, and she moved as stiff and slow as a tower crane. It was easy to see why Clifford disapproved of the project. Even Michael Boni was afraid that one day he’d look up and she’d be flat on her back with a buzzard on her chest, as bad off from his help as his own grandmother had been from his neglect.

The vegetables were endlessly forgiving of the fact that Constance had no idea what she was doing. It seemed never to have crossed her mind that different plants preferred different seasons, different kinds of sunlight, different types of soil. He doubted she even looked at the envelopes before dumping them into the ground. She scattered the stuff like grass seed. The birds flew away with most of it.

For weeks he watched the plants in the bed swell to the point that it looked as if not even the mortise and tenon could hold them. One afternoon, standing at his workbench in a respirator, holding a chamois dipped in benzine, he happened to look out and see Constance’s disembodied hand floating in a tangle of plants, grasping for something. It was a scene straight out of a low-budget horror film, an old woman swallowed by her garden.

Michael Boni put down the chamois and walked over to the wood bin, already knowing what he’d find. He’d used up the pine for the rafters. All that was left was the beautiful quarter-sawn oak. It would take only half an hour to get to the lumberyard and back with some shitty landscape timbers. He could fill his entire pickup for the price of just one of the oak boards.

Ten minutes later Michael Boni was crossing the street with the new frame on his shoulder. When she saw him coming, Constance set down her tools. Michael Boni lowered the oak beside the dirty, swollen pine. Constance bent over, running her finger along the buttery swirls in the grain.

“Gorgeous,” she said, and she patted Michael Boni on the shoulder. “Now that’s really going to piss off Clifford.”

Michael Boni built a dozen frames that spring. He must have filled a thousand buckets with dirt. It didn’t take long for his grandmother’s backyard to run out of topsoil. By late June, all that remained was the patch underneath the old Mercury. Eventually the contractor stopped calling to ask about the kitchen cabinets.

As the garden grew larger and the harvests more plentiful, neighbors suddenly began to appear, reconnaissance missions disguised as leisurely strolls. They stopped and greeted Constance from the sidewalk, and she waved from her crouch among the collard greens. Sometimes she pointed to a bucket full of the day’s pickings and told them to take what they wanted. She had no interest in exchanging pleasantries.

The only time Constance stopped what she was doing was when her great-granddaughters came by. Mostly Michael Boni saw Clementine, the younger one, who seemed to live outside, maybe in a burrow. She was always popping up among the weeds like a groundhog, wearing a second skin of dirt. She was the complete opposite of her older sister, who walked around outdoors as though on a hostile alien planet, the air poisonous to her lungs. Constance gave Clementine things to eat from the bucket, still coated in grit. He could tell where the girl had been by the trail she left of partially chewed broccoli crowns and cucumber marrows.

“Is it good?” he asked her one day when he found her sitting on a rock, gnawing on a radish.

“No.” Clementine tossed the hard red knot into the dirt and wandered off.