William Gass - Middle C

So much had changed since he and Miriam had moved into the gothic “spookhouse,” as he’d heard the kids call it while under the influence of Halloween. The college owned the place as they did many of the old mansions near the campus and let faculty members live in them rent free, awarding the houses like prizes instead of paying their occupants a decent salary. It was also a way of keeping valued teachers from seeking more-moneyed pastures. Joseph guessed that rich farmers had built these mitigations of their wealth when they retired to town. As homes, they were tall, ornate, whimsical, constructed from timber that was both local and plentiful, and band-sawn according to new techniques that made possible the extravagant filigrees of the Queen Anne style. Every such home was required to have at least one biblical moment pictured in art glass and positioned where the sun could strike a landing window: Susanna, clothed as though she were naked and ogled by the elders, Ruth in a swath of sentiment gathering grain in Boaz’s fields.

Miriam welcomed the large yard with cries of ancient Austrian origin. There was no doubt that she was a different woman from the mousy cottage complainer she had been during their early days in Woodbine when she “sweated over tubs of plastic” and marched rows of unwilling flowers alongside walks and around borders, as if their modest cottage had to be outlined in petunias and forget-me-nots the way a Valentine sported its scallops. Vines had climbed about like too many squirrels, shinnying downspouts and masking lattice with wild rose and honeysuckle. Others lay in gutters like sunning snakes causing rainwater to shower along the eaves onto the sodden soil below and fill a number of the season’s struggling tulips, as though they were goblets, until the petals sprang apart.

As a landlord the college was as much an absentee as God in the Deist’s conception of him, and it permitted the property to run down in a manner suitably decorous and stately. Annoying as this was, for Joseph Skizzen it had the considerable advantage of his privacy, for no one was likely to wander unwanted upon his masterwork or even raise an eyebrow at his and his mother’s living arrangements: neither the grand piano to accompany the potting table in the dining room nor the scatter of scissors and trowels would cause a snook to be cocked, neither his boxes of flypaper and pots of paste, nor her piles of muddy gloves or ranks of empty flower packets, already neatly sleeved over tongue depressors, waiting to mark, as though they were really graves, the place of some plant’s birth.

Dicentra spectabilis, or old-fashioned Bleeding Heart, will self-sow .

Nowadays Miriam wore durable trousers that elastic closed at the ankles; she strapped on padding for her knees; fastened around her waist a carpenter’s apron stuffed with tools and little sticks; drew over her coiled and braided hair a floppy broad-brimmed khaki hat, and encircled her neck with a kerchief soaked in insect repellent. Gardening was war, and like a professional soldier she also bore a firm stern face into battle, uttering hoarse cries (Whoa! or Woe to you, Joseph wasn’t sure which) when, for instance, she removed an invasive violet from her carefully calibrated pools of grass. She would howl and slap her thighs whenever a stray cat came to poach, for she generally thought of the birds as her friends unless, like hawks or crows, they were predators or lazy sneaks who laid their eggs in nests not of their own contriving the way the cowardly cowbirds did.

Sometimes, momentarily defeated, she would burst into Joseph’s breakfast kitchen. Ah, calamity! Where is my red currant jelly? I shall cook Hasenbraten … Hasenbraten mit Rahmsauce … how would you like that? I’m sure I would love it, Mother. Well, we shall have a year’s worth. Joey, I suffer from an overrun of rabbit. They are eating all my petunias; they decapilate my zinnias; it is massacre season for my marigolds. Poor babies. Malignant hassen! Ich hasse hassen! They sit in the grass like city folk visiting a park and chew my clover. They fornicate in the nighttime and give birth by dawn’s break. A root of ginger, I need, and some spoonfuls of jelly. I shall braten them for a year. Their big eyes shall become my buttons. Miriam laughed, surprised by her language. I am trusting their pitiful squeals will not disturb the music you are singing in your ear.

Miriam tolerated lightning bugs, dragonflies because of their beauty, bees because of their service. She granted butterflies a pardon even though the charming worms of the swallowtail were insatiable (she’d plant extra parsley the way she once would have set a dinner plate for a visitor); but hornets received no such reprieve because they tried to bite off frayed edges of her chicken when she enjoyed a leg for lunch.

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.