The Daffodils

The Daffodils





I’m just good at growing things. Used to be kids, now it’s flowers and stuff. It’s not easy, though. It’s just been a long time since we had a decent rain, and I can’t reach the hose to this little garden behind the farm house, so I have to fill up the purple watering can about sixty times a day. But this morning, the first of the yellow daffodils bloomed, and made it worth the work. The daffodils are Bobby’s. The roses are Jane’s. The tulips are Beth’s. The gardenias are mine. But the daffodils, they are Bobby’s.

         They grow under the oak tree we planted when we bought this place. Me and Richard were just a couple of old hippies looking for a place to smoke our dope and run away from our kids. The house is real old, and solid rock. When we moved in, there wasn’t any insulation in the walls and we had a fun summer shooting the rattle snakes that lived there as they came into the house. Haven’t seen a snake in years now, though, so I guess they finally got the message.

         Richard screws around on his tractor in some field all day since he retired. He plows the lines in again every day and comes in and mumbles something about planting peanuts in it tomorrow each night while he makes his mayonnaise and ham sandwich. He doesn’t though. Every day he fires up the tractor and plays farmer in the field all day and never plants a damn thing. He doesn’t grow things, like me.

         Since Spring came, we’ve been building a fire in the front yard every night. We always do that in the warm months. We drink beer and smoke and talk about the kids back in town. We lay down in the plastic lawn chairs and listen to the coyotes howl and try to stay awake long enough for American Idol to come on. But usually, we fall asleep holding hands, watching the fire smolder. Then we wake up and drudge off to bed with our hips and backs aching from staying in the sagging chairs for too long.

         I love sitting here under this tree. The mud slips between my toes as I pull little sprigs of grass out from between the flowers. I touch one of the daffodils. They really have come in nicely. But there are some little holes in the leaves, and I think I had better order some ladybugs to munch on the aphids that have been munching on my flowers.  If you want to know, ladybugs are the very best thing to control bugs. I’m proud of these daffodils. It’s been five years since I dropped these bulbs in. I haven’t lost a single one.

         Five years ago, Richard bought this damn milk cow. We hadn’t ever had a cow before, and mostly all Richard knows how to do is plow a straight line on his red tractor, so I was pretty irritated at him for bringing this old cow home. He always goes to these farm auctions and he hadn’t ever bought anything before, but that day he decided to bring home this ugly brown cow.

“Ann,” he said, “I got you this here milk cow so that you got something to do all day now other than watch Andy Griffith.”

         I told him that I never once asked for no milking cow and he could take that bitch right back where she came from, but he said no can do. So I started feeding her every day and making sure she had water and what not. This cow was real funny. It seemed like she really liked to be petted and loved on and stuff. So I would pet her head, and shoulders and back and belly. And that’s when I felt it for the first time.  She had a hard belly. Hard like a baby was in there. I knew all about hard bellies. So I started feeding her a bit more than usual each day.

         Well Richard didn’t believe me at all, but I told him that Brown Cow, that’s what we called her, was knocked up and he better get her out of here because I don’t know nothing about birthing cows. He just smiled and said he thought it would be fun. He said that his momma used to birth cows and that since I had had all three of my babies with no drugs or anything I ought to remember how to get a girl through labor. So we waited.

         Normally Brown Cow would just hang around in the far end of the yard by the fence. It was hot in May, and she would lay in the grass and sleep all day once her belly got real big. But that one day she came up and stood right by the house and looked into the kitchen window at me. She stood there watching me play solitaire for about ten minutes and I finally went outside to see what was wrong. I felt and massaged her belly for a while, and then I realized it was starting to tense up and she started breathing really heavy. It lasted a few minutes and then she was alright again. The poor girl was in labor and it was ninety degrees outside.

         Well I stayed out there the rest of the afternoon with her. Rubbing her belly and talking to her. And she wouldn’t sit down, she just kept standing in the same place the whole time. When Richard got back he found me sitting in my lawn chair next to Brown Cow holding her belly. The contractions were about fifteen minutes apart now. She was really hurting. So, we stayed by her in our lawn chairs, petting her.

         She had Baby Brown Cow at about two in the morning, and the little girl stood straight up on her shaky little legs after and I wiped her down with a blue bath towel. I didn’t know calves could do that before that, but really they can walk immediately after birth. It was really something.

We sat there watching her fumble around her mama in the porch light glow for a while. Just as we were about to go in and go to bed, we saw head lights coming over the hill up the road. We don’t ever get much company way out here, so when I saw that I went inside and watched from the kitchen window, while Richard went out and met the pickup in the driveway. And that’s when I heard what I knew was my sister, Jean’s voice coming from the rolled down window. And I looked closely and I saw the orange glow of her cigarette dangling out of it as she nervously flicked her ashes onto the dry, dirt ground. I could see my brother-in-law, Tommy in the driver’s seat and that’s when I knew something was wrong. Tommy’s kind of a horse’s ass and if he made the drive out here in the middle of the night, I knew something terrible had happened. And it’s only my kids that I really have to have something terrible happen to, so I started thinking about each of them and wondering when the last time I had talked to them was.  I couldn’t remember. Not a single one of them.

And already I knew it was Bobby. I thought he probably was in jail or something for fighting with his wife, Crystal or something stupid. I kept telling him he always was getting to mad for no reason and that one day he was going to have a heart attack. See, he had real high blood pressure and never remembered to take his pills or check it like he was supposed to even though I bought him a real nice cuff for Christmas a few years before. So I thought he probably was in jail or in the hospital with one of those attacks that people get when they are really anxious. And I thought Jean would always hold this over my head. She would always remind about the time that she and Tommy had to drive all the way out to the fucking boonies to come take me to town to bail my thirty year old son out of jail. See, her kids are all perfect and what not and she thinks she’s better than me, but what she doesn’t know is that when her daughter, Lea was sixteen she came to me and asked me to get her those birth control pills and I could never tell  Jean because it was private. But Jean’s kids aren’t actually perfect after all.

I saw Richard running up the driveway and into the house, and he had this look on his face I had never seen before.

“Ann, something’s happened. Something’s happened to Bobby,” he said.

I don’t know why, but I washed my hands before we left and got the blood off of them from cleaning up Baby Brown Cow. I grabbed my purse and climbed into the car. Jean explained it on the way, but I didn’t really understand. I didn’t need to know how, if I knew that it had happened. That was enough. I wondered why I hadn’t felt something was wrong. Shouldn’t I have felt something was wrong?

When I got to my daughter’s house, it was morning. It had rained on us on the way to town, and the cool air felt soft and moist on my skin. But when we got inside, we were suffocated by the mass of people crowding around and crying and emitting their anxiety and tears into the house. It never occurred to me before that Jane’s living room is actually so small. In the middle of the huddle, with Jane’s slender arm around her was Crystal. She was crying I guess. Or maybe she was trying not to cry. Or maybe she was pretending to cry.

The funny this is that Jane has a fluorescent light, like what you find in offices, in her kitchen. Under it, Crystal seemed to be grey and frozen, and I stared at her for a very long time, waiting for her to move or say something. And then I looked down and saw the smears of blood spread across my t-shirt and jeans. My flip flops were caked with red mud, and I could smell my own sweat, settled into me from hours in the yard holding Brown Cow the day before. And I was ashamed. When people tried to hug me that day, I pushed them away. I didn’t want them to smell me, or be disgusted by the blood. Mostly, they hugged Crystal anyway.

Really, that whole week was a blur. I don’t know what songs we played. I know that they went through all of my shoeboxes of pictures and projected them onto a big screen at the church where Bobby sometimes went when he wasn’t working or too hungover.

Mostly, I’m glad it was just him. I know it would have killed him to know he hurt someone else, so I’m glad he turned his truck over on that road. I’m glad no one was around to hit, even though it meant he laid there in that ditch for five hours. I wish someone could tell me how it happened. I wish someone could tell me how a professional, a truck driver for Christ’s sake, turns his pickup when no ones around and really there wasn’t even bad weather. It didn’t make sense. These years later, it still doesn’t.

But really, I suppose I know what happened. I always knew. He had to have been upset. He had to have been drunk. I’ve made up all sorts of stories about why. But it’s always her. Really, it’s not her fault and I know it. I sometimes wish she had been in the car with him though. Maybe if she had been hurt, not killed, but hurt, she wouldn’t have been able to act like she never even loved him. She got her hair done before the funeral. Highlighted and cut and curled. Like it was prom.

We cremated him. Really, we couldn’t have had an open casket anyway. I didn’t see him, but I would have liked to have touched his hand, maybe. I think his face was too far gone. His arm was shattered and his legs were both torn off. I like that my last image of him was standing up on those strong stout legs. Really, how much can you cut off of a person before they stop being themself at all?

Richard’s friend, Ray, runs the funeral home that took care of him. Our boys were friends at school actually. They played little league together and we bought boxes and boxes of cookies from his little girl and candles and shit from his boy to raise money for marching band trips or something. Ray mentioned that while we were picking out the urn. He said thank you for always taking care of his kids. He said he would take care of Bobby. I wanted to say that I wished we were just selling candles, but instead I asked how his daughter was doing. I knew his boy was really a fuck up and didn’t want to put him on the spot. It’s always hard talking about your kids to people who don’t love them like you do when they are fucking up.

Ray brought the urn to our house a few days after the funeral. Crystal said he might as well since we would scatter Bobby out there when we could all get together. It was really nice of Ray to drive the whole way out here. He hadn’t seen the farm yet. Really he and Richard weren’t as close as they used to be. Men don’t keep in touch, you know. But they walked the whole property. They jiggled fence poles every hundred yards to check that they were sturdy. And then Richard fired up the tractor and him and Ray listened to the motor for the rattling sound which Richard swore he had been hearing the last few weeks. Finally, Ray left at dusk, and it was just me and Richard sitting at the kitchen table with Bobby propped up between us.

We held each other that night. And we both cried into each others’ chests and hair and skin for the first time since Bobby died.

But his urn stayed there. For months it stayed right there on the table. Really, we never eat at the table anyway, but we definitely didn’t eat there with the urn there. We waited for Crystal to tell us when they were coming, but she said she was just so busy and didn’t know when she could make it. But we didn’t move it either. It was an unspoken pact. If we moved it, we risked forgetting about him. So we kept him there, and I caught Richard staring it at from time to time. Especially when he was stoned.

And then one morning she called. She wanted him back. It was like it had just occurred to her that morning that she had a husband on my kitchen table. She wasn’t too busy for him anymore. She remembered him and wanted him back, but she didn’t deserve him. And after all, we hadn’t been able to forget because we had coffee with him every morning. And it just set me off.

I thought about it all day. She had no right. He was ours. He was mine. I carried him and I raised him and I sat with him at the kitchen table. This is where he belonged. This was his home now.

I stole him. I poured him into a brown paper grocery bag and wiped the rest of him out a paper towel and put the paper towel in the bag too. No. She wouldn’t have a speck of him. Not one speck. He was ours.

The next day I dug holes with a little shovel. The same shovel I scooped ash from our fire pit to refill the blue enamel urn with. I dug twenty holes under the oak tree. I poured a little of him and dropped a bulb in every hole. And I laughed at each one.

The next week, I handed Crystal a beautiful blue enamel urn with silver doves on the outside and charred mesquite on the inside. And I hugged her like she thought I should hug her. And I told her to be careful with the urn.

         The daffodils are Bobby’s. All twenty bulbs. I’m still caressing the new bloom when Richard comes up behind me and sits in the plastic lawn chair behind me. He sighs.

         “You know, some people is allergic to peanuts.”

         “Well we’re not allergic.”

         “You never know. Those things can strike real sudden.”

         “Is that right?” I ask, adjusting my hat brim and turning to look at him skeptically over my shoulder.

         “Yeah,” he says and closes his eyes. He dozes under the tree for a while.

That evening, we light a fire at sunset, but instead of looking at the fire, we turn our chairs and look at the garden as the last gleams of sunlight break through the mesquite trees. Richard asks me the names of my flowers.

         “The red ones?”

         “Those are tulips.”

         “What about them tall orangey ones?”

         “Those are cannas.”

         “I know those. Those are roses.”

         “Sure is.”

         “You know, those yellow ones sure are pretty.”

         “Those are daffodils.”

         “We should grow some more of them. Do you have any more seeds?”

         “It’s a bulb and no, I don’t.”

         “You know we should grow a whole bunch of them. Really they are just beautiful,” he says and stands up and walks over to look at them. I close my eyes.

         “Ann, wake up. I’m serious. Let’s grow them.”

         “Okay.” I say. Still with my eyes closed.

         “No let’s grow them in the field. Let’s grow them all over the field.”

         I open my eyes and look up at him. He has wild eyes. They sparkle in the firelight. Really, they haven’t done that in a long time.

         “You’re crazy, old man.”

         “We could do it. You could do it, babe. And we could Brown Cow and Baby Brown Cow in there. They sure would like it.”

         “That would be a million bulbs. You know how long that would take?”

         “You could do it, babe.”

         “I don’t want to. I got enough to take care of.”

         “Well then I’ll do it. Nothing to it. Same as growing peanuts.”

         “You never even grew any peanuts,” I say. But now that I think about Richard wasting all those bulbs, I’m inclined to do it just to save them. Really, it would be a sight. All those flowers blooming every spring. And we already had the irrigation installed for the peanuts, so it’s not like I would have to water each one with the purple watering can.

         “Come on babe, think about it.”

         And I am. I am picturing all those flowering swaying in the breeze and Brown Cow laying down in them. Really I hope she doesn’t break them.

         As I drift off to sleep, Richard grabs my hand and rubs my palm with his rough, calloused thumb. It’s early, but it’s better that we go to bed now anyway. I’m tired, and I think maybe I’ll be busy tomorrow.

         I think maybe tomorrow I’ll be growing things.