Backyard (13 page)

Since they had planted the angel's trumpets in May, they had exploded into fragrant bushes throwing out lovely, cylindrical flowers with flaring ends. They gave that part of the yard a much-needed flair for the dramatic. But their lethal reputation caused George no end of anxiety. What if the Grunions, who were grouchy and solitary folks, were to dangle over the top of the fence, eye the lovely flowers and seed pods below them, figure them for fruit ripe for the plucking, then pick a few and drop them onto their cornflakes one morning? The Grunions also had grandchildren, who could occasionally be heard romping about without parental supervision in their backyard. In fact, George had once seen them climb up to the top of the fence, and look down directly into the maw of the angel's trumpets.

“Get down from that fence!” he shouted, waving his hands frantically at them. “Get down from that fence!”

That prompted a visit from Old Man Grunion, whose visage, George and Nan agreed, resembled a statue of hard, cold granite so poorly sculpted you wouldn't necessarily recognize it as a human being's.

“Say!” bellowed old Grunion as he moved as ponderously as a three-toed sloth across the grass toward the Fremonts. “What the hell is wrong with my grandkids climbing that fence, eh? It's my fence. Why'd you tell them to stop? You can't tell them to stop climbing that fence. It's my fence. I put it up with my own hands.”

George and Nan had decided a while back, as the first fears of the angel's trumpets' poisonous potency began to prick at them, not to tell the Grunions what it was that was caressing the other side of their fence. Otherwise, rude, inconsiderate neighbors that they were, they would order them to cut down the plants or face legal action from the Grunions' son, an evidently underemployed lawyer who had sued the city four times over Grunion property complaints, real or imagined.

“I was just a-a-a-afraid they might f-f-f-all over the fence,” said George, gnawed by guilt at having such a hazard growing in their backyard and neglecting to call a meeting to alert the neighbors, and the press, should they want to attend.

Old Man Grunion, who had approached no closer than thirty feet from them, snorted derisively, and frowned as he looked around and took in the glories of the Fremonts' backyard. Here was a guy who would much prefer this whole space to be paved over, thought Nan, irked that Grunion would so wantonly tromp over the grass, instead of climbing up the steps in a civilized way, as all the other neighbors did.

“What did you say? Well, you leave my grandkids' safety to me, you hear!” he thundered. “Just makes me wonder if somethin' fishy's going on over here. Sunbathin' nude maybe. You sunbathe naked, do you?”

“Only when it's sunny!” Nan shouted, noticing that Grunion had tilted his head slightly and cupped his hand around his ear.

Grunion snorted again, and trundled back toward his house. It took him ten minutes to clear the Fremonts' property. Nan, who tended to entertain hypothetical anxieties at a far lower level than George, dismissed his worries about the Grunions, who could eat all the poison berry pods they wanted as far as she was concerned. And if they weren't responsible enough to watch after their grandkids, then what could she do?

“They could just as easily get into some fertilizer and eat that,” she told George, to keep him from doing too much hand wringing. “Or the toilet bowl cleaner. Or the gas-oil mix for the weed whacker.”

Nan was far more concerned about the wounding of their precious angel's trumpets, dangerous as they might be to whatever it was that inflicted the wounds. Fairly certain that no human was involved here, she had begun to fix her suspicions on birds as the culprits. What if the birds had started eating the seeds?

“Then wouldn't you see bird bodies scattered around here?” said George as they continued their inspection of the nibbled-on plants. “And if birds ate poisonous plants, there wouldn't be many birds left in the yard. I thought birds and animals steered clear of poisonous plant seeds because, otherwise, how could the plants reproduce? Then again, maybe there are some species around here that are prone to mental illness and don't know any better. What if there are raccoons, say, that are retarded?”

“If something in the animal kingdom is born retarded, then it stands to reason that it wouldn't live too long. Mother Nature is unforgiving in that respect.”

“So maybe it's something out on its own, and really stupid, and it decided to try out something any ordinary critter wouldn't come within twenty feet of.”

“It just doesn't make any sense,” Nan said. “But there's the evidence. Shaking plant. Leaves torn. Flowers ingested. And plenty of seeds there for the taking.”

George, in order to add fuel to his inflamed anxieties, had done some research on the angel's trumpets, and discovered that the whole bloody plant, not just its seed, was poisonous. He had read stories about people crushing the seeds between their fingers and getting sick. He had read stories about people actually eating the seeds on purpose and completely flipping out. All a bird had to do, he figured, was take one little peck at one of the seeds and it would be a goner.

Whatever was eating the angel's trumpet plants, or might be tempted to use them as a food source in the future, was no matter anyway; Nan had no intention of cutting them down or altering them in any way just because of a few safety concerns. It was, far and away, their most striking and unusual plant. Without the angel's trumpets, she thought, their backyard was only lovely and well maintained, with nothing to make it truly stand out in a judge's eye.

It took quite a bit of daring to plant angel's trumpets and lovingly nourish them to their perilous grandeur. What was life without risks? Who else but the most seasoned and brilliant gardeners dabbled with something so fraught with potential pitfalls?

In fact, not only was Nan convinced that keeping the angel's trumpets—seed pods and all—was the right thing to do, but she began to wonder about planting something new and equally daring, something that would cause the judges to gasp in amazement. If that entailed a few risks, and possibly a few dead birds or animals, or some irksome, tripped-out neighbors sent to the hospital to have their stomachs pumped, then so be it. That was life. Life is risk if you are really living it. Why ever get on a plane? Why take a plunge off a diving board? Why even get out of the bed in the morning, for that matter, if you don't want to face any risks in life?

As the plants expanded, George had grown increasingly squeamish, looking at them in his worried way, wondering whether they should at least
tell
the Grunions about them. Or maybe make some teensy-weensy alterations.

“Couldn't we just remove the flowers and the seeds?”

“Remove the flowers and seed pods!” Nan cried. “Are you insane? They're beautiful, and without them, you've just got some ordinary-looking plants. They're part of the plants. Remove them! Not on your life! What would the judges think if we were to prune off everything just because it entailed a little danger?”

George pondered this for a while, then opened his mouth to a degree that would be described as “gaping.” He did this when his brain began to percolate with some startling new idea, either remarkably stupid or sensible.

“Rabbits,” he said. “It's rabbits. They'll eat anything, the little buggers. But most of the seed pods are too high for them to reach, and that's where the real potent stuff is, isn't it? So maybe the flowers and leaves aren't poisonous enough to kill them, and they're just freaking out and having a lot of weird visions. It might just give them gas and indigestion. Too bad; I wouldn't actually mind seeing a few dead rabbits around here.”

If there was anything that was the bane of the Fremonts' backyard, it was
Sylvilagus floridanus,
the Eastern cottontail. Nothing got George into more of a rabid frenzy than the thought of one of their legions of backyard rabbits layering the ground around the shrubs with their poop pellets and ravaging their gardens of everything that suited their gastronomic fancy at the time.

Rabbits had feasted continuously on the four alpine currants after George and Nan planted them at the base of the far trellis. They tried to protect them with chicken wire and mesh fabric coverings, but nothing seemed to work. Every year, rabbits had taken some of their hosta all the way down to the ground, and nibbled away enough at a few of the others to give their smooth leaves a ravaged, serrated look.

George had hoped the last hard winter—three years earlier—would have taken its toll on the miscreants, but they had survived and flourished, especially in the ensuing mild winters. At one point, George wondered whether buying a pet python and letting it loose in the backyard would solve their problem.

“Just one of the smaller varieties,” he told Nan. “Not big enough to take on dogs, or cats, and certainly not humans. Well, maybe
small
dogs and cats. We could fence in the yard.”

Nan rolled her eyes, but didn't bother to take issue, being reasonably certain that this was George's first step toward solving a problem: starting out by floating an utterly absurd solution, then never acting on it, and gradually working his way toward something that a rational human being might reasonably concoct. When George suggested that they buy a rifle, Nan figured she had to put her foot down.

“Are you out of your mind?” she shrieked once it became evident that this idea fell within the realm of what George would consider a rational solution to their rabbit problem. “You would be firing a rifle in this yard, bullets flying into neighbors' yards, and potentially killing and maiming our friends! What are you thinking?”

“I was thinking only of a twenty-two,” George said ingenuously. “That could kill a rabbit or a squirrel, but a lot of times the bullets only bounce off humans. A quick trip to the hospital to treat a concussion or bruised rib. Besides, I would always be sure and aim it toward the Grunions'.”

“That's tempting,” said Nan, who, after twenty-two years of marriage, reflected that she still didn't know for sure when George was pulling her leg with a sense of humor as dry as the Sahara, and when he was dead serious. “But, no. You are not firing a gun anywhere around this house. That is an emphatic no.”

“A pellet gun?”

“No!”

“Bow and arrow?”

“Absolutely not! Same principle.”

“Not even a high-powered slingshot?”

That might have sounded a lot more reasonable under ordinary circumstances, but once Nan got into one of her negatory modes, there was no turning back.

“No! N-O, no!”

So, the rabbits had continued their pillaging of the Fremonts' backyard.

One day, though, George struck a blow for rabbit haters everywhere. He came out onto the patio early in his pajamas, and there was a rabbit calmly watching him, its mouth furiously grinding on a white-and-lavender blossom. One of their petunias! An anger he had never experienced before swelled up in him. It was an odd sensation, beginning in his face and contorting it into a mask of rage, expanding his rib cage to allow for the extra heartbeats and deeper breathing that would come with the burst of adrenaline that was already fueling his brain, then moving like a surge of electricity through his arms and legs and out into his extremities.

George reached for a rock of an astonishing roundness used to decorate the border around a bed of annuals that edged the patio. He twirled it in his fingers until he got the right grip, reared back, and let it fly. The missile didn't fly straight. Instead it was headed on a trajectory that would take it four inches to the right of the rabbit. Then, it broke suddenly to the left and hit the blissfully unaware rabbit squarely in the forehead.

“Dang!” whispered George, as he always did when talking to himself. “I just threw a major-league slider!”

He went inside, changed into his shorts and his favorite outdoor T-shirt—that Jethro Tull 2005 American tour one with its “Broadsword and the Beast” motif—walked down the steps to the garage, and fetched a shovel. You couldn't be too careful. Who knew what a wounded cottontail might do? He found the smitten animal lying still and quite dead on first glance, with barely a twitch of the muscle to indicate that it had been alive and rapturously laying waste to the Fremont backyard only five minutes earlier.

Then, George did something that he would always regret, at least just a little: in his rage, he brought the shovel down hard on the rabbit's head.

“That's for the hosta!” he snarled. Then again.

“That's for the . . . the . . . oh, yeah, the alpine currant!” Another blow.

“And that is for all the petunias, the phlox, the radishes I tried to plant two years ago, and everything else you've ruined around here!”

He had raised the shovel over his head for one more blow when something clicked in his brain.

“What am I doing? Good gawdawmighty, look what I've turned into!”

He lowered the shovel with trembling hands, inserted it gently under the supine corpse, lifted it up, its mashed, flattened head dangling like a puppet's over the edge, and deposited it on the edge of the woods next to the compost pile, at a spot where he had seen rabbits on numerous occasions.

“Let that be a warning to the rest of you,” he spoke to the rabbit kingdom at large. “This is what happens to those who trespass into this yard on destructive raiding expeditions.”

“What, you think that's going to keep the rabbits away?” scoffed Nan when he told her what he had done. “That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. Maybe you should just post a sign: Rabbits Keep Out, On Pain of Death! That would work much better.”