Backyard (29 page)

29

Devastation

“I
think I can solve our dead rabbit mystery,” George said.

Nan was only half listening. She was too busy balancing herself on the pedestal onto which Shirelle had lifted her. Over the past two hours, Shirelle had treated Nan as the golden goddess of gardening, lavishing upon her the kind of fulsome praise she had not heard since performing a flawless rendering of “Chopsticks” at the age of twelve on the family piano. Nan had given Shirelle the full, heavily annotated tour of the gardens, complete with anecdotes and silly asides about George, and the young woman lapped it up, bug-eyed and panting for more.

And all the questions! Why didn't she plant zinnias? When would she prune her climbing roses? What did the bridal wreath spirea look like in full bloom? Would she start planting more ornamental grasses mixed in among the rocks? How had she managed to turn her backyard into paradise? Did she have a daughter? How would she feel about acquiring another one? Well, that last question really didn't get asked but it might as well have been. By the time Shirelle called her brother to come pick her up and take her over to Earlene's to get her car, a bond had grown between the two women that it takes some friends ten years to seal. There were proffered good-byes and hugs and promises to keep in touch. Shirelle wondered if she could come work for the Fremonts as a gardening intern.

“Well, we wouldn't be able to pay you anything,” said Nan. “And there's not very much left to do now but maintain everything and keep our fingers crossed for the contest. But we should have a burst of new blooms any day now. Come see them! You're welcome to come over any time, Shirelle, and I will teach you whatever I can!”

Shirelle was beaming from ear to ear as her brother pulled into their driveway and honked his horn long enough to spoil the mood a little; she waved her way out of the driveway into the intersection and along Sumac until she passed out of sight.

“Earth to Nan. I think I've solved our dead rabbit mystery.”

“What? Oh . . . really? Why bother? The animal people will do their tests.”

“Just bear with me,” George said.

Still walking on a cloud, Nan followed George over to the angel's trumpets, which had suffered a couple of glancing blows from the ineptly wielded hatchet of Dr. Phyllis Sproot. Seeing the wounded plant again brought Nan right back to earth with a thud.

“Gosh darn her!” she said. “Look at that gash! We'll have to prune it now, pronto.”

“That's not really what I'm looking at,” George said. “Look at this.”

The ground around the plant had been disturbed. The seed pods he thought he had ground deeply enough into the earth seemed to have been uncovered. Dangerous, mutilated seeds now lay strewn around the plant. Not only that, but carrot ends and lettuce and spinach traces littered the area around the seeds. Something else caught George's eye. A few feet away, lying in the fresh cypress mulch between the variegated dogwoods and chain-link fence, was another rabbit, curled up, still, with a couple of paws extended out at unnatural angles from its body and obviously quite dead.

“The rabbits have been gorging themselves on angel's trumpets seeds,” George said. “That's what killed them all. They were running around the yard, famished, found this, and gorged themselves. Death from rabies or some other awful and sudden scourge? I don't think so. But what I don't get is I mashed all this stuff into the ground. Did the rabbits dig it up? And a meticulous observer will note that additional seed pods had been cut off the plant and, perhaps, scattered around its base. I wonder who might know something about this. What I figure is this: a couple of those rabbits died from what we put down here before. But someone—who could it be?—must have added a little supplement recently to make sure the job was done right. Hmmm?”

“Hmmm,” said Nan, irritated that her buoyant mood had been disturbed by George's petty neuroses. “Well, if that's the case, then it worked, didn't it? I mean, didn't we scatter that rabbit food around here anyway as a form of pest control? I just added a little booster shot to the mix, and sprinkled on a little rat poison—just a little teensy bit. Okay, maybe not so teensy—and,
voilà,
it solved our sudden, unexpected infestation. And gee whiz, George, I didn't know what killed those rabbits . . . at least not for sure. It
could
have been rabies. It
could
have been something else. Besides, I didn't want to let Earlene off the hook on a little technicality. What's important is I was able to detach the seeds with a minimum of disturbance to the rest of the plants. Why, look, you can barely tell they've been altered except for that gash, damn that Sproot! And, if you ask me, it's worth it. Those bloody rabbits were going to nibble us out of contention. All this reminds me that we need to police this area a little bit before the contest. It's looking a little messy, to say nothing of this mutilated stem.”

“When? When did you do this?”

“Oh, a couple of days ago. You were gone somewhere for a few hours. What's the problem anyway? You wanted to kill rabbits and I wanted to kill rabbits and that's what we did. Besides, you wanted the damn seed pods cut down anyway!”

“I wanted to
control
the population, not commit genocide!” moaned George, visions of those orphaned rabbits beginning to populate his imagination once again.

“I say good riddance,” said Nan. “Now quit being so goddamn squeamish. You're the one who smashed a rabbit's head in, not me!”

“I know, but that was a horrible thing to do, and you can't imagine the guilt. . . .”

“For Chrissakes, quit being such a hypersensitive geek. Look at it this way: they died with full stomachs.”

“They died in pain, and hallucinating, not able to tell fantasy from reality. It would have been a long, lingering, crazy-as-hell death.”

“Well, obviously we didn't do the job as thoroughly as I would have liked.”

“Huh?”

“Look over there.”

Nan pointed to where the compost pile touched the woods. A small, silent, and still ball of fur gazed, unblinking, at them, twitched one of its ears, then, when they moved toward it, bounded off in three big leaps into the woods.

“Thank God! There are survivors!”

Thunder grumbled in the distance.

“I didn't know we had thunderstorms in the forecast today.”

“Forty percent chance,” mumbled George through the hands that cradled his anguished face. “With the possibility that a few could become severe.”

There was more thunder, this one a long, distant roll, followed shortly by a louder crack. That brought George out of his funk and sent him and Nan racing through the twilight into the front yard.

There was no mistaking that they were in the crosshairs of this thunderstorm. Looking across the lake, they could see a black sky alive with ragged strings of lightning. What especially alarmed them was some of the black was turning a sickly green. A burst of wind from out of nowhere collided with them, almost knocking them over.

“Straight-line winds!” George said. “This will be big!”

“We have to cover the plants! We have to protect them!”

They sprinted to the shed to get the plastic tarps with grommeted borders and the ropes. The hail had already begun to rattle against the roof and vinyl siding of the house by the time they threw one madly flapping tarp over some of their newest little darlings—the hibiscus—and had just started to pass the rope through the grommets. Then, as thunder crashed above, the skies opened up, hurtling a blizzard of hailstones the size of marbles earthward. It wasn't long before bigger ones—some as large as ping-pong balls—came crashing down. Glass shattered somewhere. It sounded as if artillery rounds were crashing into the walls and roof of their house.

George and Nan finally had to drop their rope ends and run for the eaves that sheltered that part of the patio immediately adjacent to the back door. There, they sat silently and grimly watched as chaos engulfed their beautiful gardens and tore them to ribbons. In ten minutes, it was done. The furious wind subsided and the hail gave way to a steady downpour of rain. The backyard was covered more than two inches deep with white hailstones of all shapes and sizes, as well as several large and medium-sized branches, and dozens of smaller branches and twigs that had been sliced off the trees. One large branch came crashing down onto one of the rose trellises, cleaving it in two. It wasn't a half hour before the rain ended and the clouds gave way to a moonless night darkened even further by a neighborhood power outage.

 

The next morning it looked as if a hurricane had roared through. In addition to all the branches lying everywhere, leaves had been stripped from most of the trees. Many had been plastered to the sides of the house. They stuck there as if they had been glued on. Much of the siding was dented and puckered from the pounding it had taken from the hail. Scores of broken shingle pieces were lying around the yard. Others had probably blown off into neighbors' yards. The glass in one of the front windows had been shattered, as had the rear window in Cullen's Camaro and the front passenger side window of Ellis's Duster. The electricity came back on around four thirty a.m. with blasts from the radio and TV, which had been left on by the kids when the power shut off.

As Ellis, Cullen, and Sis gathered the branches into several big piles, George and Nan surveyed their backyard gardens, which had been crumpled, sliced, battered, and broken. The shrubs and bushes were still standing, but what was the point? Their leaves and blooms had been shredded. At least, George noted with grim satisfaction, the hated angel's trumpets hadn't made it; their leaves and flowers were pulverized.

“There are a few survivors,” Nan said glumly. “The alyssum's okay. The hosta under the eaves. Gosh, one of the hydrangeas seems intact. It's close enough to the house that the way the hail was angling down, it must have missed it. That's about it. Everything else's torn to pieces.”

A small crowd of neighbors and friends had gathered on Payne Avenue to survey the damage. Several had their hands clamped around their faces and their mouths open in shock. Here were the Boozers, the Rodards, and the Mikkelsons, Deanna noting happily once condolences were offered and an appropriate moment of silence was observed that she was due in late August and that it was going to be a boy. Then came the McCandlesses and the Winthrops walking gravely up the steps. They stood next to the Fremonts and for several quiet moments surveyed the damage.

“All that work!” Jane McCandless said, her voice breaking as she wrapped her arms around Nan. “All that hard work!”

“The insurance should cover this,” said Alex McCandless. “I can't imagine that they wouldn't.”

“I don't know,” George said. “Who could put a price on what we lost here?”

The Fremont children crisscrossed the yard, gathering up debris in stony silence as if they were collecting the bodies of plague victims who had died overnight.

“What happened to you guys?” Nan wondered.

“Power out, that's all,” Alex said. “A couple branches down. Nothing that bad compared to you guys.”

“We didn't even get hail,” Juanita Winthrop said. “And our power never went out. It was you guys right next to the lake that got the brunt of the storm. Go down the street two blocks and there isn't any damage at all.”

Someone carrying a clipboard and holding a pen had stealthily joined their group, and was also looking around the yard.

“The homeowners here?” The Winthrops and McCandlesses pointed to the Fremonts.

“That was quick!” said George. “We just called two hours ago.” The insurance adjustor smiled, and handed him his business card.

“Quite a mess you got here,” he said. “I've already looked at the home. Looks like you'll need new siding in the front, a new window, and maybe a new roof. We'll have to work out some figures and get back to you. You'll have to call your auto insurance for the cars, assuming those parked on the street are yours. Anything damaged inside?”

“We had some frozen ice cream cakes in the freezer,” Nan said. “And several gallon-sized buckets of Rocky Road.
Extra-creamy
Rocky Road. They're all mush now. Melted ice cubes. The limes are probably warmer than we would like. Thank God we don't drink chilled white wine.”

“Make a list,” the adjustor said. “Funny. The rest of the neighborhood barely got touched. Just little stuff. Never seen anything like it. You guys were at the epicenter.”

“What about all this?” said Nan with a sweep of her hand.

“All what?”

“Why, our beautiful gardens. They've been wrecked.”

“Hmmm. We probably won't give you much for that. We're already covering the house and roof. I see your thing over here. . . .”

“Trellis.”

“The trellis is wrecked. We might give you something for that. But don't count on much for plants. We might give you a few hundred. No more than that, I would think.”

“A few hundred! These gardens are virtually priceless!”

“Sorry. You can submit a list to us of the plants damaged and destroyed and their approximate greenhouse value. We'll see.”

“You need to fight them on that,” Alex said as the insurance man walked around the yard. “You should get thousands for that.”

“Even thousands won't make up for it,” said George. “Maybe $200,000.”

“Two hundred thousand?” said Juanita. “How come that much exactly?”

“That's how much the Burdick's Best Yard Contest first prize is up to now. You know, the contest we just lost.”