Ricky's Garden

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If you ask me about Ricky’s garden, I’d tell you about the smell of Vinnie’s lobster traps, right over the wooden fence. I’d tell you the shape of them. Interlocking neon yellow grid. Stacked so high, and weeping with seaweed. How it’s like Vinnie carries the ocean eight miles inland. Not the marsh, not the bay, but the biggest, clearest expanses. The smell of open water whipping rock. The mysteries that are stirred up. And the tide, the mirror of the moon.

Behind Ricky’s garden, and behind Vinnie’s lobster traps, there is a train. It passes through every hour, starting at 5 am. The train shakes the ground. Wild grape vines on the chain fence shake. Knotweed, garlic mustard, and purslane shake. The needles on the dry pines shake also. If you were to stand in Ricky’s garden when the train went by, you would feel the vibration rising. The sound would come up so suddenly and loudly, you might be concerned that the sound would just keep coming. But trains don’t just come, they also go. When the train is passing through behind his garden, the coming and going is equal. It is just a moment, but the sound and feeling is monumental. Like every overwhelming, overpowering thing, you'd grow used to it in time. If you spent enough time in his garden, you might not even notice the train eventually.

But if you were listening for it, you could hear the train all the way from the cemetery hill across the street. Ricky was a gravedigger here. At the base of the hill, the cemetery is filled first with the bodies of the colonizers. Next, and sloping upwards, it is filled with their children who did not understand their parents’ crimes. And so on and so on until the yard is almost full. And at the top, you can see for miles and miles in every direction.

The winter that Ricky died, the town decided to cut down a dead tree that stood halfway up the cemetery hill. My dad thinks it was probably a maple, but I remember it as a great beech. Its bark was so smooth. I heard news in the local paper that the tree was coming down. The news came right after the first significant snowfall of the season. I stomped over to the hill. The snow was up to my calves. I just stood and watched this leafless thing. Every exposed part of me burned from the cold and I squinted.

My favorite part to observe was the space between the branches and the sky. Through the tight frames of the branches, the blue winter sky looked like stained glass. I remember being struck by the thought that this dead tree was its own tomb stone. I wanted the tree to remain there, no matter the consequences.

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There’s not much difference between a cemetery and a garden. In a garden, we plant potential. We tussle up the soil and plant seeds, filled with divine instructions. And in a cemetery, we go through these same motions. We dig a hole, plant the casket, and wait.

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My understanding is that my parents first caught wind that something was wrong when the garden got overgrown. All the vegetables that showed up that spring had reseeded themselves. Ricky wasn’t there, he wasn’t tending to any of it.

The garden was brown. The weeds were astounding. Branch-like, and taller than me. They swayed and shook from the train.

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I got a job at a bagel shop. My boss George was an avid gardener. At 2:30 am, while steaming our faces above the boiling pot of honey water, he’d ask me questions like, “have you ever seen brussels sprouts growing?”

Yes I had, I maybe replied, I’d seen them in Ricky’s garden.

My shift usually ended right after sunrise. I’d go home and sit in the windowsill in my bedroom, which was on the second floor. I had a bird’s eye view of Ricky’s garden as it changed.

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My life began to shape itself around the negative spaces of his. I wanted to understand the garden, the myth I had written in my mind of the garden. It was massive. He labored to grow vegetables despite his chronic pain. He did not sell them, he gave them to his buddies. He left squash and tomatoes on his neighbors’ porches.

Weeds made their way through black plastic row cover. They uprooted the sod staples. I’d never seen anything like it. Was it a garden or was it a cemetery and what’s the difference. The stuff that was left behind was, well it looked like it was in grief.

His absence was my neighbor. Any silence that I heard was also his absence. The sound of the train and the smell of the seaweed was his absence too.

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The following spring, I asked Ricky’s landlord if I could pull up the weeds and grow a new garden. He said yes, under the condition that I plant some nice tomatoes for his wife.

My friends came to help when it was still too cold to begin. We didn’t know anything. We had a wheelbarrow. Some of us had gloved hands. We pulled up the weeds and talked about Ricky.

Why did he start this garden in the first place. Why did he shoot himself in the graveyard and why was his death so persistently unbearable. Why did he love his friends so deeply, I know he did. He wouldn’t grow a garden for them otherwise. Why all the effort. Why the drought. Why would he set traps for the rabbits and drive them to the dunes. Again and again. As if it was less a garden and more a rabbit taxi service. Why did he use an old plastic gallon milk jug to water the vegetables. Why did he want to do something nice. Why did he die.

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I could tell you about the garden that happened in the wake of his. The easy, healthy soil. I could tell you a few things that have happened in these five years since his passing. That there’s not a day that goes by that Ricky is not on my mind, and I don’t know why. I remember him, effortlessly. I love him for what he did. I love him because he left zucchinis on my parents’ front steps.

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Everyday I think about love and distance. I daydream that my love moves steadily as the train. Arriving and leaving. Vibrating and shaking and sounding out wherever it passes through. Love tends to the space between us. So I wonder about where love goes when it goes to those who are gone. In the space between here and the stained glass sky, flowers bloom for the dead.