The Green of Spring

Many years later, before the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buend�a remembered that distant afternoon his father took him to see the ice.

-Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude

She had been dead for three months now, and still he built her house; it grew by the minute, wall-studs and drywall, enclosed verandah and cornices, bay windows and all-weather latex paint, glossy, non-gloss and primer. Howard still hammered every day from eight 'til ten, then relaxed, rode his bicycle, ate lunch, did paperwork, cashed his pension check, deposited his dividends, wrote a letter or two to the town council and napped. Then he hammered until dinner, when he gathered his remaining family around him like a protective fence and blessed the food they ate and his dead wife's spirit.

Sometimes, when Howard thought about it, he could actually remember when and how his wife died. Usually he forgot, and just hammered away consulting the plans that lay scattered everywhere around the half-finished house. But when he remembered he could sense the smell of snow, and the wintry flakes that had covered everything, the road, the sky, the fields and the ditch that the car had landed in. It tilted half-crazily, and when they finally found it there had been a thaw, but his wife's face was perfectly preserved, quiet, and plain peaceful, except for the glass in her breast and the cut on her cheek. Howard helped pull the car out of the ditch, received an official note of sorrow from the town council, and went home. He had thought maybe she'd run away with somebody. And just a few years after she'd started it all with the picket fence.

"Howie, do you think we could have a fence around the house?" Ellen had asked. "White picket fence, like in New England?" Ellen had grown up in New England, by the Mohawk Trail, and grown up on books about the Indian massacre of Deerfield. She still had a treasured green copy of The Boy Captive of Deerfield she had swiped from the Greenfield Public Library. Every year they got a letter forwarded through twelve addresses and two alumni offices telling her that it was overdue and that she now owed thirty-eight dollars and forty cents.

Howard paused by the dining room table. "Of course," he said. Howard did not want to build a white picket fence. It would be difficult to cut millions of posts, tiring to ram them into the ground, painstaking to paint, annoying to keep up. "We'll build you a fence. Why do you want a fence?"

"I don't know," Ellen said. She hugged herself with long-sleeved arms. Ellen was always cold. "I feel exposed out here."

The country here was not like New England. It was long, flat, rolling, bedsheet country. During each season it was all of one color. All white, all green, all brown. The towns were small, like New England, but they were thin towns, spread out, twelve miles to a block. They were farm towns. There was grazing here, there was hay, there was wheat. There were barbed wire fences, not white picket fences.

The first posts that Howard tried to sink went deep into the ground, shivering with each blow. He pounded them so much they sank and sank until only the little white tip was above the grass. When he hammered green liquid oozed out from the ground, like blood, only sweeter-smelling and softer-looking. Once Howard tasted it, and he spent the rest of the day wandering drunk, bumping into walls. He learned to not even look at the green when he worked, pounding the posts in heavily and deep. But every time he turned his back they sprung up again, bursting out of the ground like trees, high and mighty and toppling. "Hard ground here," he said. He had to dig deep holes, and cut the posts twice as long, before they would stand the height Ellen wanted, child-high.

Howard and Ellen had a daughter. Ellen had given birth to her in a small hospital outside of Atlanta when they were driving from college to grad school. Ellen hadn't even known she was pregnant until labor started. She had been complaining about a stomach ache for most of the trip but they were sure it was because of the graduation picnic. When Sarah was born she had all her teeth and pubic hair. She grew into a lovely little girl, a saint of a child, who hung around with bad influences but was always perfect.

At dinner Sarah always talked about boys. Ellen used to say it was a normal stage, but then Ellen talked about boys all the time too. Howard hated boys- they were rude and rebellious- he had been one, he knew. His son was named Joseph, and was two years younger than Sarah. He talked about the way Sarah talked about boys.

"You know, that that's not the way to get a guy interested in you. All the guys in my class hate it when girls try to act older than they are and parade around in lots of make-up, high heels and stuff." Joseph had been about thirteen when he had said this.

"Well, girls are older than boys at any given age anyway," Sarah said, feeling superior. She had had a date with a fellow who was all of twenty, and was sure the world was her oyster and she was the pearl.

"No, they aren't!" Joseph was quite indignant. "Teenage girls think about nothing but getting boyfriends. You can't tell me that's more mature than guys that think about themselves and getting ahead!"

Joseph had always been precocious and enamored of books, but no omens had attended his birth. Howard believed very firmly in omens. When the second fence post he drove shattered into a million pieces when he touched it with a paintbrush, he knew that the project of the fence was doomed. But Ellen wanted it, so he kept going. The fence ended like a white stitch across the hills, hours and hours of painting, up and down the slopes and curving round. It made one dizzy to watch it. Ellen wanted to plant petunias by it, but Howard dissuaded her- winter was coming, and they wouldn't take. She planted rhododendrons instead, and they promptly died.

The town council sent many letters during the time that Howard worked on the fence. He had not gotten a permit, and therefore was breaking a code or statute. They sent occasional people to look at what what he was doing, but invariably they were men like Old Samuel, who leaned on the fence and chewed hay while he talked with Sarah about sex and breeding among cows, or men like Dietrich the businessman from New York, who inquired as to the amortization costs of the fence and was astonished when he learned that Howard was building something that would not pay for itself.

Ellen loved the fence, while Howard thought that it ruined his view out the window. Now, whenever he looked out from the living room, what had formerly been an expanse of uncut grass became a rolling heaving sea, and the fence a curl of foam tossed haphazardly about as it rose and fell out of sight across the horizon. It made Howard dizzy and he sat down quickly. It must have been an omen.

Other things soon needed expansion. Sarah needed a bookcase for her schoolbooks. Ellen insisted that they rip out a wall in order to build a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, with the intent of converting the room into a library when Sarah moved out. She drew up plans and handed them to Howard, who recruited his son and began shopping for wood. It was hard to find wood here in the plains, but they ended by driving only eighty-two miles to get some. It took three trips in their small four-passenger car, but they got lumber enough for all the walls to have bookcases, and began.

Joseph was not good at carpentry. Howard had learned from his father and his father before him, who did it as a hobby after their stock investments paid off. Howard had never worked in his life except as a carpenter, and then only if he wanted to do it. Until he met Ellen, who had many plans.

"It's all for the children," she said. Her short dark hair bobbed most appealingly, and she ran her small hands down his wide chest. He agreed, and even showed enthusiasm, but when he went to bed with his hands made of splinters and his calluses peeling off in exhaustion, he looked like the dream of a man gone mad.

One middle of the night as he lay in bed sunlight streamed through his head and he found himself talking to his wife as she prepared breakfast. "You know, dear," she said, looking out the window above the sink, "it really would be charming to have a verandah, a sort of enclosed porch. We could put up a hammock, and I could have plants, and I could bring you lemonade in the late afternoon, and the children could play there in their cribs." Howard imagined it, saw the kids in their teenaged selves playing with rattles, and said, "I don't want to build a verandah. I want to not do anything. I hate you, Ellen. I do not care about the children or about this house." "Is that so," Ellen said, and licked her pointy teeth with a pointed red tongue, and leapt at him with her claws and furry body- he felt the tail smacking his leg as she tore out his throat- and he awoke, sweating sharply, gasping for water and holding his neck. The next morning he abandoned the bookshelves and went to work on a verandah, making twelve trips to buy lumber, and Ellen was pleasantly surprised that he had thought of such a wonderful thing. Neighbors complained of the hammering, but the nearest of them was ten miles away, so Howard ignored them.

Infidelity always bothered Howard. Sometimes he spent his nights in a red steam, dreaming and tossing in the grasping sheets, thinking about any woman who wasn't Ellen. On the best of nights, he could reach over and make love to his wife and her face would be that of some other person, to whom he was not married.When Ellen would get up and make breakfast, she would still have the stranger's face on, and the children would comment on it-Ellen never understood what they were talking about. Howard was sure that Ellen slept around, just because Howard didn't. She had a habit of mentioning men she'd met on her plant expeditions, and saying that she'd been late because they were talking about fertilizer.

When fall came, Ellen bought more plants, because the land was brown and lonely. She said she felt like she was on an English moor.

After the verandah came the bay windows. The living room needed bay windows, to give a better view of the pitching yawing sea that was the lawn. When Howard stood at the gate of the fence he looked and saw that the house was now shaped like a lumbering boat a-sail in rough brown waters.

Joseph finished the bookshelves on his own, after a fashion, because he wanted to fill them. This he did, but afterwards became afraid to enter Sarah's room, because he saw all the walls full of books and was afraid to stand under them, as if he knew that years hence he would be crushed under the weight of printed matter. But while he was finishing the shelves, Sarah loved it, because she loved the idea of someone peering in at her through her half-finished walls, telescoping her body from miles away.

She had been seeing a fellow in a leather jacket. Whenever this young man came by, a wrench was left around the house somewhere, or a grease stain. Ellen scrubbed and cleaned in vain. Soon Sarah's clean blonde hair began to come home smudged, and her cheek would have cuts on it, and her eyes would have the wild look of one who has felt the rushing air hit their face from a motorcycle. Because of all these things she fell in love with the young man, whose name Howard never got straight.

Ellen had purchased all the plants in the area. She began to take long trips to neighboring towns, to see if there perhaps she could find some combination of leaf and stalk and pestil and petal she had not already purchased. They had to all go indoors, because outside it was getting colder as winter came. They hung on chains, they tangled the hinges of doors, they wove a greenery carpet across the ferny floor. The walls were studded with them, and watering them took most of Sarah's day. It was her only chore. Sometimes, seeing her flit about the house while he paid his bills and opened his mail, Howard wondered when she had stopped going to school, but when he stopped to think about it, he decided that girls were always older at any given age anyway, and she was probably old enough. If she would marry, them they could push Joseph into her old room and see if he ever came out, and live in quiet retirement. She was much like her mother, he reflected, and shuddered.

Winter wandered over, and there it was, the plants dying, brown shriveling and crunchy leaves underfoot everywhere through the house. The house was stormbound for two weeks and a night as drifts piled up high around it. Ellen bitched about how she should have married somebody who lived in a decent climate. Sarah realized that she could never be her mother, because all the plants died under her care. Joseph took to carving little figures out of the trunks of the larger indoor trees- soon there were those little Indians everywhere, conducting wars in the kitchen underbrush. Howard asked Ellen about what could make her happy.

"All I want is the children to have a good home, all I want is for them to have something to own after we're gone," she said.

"They have that," he said, waving his arms, gesturing out at the half-finished house, with the two rooms that snow drifted into.

"Don't tell me that!" she said. Up she got from her rocking chair- she always seemed wiser in that rocking chair- and stared out the window. Snow covered the picket fence almost completely. Walking on the ice, they had seen the pointed tips stick out and had nearly tripped over them. "There's no life here, Howard. I know you wanted to come here to live because you grew up here, but there's some desire in you to go where you are most hurt, to love what consumes you. This is that place, Howard. You spend all your time with that damned town council..."

Howard's business with the town council was hardly enough to occupy an hour a day. He had found that all kinds of absurd statutes were on the books after his brush with the law over construction. Now he was an activist. It was his honest opinion that the town was rotting at the core, and that only the edges were safe. That only the fringes were habitable, like a ring around a decayed urbanized ghetto. He rationalized his building additions to the house as a holding action, whenever he didn't want to face that he did it out of guilt for the fact that he didn't love his wife.

The greatest shock that Howard ever had was the day that he found Joseph building fires in his bedroom to keep out the cold. One of the walls caught, smoke and ashes creeping up from the baseboard. Joseph was older now, and rebellious in his quiet way- Howard nearly struck him.

"Why do you do the things that you do?" he asked, deeply hurt. "If you need warmth, I can provide it. I can build a space heater alcove to direct the heat right at your bed, if you want. Or we can rip out some sheetrock and put in more heating ducts."

His son didn't reply, just stalked away. Howard was sure that all Joseph needed was to find some nice girl. Of course, no girls remotely like Joseph lived in the area. Joseph was a person born without omens, and he was different from everybody else. He had trouble speaking up. Howard was sure that he would end up marrying some woman who was wrong for him, some woman too much like his mother or sister, who cheated on him- and Joseph would put up with it, too.

Howard had pretty much decided that Ellen was cheating on him, but he didn't say anything about it, because of the children. Ellen spent more and more time out of the house now that all her plants were dead. She drove to neighboring states, further and further south, until she hit deserts. She must have kept going, searching for greenery, Howard supposed. After all, she was gone for three weeks once, and when she got back she told of having had to learn Spanish from a man (with long golden hair and spurs she wondered if he wore to bed, she said) in order to buy the single plant she had brought back. It had died on the way. She spoke Spanish for several days around the house, and then gradually phased back into English as Sarah tried to talk with her.

Sarah needed advice about boys. The leather jacket boy she loved was going to drive his motorcycle over the edge of a cliff and wanted her to come with him. He said there was no danger, he arranged it all with some friends of his, that they would be caught on the bottom and let go to ride the motorcycle clear to another country, probably Mexico, and live in peace. Ellen thought that the boy in the leather jacket was a criminal, a crook, lying to Sarah and leading her on.

Howard couldn't do much about the whole situation, so he let it be. He never pressured Sarah the way he pressured Joseph, because she was a girl and it was Ellen's job. Also, Sarah looked a lot like Ellen and he felt unsure when dealing with her.

Ellen went for a drive to think about it. And that's where Howard's memory got foggy. He seemed to remember a call from the village council. He had been thinking that Ellen was taking an awful long drive, nearly two or three days, that maybe she was seeing somebody, and the phone rang and it was the police, the village council, the ambulance. He walked alone most of the way to the bend in the road where it had happened. Then Sarah and Joseph came running up and they reached the car at the same time. The thaw had begun to come, and that was why the top of the little four-passenger car was visible. She was dead. Skidded off the road, hit a tree, glass shattered when her head hit the windshield, broke her neck instantly, and to make it uglier, a piece of glass lodged in her heart, and stained her dress.

They went home. Sitting there on the kitchen table, with a few wooden Indian figurines to hold them down, were blueprints and plans. They detailed the house's expansion for the next several years. Cornices. New paint. The only sheet that Howard considered tossing was the one with the nursery wing. Then he seemed to hear Ellen's voice saying, "For the grandchildren," and left it.

And so Howard was hammering and pounding from eight to ten every day, then all afternoon, three months after Ellen had died. During those three months, Sarah had tearfully confessed that she basically wanted just to sleep with the boy in the leather jacket, but even though he wanted to, hadn't let him, because she knew he was slime. She wanted to use him only as a ticket out of the bedsheet plains that bored her silly. Howard was touched that she confessed this to him, when she had not told her mother; but the mere confession did not cure the behavior. He felt obliged to push her to go on to college, and to make something of her life, so she could eventually raise kids of her own and make their life a secure one.

"I can't cook, father, I can't clean, I am meant to have wind in my hair and to travel the roads that someone else shows me," she said. Actually, she wrote, because those were the last words that Howard found of hers in her diary the day after she went with the boy in the leather jacket and agreed to jump off the cliff. Some of the council members saw them go:

"Revving up and then over the edge, arguing the whole while, and exhaust pushing them along and up on an incredible arc. They seemed to push and shove for the space on the cycle, and the leather boy began to tumble. She was too eager to steer, I suppose. But that was the last I saw before they sank below the rim, below and the last was her hair streaming up as they fell, the hair with wind fingers rushing though it and spreading it like wings."

Howard tried to mourn but since nobody saw his daughter die, he just told people who inquired that they had landed safely, she had phoned from Atlantis and was doing alright. He fantasized that perhaps she had a tribe of gnomes there and was their leader, that she was mother to them all and had left bad influences behind. She had always been a saint anyway and perfect, it was only the company she kept that made her look wrong.

The noises of hammering continued, and began to trouble Joseph even in his sleep. He was almost done with schooling, and in the afternoons he read more and carved. The house was full of brown and green-the dead plants sprouted shoots again now that they were free of Sarah's daily care, and carvings, growing ever larger under Joseph's fingers, began to decorate the walls. Joseph began to see two girls walking together home from school-one blonde and the other brunette. One day when he spoke with his father he told him about the two girls and the conversations he'd had with them.

"One of them is exciting, and nice, beautiful, and funny. She's exotic-I can never pronounce her name. The other is very practical. She reminds me of Sarah in some ways. She wears her hair bobbed short. I can tell, dad, I'm going to have to approach one or the other, and not get to know both. They'd both be on to me in a minute."

Howard was very impressed with the fact that his son had asked for romantic advice, and told his son to go with the practical woman, because practicality was the thing most to be desired in building a family. She would care for her children. It was not until after Joseph had run off with the girl that his father remembered the haircut and where he had seen it before. Sure enough, the path they had taken already was sprouting tall grasses and exotic plants. It was then that Howard truly mourned for his lost children, afraid they had grown up just like him.

Joseph left a life-sized statue of himself carved out of wood, sitting in his chair reading a book. Howard did not notice that his son was gone for nearly a month. Every minute or so the statue turned another page and every two or so hours it grunted, set the book down, and picked up another.

While the golem did this, Howard worked on the roof. It was there he noticed, looking down, that the golem was not his son, for the hair that grew atop its head was green- clover and moss and pennyroyal. He came down and confronted the golem, but for several days the golem continued reading. It was not until one day that Howard was padding in his bathrobe to the dinner table that the golem suddenly turned and answered his question.

"No, I am not your son- he left with the woman who will make him unhappy. Look off your back porch."

Howard ran there and saw the tall grasses leading away from the house and realized his son was forever lost to him. He began to cry, even though his son had finally earned an omen. All of a sudden the world that he had wanted his children to fly out into seemed a dangerous place, full of cresting waves and sharp white teeth stitching their way across the spring landscape.

The golem came back to comfort him. It hugged him, and Howard felt the rough bark skin and wondered what a father he had been. As he struggled to get away from the monster that held him, he felt it grip him tighter.

"No!" cried the golem. "Listen to me!" It was sprouting more and more leaves by the minute, becoming softer and easier to be held by. Howard reached for the hammer and nails there on the floor, and tried hitting the golem.

"Father," it said, gasping, shredding to pieces. "I understand all you've done for us," it said. Its voice became higher-pitched as it fought disintegration. But it had to grow apart, and exploded into a rain forest that covered the room with vines. Howard gazed about his handiwork and smiled proudly even as the plants seized his arms and legs and held him high. The last voice he thought he heard was Ellen's, calling him home. Then all was silent and he watched the springtime grow.

The vines twisted 'round nails and pounded them in; flowers grew on studs and made walls of black-eyed susan. Leaves held Howard until he cried out and burst into seed, scattering white puffballs and small seedlings across the hardwood floor.

As the two-by-fours began to shoot out green tendrils, cars began to stop on the road outside the house. When the shoots towered over the porch and the grinning red and verdant growth began to outshine the dowdy sky, people leaned on the fence-posts and watched the plants grow and grow until they were a rioting jungle. They backed away when the fence-posts themselves shivered under their hands and the grass crept and wiggled like a sea.

Townspeople came for months to see the wonder. After a while, it began to turn brown from lack of water, and in September, a vote was made in the council to chop it down.