Vegetable Garden  Richard Adams

I just got back from my work at the Garden.  The sun has set; it’s still getting dark earlier every night.  Once the time changes back from this cursed ‘daylight savings’ time, it will seem even worse.

I can’t get the Garden out of my mind; I’m sure I’ll dream of it tonight again, and wake with more baffled anxiety from the portentous images.  And tomorrow, just before sunrise, I’ll put on my Can’t-Bust-Em overalls, grab my pail of tools and lunch, stuff my leather gloves (damn; I love the smell of them) into one of my many pockets, and walk the mile to work.  The dream fragments will again intrude into my waking world, and affect what I’m seeing as I work, trying, along with the remaining workers, to salvage what might yet be saved.

But for now, for tonight…the adrenaline-electricity is thrumming through my mind, shuffling the images from the past into an almost whole picture of what’s going on now.  There were whispered conversations among the workers, fragments of news on the portable radios some folks bring with them…and the random puzzle pieces are beginning to take shape into a whole.  And I fear the whole picture.  Part of me wants to sit in front of the tiny teevee, guzzle most of the remaining six-pack of Silver Bullet beer, and numb my mind with a crap crime show.  But I’m unable to move from this kitchen chair where I’d sat down to take my boots off. 

It frosted hard last night, and when the sun burned off the cold, the cold-sensitive plants began to call their death-chants, their frost-burnt leaves drooping and curling and turning brown before our eyes.  Heeey-yay-aay-ah, they called: It’s a good day to die!  They were philosophical about the cycles of the seasons, and death and rebirth; they reminded us of that plan.  So did the Bible: ‘To every season…’ and all. 

I’d gazed at the large-leafed squash plants: the big umbrellas had protected the vines underneath; maybe they would live, and the winter squashes might have time to mature enough for storage.  The root crops were safe, and would be until the ground froze, so there would be those crops, plus the onions and leeks and cabbages, and the remaining greens.  Most years, we would be harvesting what is ready, and letting the rest of the plants fend for themselves for now.

But the news of the past few days has changed it all.  Today we’ve been told to take extraordinary measures to protect the rest, so the plants can produce more food.  And that’s what has me picturing what went wrong, and how we got here; these are not happy thoughts…

The Gardener-in-Chief is elected by the people.  This one seems a decent sort, and speaks well; he gave us enough confidence that he could help right the crop failures and other things of the past few years.  Bad things started happening, and the system began to break down.  Many began to go hungry, and not just the garden workers: some of the owners of stores that sold the food did, and lots of the folks who carted the food to their stores…and the people who worked at the little factories that canned or froze the food for storage through the months of not-growing.  We’d sometimes hear rumors of the well-fed fat people who lived far away from us, and we wondered how they could be fat: didn’t it mean they were getting more than their fair share of the food?  Why would they take it?  Didn’t it make them feel…wrong?

Some folks would joke about those people, and say they bossed around our Chief Gardener, called them the Overlords or something, but most of us were old enough to know that the folks who protected the country by handling all the money dealings weren’t evil; they just made some mistakes here and there that caused temporary problems.  They always worked them out in the end.  When things started seeming a little less fair to us, the Chief  Gardener could usually explain the changes to us, and then we were okay. 

A few decades ago, it was decided that all of the workers would get some of the food to store.  It was a good idea: we’d have food to eat even after we were too old to garden.  It wasn’t practical for us to store it at our houses, so they stored it all in big warehouses for us, and we’d get pieces of paper in our pay packets every Friday night showing how much food was being stored in our names.  It was a good feeling; most of us had little stacks and bundles of these food chits stashed away for our old age: the security felt so solid.  The past few years we’d been getting less food chits with our pay, but maybe just enough…depending.  It was worrisome, but we were working as hard as we could, and figured things would work out in the end for us all.

But, oh; the news today!  They’re saying now that there really are Fat Overlords of some sort, and that a bunch of them sold a lot of our food that they didn’t even own!  None of gardeners understand how they were allowed to that, or why people would buy food from people who couldn’t even prove they owned it: but they say it really happened.  And the radio is telling us now that this was a big part of the food problems over the past few years.  Why didn’t anyone stop them?   I remember now that before he was elected, the Chief Gardener told us that the people who ran the money protection for America needed to make some big changes, that there needed to be better rules for how it all worked, and that he’d help make new rules, and fix some of the bad things that happened before.  I guess he didn’t. 

And this morning they told us that we’d have to pay for it now, like it was our fault that the crooks stole our food.  And that some of us might not have jobs tomorrow, or the day after.

I keep picturing how the garden looked today, and us watering what was left half-alive, and the orders coming to rescue what we could, weeding and cultivating, and covering things with floating row covers to protect things from the forecast harder freeze that might come tonight.  They said we will need every bit of food we can save.  The gleaners cut and gathered and got what they could under roof; we all worked until we couldn’t see in the dark.  The little greenhouses protected the flowers just fine.  Some people say they don’t sell the flowers, but give them to the fat people for free; it may be just a story, though.  The moon hits full tonight, and it’s supposed to get really cold.  So now we wait to see what tomorrow will bring.

It’s impossible not to go back in time, wondering about what things might have made a difference.  It’s been noticeable that, over the past few years, broken or old things at the Garden didn’t get replaced: the water pipes leaked a bit, the fences sagged, and the varmints got in.  There was less composted mulch to spread around the plants to hold the moisture in and feed the soil.  We started using old row cover material with holes; I guess there wasn’t enough money to buy new bolts of it.  The tractors were growing old and funky, and were out for repairs a lot of the time.

And come to think of it: so many of the seeds never sprouted.  It was as though they were sterile seeds, something was wrong with them.  Some crops we’d had to plant two or three times, different batches of seed each time, until we’d get some good germination. 

It’s sad to think about now, but there was a whole extra month of growing season this year.  It always freezes in the middle of June, but it didn’t this year; the climate seems warmer somehow.  I have heard of this trend, and it may be so.  If we’d only known, we could have planted early, and grown more food.  If we’d only known…

Come to think of it, that was the sort of thing we’d hoped the new Chief Gardener would have known, or guessed.  He might have told us to plant early; it would have only meant the cost of seed and some worker-hours replanting if the plants froze… We were all so hopeful about the Garden this year; there had been so much snow in the mountains, so there would be more water…and enough snow cover to dampen the soil almost fifteen inches down.  And all of us gardeners had agreed to work longer hours for the same pay.  Now we feel so…foolish.  So gullible.  I guess we should have paid more attention to the rumors about the Overlords; maybe all of us together could have done something.  Maybe we can talk about it at work tomorrow.

Ooh, the air coming through the window is cold; I don’t think I’ll look at the thermometer.  I’ll head to bed, and dream what I dream; who knows, maybe some great idea will come to me in the night, and we can hatch a plan tomorrow.  There has to be a solution, doesn’t there?  Wow; I just had a thought: maybe lots of people will be dreaming of ways to make the future better.  Wouldn’t that be something, if regular-people-power could make a difference?  That’s a good thought, isn’t it?

Please, God; we don’t deserve to be this scared…we’ll try harder…and water what's left alive in the garden...