Author: Leah Andelsmith

Leah Andelsmith

Morning dawns and Lou has exactly nothing left to give. She goes out to the garden anyway because that’s the way she was taught, and she waters as the heavy hose drags behind her and threatens to knock down tomato plants or flatten the sweet potatoes. Between her tee shirt sleeves and leather work gloves are bare brown forearms and dark elbows. Her short Afro is salt and pepper all over, except at the temples, where it has begun to come in white. Her knees creak as she hefts the hose, and she stops for a moment to wipe sweat from her brow. That’s when she notices the mint. The bindweed is wrapped around the stalk.

It has crept up in the night, or yesterday morning when her back was turned, or under the glaring noonday sun when everything else was too lethargic to grow. Stealthily it slid its tendrils up and around the stalk, opening its leaves and mingling them with the mint. It may seem like a dance, but the bindweed will choke the plant and drag it to the ground.

Lou puts down the hose and crouches low to get a closer look. Her heart sinks, seeing how tightly the bindweed is entwined, how hard it will be to untangle the vines. She lifts a mint leaf with her finger, already pale and soft where it should be bright green and strong. Lou feels heavy and tired. She wishes she could go back to the time when she hid her heart in the garden. She should pull out the small pair of scissors that are in her back pocket. She should slip off her work gloves and use her bare fingers to separate plant from weed, to save the former and kill the latter.

Instead, a bumblebee floats past and lands on the squash plant next to her. In no time, it is up to its abdomen in a yellow flower, wriggling and working, its thighs fat with pollen.

She sits back on her heels and looks at the green all around her, seeing the way the plants are unabashed in their abundance. Caressing the tip of the next post with a curling tendril. Reclaiming the paths by spreading across to touch a neighbor. Fanning out their broad leaves to shelter their fruit. Creating a shady interior.

The soft soil hidden under the mulch gives beneath her feet. The leaves rustle in the breeze. Even though she knows she’s alone, Lou looks over each shoulder before laying face down. A bit clumsily, she shimmies so she can put her head between the stalks and peer through the leaves. More bees harvest pollen in this understory, buzzing softly as they fly from one bloom to the next. Lou wriggles further in, all the way to the center. She rests for a moment, catching her breath, not entirely sure why she wanted to crawl under.

Then, in the stillness, a young squash rolls an inch or two towards her as if pushed gently. It jingles, a muted chime coming from the pale green shell.

Lou suddenly remembers the sweet burst of juice from a warm, ripe cherry tomato, and a longing tears at her heart. She touches the squash and it jingles again.

Even though the part of her with the creaking knees says no, the work goes to waste if you pick the fruit unripe, Lou cuts the squash from its stem and hurries it to the kitchen.

“Louise? Louise is that you?” Lou’s father Royal says from his armchair in the living room.

Lou doesn’t answer. She takes out the cutting board and the knife.

“Did you get something from the garden? Let me weigh it.”

Slice. A ring of light green flesh separates from the squash.

Royal—lanky, wiry, dressed in boots and overalls even though he doesn’t work outside much anymore—enters the kitchen with slow and deliberate steps. “You don’t even have the scale out,” he says.

“Let me get it for you,” he adds with a tired, patronizing tone, struggling to bend down to open the cupboard.

Slice. Each time she makes a cut, a soft chime comes from the squash.

“Will you stop? You have to weigh it first,” he says, coming to stare over Lou’s shoulder. “It’s green! You picked it green?! Haven’t I taught you . . . .”

Slice. Another thin portion comes off, and Lou sees a bit of brass through a translucent coating of flesh. She digs her fingers in, her nails filling with squash. She grasps the bell and pulls it out, a short length of string trailing from the brass loop at the top.

She can’t quite breathe.

Jingle, jingle. She remembers sliding underneath a tomato plant.

Jingle, jingle. She remembers her eight-year old fingers scraping away enough dirt to make a cozy hollow for the bell.

Jingle, jingle. A gift she gave the garden, now given back to her.

“What is that bell, Louise?” Royal demanded, his voice getting sharper. “Is this some kind of joke?”

Lou shakes her head, staring down at the bell in her hands. “Yeah. It was a joke, Daddy. Ha, ha.”

“That is not a funny joke. We can’t waste food in this house! You know that.” He’s trying to be stern, but there’s panic in his tone. His endless calculations. The price of the water and fertilizer for that squash wasted. The profit on the sale of it squandered.

Lou finally looks up at him, sees his worry, his fear, as if those men were knocking on the door right now. “It was a joke from Frankie down the road, Daddy. He gave me this squash. It didn’t come from our garden.”

Royal’s shoulders slump as the tension leaves them. He bends down to put the scale away.

“Why didn’t you just say so, Lou?” he says softly, touching her back. Then he shakes his head. “That damn fool Frankie. He never did get his head screwed on straight. Imagine wasting a perfectly good fruit like that.”

Lou walks out to the porch, where she sits clutching the bell until nightfall.

The first year, before Lou was born, the mortgage for Royal and Marie’s farm came through too late to plant. They finally had their land, but they wouldn’t make a profit that year. Having seen other Black farmers tricked in this and all kinds of ways, Royal and Marie had saved up the first year’s mortgage money along with the down payment and tucked it secretly away. They also found the bindweed, which would eat into their profits, and which neither the seller nor the bank had told them about.

Determined to grow something anyway that first year, they started a backyard garden with late season vegetables. Some people have green thumbs. Royal and Marie’s hands were as brown as the soil, spreading richness and fertility wherever they worked. Royal weighed and measured it all, and Marie was a careful canner. They kept just enough to get them through the winter and sold the surplus. It was only a few bushels of collards, but they made a little bit of money.

They cultivated more and more acres of produce each year, but they kept that backyard garden, growing veggies in it that they didn’t grow out in the rows. To eat from. To last them through the winter. To try out new seeds. Royal kept weighing each leaf and ear and fruit, calculating how much would go into canning jars, and later into a deep freezer for the winter.

Royal didn’t spend money on luxuries and didn’t want to be seen buying them. It was never smart to seem like you were doing too well for yourself, because someone would always punish you for getting ahead. But he made an exception one particularly abundant year, when they had made that year’s payment and saved towards next year’s payment too. Five candy canes for the kids, each with a bell tied around it, bought from a traveling peddler on his way out of town. The mint candy was cooling and burning at the same time, sharp and sweet. Lou let it dance and dissolve in her mouth. Ringing the bell, she was full of joy.

The following July, she crawled under a tomato plant, breathing in the herby scent of the foliage, stopping every few inches to eat the tomatoes on the lowest branches. They burst on her tongue, warm and sweet, tangy and savory at once. She buried her jingle bell there next to the main stalk, all the way at the center.

The summer after that, a little horse figurine washed up in the ditch along the road. She shouldn’t have touched it; if it was another child’s, she might have been accused of stealing. But its coat was a beautiful brown, with red undertones, like the living soil itself, and she shoved it into the pocket of her dress before anyone could see her take it. If no one knew about it, she could have something special and not have to share it with her brothers and sisters.

Instead she shared the figurine with the one soul that understood her. The paths in the garden were marked with stones. She started at the corner of the squash patch and counted one, two, three, four, five, turned over that stone and made a depression big enough for the tiny horse. She pictured it in its bed of soil, as safe under its rock as she was tucked in her sheets.

A year later, the bindweed stole one of her buttons. Reached out and pulled it right off her dress. She didn’t see the tendrils curling around the white button as she pressed up against a tomato plant, carefully unwinding and unwrapping that very bindweed from it. She was ten, with newly nimble fingers and an improved attention span, and Royal had entrusted her with this delicate task for the first time.

She didn’t know the bindweed stole her button and was never able to figure out how it came off her dress, much less explain it to her mama. But since she was being a good helper, she didn’t get in much trouble for losing it. Later Marie had even let her select its replacement from the button box. Lou chose one that was bright green and shiny. It didn’t match the other buttons, which were small and white against the fading pink plaid of her cotton dress, but it reminded her of juicy cucumbers and zucchini.

Lou’s younger siblings avoided the garden, but she spent as much time in it as possible. She sought the secret low places that her parents were too big and busy to crawl under. The garden wasn’t work yet then; it was still magic, and Lou still knew how to see the world from its underside. She would lay on her belly under the squash plants, not caring about the prickly stems, and the leaves would fan out above her like parasols. She found caterpillars there, and bindweed silently spreading. Tender green leaves shaped like arrowheads sprouted from a thin vine that wound its way around the squash stems like a garrote.

“Louise,” her father would say, “Pull those weeds, like I told you.” Perspiration on his dark brown forehead would run like stormwater through the deep creases he made by frowning in the sun as he worked. He used a kerchief to mop the salty sweat and keep it from stinging his eyes. He was never happy until he’d weighed the tomatoes, counted the ears of corn, calculated the return on the money he’d spent on seeds and fertilizer.

Lou would lay in the undersides, where the smell of the soil was close. The mineral scent of rock and sand and clay that had been there since the beginning of time. The fungal funk of tiny bodies, vibrant and alive, working the soil from life to death to life again; of insects grazing on organic material and shredding it to bits; of fungi and bacteria hugging plants’ roots and passing them the nutrients they needed to survive. The damp and fragrant decay of every leaf and stem and stalk that had ever perished there, which contained the promise of every seedling that had yet to sprout and flourish. She would close her eyes and breathe and breathe and breathe, drawing in the scent of all her yesterdays and tomorrows. She felt rich then.

“Pull the weeds, Louise,” Royal would say to her feet sticking out from underneath the leaves. “Cut the stem right at the ground.” But often, she would keep her scissors closed beside her and touch the bindweed’s soft leaves as gently as she could, studying their streamlined shape, watching as they gave just so beneath her finger. “It doesn’t matter what I do,” Lou thought at those times. “The bindweed always comes back.”

When she was twelve, she snuck the white pawn from the chess set in the family room. She had won for the first time against her father, gotten her first hint at how it might feel to be grown up. She pushed the piece into the garden soil with the tip of her finger, her face inches away, watching as grains of earth fell in on the rounded top, wanting it to be saved and protected forever.

She didn’t say anything when the piece turned up missing, even helped to look below the furniture and in all the drawers. Royal cut a one-inch slice from the narrow end of a corn cob and squared it off. He let it dry out on the window sill, and they played with that as one of the pawns. Lou loved how the feather-dry piece barely grazed her hand, so light it was liable to blow away.

Marie died soon after that, giving birth to her sixth baby. Royal turned to Lou as the oldest child to be the trustworthy one. To be the hardest worker. To be careful with the placement of every seed, the harvest of each and every fruit. Marie had taken in washing to supplement what they made off of their crops, and they couldn’t make it without that money, so Royal started doing odd jobs—making deliveries, cutting wood, and entrusting more of the farm work to Lou.

Lou put away the magic of the garden the same way she tucked away her grief, protecting all the sharp and delicate corners, swaddling it in warm blankets and old clothes, out of sight. There were no more bells and buttons for the garden. Her gifts were well-cured compost and hose water on hot days.

“The garden can’t be magic anymore, Louise,” she told herself. “You have to help Daddy. Don’t say, ‘because Mama isn’t here.’ Just pretend she’s always been gone. Don’t say, ‘no more time to be in the undersides.’ Just go out and harvest and pull the weeds. You have to, because we can’t lose the land.”

Royal had had a hard enough time getting the mortgage to begin with, and they would snatch the farm from the family in a second if they could. Sometimes the white men came with guns in the dark, and sometimes they came with paperwork in the daylight. The law said one thing about equal treatment, but Royal and Lou had seen Black farmer after Black farmer lose their land. Several cousins. Three neighbors.

So Lou’s father had rules. Every item of produce weighed and recorded to make sure they would be on track that year. No fruit wasted, not a single one, lest that dime be the difference between a full mortgage payment and a short one. Work extra and save every penny for the bad years. Never seem like you’re getting on too poorly, or too well. Keep your head down and stay out of trouble in town. Royal would never have spoken up himself, but it was known among the young freedom fighters that they could get a plate at the back porch after dark, or even sleep warm and covered in the hayloft if they stayed quiet.

Lou came to know it as deeply as Royal did. One payment late or short and they’d take the farm. One step out of line, one petition signed or protest meeting attended, and they would come for you. You sell your produce, pay your mortgage, make your taxes. Live your life walking a tightrope, and maybe you’ll get to keep what you have.

One thing her father learned was to make a will. As a child, Royal’s best friends were two brothers living down the road on their family’s homeplace. The orchards and fields and woods and farmhouse had belonged to the whole family equally, but some real estate investment firm got a distant cousin to sell his share of the land. When the company came to collect, the court put the land up for sale. The family didn’t have the cash to buy it back, but a timber company did.

Better for one person to have it all, to keep it and take care of it, than to split it among scattered children and grandchildren who moved away to the city. Royal didn’t trust the courts any more than his neighbors, but sometimes playing a rigged game is less dangerous than not playing at all.

While Lou stayed and planted seeds and cared for the soil, her younger siblings sprouted and grew up and walked right off the farm. Their lives had grown fat like tomatoes, especially that Francine, who worked in a fancy bank and wore high heels every day. But Royal wanted to make his land stick, so the children that moved away got nothing.

Lou grew up too, but she never left the life she knew and the garden she loved. Someone had to be there for their father who had given them everything. Someone had to make sure they didn’t lose the farm. And so, Lou learned to pick the bindweed. She looked sharply for those tiny arrowhead leaves wrapped around a stalk, untwined it with delicate fingers and snipped it away with a small, sharp pair of scissors.

“We’ll never get rid of this bindweed completely, Louise,” Royal would say. “But if we catch it in time, we can save the plant. And if we keep after it hard enough, we might manage to keep it out of the fields.”

Every day she watched her father pour his love deep into the land as if replenishing the groundwater. Most farmers would till the soil, but Lou and Royal left it alone, only turning what they had to in order to plant. Royal never left any soil uncovered, couldn’t bear to do it any more than he would have let one of his children go without clothing. When there was nothing left to plant, Lou dug her hand into the sack of clover seed they kept dry in the corner of the root cellar.

And the family did hold on to the farm, despite the odds. Once the mortgage was paid off, Lou convinced Royal to let her take on the odd jobs instead. She took on more and more of the farm work too, and took the produce to sell at farmers markets, until she was doing it all herself. Giving and giving. Until her knees began to creak and her back began to ache. And still giving more.

They kept playing chess through the years, sitting down for a game a few times each winter, sometimes Lou winning, sometimes Royal. At some point, Lou started winning every single game. Royal would hoard his pieces and keep them to the back, even forfeiting turns instead of moving a piece he didn’t want to. Or else he would put the king out in front of the other pieces and try to use it to fight.

All these years you played a slow and careful game and you won, Lou wanted to tell him. It’s okay to let go a little. We’re all fine. Eventually, she slipped the game to the furthest corner of the closet and they didn’t play anymore.

Though she said she would stop after her mother died, Lou did entrust something else to the garden’s safekeeping, one last time when she was a teenager. Lou’s favorite cousin, who had grown up right here, right down the road, came back to visit. The kids gathered near the honeysuckle, surrounded by its perfume, picking blossoms and sucking out the sweet, floral nectar just like the bees. The cousin told stories of a world beyond the farm, beyond their town. Places that Lou knew about from books and school but could only dream of visiting.

Cities where more money was spent in a day than her town would see in a decade. Every day walking past hundreds of people you had never seen before and would never see again.

An ocean so big you couldn’t see the end of it. Churning water that felt peaceful. Waves and sand that wore down broken bottles.

The cousin had a piece of sea glass for each of them. Lou’s fingers whispered over the surface her piece, taking in the shape of its curves. To turn something sharp and painful into something smooth and soft and comforting in its beauty seemed to her an impossibility. The family survived by knowing that sharp meant sharp, and you’d better not touch or you’d get hurt. Don’t reach, don’t talk or dream out of turn. Don’t call attention to yourself, don’t make waves.

Her cousin promised them there were other options, but Lou still didn’t think she wanted to leave her family’s land. She’d have to risk losing something she knew she loved, just to find out whether or not there was something better. That didn’t feel like freedom to her. But the dream of strangers and ocean waves was precious, so she planted it in the garden, hoping one day it would bear fruit.

Night falls and Lou is still sitting on the porch. The planks beneath her are soft from years of footfall and warm from the day’s sunlight. She traces the raised grain of the wood with her fingertips and tells herself again that this small porch and all the rest of the farm are truly theirs now, and have been for some time. With some trepidation, she tries to let her heart settle into that knowledge. Not reminding her father of the fact, but knowing it within herself and believing it. It’s like dipping her toe into a deliciously warm bath. Her bones ache to slip all the way in, but she’s scared to let go.

She rolls the jingle bell between fingers and palm, listening to the tiny ball within as it tries to ring out against the muted sides. Every now and then she holds it by the string and shakes it, letting the chimes mix with the starlight.

Jingle, jingle. What now? the bell seems to say. Jingle, jingle. There’s joy for you too, Lou.

The next day, she is picking green peppers and one of them rattles. She drops the basket right there, takes the pepper in her palms and presses her thumbs into the flesh until they burst through with a juicy snap. Flecks of vivid green speckle her shirt, and a bright, vegetal scent fills her nose as she tears the pepper open. Inside is a white chess pawn. Lou brings it into the house, puts it back in the crumbling paperboard box in the back corner of the closet and slips the airy piece of corn cob into her pocket. It makes her feel so light, she doesn’t notice as a sprig of bindweed stuck to her shoe takes the opportunity to stay behind in the closet.

She lies on her side one day, mesmerized by a tiny horse galloping in circles on the leaf of a cucumber plant, trampling yellow and black-spotted cucumber beetles with its hooves. Heart ready to burst, breath caught in her throat. She stays still, still, still as delight spreads over her skin.

The wind rustling in green leaves begins to whisper through Lou’s open window as she drifts off at night. She dreams of the brown, yellow and red earth underneath the garden plants, and she smells the minerals and living decay as she sleeps. Waking, Lou sends her thoughts down into that soil like roots.

When the corn comes ripe, one ear has kernels made of golden glass, shining with the sun underneath its frosted surface. “Did I miss out by staying put?” she asks herself, the glass ear real and heavy in her hand. “Maybe not,” she answers. “Maybe some people don’t have to travel the world to be free.”

The next morning, Lou skips breakfast and sets off for town immediately after watering. The lawyers are coming to the library to do their pro bono work today, and she gets a spot near the front of the line. She has to make sure the farm goes to someone who will keep it and care for it.

When she comes back hours later, Royal is trying to drag the hose from the side of the house to the garden, his brows pressed down tight over his eyes in concentration. He jerks and jerks with one hand, trying to keep hold of the porch railing with the other, his legs spindly beneath him.

Lou begins to trot and then to run, the brim of her straw hat catching the air and flying off onto the dusty road. She reaches him just as he gives one last wild flail, losing hold of the hose and flying backwards. She can’t stop him from falling, but she gets her hands behind his head and cushions it from cracking against the stair, keeping hold of him even as her back explodes in pain.

His skin is hot and dry, not a drop of sweat despite the brilliant noon sun. His face is twisted in confusion, his eyes unable to focus on Lou as she leans over him.

“Someone has to take care of that garden,” he says. Lou shakes her head, a lump rising up in her throat. She swallows it down.

“I know, Daddy, but we don’t water at noon, remember? I watered this morning, and I’ll go out again later.”

“Someone has to—” He tries to get up, but fades immediately.

“Shh, it’s alright. The garden is fine. The tomatoes are perfect this year. Everyone is fine,” she says. “Let’s go upstairs.”

She scoops her arm below his shoulders, pulling him up as he gets his feet beneath him. He is as thin as a beanstalk, as light as an okra seed.

It’s an effort to get upstairs. Lou doesn’t know if she’s dripping sweat or tears, doesn’t know if she’s crying from the pain in her back or the drying leaf that has been substituted for her father’s body.

She helps him into the bed, where he recovers from the heat stroke, but never regains his strength. In moments of delirium he tries to get up, asks her question after question.

“Did you water?”

“Yes, Daddy, I did.”

“Did you count the ears of corn?”

“Yes, Daddy, you can rest now.”

He puts his hand on her shoulder, fixes her eyes with a desperate strength that seems like clarity. “Are we going to make our payment this year? Is there going to be enough?”

“We paid off the mortgage thirty years ago. Do you remember? We went to the bank.”

Lou remembers. She remembers the tears in his eyes, clutching his hat in his hands, so happy he didn’t quite know what to do. But also lost because he didn’t quite know what to do. A man in his early sixties, Royal’s whole life had been making that mortgage payment. He kept asking the loan officer if that was all, if it was really done.

“Daddy, the mortgage is paid. We’re all going to be fine now. It’s okay to rest,” Lou says. Sometimes it’s enough to calm him, and sometimes he worries himself to sleep.

In the weeks since it arrived, the unnoticed sprig of bindweed has tentatively sent out a tiny root tip, seeking the dusty, dirty spaces between the floorboards and feeding on the nutrients in the wood. Its roots have also found a thin pipe and worked their delicate, forceful way through the weak spots to touch the cool water inside.

Now this garden astronaut sends out a shoot from its top, along with a paper-thin leaf of the softest green. The bindweed works its way up and up, climbing the walls, anchoring in door jambs and cracks in the plaster, up to the second floor bedroom of one who is both adversary and friend.

Now that Royal can’t go out anymore, it is the bindweed that cares enough to come to him. Royal has been the life of the garden as much as the leaves and the roots and the soil. For years he worked his love through every stem and blossom. And so the bindweed sees him like it does any other plant: as part of itself.

One morning Royal does not wake. A single vine of bindweed is wrapped around his wrist, bright green and healthy. Though it is too late, Lou gets the scissors anyway and carefully cuts it away.

Lou remembers being a child in the undersides, close to the bindweed. She knew the squash would die if she didn’t pull the bindweed away, but she also knew that the bindweed was hungry too. Maybe she was as prepared for this at ten as she is now.

She clutches her Christmas bell.

Jingle, jingle. Like when we slice a head of cabbage from its stem.

Jingle, jingle. Like when the corn dies back in the fall.

Jingle, jingle. Like when we pull up a pepper plant that the bindweed got.

Lou’s siblings come back for the funeral. They bury Royal next to Marie, in the family plot way out in the corner of the open field by the trees. His will states, “To my dearest Lou, I leave my land. She has loved it as I have.”

Lou’s whole life has been keeping hold of the land he bought. Now she’s in her late sixties, the land is hers, and she doesn’t quite know what to do. Francine and the others sit next to her, hold her hand, offer to let her stay at their places in the city. They mean well, but they don’t really understand.

The day after her siblings leave, Lou finds her white button. She chips a tooth on it in one of the largest okras and spits it clattering back onto the plate. The plain cotton threads from her childhood dress have been replaced with a fine golden cord running a ring through the two holes.

The pink plaid dress is long gone, but the green button is still in the button box. When she handed the dress down, it was cut off and replaced with one that matched better, for the sister who didn’t want to be teased.

A sharp pain shoots from Lou’s hips to her knees as she rises from the table. She hasn’t been able to stand up fully straight since catching her father. Lou returns the white button to the button box and pulls out the green one that she has treasured all these years. With a few quick stitches, she attaches it to her shirt front like a brooch.

Putting her button back on makes her feel more like herself than she has since her mother died more than five decades ago. “All these years, all this work, it hasn’t only been for Daddy. It’s been for the garden itself, too,” she says to herself. “But if I could have it my way, I’d just as soon go back to how it was when I was little. There’s no need to pack this grief away like I did with Mama.”

Lou leaves five letters in the mailbox for the postman to pick up, so her siblings will know she’s gone and not coming back. Then she returns at last to her dearest friend.

The garden is a green jewel in the sunlight. The zucchini have grown to the size of her forearms. The tomatoes are bursting on the vine. The bees float on the sun-thick air, their thighs still fat with pollen. Like she has always done, she will give the garden herself. Her back aches anyway, and she would like to lie down.

She crawls underneath the leaves. The soft soil of the garden fills in every curve and bend of her spine, rising to meet her. It’s like slipping into a hot bath.

She waits there as the bindweed takes over the squash plants, as high summer passes into September. She breathes in the green and the damp of the soil. The earth and plants cover over her body. Roots nestle in her upturned palm. Her flesh shrivels like a raisin. Her body shrinks down to something like an insect’s egg.

Lou’s siblings clear the house and carry out her will. The garden browns and the frost comes while Lou remains, a tiny seed in the soil, hibernating. Incubating.

The frosts subside and the new folks begin to plant. Lou is now amongst the overwintering carrots with her feet down beneath her and the very crown of her head poking above the ground. But she doesn’t wait to be harvested. As soon as the ground warms, she stretches her arms and legs into the soil around her, her fingernails filling with dirt. She pulls herself up and out, her tiny body warming in the early spring sun.

She looks different now, just as the seed looks different from the plant, the plant looks different from the flower, and the flower looks different from the fruit. Her skin is the exact red-brown of the soil and her deep brown eyes shine with a joyful knowing. Her hair is a crown of coils in grey and silver and bright white nestling around her horns, which start behind her ears and spiral back to tapered points, like two feathers in a cap. Her knees are as resilient as they were when she was eight, and her bare feet are cushioned by tough callouses. Her clothes are the brown of dead leaves. In her pocket is a tiny bell, and right in the middle of her shirtfront is a single bright green button the size of a match head, sparkling as it catches the morning light.

“Francine can eat her heart out,” she says, and also, “There’s magic to be done.”

She carves out a burrow for herself in the soil of the garden. Then she visits the newly sprouted seedlings, which reach up to her waist. By day she cups their tender green leaves in her hands and whispers to them. By night she tickles their roots so that they grow out happy and strong. On cloudy days, she touches each leaf with the light in her eyes. When the weather is too dry, she sprinkles tiny handfuls of water near their stalks.

When the plants grow tall, she moves house, camping high in the corn where the stalks meet the growing ears, folding the leaves down around her like tent flaps. She cuts through the skins of cherry tomatoes with sharp pebbles to scoop out the pulp and reaches into squash flowers to get at the nectar, her arms emerging fat with pollen. She picks aphid eggs off the backs of leaves and bursts them between her teeth, relishing the salty, meaty pop. She puts her entire face into kernels of corn, devouring the sweet, sticky flesh.

The bindweed vines are as thick as saplings to her now. She breaks off a sliver of an abandoned snail shell and runs the edge against a rock until it is as sharp as a scythe. She crops the vines to tiny stumps at ground level, then climbs up like a logger in a tree, sawing off chunks of vine to free the plants.

“You never learned how to love, did you?” she asks the bindweed. “You’re just as tender as the plants you live on, and you need this garden just as much as you destroy it.”

She knows that the broken roots of bindweed can sprout new vines, and these she seeks out while they are tiny, stomping them back into the ground. That she still has to do this work doesn’t surprise her, not really. Without the struggle, there is no life. And without life, there is no joy.

In the high heat of summer, she digs a cave into an eggplant growing close to the stalk, forgotten and left to grow gargantuan. The spongy flesh is cool and not too humid, with an astringent scent. The seeds have a tender, nutty crunch, laced through with bitterness. The plumpest ones she saves in her pockets for planting next spring.

Lou watches the girl from the house walk up and down the paths, touching each leaf and flower, pressing her face against the foliage when she thinks no one is looking. The girl turns over tomato leaves, pats the white aphid eggs clustered beneath as lightly as her fingers will allow, then turns the leaves back over again without killing a single one.

Lou chose the new family because she wanted to keep the land in Black hands, and because she knows these folks have more than she and her father did. They have college degrees, and they know how to solicit donations and apply for grants. They have a team to help with the work, not just the one family. They have a plan to feed the community. And now they have the land. Outright. They won’t have to live looking over their shoulder.

When the girl begins to leave small gifts in the garden, Lou holds on to them. The friendship bracelet she made at camp. A single silver earring, shaped like a teardrop. Love letters on loose leaf paper, written and folded and never delivered.

When the grown-ups start leaving gifts, Lou receives those as well. A golden dollar from their first produce sale that spring. Heaped teaspoons of braised collard greens that fill her nose with the sharp scent of vinegar and make her mouth water. Thimbles of strawberry wine, crisp and honeyed on her tongue. Finger-sized loaves of cornbread so freshly-baked that steam wafts out earthy and sweet when Lou breaks them open. Although the new folks don’t ever see her, they sense that there is another pair of brown hands spreading richness and fertility, working the land alongside them.

Lou keeps what the bindweed steals, too. A sticker once worn proudly on a shirt. A lucky penny, lifted out of a pocket. A necklace, its fragile chain broken.

When the garden starts to yellow and brown, Lou returns to her burrow, nibbling on the starchy roots of the dying plants. Using her snail-shell scythe like a pick, she hollows out niches along the earthen walls, carefully placing in them the colorful bracelet curled into a spiral, the love letters lined up like family albums on a shelf, the shiny golden dollar like a little sun, the earring dripping like water. Though she knows they are only borrowed, she cherishes each present, keeping them safe, waiting for the right moment to give them back. The bindweed’s items have their own place in the dark corners at the end of her burrow, where the open space narrows and rejoins the earth. She’ll help the bindweed give those back too, whenever the green garrote decides it’s time.