Gonna get through this one as fast as I can. Try to make you understand why Servant is the way he is. Try to show you the most important thing in his young life and how it was taken from him. He doesn’t really want to talk about it. Never has wanted to talk about it, but stories about love are important. Love of others and love of things, love of feelings and love of self. All of that is so important, so here we go.
When we were young, Grandma and Grandpa’s house was the place to be. There was fun to be had there. Uncle Ball lived there and there were stories to be listened to and company from out of town and holidays and a huge yard, fenced in and perfect. It was a magical place.
They had made a patio in the center of the yard with bricks, and a picnic table sat there, near a grill. The table cloth was red checkered, plastic and stapled to the table, and when you ate there, you got paper plates. But these paper plates were handed to you in wicker supports so the plate didn’t crumble. It was my favorite place to be in the world, and then it wasn’t.
Grandma and Grandpa moved to Waynesville, and all of the groups of people telling stories were gone. The crowds of people eating at the picnic table were gone and where they had all been was our family, Uncle Ball still in high school, and Mice.
Never noticed the mice when I visited, but now that I lived there we had to deal with hundreds of mice.
But the thing that survived Grandma and Grandpa leaving was the garden.
Let me try to get this right. The garden was about thirty feet by fifty feet, cut into about sixteen rows, and it was pretty amazing.
Cucumbers, tomatoes, snap peas, green peppers, red peppers, cherry tomatoes. There were so many different vegetables, and we needed them. We needed them to get by. We could not afford vegetables, and so it was very important to keep this garden going.
Less and I had chores for sure, but Rose soon realized she did not want to garden at all. Mumble wasn’t going to do it, so one of us had to get it done. It fell to me. All I had to do was pick up dog shit in the back yard and work the garden.
The dog shit was Joe, but the garden was done by Servant.
Truth was, none of the other alters wanted it. And there was a lot of work to be done. A garden this big has a lot of weeding to do. The weeds have to be pulled out by the root or they grow back with a vengeance. The vegetables need to be picked when they are ready, and not after. Guessing when that was was sometimes impossible.
Tomatoes are popular to make, but they produce a lot and you can very quickly find yourself with twenty tomatoes. They get heavy before they get ripe, so Servant would harvest them and set them in windows to be kissed by the sun. They would get ripe, and we would have a lot of tomatoes to throw away.
Cucumbers were a different story. The family needed about two a week in order to be satisfied, but the plants yielded quite a few and they never went to waste. Servant ate them right off the vines. Rub the dirt off and walk his garden chewing on cucumbers.
The growing, the planning, and the picking was soothing to Servant and he realized that this is what he loved.
Kids like my siblings and I do not get as much money as we would like, but every now and then we would end up with a dollar or five. Servant would set it back for seeds. Always when he was ready to go to the store, the dollars were gone. He never understood it. He would get about ten dollars saved up and then it would disappear.
Other alters were spending his money. So he started hiding his money from himself. None of that made sense, but it worked, and soon he was growing other vegetables. He had green onions. He had bigger cucumbers, but the one that really got him was the lettuce. It was just a tiny brush of a thing as it started to grow.
It looked like a stack of leaves. And he found a spray brush and kept it wet. Spraying down the garden with water was done every two or three days, but the lettuce was special. A normal spraying would turn it to mush, so he held each leaf and, with a spray bottle, he would water it slowly and deliberately.
He told them all he was growing lettuce and his family laughed at him. He suddenly became aware that they were not interested. Then it dawned on him that he would get the lettuce all to himself.
He started day dreaming about his lettuce. He would take each leaf very slowly from the head, which was tiny, and he would rinse it well. He would pat it dry and he would make his sandwich.
Bologna with mayo, cheese, and his lettuce on white bread. When he thought about it, he would often get so excited he would cry.
Servant had been born when we were four and Bramble had left Rose in that tiny basement apartment. His life had been about serving her and making her happy. He did everything for her. But this he could do for himself. No one cared about his garden as long as he kept harvesting when things were ready and he didn’t ask for money.
Servant had finally found something he loved.
Now outside of the garden to the right was a hole the size of a basketball. Grass didn’t grow there. Nothing grew there. When he tried to plant something there to prove to the family that it could be done, the plant died instantly.
The legend said that a quart of oil had been poured in that hole and that was just dead ground. Servant would not give up on it. He told himself that one day he would dig up that hole. Go as far as three feet down and get dirt from the side of the house and fill it in. He would be able to expand his garden, and he would have saved that spot of ground.
Something about never being able to do that still bothers him.
Well Uncle Wrath got the idea to take Lioness, Tigress, and I to Waynesville for one month that summer, and everyone was excited except Servant. Uncle Wrath would be there in two weeks, and Servant spent his time laying in the garden between the rows and talking to his plants. He would sing Bonnie Tyler songs to them and stare up at the blue sky. And he was content. He was happy for the first time in his life.
When we all piled into Uncle Wrath’s car, Servant looked at his mother.
“You gotta water it every other day. The tomatoes and the cherry tomatoes need the most weeding for some reason, and please don’t touch the lettuce. It is not ready yet. It needs a lot of water, but water it with the spray bottle.”
Wrath honked. “Get in the car now.”
“I’ll write you and if there are any problems, you let me know right away.”
“Jesse, get your ass in this car or I’m leaving you behind.”
“Talk to them,” Servant said.
He wrote two letters. The other alters wrote a lot more, but Servant wrote two. He asked how his garden was doing and he told them what plants would be ready and told them again to spray the lettuce clean.
Rose assured him that everything was going well. She said she was actually enjoying the garden, and maybe when he came back, they could do it together.
But it takes about three weeks for grass that thick to grow.
While he was gone, they tore out his garden. They ripped up every plant, took what was ripe, and threw the rest away. His lettuce they just walked over. They just thought it was a pile of leaves. When he came back, they had grown grass over his garden.
They gave Servant the job of mowing the yard.
He never tried to grow anything ever again.
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Jesse Teller 
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