SEEDFOLKS (3-WENDELL) by Paul Fleischman

WENDELL


My phone doesn’t ring much, which suits me fine. That’s how I got the news about our boy, shot dead like a dog in the street. And the word, last year, about my wife’s car wreck. I can’t hear a phone and not jerk inside. When Ana called I was still asleep. Phone calls that wake me up are the worst.


“Get up here quick!” she says. I live on the ground floor and watch out for her a little. We’re the only white people left in the building. I ran up the stairs. I could tell it was serious. I prayed I wouldn’t find her dead. When I got there, she looked perfectly fine. She dragged me over to the window. “Look down there!” she says. “They’re dying!”


”What?” I yelled back.


“The plants!” she says.


I was mad. She gave me some binoculars and told me all about the Chinese girl. I found the plants and got them in focus. There were four of them in a row, still little. They were wilted. Leaves flopped flat on the ground.


“What are they?” she asked.


“Some kind of beans.” I grew up on a little farm in Kentucky. “ But she planted ‘em was too early. She’s lucky those seeds even came up.”


“But they did,” said Ana. “And it’s up to us to save them.”

 It was a weekend in May and hot. You’d have thought that those beans were hers. They needed water, especially in that heat. She said the girl hadn’t come in four days-sick, probably, or gone out of town. Ana had twisted her ankle and couldn’t manage the stairs. She pointed to a pitcher. “Fill that up and soak them good. Quick now.


School janitors take too much bossing all week to listen to an extra helping on weekends. I stared at her one long moment, then took my time about filling the pitcher.


I walked down the stairs and into the lot and found the girl’s plants. You don’t plant beans till the weather’s hot. Then I was what had kept her seed from freezing. The refrigerator in front of them had bounced the sunlight back on the soil, heating it up like an oven. I bent down and gave the dirt a feel. It was hard packed and light colored. I studied the plants. Leaves shaped like spades in a deck of cards. Definitely beans. I scraped up a ring of dirt around the first plant, to hold the water and any rain that fell. I picked up the pitcher and poured the water slowly. Then I heard something move and spun around. The girl was there, stone-still, ten feet away, holding her own water jar.


She hadn’t seen me behind the refrigerator. She looked afraid for her life. Maybe she thought I’d jump up and grab her. I gave her a smile and showed her that I was just giving her plants some water. This made her eyes go even bigger. I stood up slowly and backed away. I smiled again. She watched me leave. We never spoke one word.


I walked back there that evening and checked on the beans. They’d picked themselves up and were looking fine. I saw that she’d made a circle of dirt around the other three plants. Out of nowhere the words form the Bible came into my head:”And a little child shall lead them.” I didn’t know way at first. Then I did. There’s plenty about my life I can’t change. Can’t bring the dead back to life on this earth. Can’t change myself into a millionaire. But a patch of ground in this trashy lot-I can change that. Can change it big. Better to put my time into that than moaning about the other all day. That little grammar-school girl showed me that.


The lot had buildings on three sides. I walked around and picked myself out a spot that wouldn’t be shaded too much. I dragged the garbage off to the side and tossed out the biggest pieces of broken glass. I looked over my plot, squatted down, and fingered the soil awhile.


That Monday I brought a shovel home from work.