A Gardener’s Last Seeds

Chapter One

Fourteen Days

The foliage was at its peak and the back roads of Vermont were showing off. Marybeth had her window cracked despite the chill, letting the October air fill the car with the clean, earthy smell of fallen leaves and cold dirt. She loved this time of year more than any other. There was something about autumn that made her feel like mother nature was throwing one last party, dropping her mask in a blaze of color before settling into the quiet of winter.

“Here. Turn here,” she instructed.

Josh was driving. She had relinquished the wheel when she realized she was paying more attention to the yard sale signs along the road than to the road itself. He didn’t mind. He liked driving her Jeep, even though the air conditioning had given up the ghost last year and the radio cut in and out around each curve. It was a beautiful day and neither one of them was in a hurry to get anywhere in particular.

“There is it,” he pointed ahead at a lawn filled with household items. Even though the weekend was “vacation”, Marybeth just couldn’t resist the yard sale hunt. She complained about it being work, but Josh knew she secretly loved rooting through other people’s things looking for treasure.

Marybeth was out of the jeep, sorting through things before Josh could put it in park.

“Here. Hold this,” she said handing him an old mirror, the paint peeling off a wood molding frame. “And this.” She handed him a bundle of fabric.

“What’s this?”

“It’s wool, cut in strips. Most likely left over from a braided rug, or one that never got finished. I can use it for a dozen different things, probably.”

Josh laughed and soldiered on.

“Look. What do you think about this?” She ran her fingers over a dining room buffet cabinet.

Josh knew she was asking if it would fit in the jeep.

“Nope. Not unless we empty everything else out. And besides, you can probably find one down your way easy enough.”

Marybeth brought her human yard sale cart over to the host, paid and headed back to the car.

“Is that it then,” he asked as he pulled away from the curb.

She pretended she didn’t hear the question.

They had driven up from Connecticut the day before for a long weekend. It was Josh’s idea. He’d been working hard on his novel and needed a break, and Marybeth had been running her shop seven days a week for the better part of a month. They were both overdue for some time together that didn’t involve store hours and deadlines.

“How long has it been since we went somewhere that wasn’t your place or mine?” Josh asked.

“Too long,” she admitted. She was watching a red barn slide past the window, its paint faded but dignified. A hand-painted sign out front read APPLES $4/BAG. “We should get some of those on the way back.”

“Absolutely.”

They rode in comfortable silence for a while. Marybeth thought about how easy it was to be with Josh when they were actually together. They’d been doing the long-distance thing for over three years now and it had settled into something that worked well enough but inspired no one. It was the in-between that was hard. The phone calls that tried too hard to be meaningful. The texts that couldn’t convey tone. The Sunday evenings when one of them packed a bag and drove away. She knew they needed to talk about it. She also knew that neither one of them wanted to ruin a perfectly good weekend by bringing it up.

He glanced at the time on his phone which was attached to the dashboard. “Are you ready to find a place for dinner?”

“Almost. Just one more sale.”

“We’re supposed to be relaxing. You said no yard sales.”

She was focused on reading the street signs as they passed by. “I said no yard sales on Sunday,” she said off-hand. “It’s Saturday.”

“That’s not what you said.”

“It’s what I meant.”

He shook his head and smiled. He knew better than to argue. Marybeth and yard sales were like a hound with a scent. Once she picked up the trail, there was no calling her off.

She looked down at the notepad in her hand, then up again. “Turn here,” she said suddenly.

“Where?”

“Here. Right here.” She pointed at a side road she’d spotted just as they were about to pass it.

Josh made the turn with a mild protest. “But there’s no sign.”

“The ad said it’s here. This is that odd listing, that wasn’t with any of the other ones.”

“Okay. But this is the last one. Please?”

“Promise.”

They wound down a country road that narrowed as it went, the pavement giving way to hard-packed dirt. Farmhouses sat well back from the road, separated by stone walls and old-growth maples in full autumn fashion.

She’d been to four sales already conveniently located along their scenic drive and historic spots. She had a system, even on vacation. She would scan the local online listings over coffee, map out a route that minimized backtracking, and be at the first sale by eight o’clock. Josh had learned to sleep through the early planning phase. Today they had left the rental cottage early and grabbed breakfast mid-morning, which is how they ended up here on this particular road at this particular time on a Saturday afternoon in October.

“I think this is a dead end, M,” Josh observed as the road narrowed further.

“That’s usually where the best stuff is.”

He gave her a look.

“It is,” she insisted.

They came around one more curve and both of them went quiet at the same time. There, at the end of the road, was a small farmhouse with green shutters and a wraparound porch. Nothing unusual about that. What was unusual was the garden.

It was the wrong time of year for what they were looking at. Everything around them was deep into autumn. Reds, oranges, the papery brown of spent leaves. But the land surrounding this house was alive. Lush, green, bursting with growth in every direction. Tomato plants hung heavy with fruit. Sunflowers stood six feet tall, their faces turned toward the afternoon sun. Rows of vegetables stretched out behind the house in a display of abundance that belonged to July, not October.

Josh stopped the car.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” he asked.

“I’m hoping I’m not.”

He turned to her. She had her serious face on. He’d seen this look before. He’d seen it the day she came home with a dead soldier’s helmet. He’d seen it at Brimfield when she’d encountered John Hancock at the edge of a flea market. He knew what it meant but he asked anyway.

“M? Is this one of my mother’s yard sales?” He was referring to the three other yard sales that had been orchestrated by his deceased mother in an effort to help spirits move on.

She was staring at the porch. “It sure looks that way. There’s a table,” she said quietly.

Sure enough, a small wooden table sat in the grass at the end of the path to the porch, with a single item on it. And seated in a chair at the top of the stairs, as still as a photograph, was an elderly Black woman in a worn cotton dress and apron. Her gray hair was pulled back under a kerchief. She had the kind of face that looked like it had been carved by decades of sun and wind and work. Her hands were folded in her lap. She was watching them.

Marybeth let out a sigh. “I don’t know that I’m up for this.” her voice was barely above a whisper.

“You don’t have to.” Josh’s tone was barely above hers.

“Yes, I do. You know I do. We’ve both seen how this goes.” Her irritation shook her out of her daze. “Your mother has a task for us. It’s not usually negotiable.” She reached for the door handle, then stopped. “Stay here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. No. Stay anyway.”

She got out of the Jeep and walked toward the house, her boots crunching on the gravel. The air was different here. Warmer. It smelled like summer. Rich dirt, green things and something sweet, like honeysuckle, though there was none in sight. The impossible garden bordered both sides of the path to the house. She could feel the life in it, almost hear it growing. It made no sense, but she didn’t expect it to.

The old woman watched her approach without moving. Up close, Marybeth could see that her brown eyes were sharp and clear. A kerosene lamp hung from the porch post. The floorboards needed repair.

“Good afternoon,” Marybeth said, stopping a few feet from the table.

“Good afternoon,” the woman replied. Her voice was low and warm, with the unhurried rhythm of someone who had long since stopped rushing for anyone. “I was hoping you’d find your way here.”

“Let me guess. An old woman told you I’d come.”

A smile crossed the woman’s face, brief and knowing. “Something like that.”

“What’s your name?” Marybeth asked.

“Tula.”

“I’m Marybeth. Most people call me MB these days.”

“Marybeth is a fine name. I’ll use it if you don’t mind.”

Marybeth almost smiled at that. Her grandmother would have said the same thing.

She turned her attention to the table. On it sat a small clay ginger jar. The shadow of decorative paint worn off by years of use reflected the sun. Beside it lay a thin notebook she hadn’t seen from the road. On the cover was a hand drawn tomato with seeds scattered around it. The words Spring Planting were written across the bottom.

“What are those?” she asked, even though she knew better. Asking meant engaging, and engaging meant she was in it. Again.

“Seeds,” Tula said. “And the instructions for growing them. Three generations of my family cultivated these seeds on this land. My mother started it, I continued it, and my daughter after me. We bred them for this soil. Rocky, thin, stubborn soil that nobody else wanted. And we made it come to life.”

Tula’s gaze drifted out over the garden. Marybeth followed it. Even in the impossible lushness, she could see the order in it. Careful rows of plants placed with intention, radiating out from the house in line with the setting sun.

“My family bought this land in 1902,” Tula continued. “Forty-two acres. My parents were one generation out of slavery. They put everything they had into this dirt. People told them it was worthless land. They didn’t care. It was theirs.”

Marybeth felt the weight of the statement settle over her.

“Now it’s about to be taken,” Tula said. The warmth in her voice cooled to something harder. “My great-granddaughter doesn’t know. She doesn’t even know this land exists. A man bought up pieces of it from relatives who didn’t know what they had, and now he’s forcing a sale of the whole thing through the court. Two weeks from now, a judge will hand my family’s land to a stranger who wants to build on it. Progress he says.”

Marybeth closed her eyes. She knew what was coming next. “You need me to find her, don’t you?” she said.

“I need you to find her,” Tula confirmed. “And give her these.” She indicated the jar and the planting guide. “The land matters, but these seeds matter more. What my family built is right in there.” She lifted up her hand to point directly at the clay jar. “A hundred years of knowing this soil and what it can do. If the land goes, the garden goes. And if the garden goes, this knowledge dies with it.”

“Does your great granddaughter have a name? An address? Anything?”

“Her name is Della. She works with the soil but doesn’t know what she has. She lives near here.” Tula paused. “That’s all I know.”

“Of course it is,” Marybeth muttered, more to herself than to Tula. It was never enough information. It was never a name, an address, and a phone number. It was always just enough to make you crazy and just short of enough to make it easy.

Tula was watching her, patient and still. Then she said, quietly, “I held onto this land my whole life and beyond. I held on too tight, maybe. But I need to let go now. I can’t move on until someone knows what we built here.”

The words touched Marybeth’s heart. She had heard versions of them before, from Josh’s mother, from the young soldier, from John Hancock. The dead held on to what they loved, and it kept them tethered to a world they no longer belonged to. Letting go was the price of moving on. Marybeth understood this. She’d spent years learning it herself.

She looked down at the clay jar. She knew that the moment she touched it, there would be a vision. There was always a vision. She steadied herself, took a breath, and picked it up.

The jar was warm in her hands. Warmer than it should have been in the October air. The heat traveled up her arms, familiar now, almost welcome, and the world began to blur at the edges.

*

She was standing in the same garden, but it was summer, decades ago. The Depression maybe, judging by the truck in the yard. The farmhouse was newer with paint fresh and a solid porch. A young Black woman Marybeth knew was Tula, was moving down the rows with a basket, picking tomatoes and beans with practiced hands. Her belly was round with pregnancy. Sweat glistened on her forehead. Around her, the garden was magnificent, overflowing with produce that seemed to glow in the August heat.

A neighbor appeared at the stone wall, a gaunt white woman with two children clinging to her skirt. She looked ashamed to be there, head bowed, glancing up. Tula saw her, straightened up, and walked over without a word. She handed the woman the full basket. The woman started to cry. Tula put a hand on her arm and said something Marybeth couldn’t hear. The woman nodded, wiped her eyes, and walked away with the food. Tula went back to picking, starting a new basket.

The scene shifted. Now it was nighttime. An older woman, Tula’s mother, Marybeth sensed, sat at a kitchen table by the light of a kerosene lamp. She was bent over a ledger, writing thoughtfully, deliberately. It was the same careful script that Marybeth had seen on the notebook cover. Beside her on the table were small cloth bundles, each tied with string and labeled in pencil. Seeds. She was wrapping and cataloging seeds, one variety at a time, recording dates and notes about each season’s performance. Her hands moved with the purpose of a woman who understood that what she was doing mattered.

Then the scene lurched again. More contemporary.  An elderly Black man sat at a simple kitchen table signing a quit claim deed.

*

Marybeth gasped as reality snapped back. She stumbled and reached for the table, the clay jar held tightly to her chest, the seeds rattling softly inside. She looked over at the chair.

Tula was gone. The chair sat empty on a weathered porch with leaves blown into the corners.  The impossible, glorious, midsummer garden was brown. Dormant. Dead stalks and dry leaves, just like every other field they had driven by today. The air had turned cold.

She stood there for a moment, clutching the clay jar, her pulse still hammering. Then she picked the book up off a rickety table and walked back to the Jeep.

Josh was already out of the car, halfway to her.

“M, what happened? You went completely still and got that purple aura. Then everything disappeared and it was just you standing there. Are you okay?” He took her arm.

“Yeah.” She let him lead her to the car. She sat in the passenger seat with the door open, her feet still on the ground, the clay ginger jar in her lap. Josh crouched beside her.

Josh crouched beside her.

He said, “It looks like our Vermont getaway just got a lot more complicated.”

She nodded with a sigh that might have been closer to a huff.

Josh let out a slow breath. He didn’t ask any more questions. He just tucked her into the passenger seat, walked around to the driver’s side, and started the car.

They pulled away from the farmhouse in silence. In the sideview mirror, Marybeth watched the dead garden recede from view. She held the clay pot tightly in her lap, the seeds shifting inside with every bump.