by Chris Scott
What I did was after I finished watering my garden plot I dumped three big jugs of bleach in the rain barrel and then split town for a week. When I got back the following Friday, I entered the community garden gate to find every other plot but mine wilted, scorched, and somewhere between mostly and completely dead.
“Can you believe this?” Russ said, standing before his decaying plot. Russ had barely said more than two words to me before then. I doubt he even knew my name.
“What happened?” I asked, trying to feign disbelief. “I’ve been in Chicago this entire time.”
“Some kind of fungus or disease or something,” Russ said, looking forlornly at his browned and shriveled veggies, still holding the hose connected to the rain barrel. “I thought it just wasn’t getting enough water, but I’ve been watering damn near every other day and it’s not helping at all.”
“Maybe you over-watered?” I suggested.
“In this heat? With how little rainfall we’ve been getting? I don’t think it’s possible to overwater.” Russ walked the hose back and left it in a coil by the rain barrel, then made his way back before stopping abruptly at my plot which was full of thriving tomato plants, summer squash, cucumbers, basil, eggplants, and peppers. A lush, solitary oasis amidst all the vegetative carnage around us.
When I turned to Russ he was looking right at me, eyebrow cocked, and I knew I was busted. But what he said instead was, “Have you been using pesticides?” Everyone knows that pesticides are strictly forbidden in the community garden. This guy barely even knew anything about me and here he was accusing me of something I didn’t even do. This was the whole problem with the community garden in a nutshell.
“No way, man,” I said, “Just a little compost and a lot of luck, I guess.”
“I guess…” Russ said, deep in thought. “Maybe you should teach the rest of us your ways. I thought I had a green thumb, but now…” he trailed off.
I felt a little bad for Russ in that moment, but keep in mind: I didn’t actually spray anybody’s plot with bleach water. They did that. They all did that. And now was my time to shine.
“Listen Russ, I’m sure it’s just a brief infestation or something. We’ll get through this. Why don’t you take a few peppers home with you,” I suggested, already hunched over and picking three of my biggest and reddest bell peppers.
“Oh man, are you sure?” The excitement in Russ’s voice! I thought my heart would burst.
I handed him the peppers and, looking him in the eyes with what I hoped was a reassuring facial expression, said, “You bet, Russ. It’s going to be okay. We’ll all be okay.” Watching Russ’s smile as he took my peppers, this small but meaningful act of kindness brightening his otherwise dark day. I knew I’d found my purpose.
In the weeks that followed I spent more time than usual in my plot, weeding, pruning, watering with the clean, bleach-free water I smuggled in from home. But mostly I just wanted to make sure that every mourner who came by trying to salvage or make sense of their ruined plots left with armfulls of my delicious, ripe vegetables. I gave extra tomatoes to Marcella, the only garden neighbor who, knowing I’d be in Chicago, offered to water my plot while I was away. (No!! No, thank you! I’d frantically emailed back, while making a mental note of her all-too-rare thoughtfulness.)
I reveled in the attention, I’ll admit, offering sage advice when the other gardeners gathered around me like: Have you ever tried talking to your plants? I sing to mine sometimes. I only harvest what I know I can consume in the next 48 hours. I leave a dish of water next to the tomato plants so squirrels will drink from that, instead of seeking moisture from the fruit. I like watering my plot super early in the morning or late at night, when nobody else is here. And a bunch of other stuff I just kind of made up on the fly.
But I also noticed a change in my fellow gardeners. A softening. A coming together. The warm embrace of community that only reveals itself in the face of a tragedy, like the one they’d suffered. I didn’t know how many of them were religious exactly, but even the ones who I’m certain were not seemed to imbue my chosen square -- the one garden plot still standing -- with some divine aura beyond their comprehension. Like one of those stories you read about a tornado leveling an entire town except for one random house. A miracle. Everybody knew my name now (it’s Arnie) and everybody accepted my vegetables together in fellowship, like communion. I found myself growing so pleased with them, like a proud father.
Eventually the bleach cycled through, and the barrel was once again filled with fresh and untainted rainwater (or as fresh and untainted as rain can ever possibly be in this poisoned world.) On the autumn equinox, I hosted a ceremony of rebirth and renewal in the community garden, which is typically something that should happen at the beginning of Spring but oh well. We worked hard together, clearing out the last of the dead plants and sowing new seeds for the Fall.
I even gave a speech, likening the events of the Summer with a great flood (never explicitly saying that my plot was Noah’s Ark in this analogy, but pretty sure that most people would make the connection) and at the conclusion of my remarks, as applause and cheering rang forth from all their smiling faces, I knew there would never be any comeuppance for what I did. And why should there be? Would a bad guy give away all the vegetables he grew himself, leaving him to buy his own crappy, nutritionally deficient cucumbers and eggplants from Safeway? Would the villain of this story provide seeds for all two dozen other gardeners, at his own considerable expense? Would a quote-unquote monster spend so much of his time and energy inspiring others to be better gardeners, to be more generous neighbors, to work together to overcome the adversity of an inexplicable and total crop loss?
If there’s any lesson to be found in this, maybe it’s simply: Sometimes you just have to do stuff. Even if it doesn’t make sense right away, even if it’s not “right” by contemporary ethical standards. You just do it anyway, and then trust that the moral of the story will figure itself out, which is basically what happened here.
I keep three big jugs of bleach in my basement, just in case I ever sense that my fellow gardeners are backsliding, and we need another cleansing. Just in case I ever notice them once again growing selfish or lazy or rude or dismissive of each other’s needs, and I decide it’s time to start all over. Because sometimes starting over is all it takes. Or whatever.
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Chris Scott is a regular ClickHole contributor and elementary school teacher in Washington, DC. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker's Shouts & Murmurs, Okay Donkey, Milk Candy Review, HAD, Flash Frog, scaffold, and elsewhere. You can read his work at chrisscottwrites.com.
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