Excerpt from Love & Flowers, a Novel
Small things repeat their importance on a farm and make them
indelible in our memory. —Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
On the June morning the flowers froze, Nate Barnum lay in bed dreaming of Mexican tuberoses and Maggie LaFrance’s vagina. Both had been on his mind a lot that summer, and both were sugary sweet to his sunburned nose. Maggie was splayed out on the bed of tuberoses in her greenhouse between tomato vines and the ten cannabis plants the state of Connecticut allowed for personal use. Dreamtime Nate was an experienced and long-lasting Lothario with a magic wand, and Maggie thrashed the thin stems of the tuberoses into gauzy pulp. The velvety petals, supple and snowy like Maggie’s skin, rained down over the entire garden. Like most nights leading up to Nate’s daughter’s wedding, dream Maggie resembled his ex-wife and was both tender and appreciative of Nate’s lovemaking. She shouted his name now, but not in passion— was she angry? He dug his face into the mattress as her naked body sunk into the loamy earth.
“Are you alive?” the voice called again. “Nate. Get up. We’re fucked.” Chloe forearmed Nate’s door open and clicked the light. “Jesus, it stinks in here. Shower much?” She kicked her boot against his mattress and bent over at the waist, examining the shape under the sheet. “Seriously, get your ass up!”
Nate’s arm flung out from under the sheet and flopped down on the cold half of the bed.
Chloe jumped back. “It’s alive.”
He rolled and clutched the clock radio, yanked it under the sheet. His dog breath fogged the plastic and he squeegeed it with his thumb. He grunted.
“Clock don’t lie, it’s really four thirty.” Chloe turned on the fan at the foot of his bed, waved a hand before her face. “It’s like a moldy fart.” He grunted again. The longest day of the year had just gotten longer.
Nate returned the clock radio and patted around for his glasses, felt a splayed-open novel he had no memory of reading and knocked over a glass of water he wished he had drunk. He pulled the glasses under the sheet. I am not wearing pants, he thought and sighed. Christ, what I am doing? He heard the Marlboro’d voice of his dead father, Floyd. His advice, like rough-hewn lumber, always left a splinter. Alcohol begets lies and heartache.
“What is this?” Chloe bent down and lifted a half-eaten cardboard container of microwaved mac and cheese. “Son of a bitch, this is what’s all over the stairs.”
Nate had no memory of heating the plastic container or eating. They hadn’t drunk that much, had they? Two bottles of wine. Two hours of sex and then a bourbon and a joint. He put his father’s old Timex to his ear. Nothing. His head throbbed. If Maggie’s kids didn’t come home soon he might die. Today in Connecticut a man was screwed to death by his neighbor, and in other news, still no rain in California . . . How long was sleepaway camp anyway? He rolled over, holding the sheet across his chest, and the chafed shaft of his penis stung. Nate pushed his glasses onto the tip of his nose and peeked over the top of the sheet. He blinked at the ceiling until his vision cleared. Soft light pooled on the horsehair plaster—the barn lights. Barn lights plus four a.m. equaled flower trouble. Post-COVID, everyone’s luck in town had changed for the better except his and his son Roger’s. Of course Roger’s life never changed, by design. The much-ballyhooed weekends his ex-wife Jilly had promised at Carl’s cottage on Block Island never seemed to materialize.
“You look like shit,” Chloe said with a smirk.
“You kiss my daughter with that mouth?”
“Not just her mouth.”
“TMI, Chloe. I’ve warned you. T-M-I.”
“Sucks to be you today.”
She had a point there. But . . . but this was Chloe. “I’m not here to impress you.”
“Good, cause you’re not.” She kicked the bed frame to emphasize her point.
His future daughter-in-law wore her usual summer work uniform: short jean shorts with a leather pruner holster belted around her narrow hips, steel-toed Red Wings, novelty socks—raindrops, flying toasters, pride flags—she bought at the campus bookstore, pulled just below her scarred knees, and a T-shirt printed with either a crude caption (Lick My Pistil or Dykes Dig Tubers) or a singer-songwriter Nate had never heard of bought at concerts Nate was never invited to. Today he stared into the gray eyes of a woman with ghostly white hair named Phoebe Bridgers, knowing Chloe’d make him suffer through some live concert later in the barn. Even now, a few years out, life was one continuous live event, so much so that Nate was sometimes nostalgic for the quiet isolation of shelter-in-place. He bracketed life as BC, before-Covid, or PC, post-Covid, which really was just code for before Jilly left, or after. It had to stop. But the flowers didn’t give a shit either way, as long as there was water. Still had plenty of that in the ground, not all farms were so lucky.
“Start over, please.” He twirled his wrist at Chloe and remembered the dream. He wouldn’t have ruined the tuberoses, would he? They never did it in on the tubers. Lawn, sure. Greenhouse, outdoor shower, often, but never on the delicate roses he was growing on the down-low for the girls’ wedding.
She knitted the corners of her mouth into a near pucker when she cursed, which was often in the days leading up to her wedding—a week away. “What can’t you hear? You fucked us.” Body of Chris Evert and the mouth of a teenager raised on the Internet. Chloe bent over and stretched her quad on the chair in the corner. “No one listens to me around here, like ever.”
This was true, but forget about next Saturday. How was he going to through the next five minutes? And then whatever calamity had hit the flower farm. One step at time. First step, pants. Surely there was time for pants. He tucked the sheet around his waist. He liked Chloe, might learn to love her as he did his daughter, Claire. Hell, she might even allow him to hug her at the reception. But he doubted it. He squinted at the Save the Date card wedged into the frame of his bureau mirror. They were a lovely couple. Both beauties. He’d heard whispers down at the Square Cup about how whack it was that the two most beautiful women in Keeper were marrying each other. Another mark against the bachelors of eastern Connecticut.
“The cooler is a block of ice. Killed everything. Flowers are black.” Chloe flopped her boot on the corner of his bed and stretched her other quad. “We’re totally screwed.”
Nate actually felt sorry for the girl. He knew her heart was in the right place, though everything didn’t need to be a competition. He suspected she was the tennis player who challenged every call and threw her racket. The whiner the players on the low-level tour she climbed avoided in the locker room. He had not yet met her parents, so they were easy to blame. Claire called it a competitive household of overachievers and athletes, her mother a D1 swimmer turned federal judge, Dad a money guy and master of country club sports, particularly tennis, like Chloe and her younger sister, Ashley or Annabel, something with an A and just as lovely as Chloe but not as brittle. Little sister would nab a D1 scholarship like her big sister. Her air of entitlement and the avoidance of failure must be an old money Bostonian thing; a personality trait of private school kids who “volunteer” in the Dominican Republic with the Congregational Church or build schools for two weeks junior year in Costa Rica to practice their Spanish, zip line, and pad their college admissions essays. But always winning had its liabilities. Lack of empathy, for one. Just look at Washington. Luckily Claire had learned to be humble while getting shellacked by private school hockey teams. Eighteen to one. Twelve to two. No matter if she was the best left-winger in the state. Her college career was middling after she decided to attend the nearby state school without much of a hockey tradition, but at least she knew her future did not include 6:00 a.m. hockey practices. Unlike Chloe, who until a few years ago had believed she’d spend her summers at Wimbledon. Chloe blamed her skinny mother for her weak knees. Cutting on a hot afternoon last week she’d lain down beside the rows of ranunculus, grimacing from the pain. Everything was someone else’s fault. Including the freezer. Why hadn’t Claire fallen in love with a winter sports girl? He missed her college girlfriend Dawn, a basketball player, so full of spunk.
That little jackrabbit sprinted the sideline high fiving the other girls after each made three, pigtails flopping. Last he’d heard she was finishing her residency at Columbia.
Chloe stood over Nate with her T-shirt pulled over her nose. “I told you last month to call those CoolBot assholes and get the cooler fixed and you said don’t worry about it.”
“It worked yesterday.”
“Why’s everything break around here?”
“It’s a farm. Things break.” Nate rubbed the crust off his eyelids. “How’d ya know it busted?”
“Roger and Millie were on chicken patrol and they wandered in to check on Juju and found the frozen A/C. The wedding flowers petrified. And then the poor kid freaks out.” Chloe glanced down the hall toward Roger’s room. “He’s a total gamer.”
“Everyone underestimates that boy,” Nate said.
“Not me.”
Nate remembered Chloe and Roger snuggled on the couch Christmas Eve tracking Santa’s sleigh her on phone. She’d stayed up with him when he and Claire went to bed. The woman had a fierce love. Claire was lucky.
Nate rolled his legs onto the floor and Chloe jumped behind the fan.
“Cover your junk.” She shuddered. “Fucking gross.”
Hit by the dizzies, Nate dropped his head between his legs.
“If you die can I have your truck?”
“No.”
“How about the tractor?”
“I’m not gonna die.”
“Well, don’t until you fix the cooler.”
“I’ll fix it.”
“Or—” she dropped the mac and cheese on the bed—“you’re gonna die.”
Nate slowly rolled his head up and offered a sarcastic smile. “Where’s Rog now, smarty pants?”
“Claire has been in there petting him for twenty minutes.”
The hens were Roger’s domain. Juju the barn chicken, his favorite. Two summers ago Roger had begun nocturnal patrols of the property after a raccoon gutted two of his birds. He wore his green Boy Scout uniform with the Eagle Scout patches and dragged his tired Labrador, Millie, as his second. Nate had been a den leader and then pack leader to ensure Roger finished the program. Jilly ran the Applebee’s fundraiser but avoided the camping trips, as Nate did the sympathetic glances of the other dads as they cheered Roger, finishing an adventure an hour after their boys. At his Crossover Ceremony, the entire troop wept. High school graduation followed two months later and then the state of Connecticut was done with Roger. They’d taught him how to bag groceries, brush and wipe, hammer birdhouses, and write his name. Boy Scouts and farm work had taught him most everything else. Most afternoons he worked beside Nate, or seeded at the local greenhouse with other intellectually disabled adults. At his graduation party, Claire overheard a kid say Roger gave him the heebie-jeebies, “rather have a dog than a retard for a brother.” She punched him in the face. If nothing else, playing on shitty hockey teams against rich prep school kids had taught her how to fight.
Nate turned back to Chloe. “It wasn’t the CoolBot. Happened about ten years ago. A/C unit is shot. Thought we could get another season out of it.” Nate rocked forward to stand but stopped, remembering his pants, or lack thereof. They’d cut fresh. Design on the fly. Plenty of time with the whole team. He patted around for his clothes, noticed that Chloe was standing on his jeans. If those pants could talk. “How big is the wedding?”
“Nine grand. Bride’s been through a shitstorm. Claire’s design is fire.”
Wasn’t it always? “Go down and make coffee. Strong coffee. And we’ll make a plan. When’s the ceremony?”
“Four p.m. at Bittersweet.”
“Goddamn circus farm,” Nate grunted as he gripped the mattress and rocked forward to stand wondering if Mags ever felt like this after one of their sex benders. He dropped his head again. More dizzies. Did she drug me?
“Wanda makes us bank.”
“Circus farm.”
“You should get over that shit. It’s the way of the world. And like I said, this one is super important to Claire.”
“And you?”
“Just another bossy bitch in a pricy prom dress.”
They laughed. Nate raised his fist and she tentatively reached over, mouth covered, and tapped it.
“We got this. Jilly and I pulled off a similar feat BC.” He smiled at the memory. Total chaos. Jilly shouting as she tossed frozen flowers —baby Roger strapped to her chest, toddler Claire chomping the dead stems on the barn floor—but then military precision, barking orders on what to cut, vases to clean, ribbon to recycle. So he knew it was possible to build an entire wedding in a day. When Jilly delivered to the venue, two sandbags under her eyes, the bride cried receiving the bouquet; when she asked how much time it had taken Jilly burst out laughing.
Chloe’s mouth formed a tight pucker. “If we F this up it’s not on me.”
“No, all my fault.” Nate shook his head at Chloe, time for her to go far away.
“You should have fixed it.” Chloe turned, slamming the door, her boots rattling the maple floorboards that were as wide as Nate’s forearm. The original farmhouse had been built in 1776 and there wasn’t a plumb line in the place. Nate’s grandfather had claimed, like many in town, that General Washington’s troops had bivouacked on this land in the 1770s.
Nate peeled off his sweaty T-shirt, chucked it at the wicker basket in the corner, missing, hitting his guitar, which tumbled over with a hollow twang. He padded to the bathroom but avoided his reflection. He set his mouth under the faucet. Popped two Tylenol and drank more. He set his hands on either side of the sink, supporting his weight. Then there it was, the mug that broke a thousand hearts, or perhaps just three. His head was heavy, soupy with worry about the week ahead. The cooler was the easy part. He splashed water on his face and brushed the taste of Maggie out of his mouth then opened the medicine cabinet, searching for the tiny combs and razor the girls had given him for Christmas to trim his mustache, or what Chloe called the squirrel sleeping on his face. He glanced at the Polaroid with the dirt-stained edges wedged on the top shelf behind his expired prescription of prednisone and a bottle of calamine lotion. The only surviving print from the pregnancy photo shoot. Jilly stood naked from the waist up, a soon to-emerge baby named Dino in utero stretching her white belly. She wore a flouncy blue cotton skirt, had worn it nearly every day that summer, with a frayed straw hat. He could hear her high honking laugh of astonishment, a sound he’ll never forget, at the starkness of her farmer’s tan, the enormity of her once petite breasts, at the crazy reality that she’d be a mother at twenty, just like her mom, something she’d swore she’d never do, but mostly at the absurdity of walking topless between two rows of sunflowers. The old wives’ tale that farm babies were born in late summer or early fall after a long dark winter indoors had proven true. It was just their second season, so much to do, but Nate celebrated the child as another beautiful plant they would nurture, another reason to tie themselves to his family’s land and the business they were growing. In the upper left-hand corner of the photo, a sunflower with a brown center and yellow petals shone over her head, its gangly stem unable to support its tremendous weight—the stems were easily six feet in the raised beds, but this giant had been nearly eight feet in height. Jilly’s left foot pointed toward the camera midstep over the grassy row that needed weeding, her long sinewy arms outstretched; her fingers strumming the long green stems like harp strings as she walked toward Nate. He’d snapped the whole cartridge, the square photos somersaulting from the wide mouth of the camera before he’d tripped and fallen backward, the last image a blur of blue sky, into a hedge of peonies from which he’d had to be rescued.
Nate combed the mustache and trimmed the whiskers over his top lip. The plan had been to shave after getting vaccinated, but each year after his annual shot he got weepy. At first he kept it because Jilly hated it, and then to remember those lost. He’d catch folks at the monthly Ag meeting or the greenhouse staring, and then watch their faces go all soft and warm. Everyone remembered. Drive-thru testing. Health worker parades. Purell hording. So many deaths. Nate’s face softened too. The mirror reflected the first glimmer of light on the horizon. His parents buried just four hundred yards away in the family graveyard among a grove of linden trees.
Nate turned and hoisted the window higher and pressed his hand to the screen, feeling the dawn. The view always warmed his chest, seeing all that he had built. A cell of cold air overnight had left behind a fine mist that extended over the patio and grassy yard stopping at a stonewall two hundred yards out. From there, the farm spread over a twenty-acres of cultivated land with hoop houses and outbuildings divided by more walls of New England rock. Stone boulders dug up with plows driven by oxen and hoisted into square pastures by generations of Barnum men with sandpaper hands and steel forearms. The harvesting of rocks proceeded the harvesting of crops; each time a shovel struck the earth, sparks flew. Nate and Jilly had reimagined everything in the early aughts. Replacing livestock with flowers. The decades of grazing created a magical stew of organic matter for their plants to flourish. A billion microbes aided by bulldozering worms and a warming, yet still wet, climate. The needs of the plants changed by season, as did the pests, and he knew by sight or smell or touch what each required. But mostly Nate was a hydrologist, a great master of water, quenching the thirst of plants Mother Nature couldn’t provide with a finger to the wind and a hand in the soil. I wouldn’t want her to be my momma, old Floyd used to say, It’s either sugar on strawberries or coal in your stocking.
As the mist burned off Nate could just make out the perennial beds that filled the old square animal pens: hellebores, lady’s mantle, Oriental poppies, peonies, hydrangeas, tansies, Japanese anemones, chrysanthemums, fountain grass, and four acres of dahlias, their hundred-thousand dollar crop, all designed to succession bloom, a flowering baton passed over the lichen-covered walls. Ten thousand tulips were hand-twisted into the earth by Christmas. The old pasture now held rotating varieties of annuals planted in seventy-foot raised beds, about eight hundred flowers per row planted each spring, and replaced with winter rye each October. He kept another ten acres for haying. The flower farm started by the young couple on the back of his father’s failing chicken and cattle business and then injected with organic fertilizers and youthful exuberance by the girls at Love & Flowers.
Beyond the pastures and hoops the land sloped at a slow grade to Bird Pond. More of a small lake, really, and the center of the property with woods on all sides except for the one five-acre plot he’d sold off to a pair of Covid homesteaders, Ryan and Maggie LaFrance, to pay off his ex wife. As the light turned each afternoon it caught the glass of Maggie’s greenhouse where he was growing tuberoses for the girls’ wedding. The LaFrances’ McMansion was a daily reminder that he’d never sell another square foot of land, no matter the pressure from the expansionists running town hall. The land provided in many ways for the Barnum clan but in lean years the descendants of Jonathan Barnum and Audrey Keeper sold acres to pay off creditors—leases to lumber companies and housing lots—chipping away a hundred acres over fifty years. Nate held on to five hundred, he was the second largest landowner in town, most of it woods, old growth forests he’d hiked and camped as a boy.
Nate cranked the shower and sat on the toilet until steam filled the room. He breathed deeply, trying to remember what was ready, or almost ready, to cut in the field. He washed off the sweat and spunk and dressed in his usual uniform of Carhartt shorts, blue farm T-shirt, wool socks, and boots. The girls teased he resembled the construction worker from the Village People. These were his new partners. It was a gay, gay world and he was the entertainment, as long as nothing broke. Nate seeded, planted, watered, weeded, fertilized, mowed, shoveled, hauled, fixed, built, covered, and cut. If there was dirt in your snot you knew you’d put in an honest day.
The floor vibrated. Chloe was banging the ceiling with the mop. He stomped a reply. Rookies, he thought. He’d get it done; he always got it done.