Front Yard Page 6

  “We’re still losing money, though?” asked Nimwell. “Hand over fist?”

  “That would be correct,” said Matthew. “But that’s nothing new. We’ve been losing money for the past three years, ever since I’ve been here. And you were already in the hole when I got here. Unless we can find something unique, like an intact sutler’s wagon or a real six-pounder Napoleon, we’re gonna be shit outta luck.”

  Artis didn’t like his manager’s tone. He didn’t like his track record either. Besides, why did he seem to be in the dark about the big-government wolves at the door? Artis wondered why they had kept him on as manager so long. There was no reason in the world why genuine relics of American history couldn’t sell, and sell for a pretty penny, given competent and enthusiastic sellers. Obviously, the staff that remained were getting jaded. Maybe they needed some fresh blood to get things back on track.

  “Are you aware of our little tax problem?” asked Artis.

  “Yessir. I’ve been telling you about it for as long as I can remember. I’m sorry you decided not to pay attention.”

  “That’s not the kind of tone we should have to hear from an employee,” said Nimwell, blinking rapidly to fight back the tears of indignation. “Where’s the respect these days that employees used to show their employers?”

  Matthew shrugged.

  “How much are we paying you, Matthew?” Artis asked.

  “Sir?”

  “You heard the man,” said Nimwell. “How much do we over-pay you?”

  “Uh, hmmm. Maybe sixteen hundred a month. About twenty thousand a year.”

  “That’s too much!” barked Artis.

  “Um-hmm,” said Nimwell.

  “It’s not that much,” Matthew said. “Especially for someone like me, who has the contacts and knows the market.”

  “And where is that getting us?” said Artis through clenched teeth. “We should be in a position to be the foremost retailer of Civil War and historic American memorabilia in the nation. Huh? It’s Mr. Scroggit and I who have to come up with all the big finds.”

  “Maybe you should pay your taxes.”

  “There’s some more of that lip,” said Nimwell. “Stop it, please, with the lippy backtalk.”

  “I’d like to suggest a new salary deal for you, Matthew,” Artis said. “A hundred dollars a week, plus a ten-percent commission on whatever you sell. Maybe that’ll get your ass in gear.”

  “That seems really fair,” Nimwell said.

  Matthew stared at them, his mouth agape. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “No joke,” said Artis. “Take it or leave it.” The bell on the door jingled, signaling the third customer in the four hours the store had been open.

  “Leave it,” said Matthew. “I’ll take care of this last customer, then I’m outta here. Maurice comes in at noon.”

  The Scroggit brothers looked at each other, stunned. They had expected their manager, disheartened by lagging sales and afraid of getting fired, to jump at their new offer. It had never occurred to them that he just might up and walk. And when he did, which it appeared would be in about five minutes, who would run the store?

  “One of us has to check in at the store in Gable Oaks,” said Artis. “That should probably be me since I’m sort of the brains of the operation. You stay here and man the store for the rest of the day once Matthew takes off. You know how to operate a computerized cash register, right? And run credit cards?”

  Nimwell shrugged and forced a wan, tremulous smile.

  “Okay, whatever,” said Artis. “We’re gonna have to sell this place and file for bankruptcy anyway, so don’t sweat the customers too much. You’ll probably just end up twiddling your thumbs. You know what? That treasure deal Miss Price was talking about is looking better all the time.”

  Nimwell nodded furiously as Matthew put on his jacket and walked out, barely a minute before the constant jingling of the bell signaled that a busload of foreign tourists had just crossed the threshold.

  “Go get ’em, tiger,” said Artis as a dozen new prospective customers gawked at the display cases. “Just think, Miss Price is gonna make us millionaires. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to get to it.”

  Nimwell smiled and scampered over to make his first sale—a bullet-dented canteen that had once belonged to a major who served on the staff of Major General Lew Wallace at the battle of Shiloh.

  Ten miles away, slumped over the walnut desk that served as the centerpiece of her cloistered office in the venerable Eamons Hall, Dr. Hilda Brockheimer stared at the foot-high pile of paper stacked in front of her and sighed. It was the sigh of great ambitions thwarted.

  God, how she hated teaching! Research, that was what she was born to do, and here she was with no major research grants to her name and a bunch of her students’ final papers and internship reports gathering dust and daring her to touch them, to read them, perchance to grade them.

  The year was almost over and she would have to deal with these sooner rather than later. Dr. Richlin, the department chair, had just reminded her in no uncertain terms that she was to wrap up her final grades immediately.

  “What seems to be the problem, Hilda?” he said. “We have got to get these kids’ grades completed. They’re leaving in a couple of days. Everyone else has their grades in. So, what’s your story?”

  “Research,” said Dr. Brockheimer severely. “I’ve got important research to wrap up.”

  Dr. Richlin rolled his eyes, then smiled condescendingly. He’d heard this before from Dr. Brockheimer, and knew it to be either an exaggeration to hide her distaste for the requirements of teaching, or the futile exercise of a professor who hadn’t been responsible for a single bit of important research in at least six years. She was cruising on her reputation, that’s what she was doing.

  “Okay, Hilda,” he said, employing the diplomatic tone he trotted out for stubborn incompetents and malcontents. “Research is important. We all know that. Everyone here does it. But you must teach here to be a professor of horticulture. That is a basic requirement at this institution.”

  His point made, Dr. Richlin modified his smile to reflect a more pleasant, avuncular persona. He removed his glasses, and leaned toward Dr. Brockheimer, who stood before him as rigid as a post.

  “You have been a great credit to this institution, Hilda,” Dr. Richlin said. “We all know and respect this. But, quite frankly, you’ve been coasting on your reputation for quite a while. All of us here have other duties to perform, and that includes you. Will you please make my job easier by getting your grades in by Friday noon at the latest?”

  Dr. Brockheimer was one of the top floriculturists in the St. Anthony metro area and, one could argue, the entire state. Dr. Phil Goudette, at Headwaters State University, in Sap City, was really the only one who could give her a run for her money. They had quite an impressive department up there at Headwaters that they coupled successfully with a landscape design division.

  Dr. Brockheimer burned with jealousy after reading Dr. Goudette’s research paper on the use of bogs to develop exotic new flora that could then be transferred to semi-moist soils without the benefit of intermittent flooding. It had been groundbreaking—and it had been her idea, too. They just hadn’t given her the time to work on it, a fact she pointed out when she thundered into Dr. Richlin’s office with the news.

  The importance of that paper would have been evident to even the most callow of undergraduates, but Dr. Richlin had just brushed it off as if it had been a middling senior thesis, instead of seeing it for the threat it was. Now, Headwaters was going to be getting the research dollars, not them. Didn’t the fool see that? Instead of sloughing it all off, he should be freeing her from her teaching responsibilities and giving her carte blanche to do whatever research she saw fit to do.

  But that’s the way it is around here, thought Dr. Brockheimer. The faculty gravitated toward sloth and the undemanding status quo once they were tenured. They tended to pad their résumés wit
h meaningless journal articles and insignificant board positions, and rest on the laurels of whatever token research they’d accomplished in their younger years. They’d pile up bogus honors while teaching a few classes and serving as consultants to large companies and wealthy homeowners who figured a PhD added to a title had a lot better ring to it than just a plain old bachelor’s degree in landscape design.

  Dr. Brockheimer was not so inclined. At the age of thirty-nine, she felt she was just hitting her stride as a researcher of national repute. She had been stuck in her associate professorship for five years, watching as other less-talented colleagues vaulted ahead of her. That included that no-brain Dr. Felicia Wellbeng, whose papers on sphagnum peat moss had made her the laughingstock of the discipline, worldwide. And Dr. Powell Pucker, who managed to churn out forty or so scholarly articles a year, all basically saying the same thing. Why couldn’t that old fart of a department head see that?

  It was Dr. Richlin who made sure the big research money got funneled to his tennis-playing cronies and their inane and spurious projects instead of her own more meaningful and potentially revolutionary initiatives.

  So, despite the widespread acknowledgment that she had done revolutionary research in the area of winter-hardy herbaceous perennials’ survivability in semi-permafrost conditions and growing southern magnolias on Virginia creeper–like vines in an upper Midwest climate, she was stuck on a middle rung of the ladder that lead to full professorship. That meant making a measly $67,000 a year.

  What irked her even more was that her estranged husband, the archaeologist Dr. Ferdinand Lick, had been named a full professor six years ago, despite the fact that he had never unearthed anything more significant than a few crumbling chipping tools.

  Dr. Lick’s particular ambition was to prove that European explorers had made their way up the Mississippi River to the current site of St. Anthony and environs as long ago as three hundred years prior to Columbus. They might have been Vikings, or Gascons, or wanderlusting Celtic and Anglo-Saxon monks populating the British Isles. Dr. Lick had spent much of the past dozen years researching the subject at the expense of smaller projects that at least would have borne some fruit.

  As a result of all this, and despite his rise through the ranks of his department, Ferdinand Lick had virtually no influence in his field, and hadn’t published a single book or scholarly article in years. That utter academic fecklessness had been a major contributor to the breakup of their marriage.

  And speaking of idiocy, here was Dr. Brockheimer having to put up with this mound of ersatz research from her Nean-derthalish undergraduates. What a waste of time! Things had gotten even worse this year when two sections of freshmen were foisted on her! Thank God classes, exams, and all the rest of this malarkey that passed for a college education were ending for the summer.

  Dr. Brockheimer took a deep breath, stared malevolently at her stack of unfinished work, and pushed a reluctant hand slowly toward the pile.

  8

  Transformation

  George and Nan leaned over a large sheet of vellum drafting paper spread out on the backyard patio table. Shirelle’s design, drawn to scale and displaying the accurate contours of the land, was punctuated with measurements, dimensions, and comments. It laid out for them a front yard the sheer majesty of which garden-by-the-gut naturals such as George and Nan could never have conceived. They silently studied the plan, their eyes open wide and darting across the paper, then narrowing into thin slits as they bowed their heads closer to the paper to try to make out Shirelle’s handwriting and draftsman-like renderings of shrubs, bushes, and flowers.

  “I can tell you what things are if you’re having a hard time reading my notations,” said Shirelle. She watched nervously as the Fremonts’ expressions veered dangerously toward the quizzical.

  What if they hated her plan? She would just die! But if they loved it? A hint of a smile creased Nan’s face. Shirelle’s heart leaped. Then, Her Munificence, the Grand Goddess of Gardening, spoke.

  “My goodness, Shirelle, you’ve even got the contour lines on here,” she said. “And there they are bunched together to show our slope. Wow!” Shirelle flushed with pride.

  “For my floriculture degree, I had to take courses in architectural drawing and basic cartography,” she said, trying to sound secure in her knowledge without being boastful. “If you don’t have the scale right, or the topography, or the correct location of things, you can really mess up your design, and it won’t turn out right.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” said Nan, who went back to her silent study of Shirelle’s drawing. What does that “mmm-hmm” mean? wondered Shirelle. It sounded kind of noncommittal. She wondered if Nan had just brought up the contour lines to disguise her intense dislike of everything else. Damning with faint praise. Shirelle could feel her face drooping.

  “Shirelle,” said Nan. “This is . . . this is . . . amazing.”

  What was that?

  “Why, Shirelle, I don’t know what to say. My goodness, this is just amazing, isn’t it, George?” George nodded and smiled at Shirelle. “We had been having a tough time figuring out what to do in the front yard, and you’ve just solved our problem. It’s beautiful, Shirelle. Just beautiful. How can we thank you?”

  Oh, joy! thought Shirelle. Oh, rapture. I will never, ever, ever have a moment like this. I must capture it, revel in it, take a mental snapshot of this so it will live on forever.

  “I told you it was good, didn’t I?” said Mary.

  “Yes, dear,” Nan said. “But I didn’t know it was going to be this good.”

  Shirelle had taken a gamble by introducing some flowers and patterns the Fremonts had not used in their backyard gardens. While those gardens were truly magnificent, why just clone them for the front yard? Shirelle thought the Fremonts might want to shift gears a little.

  “I recognize a couple of names here,” said George. “A bunch of others I don’t. We’ve never planted these flowers. We’ll want to see photos, of course.”

  “No problem, Mr. Fremont; got them right here on my laptop.”

  “These are all sun worshippers, right, Shirelle?” asked Nan. “That’s mighty sunny territory out there, not a mix like the backyard.”

  “You can almost see all these flowers wearing sunglasses and putting on the sunscreen; that’s how much they like sun,” said Shirelle, with a giggle.

  “When do we start?”

  “We can go to Burdick’s this afternoon,” Mary said. “We’ll have to order what they don’t have.”

  “Knowing Burdick’s, I’m not worried,” Shirelle said. “It’s got to be the most well-supplied gardening store in the state, maybe even the region.”

  “Okay,” George said. “Get to it. Give me the bill when you get back and I’ll reimburse you. . . . Uh, how much do you think all this will cost?”

  Work on the new front yard gardens began in earnest the next day, with multiple trips to Burdick’s and a pop-up thunderstorm having eaten up most of the afternoon.

  What Shirelle had mapped out for the Fremonts was nothing short of regal.

  She had an entire bed, eighteen feet by six feet, given over to roses. The backyard certainly had its roses, but they were of the climbing variety, smothering two big whitewashed trellises. The front yard bed would have stand-alone hybrid tea roses, lined up at the top of the slope and picked especially for their varied and vivid colors. And Shirelle had some real show-offs in mind. There’d be buttery-white Full Sail roses, lavender Blue Girls, dreamy red Chrysler Imperials, and apricot Bronze Stars.

  “I’m still looking for one or two more,” said Shirelle during a backyard patio break from the soil preparation work. “But this will give you quite a showcase for folks driving by on Sumac or walking along the lake. The backyard was kind of hidden away, you know. A hidden gem. You had to come up into the yard to really see what was going on. Everybody will see this. With hybrid teas, you’ll have to make sure to protect them from the cold. They’re finicky, too. We can t
alk about that more before I leave, around Labor Day.”

  “Oh, Shirelle, it’s so hard to think about you leaving. Isn’t it, George?” George nodded a bit too noncommittally for Nan’s taste. “You’ve been so helpful to us, and I almost think of you as one of the family here. You’re almost like a sister to Mary.”

  “Mom!” cried Mary. Shirelle blushed.

  “Well, Miss Mary, you’ve had to grow up with two older boys, which hasn’t always been easy. You would have loved to have had a sister like Shirelle when you were little. Anyway, you must move on in the gardening world, I suppose. Of course, we’ll be very attentive to your instructions. I have always wanted a hybrid tea rose bed. And just the right place for it, isn’t it?”

  “It sure is, Mrs. Fremont,” said Shirelle, poking a work-gloved finger decisively at her plan. “They’ll get nothing but sun here, and the soil is sandy, which means good drainage. I bet you have to water a lot here, though, for the grass and all.”

  George leaned forward toward Shirelle, a disturbing shade of concern painted across his otherwise blank canvas of a face.

  “I hate to be the reality-check guy here, but how much do you figure these beautiful roses will cost, Shirelle?”

  Shirelle felt herself draw back involuntarily in shock. The thought of the Fremonts actually being cost-conscious about what they planted had never occurred to her. Since when did garden royalty ever concern itself with such trivialities as pricing? Just as she felt her jaw drop in dismay, Nan came to the rescue.

  “Oh, George, this is not really the time, is it? We’ve got this beautiful plan here that Shirelle prepared for us, and why spoil its magnificence with our petty little money concerns? You go ahead with the hybrid teas, Shirelle, and we’ll reimburse you for every penny. Now, walk us through the rest of your wonderful schematic here.”

  Covering much of the slope would be beds of Walker’s Low catmint, with stands of Happy Returns and Rosy Returns daylilies anchoring the left and right flanks. Spotted around the yard, often where some vertical edging was called for, were Magic Fountain delphinium of pink, blue, purple, and white. Shirelle was still working on placement of the ornamental grasses—Karl Foerster and prairie dropseed.