Moments of utter stillness and silence can say a lot about a person and their state of mind. Brielle Thorne sat in the grass with her arms wrapped around her knees. It was dusk, and the world had settled into the almost mystical quiet before the fall of night. For Brielle, dusk seemed to be a thin place. A time when all of eternity was closer and more tangible, as day and night kissed, than at any other time.
In the quiet, she pondered a bare patch of earth. Her persistent efforts to yield a crop there had come to naught and she was at her wit’s end. Every other part of her backyard garden was healthy and vibrant and in full bloom. This last spot, an intended shade garden beneath the canopy of a very old black walnut tree, had hosted a variety of plants, hostas and pulmonaria and heuchera, among others. Each plant had wilted, yellowed, and eventually died, in spite of her best efforts to revive them. The enigma was made even greater due to the fact that the tree was perfectly healthy, albeit knobbled and gnarled with age. Its great branches loomed over the back corner of her yard, with a thick mulch of rotting walnut hulls and decaying leaves beneath it. No great insights came to her as she sat and studied, so she released her knees and lay back in the soft, fragrant grass.
The stars were just beginning to dot the sky. Brielle’s mind drifted as she studied the twinkling spots of light. The stresses and worries that her gardening kept at bay began pushing against the edge of her consciousness. She had a stack of papers to grade for school. There was a strange dark spot on her ceiling. Ms. Rita from church had made some comments about Brielle’s organization of the new community garden they were working on. This was possibly what bothered her most. She supposed Ms. Rita just knew everything there was to know about organizing gardens. She thought about confronting Ms. Rita about her comments, and she played various scenarios in her head in which she put the older woman in her place. That if she did not like the way Brielle organized events she could just do them herself.
Brielle pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes, anxiety and a strong feeling of injustice, of being put upon, made her head ache. She rose from the grass and walked into her home. It was a tidy little Victorian two-story. It was utterly perfect with gingerbread molding and original hardwood floors and joinery. She slowly, almost painfully, ascended the staircase, not seeing the lovely carvings of acanthus leaves on the spindles, and entered her bedroom. She quickly prepared for bed, her mind still on Ms. Rita and her negative comments, still playing scenes in her mind, wondering if perhaps she really was unfit to successfully launch the community garden.
As she pulled back the quilt on her bed and crawled in, she felt dejected and exhausted. Her head pounded and her stomach felt sick. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to muster her evening prayers, but Ms. Rita’s words, growing harsher and more accusing in her imagination, pushed the prayers away, like a busy mother ignoring the persistent cries of her child for attention. Brielle’s emotions became increasingly raw, hurt rising and swelling, bursting open and infecting every thought, every memory, every part of her. She writhed in the torment, distortions of truth cavorting about her until the very shadows seemed to take up the dance and she, overcome by horror, fell into a fitful sleep.
Brielle rose early the next morning with bloodshot eyes and a feeling of impending doom that stole her joy of the ombre horizon, barely noticing its glorious colors fading from lavender to magenta to peach to gray as she fixed her coffee. He eyes trained on the dark patch of ground under the looming black walnut tree. Suddenly, fueled by a need to escape her disquiet, she snatched her keys from the counter and drove to the nearby garden center. Once there, she wheeled a disabled cart, one wheel jerking spasmodically from side to side as she pushed it into the store, and began hunting for shade plants. She grabbed ferns, heuchera, azalea shrubs, and several other varieties of plants. She paid far too much for all of them and loaded up her SUV and drove home.
Once there, she wielded her spade like a weapon, digging holes, smacking plants into them, until the entire area was full of green. Brielle stood back to admire her work. This time, surely, the plants would survive. By sheer force of will she would make them survive. She carefully watered them in, spread compost and fertilizer, and ensured her drip irrigation was set up to water four times a week
One day, two days, three days, a week went by and the plants didn’t grow, but they did not die. Two weeks, a few of them looked wilted and bedraggled. At three weeks the leaves began to yellow. Brielle watered and sprayed insecticides and fungicides and applied the best fertilizers she could find. All to no avail. One by one, each of the plants died, once again leaving a wasted, barren swath of earth under the black walnut tree. Brielle was so frustrated that she began to cry. Ms. Rita was right. Every bad thing anyone had ever said about her swarmed into her mind, stinging and buzzing and angry.
“You can’t grow things around a black walnut tree, child.”
Brielle jerked her head up, startled. “I beg your pardon?”
The black walnut tree. You can’t grow anything around it.”
She saw a little man standing just beyond her fence line on the sidewalk. He bent over a beautiful and elegantly carved cane, the many creases in his face testifying to his time in the sun over the course of his life. He had on a long-sleeved plaid shirt neatly tucked into a pair of khaki trousers. A rich, chocolate-colored leather belt around his thin waist and matching leather shoes.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Juglone. It’s a toxin. Black walnuts poison everything around them.” The little old man looked at her through thick glasses and waited for her to reply. She gaped at him, all of her gardening knowledge failing her. “How do you know that?”
“I’ve got one of them trees too. I just have to plant far away from them,” he said. “The rest of your yard is lovely miss. Seems to me you’d best ought to tend the garden you’ve got and let that old tree alone.”
Brielle stared at him, irritated at his unsolicited advice, and entirely uninterested in continuing the conversation. “Yes sir, that’s very interesting. Thank you.” She then eyed him pointedly, hoping he’d take her hint.
He considered her for a moment. “Well, yes ma’am. You have a good evening then,” and he began shuffling down the sidewalk and out of her sight.
Brielle frowned after him, not knowing who he was, having never seen him around the neighborhood. She looked around her yard, though. He wasn’t wrong. Her garden was beautiful. Confederate jasmine grew up ornate trellises along her porch. Drifts of roses, heavy and fragrant with blooms, perfumed the evening air. Other plants created textures and colors and patterns with an overall effect that would have rivaled Bellingrath, though admittedly on a much smaller scale.
Brielle sat back on her heels, looking critically at the hundreds of dollars of dead plants around the base of the black walnut tree. But what did that old man know? Surely there was a way to get her dreamed of shade garden to grow beneath this tree. It was the only part of her yard not yet lush and green and flushed with bloom. She glared in the direction the old man had gone. What did he know anyway, she thought to herself again.
The next morning, Brielle dressed herself for church, a pretty pink sundress with a ruffled hem, and went to service. She stood and sang worship songs, she lifted her hands to heaven, and she listened to the sermon, taking notes. She would occasionally glance at Ms. Rita, sitting a few rows over, the woman’s words about the community garden echoing in her head. Part of her hoped that Ms. Rita would look over so that she could give her a scathing look, but the woman never did, which Brielle found vaguely frustrating.
When service ended, Brielle milled about, smiling and talking animatedly to a number of people. Ms. Rita never spoke to her or looked her way. “She knows she’s wrong,” Brielle thought. “She’s so ashamed she can’t even look over here.” Feeling slightly vindicated and a little smug that Ms. Rita was surely wallowing in guilt over her unkind words, Brielle headed home.
In her kitchen, she fixed herself a sandwich and a cup of hot tea and seated herself at the little round table in the bay window overlooking her back yard. As she tucked into her sandwich, she looked admiringly along the lovely border of flowers along her fence, enjoying the different hues and textures, watching butterflies flit from plant to plant. She studied along the border, appreciating each part of it, until she reached the end and her eyes stopped on the black walnut tree with its dark, empty, barren circle of earth. Her face pinched, eyeing it, annoyed with it. She chewed her sandwich and sipped her tea. She stared and stared at the tree. She stared until it was all she could see, so that even when she closed her eyes that night in her bed, and no light shone on it, she saw the tree.