Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

Dirt by Kate Barsotti

Kate Barsotti is an illustrator and non-fiction writer who lives in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. The inspiration for her story “Dirt,” her first fiction sale, was her own garden, which she describes as a Midwestern “weed crop” that she attempted to turn into a butterfly nursery. While doing her best to learn the intricacies of composting, she says, she was sidetracked by garden philosophers, and thus, her story’s Maxwell Rimmer was born.

Maxwell Rimmer gazed through the warped glass of old windowpanes, letting his eyes settle on rain-cloud washiness and green-leaved wet. It was ridiculous, this weather. An early spring tempest with ambitions to be a full-fledged cyclone had, instead, lowered its expectations and become a persistent storm. It spun in place off the New Hampshire and Maine coasts, near the Isles of the Shoals, too strong to blow itself out and too weak to return to the sea. TV weather-persons waned from jocular to worried to apologetic, as if the storm were a delinquent child that no one could control. Rimmer half believed it was.

Under the persistent rapping of rain on his roof, he sipped his morning coffee to the voice of Reverend Ansel Peach on the Christian radio station W-EVE. Reverend Peach spoke of God’s judgment, of signs and revelations: “Verily, I say unto thee, woe to the man who repenteth not, for God will drown his disgrace in a flood of judgment. Sin not. That is the word of our Lord.”

Repentance, evidently, was the remedy to rain. Rimmer liked Preacher Peach’s voice, steady as drops on the eaves. He was pleased that the sermons rarely made much sense, but were stern and comforting in a King Jamesian sort of way. The reverend’s voice was pure, unsullied by doubt, he was only slightly surprised at the stupidity of his listeners, who seemed determined to head straight to hell. For each continuous day of wet, Rimmer sent a donation to the ministry, a check for exactly one dollar. It was the least he could do, since the minister’s predictions of the next great flood seemed to be correct. Rimmer’s bank account was less thirty-seven dollars and counting.

It was becoming personal, this rain. While Rimmer pitied his few neighbors with cesspool cellars and dripping ceilings, his problem was lack of inspiration. Over the past forty years, Rimmer had built a voracious following of amateur green thumbs who gobbled his weekly columns, devoured his books, and sucked in his interviews as if their Wild Blue Yonder roses depended on it. He didn’t solve problems such as root rot or blight. Discussion of compost or organic weed control was beneath him. Sheltered on Appledore Island, Maxwell Rimmer was the poet of the garden, the sensitive soul who appreciated the inner lives of pansies and the arousal of bees in the honeycomb. He was not looking for backyard converts (weedies, he called them). Rimmer was happy to continue preaching to his choir, devoted gardeners who wrote fan letters with dip pens in calligraphic hand, pressing flowers between the pages. Sometimes they sent knitted mittens, although Rimmer never quite understood why, but he always instructed his agent’s secretary to send a thank-you note, along with a notice about his upcoming book.

If there ever were another book. No words flowed. He knew that he’d been petering out the last few years. What more could he write about daisies? The damper it became outside, the more dried up Rimmer felt within, his brain parched as a lake bed cracked by drought. He stayed indoors. He nodded off in his chair and woke himself with his own snorts. His only real activity was to listen to Reverend Peach every morning. Much to his chagrin, he’d begun to take notes.

He let his eyes wander from the window to the wall. He stared at a framed print of a painting that depicted a woman in her island garden. The woman was none other than Celia Thaxter, who had lived on Appledore, created a lovely garden, and was famous in her day for writing about it. Rimmer’s agent had sent the picture as a gift when his first book was published. She said that his living on Appledore, which naturally associated his work with Thaxter’s book An Island Garden, added to Rimmer’s mystique.

“Like, you know,” Tina said over the phone, snapping her gum in his ear, “like your pages and hers are having a nice garden chat, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Maxwell?... Hello?”

Rimmer neglected to tell his agent about Thaxter’s associations with things other than flowers. Murder, for instance. Thaxter had written an essay called “A Memorable Murder” about the gruesome deaths on Smuttynose Island, a spit of land near Appledore. The murders occurred in 1873. Thaxter’s essay was full of romantic nonsense, but Rimmer admired the prose with which she described the tale of woe:

Louis Wagner had rowed to Smuttynose on a cold, still night. The island was still encased in ice and snow. Wagner knew that the other men were out fishing. He also knew that they’d recently been paid, and he wanted to visit their homes and steal the money. Three women were asleep in the Christensen cottage, unprotected. Wagner felled Anethe with an axe and strangled Karen, but the third woman escaped. Wagner was captured, tried, and jailed. He admitted no guilt and expressed no regret.

And Celia Thaxter got her essay, Rimmer thought, peeved. Easy enough for her. She was a flowery woman in a flowery age. She was even famous for her poetry, for God’s sake. If such a murder happened on one of the Isles today, who would notice? It would be a blurb one day and a footnote the next, and might get a full minute on local news. Rimmer couldn’t even expect a newspaper byline, unless by some feat of divine intervention, the New Yorker called.

Rimmer raised his fingers to his typewriter, a sturdy Olympia with a working bell that dinged at the end of each line. He laid his fingertips on the keys, set his jaw, and tapped in time to the rain:

Of all Nature’s growing things, herbs are the most innocent. While some may sneak out of their quarters and propagate willy-nilly in flower bowers or vegetable beds, this spreading of seed is mere exuberance, not opportunistic lust.

He gnashed his teeth and crumpled the paper in his fist. “Lovely. Maxwell Rimmer, garden pornographer.”

He left the paper in a creased ball and placed it on the corner of his desk beside the other castoffs. They’d been accumulating for a month. One of them might contain the germ of an idea. He would need his stockpile of sentences to nourish it along.

The sound of a flapping rug grated on his ears. Rimmer shoved himself up from the desk and stomped to the back door.

“Must you?”

Elsa’s chapped hands snapped the rug in the air, sending dust and debris flying to settle in nearby puddles. Wattles of flesh under her arms flapped, too, but her thighs and buttocks held firm under the cotton dress.

Nice hams, sweet gams. The thought bubbled up in Rimmer’s mind unbidden. He swatted it away.

“I said, must you? I’m writing.”

Elsa faced him. “You better outside.”

Rimmer’s eyes skittered away from hers. He found it impossible to meet her gaze. For one thing, her irises were too blue. For another, her age was unfathomable. She could be a worn-out forty-something or a well-preserved sixtyish.

“I’ve told you a thousand times. I need quiet.”

She folded the rug on her arm like a maitre d’. She looked as if she expected to escort him outside and send him under the sodden arbor. “You need garden,” she said and brushed past him into the house. He stayed in the doorway and watched her firm calves disappear into the kitchen.

Elsa had appeared on his doorstep three years ago, after her former employer and Rimmer’s nearest neighbor keeled over at supper. The old man had bubbled his last breaths facedown in a bowl of pea soup.

Ba-bam. Ba-bam.

Rimmer remembered her knock as a terrible summons given with the force of law. He’d rushed to the door. A stout woman had commandeered his doorstep, holding two suitcases.

“McKintey dead,” she announced in a thick Dutch accent.

“S-sorry?” Rimmer stammered, blushing. He hadn’t seen the old coot in years and figured he was already gone. The housekeeper’s proclamation made McKintey’s recent passing seem anticlimactic. Bad manners, even.

Elsa looked Rimmer up and down, scowling. He’d rushed to the door wearing his writing garb: a new sunscreen hat; an apron with sturdy pockets for trowels and forks; kneepads; and spotless galoshes. They helped Rimmer get into the mood to compose and, besides, the corporations that provided them for free were desperate for his endorsement. Elsa sniffed.

“I clean now,” she said. She strode in with her suitcases and forced him to step aside. She found the guest bedroom, where no guest had ever stayed, and unpacked. Rimmer slunk back to his desk, minus the garden accessories that he squirreled away in a closet. He sulked for a day, prepared to send her off on the next boat. She wasn’t his responsibility. But she’d managed to clean the kitchen, cook a sublime meal of potatoes and meatballs, and then make the kitchen sparkling again before going off to bed. Her English was too limited to negotiate more than room and board, plus a small allowance. Rimmer wallowed in smugness. He dismissed the maid service that came once a month and prepared to live like an exiled king.

They butted heads over the garden. Elsa pestered him about doing his own planting and pruning. Said it would be good for him. Rimmer dug in. He’d hired out that sort of thing. Why would he tend his garden any more than he cleaned his toilet? He was an artist, not a laborer. Genius required cultivation. Let her mumble Dutch in the kitchen. Let Mexican Spanish be chattered in the hedgerows. Let their fingernails stay split and soiled. His readers needed him.

At least, they used to. Closing the back door against the rain, Rimmer sat down heavily at his desk and sighed. One eye squeezed out a tear. His early books were out of print. When the phone rang, it was a garden society, not a national magazine. His own agent had been hinting for some months that, if a great work were not forthcoming, perhaps Rimmer should consider appearances at state fairs. Farmers markets. Girl Scout troops. She even mentioned something about a blog. Rimmer despaired. Appledore Island didn’t even have roads.

His chest ached with dormant feelings. I’m root-bound. Withering. He plucked one of his crumpled-up papers off his desk and unfolded it.

Words were missing.

Rimmer flattened the page. Entire phrases had been cut out, leaving rectangular holes all over the paper. He grabbed another crumpled ball. It, too, had been vandalized by somebody’s scissors. He snatched each one and tore it open; they were all ravaged. Finally, Rimmer noticed unwrinkled sheets at the bottom of the pile.

The cut-out phrases composed the text, taped down to form paragraphs. His words, made new again, by careful arrangement. Trite phrases and stale observations had been left behind. Some benevolent elf had come in the night, read his poor draft, and lifted the gold from the dross. A gift. Rimmer gasped and put a hand against his breastbone.

He stumbled outside, expecting the sun to be beaming. Instead, raindrops streamed down his hair and face, trickled under his collar. Rimmer wiped his cheeks and let a laugh work its way from his belly to his lips. He felt giddy. He wanted to roll in the mud and kick his feet in the air. Instead, he picked up the garden spade that leaned against the house and worked the tip a little way into the earth. The soil squelched.

“Good, yes?” Elsa’s voice.

Still grinning, Rimmer turned and said, “Yes, I suppose a little dirt might be good for me—”

She stood in the doorway, the paper with the taped scraps in her hand. She extended the paper to him, an offering. “Better now?”

His mind froze. He could feel that his face had frozen, too, stuck in a half-smile. This servant, whose mother tongue was gibberish, had tampered with his work? He should laugh it off, pour her a nice glass of scotch, and toast her health. But instead he felt, or rather, noticed, the way rage distilled inside his gut. She had trespassed. He watched his hands grip the handle of the spade, swing it round in a perfect arc, and crack it against her skull. She toppled forward, stiff as a post. Water rippled in the puddles, reflecting more water coming from the sky. He stepped over her body to pick up the paper and slammed the door to the house.

He came out again in a few minutes, now wearing his old writing duds — galoshes and apron and hat. He took the spade and walked to the back of the yard. The mulch bin, a large one, was covered against the rain. Some of the compost would be relatively dry, and it stunk to heaven anyway. He lifted the spade over the bin’s low wall, put his shoulder against the handle, and started to dig.

The rain stopped three days later. When the phone rang early in the morning, Rimmer picked it up obediently, certain that the sheriff was calling to order him to turn himself in. Time to take his medicine.

“Maxwell? Tina. Love the new work, thanks for faxing it along. Poignant. Gripping. Just like your old stuff. Is there more? Send it on, baby, and we’ll get a book out in time for next spring... You there?”

Dust coated the house. Motes swam in the sunbeams. Every dish was in the sink. How had she kept stains off the floor? At night, cockroaches scuttled in the pantry and mice rustled in the walls.

Rimmer went to Elsa’s room and stood by the bed. For three years, he’d never set foot inside; he’d even avoided glancing through the open door on the way to the bathroom. The cover was smooth. She’d hung a cross above the bed. The dresser held a jewelry box with a strand of pearls and rings he’d never seen her wear. He found a stack of letters in a drawer, all in Dutch. The dates were at least a decade old.

The nightstand held a lamp, a coaster for her water glass, and a small radio. Rimmer turned it on, but could barely hear its whispering. He found the volume knob and twisted.

“Welcome to W-EVE, house of the Lord on the airwaves. Coming up, it’s Reverend Peach, here to offer comfort and words of redemp—”

He switched it off. Had she been here each morning, quietly listening to the same show? She could have joined him. They could have shared a cup of coffee. Talked about his writing or her errands for the day. But she had stayed in her room because she knew that he wished to be alone. Hadn’t he always said so? She must have slipped out to his desk after he went to bed, to read what he had tossed away. And one night, not so long ago, she had seen his struggle with words and cleansed them.

Maxwell Rimmer shuffled out to his typewriter and sat. He heard his own breathing, but could not feel his body. It moved like a puppet. He ordered his fingers to rest upon the keys and tapped out the words: I have lived in paradise.

© 2008 by Kate Barsotti