How Does Your Garden Grow

How Does Your Garden Grow - Chapter 5

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Chapter 5

After the bastards at Witherspoon Elementary forced her to retire, Irma King decided that the best way to sooth the sting of her embarrassment was to buy a new house with an expansive garden and a privacy fence to shut out all the cretins – big and small -- who had made her life insufferable for so long. The remaining AT&T stock her late husband left her was just enough to do it, and she decided that the old Volk Funeral Home, with the cage elevator and its large conservatory in the rear, would suit her well. She was certain it would make the perfect place to nurture her love of the soil and the things she could grow there during her retirement.  Her friends, if they were that, said the house was too big for just her; but what gave them the right to voice such an opinion? Not friendship or even genuine concern; Irma was certain of that. And where the hell were those voices when, after 40 years committed to teaching Blackwater’s sniveling, pants-wetting little brats, the school board decided she should be forcibly retired with little more than a letter outlining a date of contractual separation and a pension? They were silent, most of them, or whispering, along with the others in the teacher’s lounge, about how harsh treatment of her first-graders was practically abusive, that the complaints from parents had gone on too long, and how it was about time they put her out to pasture. She was 60, after all, and they’d put up with her for four decades. Wasn’t that long enough?  Well, Irma had decided she was going to turn that shitty pasture into a garden and the property on the corner of Woodlawn and Willow Avenues would be ideal.

Irma knew she’d get a good deal when she learn the house had stood empty and on the market for over two years, ever since Volk moved out of Blackwater to a more modern facility in neighboring Palisades Park. But she thought she might get an even better deal when she learned who was managing the sale of the property. The realtor was little Vernon Capers. Vernon was a crier; that she knew well, ever since she taught him and his twin brother Alfred nearly 30 years ago.  She figured him for a bed-wetter, too, but counted herself lucky that she never caught the acrid whiff of urine coming from Vernon’s third row desk.  Oh, she had one of those in just about every class, but not Vernon.  And yet, 30 years later, she wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t mess his trousers when he opened the door of the property on 3131 Woodlawn and saw her standing there, flowered hat cocked and purse dangling from her elbow.  Irma saw Vernon’s lip quiver a fraction before he bit it still. That was a good sign, but when he began to stammer an awkward welcome, and Irma saw a bead of sweat form at his temple, she allowed herself a little smirk.  That’s when she knew that the property, which had been priced to sell fast, just got a lot cheaper.  Ah, but life had its little pleasures sometimes.

She let Vernon stammer through his sales pitch and walk her through the property, but he told her nothing she hadn’t already learned from her research at the Blackwater Public Library. 

After hours of sifting through the microfiche, she learned that the three story house was built by Cecil Woodrow in the late 1860s. It was considered a mansion in its time.  He was a wealthy man and a major investor in the Roebling Company until he was stricken with caisson’s disease after checking on the progress of the Brooklyn Bridge project he was helping to fund. Ill and confined to a wheel chair for the remainder of his life, he had a cage elevator installed that traveled from the basement to the top floor. Decades later, when Volk bought the property in the 20’s, the elevator proved invaluable in transporting bodies from the embalming table down in the basement prep room to the viewing rooms on the upper floors.

Irma liked the idea of having an elevator in the house, it would be helpful as she grew older and more infirm, but it was the half-acre of property and the large conservatory that interested her most. Woodrow, she learned, was an amateur botanist. His glass enclosed conservatory adjoined to the back of the house rose two stories and took up 1,500 square feet all by itself.  With an indoor sprinkler system, this professional green house was ideal for creating her own exotic indoor garden to match the one she planned for the property outside. The Volk Funeral home had used it for their Eternal Garden Services, an expensive funeral package that Irma thought wasn’t nearly worth the price when she bought it for her husband 10 years before.  Volk’s “eternal garden” was little more than a collection of ferns and low-maintenance evergreens spruced up with plastic and silk flowers; anything to cut corners. It was one of the reason’s Volk left the property.  Garden funerals had gone out of style and they couldn’t repurpose the square footage for anything that would add to the bottom line.  So Ceil Woodrow’s indoor garden, which had begun to wane in the last years of his life, and which had been converted to an ugly evergreen crowded funeral viewing room, eventual became a filthy old storage facility where fake flowers, empty planters, unsold and out of style caskets and various tools of the mortuary trade gathered dust. Ceil’s legacy of creating life was as dead as the bodies that once lay on the embalming table in the basement.

But what Irma lacked in social skills, she made up for in both vision and determination. The house was never her focus.  For her, it was always about resurrecting the gardens, both outdoor and indoor; and she would do whatever it took.