Be Not Afraid Read Online Free PDF Page A

have to worry.” I kissed her cheek. “I just need some air. Thanks for coming to get me.”
    Nan’s farmhouse was set on three acres of lush land on the outskirts of town, prime real estate in dinky Fairfield, Connecticut, where most houses had been built over collapsed coal mines. To the right of the house, a small pond was edged with cattails, pussy willows, and giant swaths of honeysuckle vines. A single, enormous oak on the north end dangled its limbs over the water like a wide umbrella. Beyond the pond was a tangle of woods, through which Nan had long ago cut a path, leading to an empty greenhouse she was trying to restore. Sometimes, if I was really bored, I wandered back there, poking around at the empty terra-cotta pots and barren shelves, as if I might find some kind of hidden secret Nan kept from the rest of us. Now, though, I went around to the back of the farmhouse and sat down next to the garden.
    The garden was not really a garden. Or rather, it was the beginnings of one, a ten-foot by fourteen-foot plot of dirt Dad had dug out last fall for the sole purpose oftransplanting all of Mom’s flower bulbs. He’d gotten as far as creating a border around the edge and removing a few of the really deep rocks along the right-hand side before putting the shovel and pickax away for good. It didn’t take me long to realize that the whole thing had been just another one of his “grieving ideas,” something he had momentarily gotten into his head to remember Mom by, only to abandon without explanation a few weeks later. The cardboard box filled with her bulbs was still sitting on the other side like an afterthought, collecting dust.
    I walked over to examine the contents of the box. It was more than half full, most of the bulbs withered and frayed around the edges. They made a dry rustling sound when I picked them up, and chunks of dried dirt fell off the bottoms. The majority of them were the size and shape of small onions, but there were some rhizomes in there, too, a type of iris root, which were shaped like thin, lopsided carrots. They were rotted at the bottom, the wet, fibrous material emanating a kind of mushroom smell, and I wrinkled my nose. It would have been nice if Dad had actually gone and planted them, even just a few, but he didn’t know anything at all about these bulbs; he had never even been able to differentiate between the types of flowers they produced.
    I was the one Mom had given her flower knowledge to, pointing out the bearded iris in her garden with their telltale whiskery strands inside the petals, the colors ranging from a soft, watery lavender to a buttery yellow. She’dplanted allium, too, purple and pink puffballs perched like little globes on the ends of stiff stems, and dinner plate dahlias, their cranberry-colored faces adorned with rows of circular petals. To the right of the dahlias had been rows of
Nerine,
long, curly petals flush with pink and orange hues; next to them had been the begonia and the hyacinth, the gladiolas and the lilies, and finally, the endless rows of red and orange and white tulips.
    Mom loved each of the flower species with an intensity that sometimes aggravated me, and she’d tended to them as dutifully as she might other children in the family. And as much as I sometimes resented the time she spent in the garden, when the tiny buds finally opened and the flowers bloomed, even I found it hard to feel anything but awe. Once, all the crested irises on the right-hand side of Mom’s garden bloomed at the same time as the allium and the tulips, so that every morning for an entire week, as the light began to creep up into the sky, the tips of the flowers would gleam, creating such a swath of multihued brilliance that it looked as if a rainbow had caught fire.
    I sat there for a minute, fingering a mangled rhizome root, and then pushed it into the soil. It was a pointless gesture; none of them were any good. The rotting fungus would prevent them from ever