Grampy Fernside's Arc

Chapter 12 of 16

By midmorning the toad had not moved and the finch had not sung. Grampy stood at the edge of the bed and looked at the flat brown surface. One sprout had broken through near the head of the row. The other eighteen seeds lay hidden under the moss cover, half a finger down, spaced by the pegs he had used at planting. He knew the pattern in his head. He did not trust his feet. His boots were off, as always, and his toes were wide and clumsy. One wrong step would crush a stem before it saw daylight. He sat on the picnic table with his green journal open on his knee. The tomato stamp on the cover had faded from forty summers of pocket wear. Inside, he had drawn the bed at planting, nineteen dots in three staggered rows. He counted them again. He needed a marker for each dot that a toad would not swallow, a slug would not climb, and his own foot would notice before it came down. Togg watched from the fence rail, cheek pouches empty for once. "Sticks," he said. "Break in the wind. Twine snaps. Use stones." "Stones look like stones," Grampy said. "I'll forget which ones I placed." "Then don't use plain ones." Grampy closed the journal. He limped to the shed and opened the low drawer where his granddaughter kept her painting things. She had left a tin of small rocks from last summer, pink and blue, each one striped or dotted in white. He carried the tin to the bed and set it on the slate. He counted nineteen out and lined them on the table. He worked on his knees where he could, and on his backside where he could not. He lifted the moss cover a hand's width at a time. Under each peg-hole he set one painted stone, pink for the outer rows, blue for the middle. He pressed each stone flat so it sat level with the soil. The sprouted seed got a pink one tucked behind the pale hook so the stem had room. When he reached the last hole, he sat back and counted. Nineteen stones. Nineteen dots in his journal. He inked a small mark beside each dot to show it was placed. Hazel came down from the pipe and hovered above the bed. Her black eyes moved along the row. "I can see every one," she said. "From the air. From the ground too." She landed on the toad's back for a moment, then lifted off. "Tell the finch to sing louder if a boot comes near." Grampy weighted the moss cover again. The bed now read like a map. He could walk it in the dark. What he could not yet see was which of the other eighteen stones would show a green hook by morning, and which would show nothing at all.