Harvesting Memories

Harvesting Memories

Jennifer L McKeighan

My great-uncle Gabriel was an excellent gardener. He transformed my father's plantation into a stunning view people often stopped to enjoy the view. Sometimes they would pull into our drive and ask Gabriel for a tour, for which he was always grateful.

"There is no sense creating something special and then not sharing it. That defeats the purpose of creating it at all," he often said.

Each summer, the local garden club held a contest to determine whose yard was the most visually striking that year. Gabriel had won it for the past ten years, albeit deservedly. He was known as the one to beat, and there were more than a few gardeners in town jealous of his skills.

"I think he should bow out one year, give someone else a chance," one of the patrons told Angus down at the garden nursery.

"Why? If someone wants to win, they will have to beat him fair and square. Gardening isn't like grade school sports—not everyone gets a trophy just for playing." The patron never shopped at Angus' again, not that 'Gus minded. He always hated whiners.

A month before the Gardener's Prize, a truck came and delivered flowers, trees, and strawberry plants. My father signed for it all because Gabriel was out of town buying the items needed to construct a small fountain.

Gabriel returned and was like a kid on Christmas morning. He was an artist with a new set of paints. He was going to get up before first light to get started. He retired for the night a bit early and probably found it hard to sleep with so many ideas on his mind.

When we woke later in the morning, there was no sign of him. The only thing he had planted was a pear tree. It looked nice, but we couldn't help but wonder where he'd gone. His truck was in the driveway. And his old-fashioned bicycle was leaning up against the stone column near the water pump. He wasn't one for taking walks, but perhaps today was an exception.

"Weird, though," my mother said. "He has so much work to do today in the garden. I can't imagine what could pull him away from all that."

The day got stranger still. Gabriel didn't show up for lunch, and no one had heard from him. He refused to carry a cell phone ( he called them 'electronic leashes'), but he always called to let us know where he was. This entire day was perplexing. That was all unlike the Gabriel we knew.

When we still hadn't heard from him by late afternoon, we borrowed Gabe's truck to drive around the neighborhood, looking for him. We searched; we had too many questions deserving answers.

The crazy thing is this: we never saw Gabriel again. He vanished without leaving a single clue what happened.

The years went by—12 of them, in fact—and still, Gabriel was the greatest mystery our family had ever known. We had reported him missing back when it happened, but neither we nor the police knew any more now than we did back then.

Over the years, a few attempts Our family had parties, weddings, and picnics amid the splendor of his plantings. The entire yard served as an apt backdrop for lovely photos of our gatherings. Everyone had their favorite corner of the yard in which to linger.

We tried to re-establish the gardens, not because we thought we could win the contest, but to keep Gabriel's work alive. But we were not Gabriel, and the gardens never returned to their former glory. Our one consolation was that pear tree. It produced large, sweet pears, the best we'd ever tasted. It was a link to Gabriel and a godsend to us that the last thing he ever planted reminded us of his sweetness.

The older members of the family were passing away, however. No one wanted to take on the big house or the inevitable disappointment of not restoring the gardens successfully. It was a lot of work to keep up both and still not garner the slightest success.

I inherited the property, and I intended to restore the garden myself. Some perennials had begun to take over, running wild and obliterating the annuals. Everything in the gardens looked washed-out, unloved, except the pear tree. It was the single thriving plant in that garden.

I searched the attic, where Gabriel's things were. I found ledgers of planting records, information on which plants he had tried, and how they fared. He even kept track of seed companies, rating them on quality, times for delivery, and so much more. I knew he took his garden seriously, but I had no idea the sheer dedication involved.

I opened the latest binder to study what he was planning to do when he redid the garden. It was all the usual sort of entry, with all the detailed notations.

I thought it might be nice to add another fruit tree to the garden since the pear tree did so well. I looked through the ledger, hoping to find where Gabriel had purchased it. I reasoned it must have been a good nursery, and maybe I could get an apple or peach tree from the same place.

The was no entry for a pear tree. I was honestly puzzled; after so many detailed entries, there was nothing about the pear tree? The other plants, those he purchased the day before he vanished, were meticulously cataloged. Why wasn't the pear tree included?

I tried to think back to the day he disappeared. I specifically tried to remember how the garden appeared. I remembered so many flower beds, their soil prepared for new plants to grow there. I didn't recall the tree being there before that day. Something about that troubled me.

Back when it happened, the police could discover no sign of foul play. The officers knew, as did we, it was unlikely for Gabriel to have walked away from his life here, especially with the Gardener's Prize coming up. But no one had any good ideas where he might have gone.

My head was foggy with images half-remembered. I'd been reading these ledgers all afternoon, and my head ached. I closed the book, went to fix a little snack.

I dreamed of my family gathered out in our garden. We were all wearing casual clothes, and it looked as though it might have been a cookout--the 4th of July or Labor Day, maybe. We were admiring the pear tree and began picking its fruit. We all started to bite into them, and it was blood dribbling out rather than fruit juices. I woke in a cold sweat.

The dream stuck with me for days. It troubled me more than I cared to admit. I returned to the entries. I double-checked, and there was no mention of a pear tree—not on the order forms and not in the ledger. The other thing that bothered me was that the tree would not be in fruit in time for the judging. I had never known Gabriel to plan anything on a whim—or to plant anything that would not enhance his garden for the judges.

The questions came rushing at me. Could someone else have planted that tree? Why would Gabriel add something that could not please the judges? Why were these thoughts so determined to flood my brain?

I had the dream again that night. That time, when we all took our bloody bites, we could see a shadow of a man cast on the lawn in front of us. Who could it be? Everyone I knew was already in the dream.

A horrible thought: what if Gabriel was dead and planted beneath that tree? I told myself to stop reading so many murder mysteries and horror novels; they were poisoning my good sense. These thoughts circled like a moth fluttering desperately around a lit candle. I decided to dig just a bit of dirt away from the tree's base—just enough to squelch these terrible thoughts.

At first, I found nothing in the dirt. I thought that would rid me of my wild notions. The next day I dug deeper. I didn't want to destroy the roots or the entire tree. I decided I'd done enough, but my mind harangued me to dibble further.

I then found what might be small pieces of bone. I could barely believe my eyes. I rebuked myself that these could be any bones, not just a human's. As I unearthed more of the area, I uncovered more, recognizing them as tarsals, metatarsals, and phalanges. I was extricating the remains of a human foot!

Continuing, I saw the bones were being held together by delicate strands of roots. The roots and the bones resembled the shape of a human foot, with near perfection. The root structures mimicked veins, arteries, and capillaries.

I understood then. The roots had consumed the body and left a framework in the shape of a circulatory system. I was looking at my great-uncle in vegetative form. The tree had eaten him, and we had eaten the pears. I ran to a clump of Hooker's onion to vomit. I was sure I would never eat again.

I called the police. The officers arrived with a photographer, a medical examiner, and a forensics investigator. They were in awe, trying to pretend they had seen anything like this before.

"We're going to need to separate the remains from the tree, and that might mean taking that root system along with him. Will that be a problem?"

"No," I replied flatly. I knew I never wanted to taste another pear my whole life long. I especially never wanted to taste a pear from that tree.

"It's fascinating. If you colored the vein roots blue and the artery roots red, you'd have a representation of a person's circulatory system," the M.E. said.

"Yeah. Never seen anything like it," the forensics guy replied, shaking his head.

They gathered up everything to examine. Months later, they told me I could come to take Gabriel's remains. They were no nearer to discovering Gabriel's killer than when I first called them. I couldn't blame them, for there was so little to investigate. Even a search for which nursery sold the pear tree yielded nothing but dead ends.

The museum wanted to purchase the rooted form, but I declined. I found it all quite interesting, too, but I would not put my loved one on display. I even imagined the killer going to the museum and getting amusement out of the remains. I was never going to allow that.

Gabriel was buried in a coffin, with a headstone and a memorial service, at last. The family was still in shock even now. They stood like paper dolls, wordless and somehow flimsy as if a gust of wind might blow them all down.

I burned the rest of the pear tree. I couldn't bear to look at any of it without seeing a vision of its carnivorous appetite for my family member.

Where the pear tree once stood, I've planted a bed of tiger lilies.

At least their warning is right there in their name.