I couldn’t find Hayden anywhere. He’d disappeared while I was scanning our passes at the YMCA, and after twenty minutes of milling around and calling his name like an idiot, he still hadn’t turned up. He was cutting into my swimming time, and I was feeling jittery and greasy, which happens when I’m away from the chlorine for too long. The longer I hunted for him, the more I grew annoyed. Then I began to feel guilty because even though Hayden had been coming to the Y since he was two months old and knew the place better than the janitors, he was only eight and easily tempted by candy. With every passing minute, the odds were increasing that he was tied up in the back of a white van headed toward the Canadian border.
The front-desk attendants hadn’t seen him. They swore that the front entrance was the only way in or out and that all the back exists had alarms that would sound if the doors were opened. I knew that wasn’t entirely true because I often used the door by the Dumpsters as a shortcut to my car. The desk attendants offered to put the facility on lockdown. No one in or out until Hayden was located. That would involve a lot of people running around and the cops coming, so I said, “Let me take one more lap.” I retraced my steps, starting with the common area adjacent to the snack bar. I’d come through here at least a dozen times already.
I turned the corner, and there he was, seated alone at the last table closest to the vending machines. He waved when he saw me, as though we’d agreed to meet right here. “Where were you?” I said. “I’ve looked everywhere. I was getting worried.”
“Around,” he said.
“You’re eight,” I said. “You’re not allowed to loiter.”
“Well, I’m here now.”
He sat with his hands clasped together atop the table and his chest pressed tight against the edge. I could tell he was hiding something. I cupped my hand over his shoulder and moved him back. Beneath his thigh, peeking out the hem of his shorts, I caught a flash of red plastic. A candy wrapper. Two, actually: a Reese’s Fast Break bar and a bag of Skittles, both emptied of their contents. Hayden’s teeth were blue. Leaning closer I could see the faint chocolate shadow rimming his lips.
“We talked about this,” I said.
Everywhere we went, people tried to feed the boys sugar. The barbershop, the bank, the dry cleaners—they all had jars of suckers and Jolly Ranchers the proprietors tried to press into the boys’ hands with a wink and a glance over their shoulders, like a drug deal was going down. Hayden volunteered to run errands with me on Saturdays because he knew every sugar stash in the city. The old guys who ran the Ace Hardware set out a coffee urn and a package of E.L. Fudge next to the paint display. Hayden could empty the plastic trays of cookies in less time than it took me to buy a light bulb. And that’s only the stuff I saw.
School was a whole other problem. Every week at least one kid brought in cupcakes to celebrate a birthday or half-birthday, the school sold Dairy Queen Dilly Bars on Fridays as a fundraiser, and if ever there was a slowdown in the pipeline, the teachers themselves would dole it out. I had a hunch that sending the kids home tweaking on artificial sweeteners was how the teachers paid back parents for dumping our kids with them all week long. I’d seen groups of teachers at the bars a few times, and I’m here to tell you that elementary school teachers can drink. If anyone had steam to blow off, it was them, and after watching a crowd of kindergarten teachers in Christmas tree sweaters pound tequila shots, there wasn’t much I was willing to put past them.
In an effort to curb the boys’ sugar jones, Katherine and I had emptied the cupboards and freezer of as much junk food as possible. But instead of eating the fruit we left on the counter or snacking on the nuts and raisins we bought to replace the Chewy granola bars, Hayden had turned into a bit of a small-time thief. He’d absconded to the basement with the bowl of Splenda packets we kept beside the coffee maker, emptying them into his mouth one at a time and hiding the evidence behind the washing machine. Once those were gone, he started scrounging for cash. I kept finding the coin tray in my car cleaned out, the change jar on my nightstand reduced to nothing but dirty pennies. We couldn’t leave the house without Hayden looking to score.
Before leaving for the YMCA that day, in fact, I’d asked Hayden to empty his pockets. He’d pulled them both inside out, then showed me his hands and shook out his shirt. I even peeked down the back of his undies. His little white buns concealed, from what I could tell, no secret stash of cash.
“Where did you hide the money?” I asked him.
The corners of his stained mouth curled. He was proud of himself for putting one over on the old man. “In my shoe.”
“You disobeyed, and you lied to me,” I said. “You lied right to my face.”
He shrugged. “I wanted some.”
I was still angry that evening when I recapped the day’s events for Katherine. The longer I droned on, the more her eyebrows screwed closer together. It was the face she made when things weren’t adding up. “I don’t understand where he got the money in the first place,” she said. “He spent all of his last week.” I went for my wallet. I’d broken a twenty that morning to buy a cup of coffee. I could clearly remember returning eighteen dollars to my wallet. The ten and the five were still there, but the ones were missing. I stood at the bottom of the stairs counting up all the breaches of father-son trust that had occurred in the last few hours. Not only had Hayden caused me to miss half my allotted swimming time while he gorged himself on 450 nutritionally fatuous calories of partially hydrogenated soybean oil, blue #1, and glucose syrup and then lied about it, but the money used to procure the contraband had been stolen from my wallet. When I was a kid, my dad’s wallet was like the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, a sacred vessel and the source of all blessings and fear. I couldn’t recall a moment when I’d touched my dad’s wallet without his hand on it, too. It was too powerful to handle on my own. It stung me to realize the boys didn’t see my wallet the same way.
I called up for Hayden. It was time for punishment.
But how, exactly, to punish him posed something of a problem. I grew up in an era when punishment took one of two forms: spanking or grounding. Spanking was the preferred method before, say, puberty kicked in, at which point the judicial system switched to grounding. When I was Hayden’s age, everyone I knew got spanked. Some friends got spanked in front of company, their parents setting their scotch and sodas on a coaster just long enough to tan some butts before rejoining the adult conversation. Even our school spanked. My elementary and junior high principals both kept wooden paddles wrapped in duct tape behind their desks. If you opted for swats, they’d call your parents to make sure it was okay, and once they got the green light, you’d bend forward, hands on your knees, and think of Christmas. My mom was the MacGyver of spanking. She could make use of whatever she found within arm’s reach, whether it was a hairbrush, a spatula, a rolled-up magazine, or, if all else failed, her shoe. Getting grounded, in contrast, was like a teacher making an in-class exam a take-home paper. There was less pain up front, but it lasted much longer.
When it came to my boys, I lacked the paternal instinct for meting out pain. The boys’ swearing often made me laugh, and it never seemed fair to chuckle at a perfectly landed “Bite me, asshole,” then punish the speaker for saying it. I had a temper that occasionally culminated in thunderclaps of yelling, but the boys had figured out that my bark was much worse than my bite. I’d spanked them a few times, but I hated myself every time I did it, so mostly I yelled until my face turned blue and I ended up hurting myself. I’d stub my toe on the doorjamb, or gesticulate so wildly my hand would knock against the kitchen cupboards, or do any number of stupid things that would make Katherine laugh at my suffering.
To complicate matters, Hayden was a nihilist when it came to facing the music. Having spent much of his life barricaded inside his room at night thanks to the trusty shower curtain rod, the prospect of a time-out struck no fear in his heart. If we quarantined his books and toys, he’d scribble on his walls with a crayon hidden like a shank beneath his mattress. I’d considered strapping him to a chair in nothing but a ribbed tank top and his skivvies—which I was fully prepared to do now if he didn’t cop to the theft. The look on my face, and the open wallet in my hand, was enough to convince him to tell the truth. “Am I grounded?” he asked when he came down the stairs.
“Grounded isn’t the right word for what’s coming,” I said.
“What are you going to do to me?” For the first time, he looked actually scared. I considered it a small victory. I tried to think of the worst job I could subject him to that wouldn’t prompt the neighbors to call Child Protective Services.
“Get ready to pull some weeds,” I said.
Pulling weeds was my father’s preferred mode of punishment. If ever I sassed or grew too hyper or slapped my sister, I’d be turned out to the yard with a plastic trash bag and orders to clear the beds along the driveway. Pulling weeds is a fundamentally different activity from gardening. Gardening aims toward sculpting and beautification and can involve the satisfying hum of power equipment or the crisp snip of pruning shears. Pulling weeds is chain gang work, trash picking by another name, Man vs. Nature in the most elemental, back-breaking sense. And in Houston, the weeds, like the cockroaches and pickups and hairdos, were just massive. They’d evolved to grow especially thick in order to withstand the triple-digit heat and sauna-like humidity. Pulling a Texas dandelion out of the ground was like extracting a molar from an elephant’s mouth.
I’d tried to make the boys do various jobs over the years, all with disastrous results. After patiently teaching Galen how to use the lawnmower, he’d cut a path through the lawn that looked amazingly similar to the cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Crop Circles” box set. After months of empty threats to make Hayden scrub the toilets, I decided to make good and sent him into the john with the caddy of cleansers. He emptied half the can of Ajax into the toilet bowl before pouring the rest onto the living room rug and spraying it with Windex. It formed a tenacious paste that required a putty knife to remove. Pulling weeds, I believed, would prove a simpler, purer task. Just a boy with a trash bag and his thoughts for company.
Early Saturday morning I walked Hayden to the garden beneath the pines at the back of the yard, a stretch of dirt spanning the entire width of the property and long dominated by dandelions and buckwheat. We’d tried once to grow vegetables there but soon realized the grocery store had far better vegetables, grown by farmers who actually knew what they were doing. Galen wanted to grow pumpkins one year, so we tried that, too, and ended up with massive, snarling vines that formed a barbed-wire barricade around the weeds. My last bright idea had been to layer the beds with newspaper to kill everything beneath it, but that only gave the squirrels something to read while they burrowed through it. Bits of shredded newspaper still blew against the house every time the wind picked up.
I handed Hayden his trash bag and the hand spade, the one Katherine used for potting flowers. “Here you go, my friend,” I said.
“How many do I have to dig up?” His eyes grew wide as he surveyed the knee-high jungle engulfing his feet.
“Get digging,” I said. “I’ll let you know when you’re done.”
I watched him through the back window, the sun on his scalp, his shovel working the soil. Every few seconds Hayden sat back on his knees and squinted at the house—for me or Mom or anyone to rescue him from this purgatory. As punishments went, it seemed to be working, though after an hour of work he’d cleared a section about the size of a dinner plate. “What are you thinking about?” I asked when I went out to check on him.
“I’m thinking I sure have learned my lesson,” he said. “Can I be done now?”
It was early May and as fine a day as we’d had all year. I could hear the mourning doves and titmice in the branches. It had been two years since our failed bid to sell our house, two years since we’d decided to remain on this little patch of earth, in our small city in northeast Wisconsin, in our jobs and neighborhood, in communion with our small but delightful circle of friends. We’d kept the possibility of leaving in our back pockets, a last-ditch ejection-seat option in case life here turned out to suck, and we’d come close a few times to pushing the button. But we hadn’t, we’d stayed, and for better or worse, the house and the land it sat on were home.
Standing among the weeds with Hayden I recalled how I’d stood in more or less this same spot looking back at the house on the day we decided to buy it. We were fairly certain Hayden was conceived the night our offer was accepted, which meant that Hayden’s entire existence was congruent with our possession of the place. I remembered parking the car in the garage on the day we brought him home from the hospital, Katherine and I still shaky with fear after his touch-and-go time in the NICU. He’d learned to walk here, and talk, and in his tiny bedroom beneath the eaves of the roof he’d undoubtedly stared up at the ceiling as the morning light squeezed through the blinds and understood that he was himself, separate from other people, I and therefore not you. Our house was the only one he’d ever known, and the odds were decent that he’d live nowhere else until he lived on his own. That fact alone gave me reason enough to invest in it. The houses we grow up in have ways of not only containing our childhoods but defining them: They’re the stages of our earliest, most primal memories, and from them we each derive our idiosyncratic conceptions of home. What had felt to me like an arbitrary decision eight and a half years ago (we had only a few days to look for a place to live and our budget was tight) would end up playing an outsized role in how the boys thought about themselves, the places they saw in their minds when they considered where they were from. Hayden’s DNA was knit with this ratty patch of weeds. I owed it to his future to transform it into something worth remembering.
But when I pushed the spade into the soil, I realized why Hayden had been working so slowly. Last winter’s snow had left a crusted scrim over the top layer of dirt. The second and third layers were bone dry from the pine trees along the perimeter. Even with a good shove, the blade barely sank an inch. The earth was as hard as concrete. “See?” Hayden said. “It’s impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible,” I said. “We just need a bigger shovel.”
We rented the largest rototiller the hardware store had on hand, an orange Husqvarna with a mouth the size of an oven door and counter-rotating tines ferocious enough to mulch a tree stump. I told Hayden to make sure the dog was inside the house before I yanked the starter cord. A black cloud of exhaust puffed out of the engine, and the entire contraption began to hop and shimmy, itching to gnaw a hole through the center of the planet. Weeds came up whole, stringy roots and all, along with hunks of pumpkin rind, old newspaper, clumps of hardened dog shit, and at least two dinosaur bones. I could have dug a hole for a swimming pool in under an hour had I let the thing go.
Hayden followed behind me, well back from the grinding jaws of dismemberment, gathering up whatever the tiller ejected. He hauled one bucketful at a time, with both hands and plenty of anger, to the compost bin, then came back to gather more. I steered the tiller in uneven zigzags across the garden, then turned and cut even ziggier zigs and zaggier zags in the other direction, Hayden on my tail the entire time. As long as the tiller ran, he kept hauling. Soon the garden was free of weeds, and the cracked, winter-hardened dirt had been churned into a loose, loamy, chocolate-syrup black soil oozing with phosphates and earthworms. Whatever vegetation had been planted here seventy years ago when the house was built had been ground back into its primordial elements.
“Now that we’ve got the weeds out, what should we plant here?” I asked Hayden.
He lifted his shirt to wipe his face, flashing a bit of his pale stomach. “Money.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Money’s printed on paper, right? Paper’s made from wood. I’m thinking we find out what kind of wood is used for money paper and plant that. Then we can sell it.”
It wasn’t the dumbest idea I’d ever heard.
“How about watermelons?” Hayden said. I immediately had visions of vines growing through our windows. “Think of all the picnics we could have!”
“How about we see what the nursery has,” I said. I hefted the rototiller into the hatchback and bungeed down the gate. Hayden climbed in up front—tall enough now to ride shotgun—and rolled down his window. He fished my spare sunglasses out of the glove compartment, propped his elbow on the sill, and the two of us headed out.
When I described the garden to the sales associate, noting the five pine trees that shaded the soil, she said bark mulch would probably be my best bet. “You mean, like mulch mulch?” I asked.
She wore dream catcher earrings and had a cat tattoo poking up from the collar of her polo shirt. “Pine trees suck the water from the soil like frat brothers at a keg party,” she said. “Not much you can grow under a pine tree. Mulch is no muss, no fuss.”
“How about watermelons?” Hayden asked.
“Pumpkins are the better gourd for drier soils,” she said. “Or squash.”
“I want something green,” I asked. “Low maintenance but pretty to look at.”
“Well,” she said, turning to stare into the canopied section behind her, the kitty stretching into fuller view. “You could try pachysandra.”
Pachysandra, she told us, was a Japanese plant with waxy leaves “indifferent to drought and cold.” I liked the idea of the plants as “indifferent,” as if they had better things to do than react to the elements. “Plant them deep and six inches apart and they should be okay,” she said. “Water them in real good. Morning and night.”
We loaded a flatbed cart with as many as we could fit and rolled the sled toward the register. For a wheeled contraption on concrete it moved oddly like the rototiller. The garden center was busy with shoppers, older women in straw hats and men in white-on-white New Balance sneakers shuffling among the shrubs and trees with their hands behind their backs and futzing over the peonies and the poppies. Steering through them, I felt a pang of worry that I was, without having ever intended it, turning into a middle-aged, middle-class, Midwestern beer-drinking schlub who spent way too much time thinking about his yard when I ought to be planning our next trip overseas or attending Fellini retrospectives. To make matters worse, while I stood in line waiting to pay what amounted to that week’s grocery budget on emotionally aloof garden flora, my dad texted me a picture of his bare feet in the sand at the beach. The cobalt wave breaking in the background of the photograph looked glassblown. A bodysurfer slid down the face with his arm extended. “Three to four and building,” Dad wrote. “Water temp 65. You should be here.”
The road past the nursery led west, first into farmland but eventually, if you kept going, into the mountains and, once you got over those, the Pacific. The gap between where I stood and the picture in my hand was 2,500 miles. For a long moment I thought about it.
Once we were home and on our hands and knees in the garden, turning holes in the tilled soil and lowering the pachysandra plants one at a time, I felt better. Hayden’s energy had rebounded, thanks to a burger and a root beer, and he’d stopped asking to go inside and watch TV. We’d stopped talking about the work we were doing as punishment; instead, it was just work. In the same manner that I’d acquired a taste for brussels sprouts and spinach, I’d grown to love work, in particular hard, physical labor. My hands in the dirt, the sun on my back, my knees earth-stained and sore. A full day of teaching and writing could leave me as bedraggled as a ditch digger, even on days when I didn’t move more than a hundred feet from my desk. Drudge work offered an unexpected but definitive reprieve. The more my body hurt, the more my mind was at ease. I’d never been especially handy and was all thumbs when it came to machines, but certain tasks I’d hated as a younger man—like helping friends move—I now found oddly enjoyable. There was a Euclidian pleasure to be found in stacking square boxes inside a rectangular truck, all those tidy corners fitting together. At its core, work held the same pleasure as swimming: monotonous and repetitive but also cathartic and meditative. On several occasions, it had even saved me from myself.
I didn’t know if my attitudes about grunt labor were anomalous or annoyingly shopworn, and I definitely didn’t believe that hard work, whether with body or mind, was a virtue exclusive to men. But I did believe in work as a value worth instilling in the boys. Galen was self-motivated but easily frustrated; Hayden most often sought to complete every job as quickly and as effortlessly as possible. He cleaned his room by shoving his dirty clothes under his bed, and we had to check his math homework at night because left to his own devices he’d answer every word problem with “Just because.”
The fact that Hayden had been working for this long seemed a minor miracle. Even Katherine couldn’t believe it. She shot me a thumbs-up from the kitchen window. I pulled back the dirt, Hayden lowered the seedling, and together we packed the soil around the base of the stem. “You know,” I said, “one day you might have a kid. You’ll make him do jobs. Or her, if she’s a girl.”
“Is that why you had me?” he asked. “So you’d have a slave?”
“Trust me, my young friend,” I said. “Having kids is not about saving yourself any work. Or money, for that matter.”
“So?” he asked. “Why did you decide to have me?”
“Well, we didn’t exactly decide. You just happened. Mom and I weren’t planning on it.”
“I was an accident.”
“In a manner of speaking,” I said. “So was your brother.”
“Were you happy about it at least?”
“Of course I was,” I said. “Once I stopped being so scared.”
Hayden scooped his hand through the dirt and dropped in a handful of root promoter. He didn’t look up. I noticed the scalp beneath his hair turning pink. “You were scared of me?”
“Not of you. Just about having you. We didn’t have much money when your brother was born, and I didn’t know if we could afford to have another baby. I was scared of how my life would change. When you have kids, you’re responsible for them. You don’t get to do all the things you used to do. Imagine if someone said you couldn’t ride your bike anymore. Even if you hadn’t ridden it in a while, you’d be kind of freaked out if you suddenly no longer had the option.”
“What would you be doing if you didn’t have me?” he asked.
The funny thing was, I couldn’t think of anywhere else I wanted to be right then. Not even the beach. “Probably this,” I said. “Except I’d be alone.”
“What would you be doing if you weren’t out here with me?” I asked Hayden.
“Watching TV.”
“Is this better or worse?”
He sat back on his heels and wiped his hands on his shorts. The pachysandras were spread out in a tidy grid. In a few weeks, they’d blossom with small purple flowers that would turn a deep violet when the sun dropped behind the pines. “A little of both,” he said.
The last seedling went into the ground nearly nine hours after Hayden and I had started that morning. I pushed myself to my feet and walked like a humpback to fetch the hose. Katherine came into the yard to admire our work. Hayden stood with his mom while I watered in the plants, the spray from the nozzle throwing rainbows across the garden. Hayden had streaks of dirt on his forehead and shirt and calves, black fingerprints on his cheeks like war paint. I felt the long day in my knees and back and knew I’d feel much worse in the morning.
Katherine said, “Tom Thumb here was telling me all about pachysandra.”
“It’s from Japan,” Hayden said. “That’s what the lady at the nursery said. Also that we have to water it good for the next few weeks. Morning and night.”
“Should we plant more tomorrow?” I asked. “Tackle the weeds behind the garage?”
“No way,” Hayden said. “Tomorrow I am definitely watching TV.”
I woke up the next morning not to the sound of the TV but of the water running, that unmistakable metallic echo through the walls. I thought I’d shut off the hose sprayer; I had no memory of shutting off the spigot or coiling the hose. If the water had been running all night, the plants would be swamped, the garden flooded, all our hard work washed out. I hobbled to the window and pulled open the curtain, expecting the worst. Hayden stood at the back of the yard in the first morning light, tending to the fruits of his labor.