Jeba Dispatch on Folly Beach Trek

Sweet Shrub

Sweet Shrub
Lib Willard

Her job was to do grave plantings.
People would tell Celie something about their loved one and Celie would think of a plant
that corresponded. She was familiar with plants and had many in her yard to choose from. She
liked to divide plants anyway, to make more. It made her think of Jesus dividing the bread and
multiplying the fish. She understood how he could feed so many. The world, Celie knew was
rich.
Her first grave planting was for her cat who got run over one Saturday morning by a
pickup truck. The heavy man in blue overalls stopped and said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Celie was
screaming. She saw it from across the field, Sam coming to her and the truck stopping. Sam,
Sam.
When John said, Plant daffodils, Celie agreed. Nothing would be right enough anyway for
the softest sweetest white cat in the world and she could not think of anything else except, Why
her Sam? She had cared for him like her first born son, carrying him in a pouch around the
neighborhood, and in the evening with John, pretending that Sam was a child. She fed Sam from
her hand. He would only eat that way, from her hand, Please please please, feed me that way.
Sam then fit his mouth snug inside her cupped hand and moistened Celie’s fingers with the mixture
of saliva and cereal grain and ground poultry. Celie learned later that the whiskers are the
most sensitive place on a cat and she tried the fact out by rubbing the whiskers on her other cats
but none were as sensitive as Sam.
Several years would pass before she planted Bobo’s grave. It was more elaborate, with two
plants Sweet Shrub and Lily of the Valley. She could think this time, and the emotions that
waved around her were clearer.
Why Bobo? Later she added a big red canna.
Celie had the two plants because she had robbed her next door neighbor, Doris, and Doris’s
yard the night after Doris moved. Then when she and John moved the next month she brought
the plants with her to their new house and stuck them in the ground. She thought about discarding
the lilies because their blossoms looked like pieces of a doll’s plastic pearl necklace. That
kind of plant didn’t seem right anywhere around or next to their red brick ranch. But Celie’s
gardening friend expressed a slight like for the plant so Celie kept looking, finally finding a spot
where she liked the way she could notice the way the lily’s leaves stood up straight, and curved.
It was the leaves she grew to like. Like Bobo.
Bobo was a testy, scrawny, teenager cat always dirty from rolling in the dirt in Doris’s
yard, and also he was a cat leery of anyone except Doris, devoted to Doris, loving Doris like Celie
had loved Sam. Celie had grown to love Bobo. John had loved Bobo immediately.
Bobo’s fur was fine long and black, like silk and it started out white at its roots. If you got
close, Bobo smelled sweet. That’s Egyptian lineage, said Paul. The white underneath is a sign
of Egyptian lineage.
Paul never got close enough to smell Bobo. Paul spoke from across the street during one
of his occasional visits over to his brother’s house when he would deliver carpentry work. He
never came into Celie’s yard. He always stayed in his brother’s yard and never came closer than
that. Apparently, according to his brother, Paul was an expert in cat lineage.
Would you like another cat? Paul said. Celie would turn her head towards her own porch,
and see the four young cats and say, I would. but no.
Celie was looking for Sam. Maybe Sam would be in one of Paul’s litters. She knew Bobo
was not Sam. But maybe Sam would be in Mama Gray’s next litter or maybe Baby Gray would
turn out to be Sam or maybe Sam was in one of Paul’s litters. Celie had started taking in all the
kittens being born in the neighborhood. She even began the process of having a baby. Maybe
we would name the baby Sam. But none of the kittens, not even the baby turned out to be Sam.
Maybe Doris’s dirt reminded Bobo of the sand in Egypt.
Maybe Celie reminded herself of Doris. But Doris was not a crazy cat lady.
Doris was just feeling her oats doing what she pleased in her widowhood even though she was
living in a wood frame house without anything in it that half worked. And there were more differences.
Doris had been married and Celie and John were not. Doris could not even have a
garden until her husband died. Celie had had a career, honors, and now a garden that John had
started and that she had taken over. Celie went to college. Doris married a man that kept fishing
worms in the bathtub. Doris fed any cat. A Bobo cat. A cat that nobody would take. Celie was
looking specifically for a Sam cat. Maybe that is why over time Celie came to love Bobo so.
Because he was not Sam and because from the beginning Bobo defined himself clearly as a cat
that nobody could take.
*
Celie and Doris were both scavengers. Except Celie was an active go out into the world
scavenger and she saw herself as a saver of plants rather than a robber and Doris just took anything
that anyone offered. The night that Celie saved the plants out of Doris’s yard was the night
after Doris and her Daughter finally moved the last load of itchy recliners out of their house. The
loads had come out like a rich magician pulling swans and geese and ducks out of a hat. How
many old wool recliners and old warped clothes dressers and old red linoleum tables could be in
there? One night all of it sat in the rain. Doris and her Daughter kept renting U-Hauls, taking
loads down to Myrtle Beach where they would be renting an apartment with the money Doris
made from selling her house. Before the actual sale and even to the end, Doris had been potting
up plants to take.
Life had taken a turn for the worse for Doris when her Daughter moved back. Her daughter
started filling up the house with boxes of envelopes and a small business that specialized in
hand addressing those envelopes. That way people would open the letter. She and Doris stayed
up late into the night writing names. Then Doris’s vegetable garden disappeared completely and
Doris started losing her health but she kept taking in and feeding cats. Then the Daughter
thought they should move to Myrtle Beach since the Envelope Addressing Business was going
nowhere.
He’ll know if anything’s gone, Doris said.
He took pictures from the street.
He said all of the plants had to stay, Doris said.
Celie was hoping that Doris might giver her a small off shoot from a Sweet Shrub. She
was admiring the plant’s tight blossom that coiled into a beautiful ball. And if you put your nose
right into it, it smelled sweet. But you would not smell it unless you stopped and put your nose
right into the bloom.
That night Celie was a little afraid. What she did not know, but what did not stop her was,
what if the man who bought the house was a plant connoisseur, and maybe the sweet shrub was
rare. Celie had never seen one before. Maybe he had documented the plants. Maybe the plants
were worth more that the house. The sweet shrub’s blossom was the color of Celie’s burgundy
velvet wedding jacket and the blossom was shaped like Sam’s mouth and the smell was surprising
like Bobo. The sweet shrub reminded Celie of so much and so she thought why not, it was
important. What if he just cut them all down and they were gone forever.
That night, at the same time that Celie saved the sweet shrub offshoot, she dug up the lilies.
Why not. Celie and John had married and they were fixing up a house. They had a baby boy.
*
One scratch from an infected cat could do it.
How long had Bobo had cat AIDS? How much pain had he suffered? The vet Dr. Packan
had detected a heart murmur four months earlier. She told Celie then, Heart Murmurs are a remote
and unusual but possible sign of AIDS. She did not propose testing BOBO for Aids.
Now Celie wanted to know why. Why Bobo. and why does a heart murmur indicate AIDS?
Dr. Packan, Celie wanted to ask now, How long might Bobo have had cat AIDS?
Celie had let Bobo be and be with her when Doris left him to move to Myrtle Beach. Bobo
became a part of the cat pack, beautiful to watch and take care of and now he was gone just like
that.
At the new house Bobo took up the front yard position and kept the new stray cats away,
just like had on the old street. He came inside the new house and he bathed two of the cats and
enjoyed lounging about them. Celie watched him from a distance. She began to see way down
into his green eyes to notice that they were the color of the ocean off of Cape San Blas where she
and John had camped. She never forgot the color but she could never replicate it in a painting.
She enjoyed the cape again in Bobo. She noticed more, that he stayed dirty and never gave up
rolling in the dirt, that occasionally Bobo got into a small skirmish if another cat came into the
yard, but she could scarcely remember the skirmish, so minor.
One scratch?
Finally Bobo was staying closer and closer to inside and then staying inside of the house
until in the last few days, he just slept on a quilt in Celie and John’s closet, except for that last
morning when he left and laid himself out in the next door neighbor’s yard and it was as if he
went to Egypt then, lifted up bathed and bathing himself with the sounds of the birds and squirrels
and leaves and dirt especially.
I’m going home to Egypt. He could not move hardly at all. He just laid down in the green
undercover and listened to his world that he knew better than us. Two times he had picked his
way back to Peach Street and going across busy roads and through several neighborhoods and a
set of woods, several miles back to our old house, Doris’s old house. The first time he disappeared,
Celie called, Bobo, Bobo, all over the new neighborhood. For two days she did not find
him. On a whim she took a drive over to Peach Street, having heard stories of cats traveling long
distances to find and finding their way back home. And there he was, Bobo sitting on John and
Celie’s old porch.
The second time Bobo was missing Celie went to Peach Street right away and picked him
up. He didn’t go again. Maybe if he hadn’t had the cat AIDS.
Celie and John had moved into a little better neighborhood and a brick house with central
air conditioning and a dishwasher. The house was cool and they had spread out their belongings
that had become as tangled as Doris’s and they had had a son.
How Dr. Packan? How could Bobo find his way back?
Dr. Packan said, Perhaps by smell. That’s what scientists think now, she said.
It was not until Celie decided on the grave plantings of Sweet Shrub and Lilies of the Valley
that Celie could find any relief from losing Bobo and for the longest time his death stayed
with her. Lilies and Sweet Shrub from Doris’s yard. Maybe later Celie would go to Egypt. She
added the red canna for no reason except that it was voluptuous.

Opening message

My stories are spread over three computers, some lost on hard discs in dumps now turned and tilled and still a mire of waste, many on paper needing transcribing because my career – while not that long, still has spanned the paper and pen, the typewriter, the computer keyboard, and now it seems that I need to hone my thumb and write a cell phone novel. The words are easier. Keeping them together is hard. So my latest organizing tool is you. Please enjoy new and old stories.

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