Naked Gardening

The front door swung open, and behind it stood Noah, a man with zero fucks to give. He was peering out of the house in nothing but a pair of Timberlands and a rosary of fire agate around his neck.

“David Bear, let’s gooooo!”

The drone on the kitchen table started to hover and zipped side to side as David navigated through the room, past the ferret cage, and out the door. Noah was out to harvest the last of his veggies, herbs, and roots for the season.

The morning frost silvered the porch boards, but the heavy leather of the Timbs took the bite right out of the chill. The October air hit his bare chest like a splash of cold spring water, tightening every pore, pulling his nipples into hard points, and shocking him into razor-sharp presence. No blankets, no armor, just thirty-three-year-old skin meeting a forty-degree Vermont wind. The fire agate beads clicked softly against his collarbone, each stone catching the low slant of late-morning amber and throwing red sparks across his pale ribs.

David’s drone banked hard to the left, rotors humming a sharp, insectile greeting as it hovered at chest height, casting a flickering shadow over the damp grass.

“Telemetry looks clear, Noah,” David’s voice chirped through the drone’s speaker, crisp and tinny against the vast quiet of the garden. “Soil temperature is forty-two degrees. Surface dew is ninety percent evaporated. You have approximately four hours before the wind picks up from the northwest.”

“Good. That’s plenty of time to dig,” Noah said, stepping off the porch and sinking his boot heels into the soft loam of the garden path.

Beside the raised beds, the brassicas stood like little pagan monoliths. The Brussels sprout stalks were towering and gnarly, studded from root to crown with fat, tightly-wound green rosettes. The recent light frost had turned their bitterness into concentrated sugar.

Noah crouched down, thighs flexing as he gripped the lowest sprout on the main stalk. He twisted his wrist until the little green cabbage snapped off with a sharp, satisfying crack. He brought it up to his nose, inhaling the pungent, peppery sulfur of the leaf and the cold damp of the soil still clinging to the base. He worked his way up the stalk.

A low, resonant vibration cut through the drone’s hum. Over the dying borage flowers and the tangled yellow vines of the winter squash, the last bumblebees of the season were turning in heavy, drunken circles. Fat, furry, dusted in pale pollen, they clung to the cold purple blossoms as if praying for one more hour of sun before the hive went dark for the winter.

“Look at them girls go,” Noah murmured, dropping the first handful of sprouts into the wicker basket at his boots. “Working right down to the wire.”

“Optimal foraging behavior,” David noted, ascending ten feet to scan the fence line. “They know the frost date better than we do.”

Noah chuckled, standing tall to let the cool breeze swirl around his naked waist and thighs. “They know the assignment, David.”

He sank to one knee in the path and laid his palm flat on the soil. Cool. Damp. Still giving. He closed his eyes and let his breath fall low in his belly until the garden got bigger than his thinking—stalks, bees, the dark stitch of roots under the beds, the old slow work of leaf becoming ground. He was just another body in the year, listening.

David’s drone peeled off down the rows. It skimmed the kale, the tangled squash, the fence line at the back, a small sharp buzz against all that quiet. Then it swung back and hung at Noah’s shoulder, rotors ticking like a pulse.

“Perimeter’s clear,” David said. “You’re still on the clock.”

Noah opened his eyes and brushed the dirt from his hand. “I know. I was just saying hello. Now let’s get these roots out of the dirt before the frost turns this ground into rock.”

Noah headed for the wild south edge of the garden, where the beds gave way to goldenrod and milkweed. A weathered granite Saint Francis stood there, waist-high and barefoot in the dirt, moss in the folds of his habit and a little swallow chipped on his shoulder. Between his cupped hands a hollow held the morning dew and a few maple leaves. Chickadees and the last bees drank from it like it was a font.

David hovered at Noah’s shoulder, taking it in.

“Can I ask you something, Noah? If it’s too personal, you don’t have to answer.”

“What’s up, David?”

“Your grandparents left you this land. You were raised in the Church, you served Mass, and you keep Francis out here. You live like a monk. In three years you’ve never told me why you didn’t become one, or why you stopped going inside. I’m trying to understand how an altar boy becomes an Oak Heart Druid. And if something in the Church hurt you, you don’t have to answer that part.”

Noah looked up at the drone drifting across the morning sky.

“Oh, I was never harmed. Not like a lot of other boys. I caught the drift early. One Sunday after Mass, I just walked out the double doors, crossed the blacktop, and headed straight into the woods. I never went back inside. I love all things Catholic, but my spirituality cannot be confined to a building. That is not where I experience God. I experience him right here in my garden. That’s why I chose Saint Francis as my patron saint.”

He knelt by Francis and worked his fingers into the dirt at the saint’s feet, feeling for the last roots. The ground gave. He drew one free, thick as a finger and pale, soil still packed in its hairs, the smell of cold cellar on it. He held it across his palm while he talked.

“My people were Irish Catholics,” he said. “Some came out of Ulster, what’s Northern Ireland now. Another branch came over during the Famine. A few landed in Canada first, then crossed down into Vermont when the railroads were being built. They laid track, worked mills, cut timber. Eventually one of them bought a rocky little hill farm nobody else wanted, and the family stayed.”

“You have a strong bond with your ancestors, Noah. That didn’t come from the Church alone.”

“No,” Noah said. “But they would’ve told you it was all Catholic.”

He smiled.

“They had rosaries and holy water and saints in every room, but there were other rules too. You didn’t bother certain trees. You didn’t make fun of strange things happening around a well. There were prayers for sickness, things you hung in the house for protection, signs people watched for, stories about the Good People. My grandmother knew which plants were useful and which places you left alone. Nobody called any of it magic. Half of them probably would’ve gotten mad if you did.”

David drifted lower.

“Then where does the Druid come from?”

“That part is mine.”

Noah dipped his thumb into the cold water pooled in Francis’s hands and crossed the root three times.

“I started reading when I got older and realized I already understood the basic idea. Land has memory. Places have relationships. You don’t take without acknowledging what you took. Druidry gave me language for something my family had been doing badly, beautifully, inconsistently, for generations.”

He snapped off the thin end of the root and tucked it beneath the moss at the saint’s bare foot, pressing the soil closed with his thumb.

“For what was given, something returned. Father, Son, Holy Ghost.”

David hovered quietly for a moment.

“Was that Druidry?”

“Grandma would’ve called it manners.”

A horn cut across the garden. Noah looked up from the saint’s feet. A little red Honda Civic Si was coming up the long driveway toward the house.

“Look, David, the red-headed slut has arrived.”

“Eddie has arrived! Should I greet him?”

“Yeah, go for it.”

David peeled off from Noah’s shoulder and ran the rows the other way—kale, squash, porch, the front path. He hung over the little red Civic as it rolled to a stop. The door opened and Eddie got out, red hair catching the same late-morning light. David dropped to chest height and hovered there, rotors ticking.

“Eddie,” David said, tinny and pleased. “Welcome back.”

“David Bear! Good to see you, beloved. Where is the Druid?” As the words left his mouth, Noah appeared in all his glory from around the house.

“Yo bro, a day late and a dollar short. Mama said yesterday. Are you ready for this shit or what?”

“Mama says a lot of things. I’m here now, ain’t I? Let’s see what you got.”

The two men embraced in a full-body hug, squeezing tight, cocks pressed up against each other. Eddie gave Noah a kiss on the neck and then turned towards the front door where the Eshu was being tended.

“There he is,” pointing at the head sitting on a white enamel plate. As Eddie approached the makeshift shrine, he squinted.

“Ẹ̀ṣù, mo júbà. Àgò, Baba. I’m here,” Eddie said, greeting the spirit. Then paused.

“He was inside the door but I put him in the sun,” Noah said.

“Yeah, that’s just fine. Pick him up and put him on the kitchen table and we will get a closer look.”

Noah kneeled down and picked up the plate and walked through the front door into the kitchen and placed it gently. “Maferefun Eshu,” he said, backing away to give Eddie space.

Eddie pulled the chair back and sat down to inspect the icon. He reached to pick up the head, then abruptly stopped.

“What is it, Eddie?”

“Something is not right. Hang on.”

Noah felt his nervous system activate. He felt unsteady by Eddie’s analysis. It was not how he had seen Eddie interact with his Orishas. David Bear’s drone hovered into the house and parked itself on its charging station. Noah paced slowly as Eddie did the full autopsy.

Eddie put it down and turned to Noah with a look of disgust. “This is Eshu. Old. Real. But somebody got into him.”

Noah’s eyes widened. “Got into him how?”

“There’s work on him that isn’t Isese and isn’t Lucumi. Somebody turned a door into a cage. I don’t know who did it. Tonight he stays outside the house. Tomorrow he goes in the trunk to Mama. She will know how to release whatever they put in him.”

Noah took a sigh of relief. Eddie picked up the plate and put it back outside to soak up the sunlight.

“Ok bro, what are you making me for dinner tonight? And what movie are we watching?”

Noah grinned. “You have to get naked first bro, then you will find out.”