Twelve by Twelve by Micahel Powers Read Free Book Online Page A

farm and children. They wanted to live by sweat and gusto. They chose the organic model partly out of idealism, but also because this premium niche market was the only route open to small farmers, since big companies like Gold Kist can crank out conventional factory-farmed chickens much cheaper.
    Kyle took me over to their front porch and opened a shoe box with holes poked in the top. A single duckling. I asked him where the other thirteen were. “Coyote raid,” he said. “They got all but one.”
    I looked down at the single duckling, a little horrified, picturing the coyote downing them one by one, like popcorn. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
    “It’s fine,” Kyle said. “There’s two more batches on the way.” He pointed to two other mother ducks, sitting on their freshly laid eggs — reminding me of Leela , the divine play of the Hindus, where the forms on earth spontaneously replicate themselves by the hundreds, the thousands. Down by the pond, Mike was dumping another two buckets of feed randomly, two of his kids leaping in it, another twirling an inchworm on its silk in each hand, a hundred birds fluttering for what they could grab. Everyone and everything seemed to be laughing and dancing. In the competition with factory farms, and considering the way mainstream America is organized, could this pay the bills? Michele did some tax preparation part-time — she was trained in basic accounting — but the family was up to its neck in debt. For them, the farm simply had to work.
    I GRADUALLY BEGAN TO NOTICE a mysterious smell. I hardly noticed it at first because I was so enraptured by Jackie’s budding gardens, the 12 × 12’s solitude, the rush of No Name Creek, which had changed from an end-of-winter sluggishness to a cheerier spring flow, flush with rainwater. But after a while the smell was impossible to ignore. It was noticeable only under certain wind conditions and at particular places on my long walks into the surrounding countryside, where it would creep into my nostrils and send a wave of discomfort through me. It was the stench not of death, but rather of the absence of both life and death. The unpleasantness of an overflowing ashtray.
    The smell — which I wouldn’t identify until later — was usually covered over by brighter ones. The fecund scent of thawing earth, the fresh scent of my skin after a rainwater solar shower, budding wildflowers. Jackie’s storied fields came into fuller life. Storied, because her dozens of beds contained seeds, roots, and bulbs given to her by friends and family — tulips from one of her daughters, Honduran herbs from Graciela’s finca south of the border — and asthey bloomed, fruited, and flowered each year, so would their presence in Jackie’s heart. She’d left out a colorful, unfolded map in the 12 × 12 that showed the names of her plants as well as stories about the giver of the seed.
    There was Aunt Daisy’s scuppernong, a variety of muscadine grape with sweet yellowish fruit from the aunt of one of Jackie’s best friends. “Aunt Daisy died a few months from her hundredth year,” Jackie noted on her map, “an African American elder and wise woman.” Another “well-adapted bunch purple grape” — the Jack grape — came from Tom Franz, who found it three decades ago on his nearby farm; journals indicate it may have been established a century ago.
    I followed the treasure map to ginger lilies from Jackie’s sister and onward to spider lilies from the old homeplace of “Daddy’s people,” her mother’s yard, and “the gardens of the home place of my great-great-grandmother.” She noted: “Spider lilies are all over my childhood lawn. We always took them to the teachers when school started.” I discovered columbine and green-and-gold, beautiful native wildflowers that Jackie got from her adoptive godmother, who was a legendary activist and, she noted, “my beloved mentor and friend. I have many plants in my gardens from her, and it is