"Jay Lake - Pax Agricola" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

to treat that way. So he got the last of the month's cash out of the coffee can under the trailer's hitch,
evicted some chickens to load Bella into the back seat of his rusty white Gran Torino station wagon, and
headed into Lockhart to see the large animal vet.

***

Back from the vet, tired and flat broke, Joe knelt in the garden in the cool orange light of dusk and
looked at the seeds he'd rescued from the kitchen floor. Each spring he got his order from some hippies
out west. Near as he could tell from the little catalog, they were a bunch of tie-dyed fruitcakes living in
old school buses, but they had the best damned tomato seeds going and some mighty fine cucumbers and
squash as well.

Just like every year, the packets were handmade from recycled paper grocery bags and sealed with wax,
the varieties stamped on them with fanciful lettering in spotty, colored ink. This time he'd got in Moreton
and Carnival tomatoes, Gold Rush zucchini, Saladin cucumbers for his pickles, and just because he liked
the name, Jack of Hearts watermelons. Rifling through the bucket he'd put the seed packets in, Joe
found the usual scribbled invoice, this year with a note clipped to it:

Dear Mr. Radford. Because you are such a loyal customer, we have enclosed a special gift. Yours
in Green Earth, South Cascade Seeds.

And those Oregon hippies had sent him a new variety, their gift from the Pacific Northwest. Joe almost
smiled. The kraft paper packet just read "Pax Agricola" -- probably one of them Latin names the
nurserymen used -- with two little girl fairies kissing over a flower Joe couldn't identify. Right below that,
someone had written "Water with love."

Water with love. Right. Singing Grateful Dead tunes the whole time, probably. Love or no love, Joe
doubted this whatever-it-was would even grow in Central Texas so far out of Oregon's cold and damp,
but what the heck? He'd planted worse, and he could always turn the row over for a summer vegetable
if the pax agricola didn't grow.

Joe needed to work dirt, to forget the idiots on Ralph's lease and his worries about Bella's wound getting
infected. There weren't any directions on the packet, so Joe turned the soil in one of the rows he'd left
fallow for the winter and mixed in bone meal and manure. With a gardener's natural economy he shook
out half the seeds, inspecting their hulls. Finally, by the early moonlight he planted them one by one, each
slipping beneath the earth as delicate as a kiss.

***

The pax agricola sprouted almost overnight, fast as anything he'd ever seen, sending up the hopeful green
swords of little shoots. Joe studied them, trying to determine if they were vines or bushes or what. From
the little stamp on the packet, he had imagined a tall plant, like a Kansas sunflower, but of course there
was no telling yet.

That day he mulched the shoots carefully against a possible late frost and double-checked his repairs to
the goat-damaged chicken wire and the gopher fence.

***

Saturday night Ralph Farney's older boy Willie Ed, a varsity forward for the Lockhart Lions basketball