Wordsworth on March
IT is the first mild day of March: Each minute sweeter than before...
There is a blessing in the air, Which seems a sense of joy to yield...
William Wordsworth
"B. Wordsworth," he signed on the attendance sheet. He was William, but he didn’t want anyone to notice. Only his mother used to use it and she had called him, "Wi’yum." In school they’d called him "Willy," later, in jail, "Free Willie." That got shortened to, "Freebie," which gave way to, "Freeb," and then, just plain, "B." He could tell where a person knew him from by how they called him out. He didn’t correct them any. He didn’t want too many people to know him by name anyhow. Everybody shuffled into folding chairs, the exterminator crews hanging together and the rest, a bunch of landscapers, tree surgeons and nurserymen slouching alone. The county agent dude stood up and started to rap about pesticide application. You wanted to get your pesticide applicator’s license, you had to go to these classes. B. didn’t mind–it was good stuff. If they’d talked about something this useful back in school, instead of all that dead stuff, he might’ve paid them more mind. He glanced at the clump of pest control cats and smirked inside; he could show them how to stomp on a roach, if they were really wanting to know. Kind of funny, how him and them played two different sides of the same street–them were trying to eliminate roaches and B. trying to produce them. He was laughing, but nobody could tell.
He wasn’t trying, man, he was producing. Nobody knew it, but he was the main man down the Bottoms and the Vill for what you wanted to make you a good-smokin’ roach. And it was March, time to be getting your seed in the little trays. Last year he had lost half of what he planted to what he now understood to be a fungus disease called, "damping off." Whatever. It wasn’t going to cost him again this year. And he had gone through hell with the little buzzards he now knew were called, "white flies." He’d fix their ass this year. He kept heat close to hand at the house, but he didn’t bring it to these lectures. He wasn’t clear in his head about why, but it made him somehow feel like he was on vacation, more even than when he shot down to the casinos. This was the goods. This was straight stuff from the man, man. And he was soaking it up, laid back in his rinky-dink metal chair, like he was some cloth-head, didn’t know what was coming down. But he knew and he liked it that way. Looking at the course schedule, he took in that there was going to be a visit to a commercial site where container-growing was the big thing. That and lights was what he needed to learn something about, because he sure as shootin’ wasn’t going to be planting his crop out in the park. Another class was something about, "How to Raise Fresh and Dried Herbs for Market." Police dogs wouldn’t keep him away. Maybe he’d bring an apple for Teach, with nobody to dig why he was there at all! It made him laugh inside. Maybe he’d lay a nickle bag on the teacher after class. These brothers got to get down once in the while, didn’t they?
B. owned two side-by-side houses, never mind where. From outside, they looked just like cheap, dirty run-down row houses, but he knew a brother who fixed his own private hook-up to the electric line, without the inconvenience of a meter, and from then on, it was sweet sailing. He’d busted through the basement wall dividing the buildings and put in long rows of planks on saw-horses and rigged electric lights above them. You wanted the cool-white kind. And you needed to get them right close to the tops of the plants. Some rasta-man with locked-up hair had explained how to pinch out the growing tips, so that the plants would grow shorter and bushier, with more leaves. But B. had not understood about ventilation at all. Now he had restaurant exhaust fans in the floor of both living rooms above the growing area. The important thing was that light didn’t show at night. The neighbors would cop to the police if they thought he was up to something. Or he’d have the local boys breaking in for a free taste. B. had an Ouzi, two automatic pistols, a chopped down shotgun, one of those electric things you jab a cat with and he hops three feet in the air and falls over backwards, but he didn’t want trouble. He was happiest down there with the plants, messing about with fertilizer and water. When he thought about it – and sometimes he did, he wasn’t one of those rock-heads – he thought he might be cut out to be a farmer. He didn’t let on, but it was in his blood, a few generations back. Still, he couldn’t picture himself in the country, tending a mess of greens or chopping cotton. No pay-off in it. He wouldn’t be comfortable in the trees nohow. "Urban Gardening," was the name of one of the classes he didn’t bother about, seeming to be mostly about growing table-food in brick rubble. If he wanted eats, there were restaurants, weren’t there?
But he had to admit it, looking for his little Porsche after class behind the battered vans and pick-up trucks the other attendees got around in, the way chilly March air tore at him made his blood perk; but being the careful type, he didn’t let it show. Dude, it would be good to get his hands (properly washed, so as the seedlings didn’t get tobacco mosaic virus behind his cigs) into fresh bags of starting mix. Man, spring was in the air and that about was all there was to it.
The extension agent stepped out, right in B.’s face, from behind a parked van, and they both stopped short. "Mr. Wordsworth," said the agent, "how’re you?"
Feeling good, B. spoke on impulse. "March first, man: gets better every minute, don’t it? This air’s a mercy, makes you feel..., I don’t know, alive; c’n you dig it?"
appeared March, 2002