The Italian Gardener’s Stories
Bottomlands Barn, Quincy, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St Clair.
I am Jarvis. I am the Italian gardener. My parents were immigrants who come to this country in 1939, escaping the war everyone know was coming. Or should have. At least my parents figured it out. I am happy they did. Others were not so lucky. My grandmother feared Hitler would move on Italy. Others thought Mussolini would ally with the Nazis and blitz France from the southeast, sucking the country into a nightmarish conflict. Some welcomed it. Most thought it wouldn’t effect them even if it happened.
Those in position to profit from the arming, the rebuilding, the restocking and everything else that comes with war were certainly for it. Publicly for it. Vocally for it. Aggressively for it. They kind of let the cat out of the bag. Anyone paying attention was forewarned. Sadly, too few. At least that’s the story the sisters told me.
I never know my parents. My mother pregnant, they leave Italy as soon as they can get money and credentials. The credentials were easy as long as you had the money. Most of it was borrowed from well-wishing relatives and friends. The home they were leaving was Campo di Fiori, on the Fiume River. That’s a neighborhood in Rome. There was much wealth around them, but they were not wealthy. They knew their place and they were cunning. They recognized the significance of being frightened by strangers with guns. They come to the neighborhood asking questions everywhere, making lists. A year earlier grandfather ordered my parents to never talk about politics or religion with anyone, even their best friends. He could see the signs. At least that’s how the story goes.
Now, you may ask how the son of Italian immigrants got the name Jarvis. Ask the nuns. My parents died from intestinal parasites when I was an infant. I have been asked to never reveal the name of the city where they drank the public well-water that contained their microscopic killers. The city claimed it was my parents fault for not seeing a doctor. Less than ten died, after all. My parents couldn’t afford a doctor. The nuns told me I would follow Christ because I was born penniless and alone. I didn’t see how one followed the other, but I thank them for their advice. I try.
I will respect the wishes of those who think they could be harmed by the knowledge of the location of the poison spring. Believe me, Jarvis knows how to keep a secret. I know I am lucky to be alive and I am grateful every day. I was still drinking mother’s milk when she died. A janitor came to turn off the water and found me huddled under a blanket against my dead mother. The nuns switched me to formula. I never got sick from drinking latte materna. But that’s more than you need to know. I will not tell you how I come to Cleveland. Just know that I was seven when I arrived.
Once I asked a nun in my new group home on St. Clair Ave. about my name:
“What kind of name is Jarvis?” I said to my newest substitute parent.
“It’s your name,” she answered.
“Did my parents name me Jarvis?” was my next question.
“Of course. Who else would name you?”
I’m not sure I trusted her on that one. But that’s the past. I have chosen to not share any more. I am unsure of my past. I don’t know what was real and what was stories. So I no go there. Instead, I share my love for the garden. It keeps me in the moment. Like Jesus, I imagine.
Today, as I do every spring, I transplanted seedlings from their sprouting medium to peat pots. I gave new homes to more than a hundred baby plants. Just like the sisters gave me new homes. Only a few hundred more to go.
Most of the plants, the tomatoes, peppers, beans, zucchini, eggplant and herbs, are going into the community garden here in the village. The garlic, onions, shallots, asparagus and peas are already in the ground, as are beds of blueberries, strawberries, raspberries and a few apple, cherry, peach and plum trees. The cherry trees aren’t looking as good as they should, but they will recover and do fine. It’s been a very dry spring. I water them with de-chlorinated water, but trees need rain. God will make it rain soon.
The community give me a nice garden plot: 800 square feet, 20-by-40, in the southwest corner of a one-and-a-half acre farm. It’s more than enough. Some of the residents, the active ones, enjoy working in the garden, growing their own clean food. I prepare the soil, sprout the plants, and let them take it from there. Many are too infirm to do anything as physical as gardening, so I grow their fruits and vegetables for them. I push their wheelchairs through the gardens on nice days so they can watch their plants grow. I like it when they give their extra fruits and vegetables to the church.
I no mention the marijuana plants. They’re for the landlord and his kids. I love them all. The plants, that is. One of the sons is kind of mean. Jesus wants me to love him anyway, but sometimes it’s not easy.
Today I watch red heirloom tomatoes struggle after I place them in their new lodging. The starter sponges were too wet and the weak leaves drooped at the shock of being mildly uprooted and placed in peat pots. An hour later I check. They bask under their full-spectrum lights, in nutritious, well-drained soil. They were happy. Thriving.
“Nice going,” I tell them. I talk to the plants all the time. Birds and squirrels, too. And the dogs that visit the residents. And my pet cat, Elvira.
I am 84 years old. I live in old equipment shed that has been remodeled into a lovely studio apartment. I get free rent and a little stipend in exchange for my work in the gardens. I live in the All Saints Retirement Village in Parma Heights. The residents come from a wide range of backgrounds. Catholicism, whether Italian, Polish or something else, is the common thread. There are non-Catholics, too, but not many. I was raised Catholic, but was never that interested in mass or all the rituals that went with it. I went because it pleased the sisters. The nuns who raised me like mothers after I was orphaned. They get all my gratitude. I wanted to make them happy because I was happy.
I have everything I want. Most of the residents have cell phones, but i never get. I couldn’t afford one and even if I could I probably wouldn’t be able to see the screen. I see enough though, and I can do some gardening by feel, by tocco, like planting baby plants. I have reading glasses if I need them. I watch TV in the lounge.
Sometimes I go to church twice a week, mostly because I enjoy talking to the parishioners and the sisters. It’s about a 10-minute walk from the village. I could get there in five walking alone, but I like to stay with all the transplant recipients, arthritis sufferers, wheelchair-bound, all the victims of age, disease and injury spending their final years together in the village. Sometimes as many as 20 or 25 residents walk and roll to 10 o’clock mass. Mostly I give them gardening advice. Everyone knows I am the Italian gardener.
I get many requests to grow things. Once Valentina say, “Hey Jarvis, can you grow me some avocados?” I love her. She almost 80 and still beautiful. Dark and sultry. I think she Puerto Rican. She lays out in a bikini and drinks rum on ice with lime and sugar when it’s hot. I got a little ubriaco with her more than once. I told her I could probably grow some indoors but I would need expensive lights. She’s very persuasive. She got the center’s board of directors to pay for lights and potted trees and electric space heaters and humidifiers and gave me an un-leased apartment to grow avocados for the tenants. And weed for the landlord and his sons.
My earliest happy memories were the experiences that made me fall in love with the garden. It was in the courtyard between the church, rectory and school in the city I can not name. Without giving away too much, I will say that Father Hugo pointed me towards my life with plants.
Father Hugo hid a spectacular vegetable, fruit and perennial garden in the southwest corner of the church yard, a place not visible from the parking lot or sidewalk, or through the church’s stained glass windows. The courtyard behind the vegetable gardens was the most peaceful place in the world. Full sun flowed through a transition to dappled, then shade. Perennial flower-and-shrub beds blended into gardens of hosta, ivy, periwinkle, rhododendron, azalea and ferns mixed in and around large rocks, iconic statues and fountains. He showed me how to care for all of it.
May is my busiest month. I love sprouting and seeding and planting. I love pruning and watering. Weeding, however, I curse. Sometimes it can’t be helped if I neglect an area for a few weeks. When I see them, they make me angry. Arrabbiato. Some weeds are okay if they have a nice flower and don’t get so aggressive that they start killing the other plants. I love Dandelions because they make nice bittersweet salads and stews, some for myself, mostly for the residents. The lawn service has agreed not to spray the weeds in my garden beds. Young dandelion greens are an especially choice meal. They’ probably my biggest crop, because I can pick them from May to November, and they grow everywhere you let them. It is a sin to poison them. I use a special knifelike tool to pop the tops off the roots. This is how Father Hugo taught me do do it. He gave me the wood-handled weeding tool I still use to this day.
Chameleon plant is my nemesis. It is virtually impossible to get rid of and can take over a garden in a short time. It is an ugly plant. Brutto. No matter what you do, underground rhizomes shoot out to start new plants. Their variegated leaves look rusty, like they would be right at home in a junkyard. But I will not use herbicides. I get my revenge, my vendetta, by having the patience to pull them out whenever and wherever they mount an attack. They stink when I pull them, tormenting me even as they die. But I have the last laugh. At least until they return.
I don’t use herbicides anywhere. You can’t wash off toxins that have penetrated the fruit, and they will hurt you. At least that’s what the environmentalists say. I’m not sure what to believe a lot of times. I graduated Catholic middle school. Sometimes I couldn’t recognize the dividing line between knowledge and stories. Most of my useful knowledge came from my years with the plants. They tell me things. Usually I can help them when they ask. Sometimes I can’t. I grieve all the dead plants, other than the vegetables that are meant to die after they have given of their fruit.
When I’m not gardening, I spend a lot of time in the lounge. I usually stop in during my lunch break and have some bread, pickled vegetables, fruit and free coffee. Sometimes some cheese. Today I needed to warm up. A gray, damp and chilly day, not uncommon for early May. God rarely gives us perfect days. Too hot or too cold, we complain. He’s saving most of the good stuff for the afterlife, I tell people. Sometimes he gives us a little taste. A little gusto. Just follow Him and your reward will be all good days.
If there’s no one to talk with in the lounge, I like to read The Plain Dealers. Those are newspapers. There’s two or three copies delivered four days a week. Sometimes they are scattered from table to couch to floor. But every section is there somewhere if you look for it. I’ve found sections in the refrigerator.
The nuns told me it was important to keep up with current events so I would be a good citizen. I still try to please the sisters. I study the news of the world in discarded papers. I don’t know how reliable it is, but I like to believe it. Newspapers have proven accurato with things like fish fry dates and church events and sports. I like the baseball mostly. I watch football in the lounge too, but it is so violent. I’m glad they are being paid welI as they bash their skulls and break their limbs. I’m also glad that there is usually some baked delicacy left on the kitchen table by one of the residents or caregivers, next to the coffee makers.
In the lounge, people are talking a lot about the new president and what he has been doing. I try to stay out of those conversations. I don’t have much conviction either way. Poor people suffer whoever is running things. Rich people get richer. But something happened recently that made me pay attention. Here’s what happened:
I was mulching the shrub and perennial bed in front of the south building when Thomas stormed from the parking lot. You could feel his anger as soon as he got out of the pickup truck. He is 6-foot-5 and well over 300 pounds. That was a lot of anger. It wasn’t so much that he stormed as hobbled at a more painful speed on his cane, a fiery-red aura trailing him, as red as his MAGA cap.
“Are you OK, Thomas?” I asked, as he neared me on the sidewalk approaching the main entrance.
“No fuckin’ way,” he whimpered. It was odd, hearing such a weak and frightened sound coming from such an imposing man. “They took Doris. They’re deporting her to El Salvador. They said she’s illegal and she doesn’t have a Green Card.”
“That can’t be,” I said. “She’s been here longer than I have.”
She had. Doris told me she had been at All Saints since the 1980s, more than 10 years before I arrived. Her parents sent her alone to this country, seeking asylum from the horrors of civil war in Guatemala. She headed straight to Cleveland, following her parents orders, looking for family. It was preferable to waiting for a judge to hear your case. She never found her family, but was taken in by the village after being referred by a Catholic social worker. She became a home health-aid and unlicensed physical therapist and never left. The residents loved her. She did everything for them. She sometimes worked 24-hour days, staying over with women who found themselves alone, or to care for the ill or dying. She entered on a three-month visitation visa, obtained by bribe, and never left.
One woman, Jill, ask to be discharged from a hospice center because she preferred dying with Doris. They wouldn’t let Doris visit because she wasn’t family. That was the story they gave her. Doris thought it seemed more like because she was brown and illegal and spoke English with an accent. Here’s some of the other things Doris did for the residents: mended clothes by hand with needle-and-thread, made trips to stores for specialty items, mostly cheap wine, helped with pill schedules and gave free massages. Those were just a few of the residents’ perks, courtesy of Santa Dei Doni, the gift giver.
Thomas had every reason to be upset. Doris helped with his cleaning, his cooking and led him through physical therapy to ease the suffering from his everywhere arthritis. She gave him full-body massages, other than his privates, which were covered by underwear and a towel. Doris flirted when Thomas made lewd remarks about the erezione he could not get. She also yelled at him when she found him stuffing himself with pizza and guzzling beer brought by friends.
“I’m going back to pills if they take her,” Thomas said. This time he was near tears.
I wasn’t sure what to say. I wanted to say this: “Donald Trump told you he was going to deport all the illegals. The clandestini. Why did you vote for him?”
But I didn’t. Everyone has their own stories. I don’t know where he got his. I got mine mostly from the paper and from people at church or in the lounge. And from the sisters. I trust the sisters. He might not have believed my stories anyway. To make him feel better I will tell him stories from the garden. I will bring him peas, which will be ripe soon.
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