This short story comes from the novel I’ve been writing off and on for...quite a few years. I wrote it to explore the backstory of the narrator, Frank Butterfield. The novel itself focuses mostly on the two children of Frank’s older brother, Weston.
I originally intended this story to be part of the novel, but I don’t think it fits in anymore; it does work as a standalone story, though.
Hope you enjoy!
Original Sin
In April of 1976, Spencer W. Kimball, president and prophet of the Mormon church, revealed that God wanted the Saints to grow gardens. Three days later, our small family crowded around a shelf of seed packets at the local grocery store, mom reading from the red notebook where she’d compiled the list of vegetables we’d grow, and dad searching through the shelves to pick the right packets.
I was only five, but I remember vividly looking up at Dad and watching him hand the packets one by one to my big brother, Weston, who placed them carefully in the basket he carried. My sisters, Tania and Sariah, chatted about how much fun the garden would be, and I stood behind them, taking it all in.
When mom finally closed her notebook, dad took the basket from Weston, and we followed him out to the checkout. But Weston lingered a while, carefully looking through the different seeds on the shelf. Then he grabbed a packet and hurried to meet us by the register.
“Mom, dad, can we plant watermelons like Jack’s family does?” Weston held up the packet of seeds he’d found, “They grow ‘em so huge that they take ‘em to the fair. I bet we could grow some even bigger!” His eyes looked hungry.
“There won’t be enough room this year, honey,” Mom said as dad approached the register, “We want to start with simple produce, like zuchinnis and potatoes, but maybe we could try melons next year.”
Weston looked deflated but said nothing.
Dad borrowed a tiller from the neighbors and labored long into the evening after work for a week to prepare the long, rectangular patch of soil at the edge of our yard that became our family garden. Weston tried to help him on the first night. He pled to have a chance to try the tiller, but dad said he was too young, and told him to go play with me and Sariah jumping on the tramp.
Weston seemed mad, and he didn’t join us. After we finished jumping, Sariah and I lay staring up at the branches of our yard’s massive beech tree, watching the pink light of the sunset filter through its leaves. Suddenly, Sariah screamed and jumped up. Startled, I screamed with her and scurried off the tramp, not sure what had happened.
The tiller stopped. Moments later, dad was calming Sariah, asking her what happened. Mom, who had been tending the flowerbed in front of our porch when she heard the scream, was kneeling with her arms wrapped around me as Sariah pointed to a long snake slithering on the tramp. Then I noticed Weston peeking mischievously from behind the tree.
Dad saw him, too. “Weston,” his voice was firm, “do you know what happened here?”
Weston emerged from his hiding place. “It’s just a garter snake,” he said, “they don’t even bite! It was just a joke!”
Mom and dad reprimanded Weston and gave him extra chores in the house as a punishment. Sariah and I went inside. Mom put on a church cartoon to calm us down, and Tania, the oldest, brought us brownies and milk.
We were supposed to plant the garden together as a family the next morning, but Weston was missing when we woke up. So mom and Tania started planting with help from me and Sariah while dad went off to hunt him down. Dad eventually found Weston playing in the barn at Jack’s house. When the truck pulled up our gravel driveway, we could hear dad shouting through the closed doors. Weston was silent for days after that.
As the years passed, our garden grew special to each of us in different ways.
Tania took the overgrowth of zucchinis as a personal baking challenge and filled our kitchen with the smells of bread, cookies, and muffins. I’d often sit up on the counter taking in the sights and smells while she sliced and mixed and baked. The whole time, she’d tell me story after story. Tania was in her late teens while I was a kid, but she talked to me the same way she talked to anyone. I was the first to know when she started liking a boy named Peter, the first to know when he held her hand, and the only one who knew how scared she was to talk to mom and dad about it. I loved listening to Tanya, but I rarely said anything back.
Weston did end up getting his watermelon patch. They didn’t grow quite as big as Jack’s family’s at first, but he figured out a few tricks and ended up winning a silver medal for his watermelons at a 4-H competition. Weston and Jack starting bringing their watermelons to the county fair each year, both trying to beat each other to win an award for the biggest watermelon in the county.
It was the snacks that drew me and Sariah to the garden. We’d sneak through when no one was around to snip at the peas, snap ripe cherry tomatoes from the vine, and spy for any early cucumbers to munch on. Then we’d climb the tree for the hundredth time, or play in the fields behind the house, or sneak off to the nearby creek to soak or feet in the cool water.
Each of us took turns with garden chores. On Saturday mornings, me and Weston were assigned to weed the whole garden, and those were some of the only hours I remember spending alone with him during his high school years.
On those mornings with Weston, I tried my hardest to get him to talk. But he wouldn’t ever say much, so I would just tell him all about what I saw on TV, or things my friends had said, or games I wanted to play. I always hoped he’d ask me a question or even just smile, but I couldn’t even tell if he was listening most of the time.
When he did speak, it was usually to interrupt whatever I was doing to give me some order that I’d jump to follow––Go back and dig up the roots on that last one! Weeds’l just grow back if you don’t get the roots.--Watch your step! You almost crushed a pepper plant.––Go get me some water––Hey back up, Franky! No one gets near my watermelons.”
The summer of 1981 felt momentous even before the drama began. Tanya had stayed at home for a year after she finished high school to save up her money, and now she was planning to finally move out and start school at BYU. Weston graduated high school and turned nineteen in July of that same year, so we all know he’d be leaving to go on a mission sometime soon, too. He kept saying he’d send in his application after the county fair. It was his last chance to finally get that prize, and he was still determined to beat Jack to it.
Towards the end of July, mom and dad set up a circle of chairs next to our garden and gathered us kids together for a special evening.
After dad said a prayer, mom pulled out the old red notebook she’d used to plan our first garden. She’d written quotes in there from that talk by President Kimball, and she read them to us, and then showed us those first lists of seeds and supplies she’d made with dad.
“We’ve been planting our family garden for five years now. Before Tanya and Weston leave, your dad and I wanted to come together as a family to remember all the blessings we’ve received from God for following his prophet’s counsel.”
Then she asked us to go around, one-by-one, oldest to youngest, and say the biggest blessings we’d each received from the garden.
Tanya began, smiling wide, “I’ve been blessed to learn lots of things to cook and bake. Peter took me to see a movie last Friday night and I snuck in some of my zucchini cookies. Afterward, he said they were the best cookies he’d had in his whole life!” She noticed the sudden concern on our parents’ faces. “Oh don’t worry, you know it’s always double dates. Colton and Jess were there. They loved the cookies, too.”
It was Weston’s turn next. He stared at the ground for a bit until finally saying, “Well we got stuff to eat without haffin’a go to the store.” Mom paused, giving him space to say more, but Weston just stared off at the ground. We’d all learned time and again that there’s no use trying to get Weston to speak when he’s decided not to.
Mom gave up. “What about you, Sariah?”
“It makes our yard look really pretty! And maybe we could plant big sunflowers next year, too! That would be even prettier,” Sariah said.
“That’s a great idea, sweety. What about you, Franky?”
Without a pause, I smiled real big and said earnestly, “I get to spend time with Weston when we weed the garden. That’s my biggest blessing.” I looked over to Weston as I said it, beaming with ten-year-old innocence. But Weston didn’t look at me, and when he rolled his eyes at the distant mountains, my smile sank down into a deep frown.
Mom and dad missed what happened, but Tania immediately reached her right arm around me and pulled me so close my chair came up onto two legs.
“You’re just the sweetest,” she said, “I should start coming out to help weed the garden just so I get to spend more time with you.”
Then Dad launched into some version of the speech he always gives about blessings: how it’s not about getting something; it’s about becoming something. That was always his thing. The blessing we should be most grateful for, he told us, is that we had become gardeners together. And God is a gardener, too, he said. He made the most perfect garden ever, the garden of Eden. So when we work on our garden, we’re becoming a bit more like God.
Yeah, I thought, all of us but Weston.
That night as I tried to get to sleep in the top bunk, Weston sleeping peacefully just below me, I dreamed up a plan. Weston had a job at the farm down the road moving pipe in the mornings. He was always up before sunrise. I woke up to his alarm clock every day, but I’d just roll over in the fall back asleep for as long as I wanted. I decided the next day, I’d get up right after he left and surprise him by weeding the whole garden before he got back.
I imagined seeing a sigh of relief on Weston’s face when he got home to see it was all done. I pictured him smiling and saying, well, the work is done, so let’s do something else together. I fantasized about him taking me in his truck to get ice cream or penny candies at the store, saying he was sorry for not being nicer today.
When his alarm rang the next morning, my eyes shot open, but then I quickly closed them to a tight squint. I rolled over, away from the wall, and watched Weston’s blurred form as he got up, changed his clothes, put on his boots, and walked out of the bedroom. My heart was racing, and I waited, wondering how long it would take to be sure he’d actually left the house. Soon, the grumble of his truck’s engine set me at ease. I leaped out of bed, changed my clothes, put on my shoes, and hurried quietly downstairs and out the front door.
When I got out to the garden and knelt next to the tomato plants, I realized there wasn’t enough light yet for me to even see any of the weeds. Disappointed, I slumped onto the grass and lay there, determined to wait in place until it was bright enough for me to weed.
Soon enough, my eyelids began to flutter, and I started drifting gently back to sleep right there in the wet morning grass. Right before my mind settled into slumber, I felt something slowly slither against my leg. I jumped up in alarm. The light had grown enough for me to see a long garter snake slink past me right down the center of the garden. When it passed Weston’s watermelon patch my alert eyes settled on his fledgling melons.
Memories flashed through my mind as I looked at those melons. I saw him pleading with mom to plant watermelons, saw him peeking mischievously out from behind the tree when Sariah and I had been scared by the garter snake, saw him gruffly ordering me around week after week.
Then, a wicked idea passed through my mind, and I suddenly knew what I was really out there to do.
I walked up to Weston’s watermelons, plucked each of them, and chucked them one-by-one as hard as I could against the tree. I felt sadistic glee as the melons burst their bloody fruit against the bark, and then I stomped on them, hard as I could until my dirty white tennis shoes were stained pink. I ripped the plant up as much as I could and then went back inside, crawled back into bed, and stared at the ceiling, realizing what I’d just done.
The memory of my melon massacre is poignant, but the events slip back and forth in my mind after that. I don’t remember waking up or who found out first. But I do remember it was dad who went outside first and found the mess. I remember mom yelling at me, grounding me, giving me extra chores. I remember Sariah first saying it was stupid of me to do but then later admitting that she wished she’d done it herself.
Just before Weston got home, Tania brought a warm slice of buttered zucchini bread up to my room. She found me crouched by the window, softly crying, staring down at the red, fleshy mess under the tree and waiting in terror for what would happen when Weston got home.
She walked over, set the plate on the window sill, held my hand, and said, “We all make mistakes, okay buddy? Nobody is perfect. You just gotta learn from them and not do them again.” She gave me a big hug. “I’m always going to love you no matter what, okay? Eat this. I promise it will make you feel better.”
Tania left the room, and the bread did make me feel better for a moment. But just as I finished the last bite, Weston’s truck appeared in my line of sight. I turned away from the window and hugged my knees, rocking gently back and forth. But it wasn’t until five minutes later when I heard Weston’s voice rising up from the garden that I learned just how deep in the body a red-hot shame can sink. When it got down below my belly, my whole body shouted at me, HIDE!
I got up slowly and tentatively made my way to the bedroom door. I slowly pushed it open and checked both ways. The coast was clear, so I tiptoed to the hallway closet where we stored boxes and a heap of blankets. I hurried inside, shut the door behind me, and felt my way in the dark to the blankets and then slithered between them until I reached the back wall.
There was sound and commotion, but it was all muffled, and I couldn’t make out much. At one point, I heard Weston yell, “I DON’T WANT TO TALK TO HIM.” I heard Tania’s voice a lot, but I could never understand what she was saying. It felt like hours before the yelling all stopped. But after it quieted, only a few minutes passed before the closet door creaked open and I heard Sariah say, “It’s okay, he’s gone, you can come out now.”
I slinked back through the blankets and over the boxes.
“You know everyone knew where you were hiding, right?” Sariah asked. Shame sent more tingles down my spine. “That’s what most of the yelling was about. Mom, Dad, Weston, and Tania were all fighting about who should come get you, but Weston wouldn’t let them get you. He said… some really mean things. And then he packed a bag with clothes and said he’d go stay with some friends for a few days.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Come on out, mom wants to talk to you.”
A few days later, the phone rang while I was right next to it, sitting on the counter in the kitchen listening to all of Tania’s plans for moving to Provo. I picked up and said, “Hello, this is the Butterfields, Frank speaking,” just like my mom had trained me, but no one answered on the other side. I hung up and told Tanya it must have been a mistake. But then the phone rang again, and the same thing happened.
Turns out it was Weston, and he hung up when he’d heard my voice. He tried again half-an-hour later. I’d left the kitchen at that point, so Tanya answered, and Weston asked her to tell mom and dad that his friends offered him a summer job tending sheep in Idaho and that he was going to take it. He didn’t have enough time to drop by and see everyone before he left. He said he had enough clothes.
Weston’s summer job turned into an autumn job, and that led to a different winter job, and none of us saw him for a whole year-and-a-half. Every night when we gathered in a circle to pray as a family, we asked Heavenly Father to bless Weston, to bring him home to us, and to inspire him to go on a mission like he’d planned.
Throughout those years, and for many after, my inner monologue became a broken record: please, God, please forgive me for bashing Weston’s hopes against a tree. Please Heavenly Father, forgive me for driving him away. It’s my fault he didn’t serve a mission. Please forgive me for all the people who will never be baptized because he decided not to go. Forgive me for breaking our family. Please forgive me. Please forgive me. Please forgive me.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear any thoughts/feedback. I’m still very new to writing fiction, and there’s a lot to figure out. I’m dissatisfied still with many elements of this story… but I’ve learned that if I wait until I’m satisfied with my writing, I’ll never share it.
Until next week,
Josh