Molly went upstairs to the guest suite, used mostly by staff researchers and members of the board. She noticed several sprigs of rosemary in a jar. The bed had fresh linen. A glass pitcher stood on the dresser table filled with water, beads of evaporation dripped down its side. She poured herself a glass and pressed it to her forehead. Gerard’s smile made her feel like a young girl again, the only person to support her when certain board members had challenged her about developing the Devil’s Forest.
“She’s a landscaper. What does she know about a business?” They didn’t have the courage to kick her off the board, but instead, demoted Molly to adjunct consultant, whatever that meant.
“Those stupid board members,” she told Gerard. “Just because they come from the cities of buildings, they think they can tell us what to do. They’re not interested in supporting the school anymore,” she said. “only highly-publicized romps through the Devil’s Forest.”
They’d asked her to develop specialized plants for the new forest, ones that would do more than just sit there and grow, which is how the doll’s eye plant got started. It had been a joke.
“I’d like to make several of those board members disappear,” she told Gerard, and started to cross-breed strains of milkweedy with chrysanthemummer. It took time and patience. She didn’t realize that they’d actually plant them in the forest. Now the whole affair had come full circle with investors pressuring the weak-kneed board to turn the place into a theme park and forget its educational mission. Who were these people?
Molly had always liked nothing better than working in the garden; thought it all tosh and nonsense when people began to call her the dirt girl. As a matter of fact, she liked that name and adopted it. “I’m the dirt girl,” she said, and dug up another shovelful of earth as she planted corumrum bulbs, a decorative edging along the cobbled pathway.
Ever since she could remember, she had always been involved with growing plants. It was an easy. Her mother stayed busy as the school’s housekeeper. Molly laughed and told her, “I’m working also!”
Molly spent afternoons stomping around in the woods, stretched beneath stands of flying maple wood and allowing their heady fragrance to fill her lungs. Something like buttered popcorn. She made friends with worms, little creatures with beating hearts. My gosh, when she was a girl she’d saved empty crates and planted seeds, charted their growth, drew pictures of stems and leaves, until she became familiar with every start to finish.
But after her mother died, Armantrout allowed Molly to remain at the school and become its landscaper. He was like a father to her and in certain ways, the Pool of Knowledge was like her mother, for without it, she felt everything she’d worked for would wither and die, and more than anything Molly held on tightly to what grew in her heart, small pointed leaves unfolding one at a time, which was her love for Gerard Creasemore.