What Are You Afraid Of?

miracle-gro

miracle-gro S Peet Hillegass had been thinking all morning about too much of a good thing being poison, so he decided to try it. In the supply shed behind the church, he took one white industrial-sized bucket, filled it from the tap, and emptied an entire box of Miracle-Gro. The water turned a shocking shade of blue. He heaved the bucket out into the sun and toward the cemetery. By now, he knew exactly where all five hundred fortyseven were buried and how long they’d been there. “Head Maintenance ,” Peet called himself. The janitor/groundskeeper who’d held the position before had suffered a massive heart attack, an unfortunate result of strenuous labor, and left the spot open. Peet had jumped at the opportunity, spending the weekdays of the past seven years wandering the empty church, straightening hymnals, 81 playing at the piano when no one else was around. He worked the cemetery as if it were his own, something he could memorize and that made complete sense. With the concoction of Miracle-Gro, Peet walked among the headstones, the row closest to the highway, and stopped when he came to a rose-marble marker. BERTRAM CHASE, it read. A picture of a deer’s head was etched beside the name. Peet put down the bucket and imagined his former dentist there, lying beneath him. The afternoon Peet remembered most was when he and his father had gone into Bertram’s office—Peet recalled being about ten—and Bertram’s breath had smelled like medicine or a whiskey. “You’re going to be a mush mouth for sure,” Bertram had said. “I can read it in your teeth.” The words had been a curse. Every time Peet went to the dentist now—the new one, Dr. Milkin—he would lie back in the dentist chair that felt more like a medieval torture trap than anything, and he’d have to endure that horrible drill as it rammed and rammed and rammed into teeth and gums, leaving him a mouth full of blood. No matter what he did—he brushed twice each morning, twice each night— his mouth was filled with rot. Had Bertram kept quiet, Peet might’ve been looking in the mirror every morning at a set of perfect ivories, not a mouth filled with snaggled teeth and stains and a decay he could not exactly see but knew was there. Peet tipped the bucket so a portion of the Miracle-Gro splashed across the grass of Bertram’s grave and waited while the water seeped into the ground. Then Peet smiled and spit and hurried back four rows, over seven plots to ELAINE MENSCH. She lay under a white-marble-cross model that made it seem she was a saint. He pictured her: hands clasped on her chest and decked out in a lavender knit. She was one of those who always wore some purple. Normally, Peet would’ve just pissed on his old teacher’s grave, doing figure eights with his urine stream, imagining her shriveling up her nose up at the smell, but today he had 82 what are you afraid of? the Miracle-Gro and dumped some of it over her plot. She’d made his fourth grade year a living hell, telling him once—after sticking his face in the corner of the classroom—that he wasn’t going much further in the world. Now look at me, Peet thought. Now who’s calling the shots? With the last of the Miracle-Gro he doused out BARB WORTH. She’d been good cause to break that love thy neighbor clause, tattling to Peet’s parents and anyone who’d listen all through his high school years about what Peet was doing and with whom. She’d turned on her porch light and caught Peet and that girl screwing in the middle of her yard—that was the worst of it. Peet splashed the Miracle-Gro over Barb’s grave and imagined the hissing of acid as the fertilizer bled into the ground. He could barely wait to start seeing results. Following the barbed-wire fence that framed the cemetery off from a pasture, Peet made his way back to the church. A cow forced her heavy head through the fence to chew at the greener cemetery grass, and when Peet came close she didn’t move, but looked...