Ferguson's Wagon

FERGUSON'S WAGON / Barton Wilcox EVERYBODY WHO KNEW about it—and that was everyone in Breemsburg—told somebody else about the Ferguson place. Inquisitive Saturday or Sunday afternoon guests might even be loaded into the car and driven by the Fergusons just to save the explanation. Gray Ferguson's green thumb, when it had not been counting out change at Ferguson's Hardware, had turned the Ferguson lot into a virtual arboretum that Gray's son, Robert Jr., would one day describe to the readers of his Techtown Beacon column as "aglut and agog with beauty," before going on to catalogue the mid-summer scenery. It was like an inventory of the unsold seed packets left over from Ferguson's Hardware: zinnia, black-eyed Susan, berbena torenia, Sweet William, tithonia, stock and statice, phlox, salvia, snapdragon, a gaudy collar of portulaca around modest petunia, indiscriminate nemesia, lupine, love-lies-bleeding, lobelia, impatiens, hollyhock and honesty, heliotrope, mums, dahlia and cornflower, alyssum and aster. Those were just the annuals. Add the faithful glads, wood hyacinth, and iris towering, cyclamen clinging, snowdrop in patches, tulip, begonia, crocus, sea lavender, primrose, True Solomon's Seal, Christmas rose and red-hot poker, mayapple, lupine, the UIy—which Gray caUed "The RobertJr."—burning bush, daisy, a veritable field of poppies for general commemoration, and a reservoir of peonies for specific graves, all reinforced by bugbane, baby's breath, and agapanthus africanus. Among others. The lot was anchored by euyonymous, hibiscus, pyracantha, yew, fir, holly, crepe myrtle, rose of Sharon, cedar, maple, and ash. A plaster fountain and a few ceramic deer completed the pastoral. So many successful high school science projects had been gleaned from the Ferguson grounds that the Fergusons could have claimed something dried and matted and framed in nearly a quarter of the attics in Breemsburg. As a result, the Ferguson gardens had become the trademark of values too often forgotten or long neglected, such as retirement as an end in itself. This was documented in a Breemsburg Daily News feature, quoting Gray Ferguson: "I never had a cent when I was growing up, but we always had us a nice yard." The Fergusons had framed and hung this over the mantle in the living room of the modest white bungalow, which stood two city blocks from its nearest neighbor, right on the edge of the Breemsburg city limits. It was true that the Fergusons were luckier than many, because The Missouri Review · 275 they had their health. Bull-headed Gray Ferguson—nicknamed for his gray crewcut or his gray workclothes—most had forgotten which— had refused prostate problems, kidney stones, bursitis, arthritis, back trouble, corns, bunions and constipation. He had suffered a heart attack, but no one had taken it seriously, because everyone knew that if you got past the first one you had it made. And, after almost twenty years of marriage, Gray and Ethel had a son, who was given Gray's real name, Robert, and whom no one in Breemsburg would have remembered at all if he hadn't become a celebrity. Gray ran the hardware store every Saturday, as well as the other five days, except for the two weeks each year he drove the three of them to the Ozarks, a vacation they eventually gave up because of RobertJr.'s exotic allergies—it turned out that RobertJr. was allergic to Missouri—and because of his temperament. They were quite happy when the boy was an infant. Then he had begun to want things. Gray had never known anyone to want so many things and do so little—besides making other people miserable— to get them. Gray had learned how to work during the Depression, and it distressed him that his son would grow up completely ignorant of this, despite the fact that he was told often enough that he should remember. Theboy wasinundated with erector sets, chemistry sets, microscopes, footballs, basketballs, paints, cameras, etc. What he could not burn, he smashed. What he could not destroy outright, he left outdoors to rust. If something he poured down the pipes did not clog them or eat them away, then he applied it to the finish on the...