Desperate Times in This Garden of Earthly Desires

This year, Labor Day marked not only the end of the holiday season but also the beginning of the most crucial presidential campaign in decades.

I rose early and scanned the papers. All the news seemed bad--falling incomes and rising unemployment at home, famine and communal strife abroad. Outside, the air was cool and fresh; inside, the news seemed to promise the onset of an uncertain, edgy season.

It was, I thought, a good day to spend beyond the reach of policies and politics. And there I went, pausing under the grape arbor that frames the entrance to our kitchen garden. The shade there was like a warm, sweet-scented blanket, heavy with the winey odor of ripe fruit. The Concord vines were planted for my wife, a continuing memento of her Eastern childhood.

Inside the garden, the crunching of the gravel on the path under foot sounded crisp and purposeful. The white stuccoed walls that form three of the garden’s sides suddenly seemed to suggest not only boundaries but also the limits of what might be knowable--and doable.

Things imagined in the spring so long ago still were there to be harvested--plum tomatoes grown from the seeds a neighbor carried home from her Tuscan sabbatical; armloads of Neapolitan basil; red, yellow and green peppers; deep purple eggplant from Sicily; serrano and habanero chiles; pole beans so abundant it is no wonder the thrifty Dutch farmers who first grew them called them rentegevers --rent payers.

Other crops--the tomatoes and peppers from Provence, the Japanese cucumbers and eggplant, the summer lettuces--had done their best and receded into brittle and--in the case of the salad greens--bitter old age. They would have to give way; their beds would have to cleared and fertilized for winter vegetables.

Even in California, where time passes with a whisper, there is a fashion in which the turning seasons announce themselves.

The afternoon was warm and the cleanup was sweaty work. The redwood border on one of the herb beds had split and, as I bent to examine the damage, I thought of the man who helped me build my garden. Hector, like many of the people who do this city’s hard labor, is from Mexico. He was born and raised in Zacatecas, which, he says with a chuckle that becomes a sigh, is “muy lejos de aqui” --very far from here.

Together, we cut down a hedge of weary 50-year-old camellias and dug up an expanse of lawn. We put in a drip irrigation system, built redwood frames to enclose raised beds, trucked in soil for the vegetables and gravel for the paths. The work stretched over weeks, and we saw a lot of each other.

It was winter and the days were short. In the red light of the late afternoon, we would sit together in the middle of the chaos we believed would one day be a garden. Tired and sore, we zipped our jackets against the rising chill, smoked and drank beer--Bohemia if I had made the run to the liquor store, Michelob if it was his turn to buy.

And we told each other stories. He recorded mine with a laugh, a grunt or a shake of his head; I wrote down many of his.

This week, squatting with a piece of redwood planking in my hand, I thought of what I had read that morning and recalled this story from Hector:

“At home in Mexico, my village is very poor. The farms are small, and there are many children. People think always of the land--and there is never enough of that.

“My father had only enough land for my older brothers. For a while, I worked for my wife’s father on his farm. But after three years, I knew he would never give me anything of my own. So I went to work in a furniture factory. That’s where I learned to work with the wood. Then I came here. Here, there are chances for a man who works hard.

“Let me tell you what it is like in Zacatecas. Once, I knew three brothers. When their father died, the oldest inherited their farm. His two brothers worked for him, and they had nothing of their own. One day the oldest brother is working in the corn field, and the lightning comes and it hits him. When they find him, he has no breath. He is dead, they say. His brothers carried him back to his house, where his wife and their mother are crying. But the brothers are not so sad, because now they get the farm.

“So they sent to the undertaker for a coffin and put their brother in it. Then, they need a priest. But our village is poor and no priest lives at the church. They had to send to some other village. One brother says to send to a certain village for the priest, but other brother says, ‘No, that priest is too old. He will never get here. Send to the other village, where the priest is young.’

“That is what they did. But, when the young priest gets to their house, he goes in and he looks down at the coffin. It is a good one with the glass over the face. And when the priest looks in, he sees that on the other side of the glass is water, like from the breath.

“ ‘Look, look,’ he says. ‘This man is alive.’

“ ‘No, no,’ the brothers say. ‘He is dead. It’s just his hair is wet from the rain.’

“ ‘No,’ the priest says. ‘He is breathing. See, the water gets thicker on the glass. He is alive.’

“Of course, the mother and the wife are very happy, and they open the coffin. But the younger brothers are not so happy. Now they have no land again.

“ ‘I told you to go for the old priest,’ the one brother says to the other. ‘He may be slow, but his eyes are bad.’ ”

Land hunger so gnawing that it sets brother against brother is the final vice of societies with nothing to ration but scarcity. It is not confined to Mexico. Over the last century, in country after country, conditions like those in Hector’s village--too many people in pursuit of too few of the material things that make life bearable--have sent millions of immigrants to this country. Here, there was enough space and opportunity to set aside not only the old country’s deprivation but also the enmities it engendered.

That may no longer be true. In our troubled economy, too many people are chasing too few jobs paying wages that are too low. Sooner or later, those people will turn in large numbers, first on each other and then on the fortunate few whose lot is kinder.

How that possibility can be avoided is the only question worth discussing in this presidential year.