Reborn

3

The ground was thawed and the weekend was promising to be a warm one, so Jonah decided to get an early start on the garden. Come Friday afternoon most weeks he was bushed by the time he got home from the plant. But lately he had been full of life, bursting with energy, and the vegetable garden was as good a place as any to work some of it off. Maybe he'd be able to bring in some lettuce this year.

The first thing he was going to do, though, was set up a decent perimeter fence to keep the rabbits out. He would have loved to set up coils of razor wire to shred the greedy little rodents as they hopped into the garden, but the neighbors would raise a fuss when the same thing happened to their wild little bastards as they took their usual headlong shortcut through his backyard.

So he'd have to settle for chicken wire.

He planned to set up a two-by-four post at each corner of the garden, then string the mesh between it. Three feet would be more than high enough.

He began digging the hole for the first corner post. About eighteen inches would do it. Jonah liked the slicing sound the spade made as he jammed it into the soft earth, loved to feel the countless rootlets part beneath the blade as he drove it deeper into the ground with his foot. There was something delicious in disrupting the delicate balance below. Years of interplay; of give-and-take between the soil, the nutrients, the bacteria, the insects, and the vegetation—all altered forever with the thrust of a shovel.

When he had dug down about a foot, the dirt began to turn red.

Strange. He hadn't known there was any clay around here. And then he saw that it wasn't clay but a red liquid seeping up through the soil. He lowered himself to his hands and knees for a closer look. He sniffed.

Blood.

Jonah's pulse suddenly picked up as a shudder of elation raced through him. This wasn't a hallucination. This was the real thing. Another in a long line of signs he had been gifted with throughout his life.

Breathless, he watched the thick red fluid well up in the hole until it reached the rim, then ooze off into the garden in a thin, slow rivulet. Jonah would have liked to have let it fill the garden, to watch it cool and clot as dusk fell, but there were no secrets in these tiny, crowded backyards around here. It wouldn't do at all to have the neighbors wondering what had happened in the Stevenses' yard.

Reluctantly he began shoveling the earth back into the hole, stoppering the crimson flow. When the sod was back in place, he stepped back, reined in his excitement, and stood there thinking.

Blood flowing in his backyard. How else could he interpret that but as a harbinger of death, the death of someone close to his home? It was also a sign that events were gathering speed, and that he should not waste his time tilling the earth.