The Earthworms

Old He kept two mu of vegetable land on the western fringe of the city, where the town ran into the countryside. He had not been born to the soil. Once a fitter in a machinery plant, he lost his post and put up a fibro shack at the edge of the field, and there he lived for twelve years.

He had a strange habit: he treasured the earthworms. Other growers sprayed and poisoned; he used wood ash. Others cursed the little mounds the worms pushed up and flattened them; he would crouch in the furrows and ease them gently back into the channel. The neighbours laughed. Just mud grubs, they said. Old He said nothing to that. He only stubbed out his cigarette and answered that you could tell whether ground held life by what crawled out of it.

In the early years the vegetables fetched little, yet Old He's greens were always the livelier. The knowing market men said his soil never clenched hard; one spade down and you caught the smell of wet earth. Old He knew it was the worms' doing. At night he walked the ridges with a torch, watching the pink bodies creep over the damp soil like so many breathing stitches.

The year of the great drought, not a proper rain fell in all of July. On the neighbouring plot the eggplant leaves rolled into tubes and the peppers dropped. Yet Old He's cucumber frame still carried tender fruit. One midnight a hard wind rose and hail looked certain. He stumbled into the field by feel and threw plastic sheeting over the beds one by one. The torch swept the bank, and he froze. The worms had all come up. Black and dense, they lay in several ranks, every head turned toward the low drainage ditch. He followed the way they pointed and drove his spade two cuts deeper at the mouth of the ditch. Half an hour later the hail came down, and where other men's water flooded the beds and rotted the roots, his half acre let the water run obediently out along that ditch.

Old He told no one. After that he minded the worms the more. Whenever his heart grew heavy he would crouch at the field's head and murmur a word or two to the worm at his foot, old matters from the plant, the cold quiet since his daughter married far off. The worm did not flee. It coiled soft against his shoe, as though it listened.

Last winter the notice came. The land would go to a cold-storage warehouse. Old He made three trips to the subdistrict office. It was no use. When the developer's men came to look, he blocked the shack door and said, level it if you must, but move the things in this soil first. They took it for a joke.

On the last night the bulldozer was due at first light. Old He did not sleep. He sat in the shack past midnight and heard a soft rustling in the earth outside. He took the torch and went out. The worms had surfaced everywhere, thick as a carpet, ranked along the furrows into one long line that ran clear to his door, as if seeing someone off. He knelt and touched the foremost one. It did not draw back; it butted toward his palm.

Day broke. The bulldozer came roaring in, and Old He stood in the middle of the field with his arms spread. The driver leaned out and cursed. Old man, what nonsense is this. Old He said, crush it if you like, but wait while I take these few ridges of soil away. And he truly hauled up twenty sacks, knelt, and filled them handful by handful with the living soil and its worms. The driver, grumbling at the delay, went first to level the farther ground.

The field was gone in the end. Old He moved into the elevator flat his daughter had rented, and on the balcony he set a dozen pots, every one filled with soil from the old land. In spring, watering the plants, he saw the surface of the innermost pot push up a small mound, split, and out came a pink worm, crawling slow toward the brass button he had left on the sill, his late wife's button, long lost in some furrow, come back with the earth.

Old He said nothing. He pressed the button gently back into the soil and added a handful of water. Beyond the window the buildings stood wall against wall. Inside that concrete box he kept a pot of breathing earth.