They Laughed at Her Sunflower Wall… Until the Blizzard Came

Chapter 5

The whole valley heard about the trenches before the seeds had even broken the surface of the soil.

News traveled fast in a settlement that small, and there was no news stranger than the widow Wray planting a ring of sunflowers around her cabin. Not in the garden, where a sensible person might grow them for seed or oil. Not along the fence line, where they might catch the eye. Around the foundation. In the dirt. In a tight, deliberate circle, as if she meant to grow a fence out of flowers.

At first, the basin simply assumed she had lost her grip on things. It happened to widows, people said. Living alone out there with only a child and a dog for company, the silence got into a person’s head after a while. They watched her from the road with something between pity and fascination, waiting for the moment she would come to her senses and admit the whole thing had been a spell of grief.

She never did.

The seeds came up in June, thin green shoots that looked impossibly fragile against the vast, hard country. Esther watered them by hand, hauling bucket after bucket from the creek, because in that dry basin nothing grew without a fight. The men driving their wagons past would slow down to watch her bent over the young plants, and they would shake their heads and cluck their tongues, and by the time the Fourth of July passed, the story had grown a name.

They called her the Sunflower Widow.

The name spread the way such names spread — not out of malice, exactly, but out of the particular cruelty of people who have found something to agree about. It was said with a grin at Ezra Fenn’s general store. It was said with a sigh over the fence. It was said loud enough, once or twice, for Esther herself to hear it, and she had simply kept working, her face unreadable, her hands in the dirt.

It was Amos Hale who finally said what everyone else was thinking. Amos was a rancher from three miles over, a big, blunt man with a voice like gravel and the kind of confidence that came from never having been truly tested. He rode up to Esther’s place one afternoon in the heat of July, reined in his horse, and studied the rows of young sunflowers — already waist-high now, already beginning to thicken into something that looked almost like a wall — with open, undisguised contempt.

“Widow,” he said, touching his hat brim without quite meaning it as a courtesy. “I’ve got to ask you plain. What in God’s name do you think you’re building?”

Esther had straightened up slowly, wiped her hands on her apron, and looked at him with those calm, unreadable eyes of hers.

“Winter’s coming, Mr. Hale,” she said. That was all.

Amos had stared at her. He had waited for her to say something else, something that would make sense, and when she simply turned her back and knelt down again in the dirt, he had ridden off shaking his head, muttering about a woman who had finally gone round the bend.

He was not the only one. Cyrus Bell, the finest carpenter in the territory, came by a week later on his own account, and he had not laughed — Cyrus was too professional to laugh. He had walked the ring of growing stalks with a frown, squatting down to inspect the way Esther had layered the young plants against the base of the logs, and then he had delivered his verdict the way a doctor delivers a diagnosis.

“You’re going to trap moisture against the logs, ma’am,” he said. “All that green growth pressed up against the walls — come autumn, when it dies and soaks up the wet, it’s going to rot your cabin from the outside in. You’re building your own ruin here, and you’ll be lucky if the place stands till spring.”

Esther had listened to him politely. She had thanked him for his trouble. And she had kept planting.

Ezra Fenn, who ran the general store and considered himself the valley’s authority on all matters of sense and economy, had made his opinion known to anyone who would stand still long enough to hear it. He called it the most foolish thing he had seen in a year of foolish things. He predicted, loudly and often, that the widow would be eating her words — and possibly her sunflower seeds — come January, when her cabin fell down around her ears and she came crawling to the store for coal oil and charity.

The seeds grew anyway. They grew the way only sunflowers can grow — with a kind of relentless, almost arrogant confidence, as if they knew something the rest of the valley did not. By the end of July they were chest-high and thick, a dense green wall running the whole way around Esther’s cabin, nearly three feet deep at the base. From the road, the little log house had begun to look like a fort. A fort made of flowers.

Mae thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world. She had taken to walking the ring every evening, running her small hands along the leaves the way other children petted a cat, and she had asked her mother a question that Esther had not quite known how to answer.

“Mama,” she had said, “are they going to be our friends?”

Esther had looked down at her daughter, at that small earnest face, and she had felt something crack open in her chest.

“They already are, sweetheart,” she had said. “They’re going to keep us warm when winter comes.”

Mae had considered this for a long moment, and then she had nodded, satisfied, as if her mother had said the most reasonable thing in the world.

The men of the valley could laugh. The women could whisper. The wagons could slow down on the road so their drivers could stare at the Sunflower Widow and her ring of yellow flowers. It did not matter. Esther had a plan that had been a hundred years in the making, and she was not about to let a valley full of people who had never been truly cold in their lives talk her out of it.

But there were nights — long nights, after Mae was asleep and the only sound was the creak of the cabin settling and Gus’s slow breathing by the stove — when Esther lay awake and listened to the wind beginning to turn, and she let herself feel the fear she could not show her daughter in the daylight.

What if she was wrong? What if Greta’s old-country trick did not work here, in this harsher country, against these colder winters? What if she had bet everything — her daughter’s life, her home, her last thin claim on a future — on the memory of a dead woman’s sunflowers?

The stalks stood silent outside her window, taller than her head now, their great heavy faces already beginning to bow with the weight of their seeds.

And somewhere deep in the basin, the first edge of autumn touched the ridgeline, and the leaves began to turn.