SHE DIGS IN THE GARDEN like the shovel is an axe. She hacks and the wet dirt flecks off her cheeks and stays in her hair like blood. Her face is freckled in dirt. I think her beautiful this way.

"I'm just digging out the roots," she says. But it looks like she's cutting off their heads.

Her husband beats her. Not the bruise-leaving kind. That would be better because wounds on the flesh heal. He bruises her on the inside, and if I could see her from the inside, I know she's just one strip of bloody black and blue.

He told her he wouldn't have chosen her out of all the women in the world to marry, but God wanted it that way. God wanted her to be the mother of his child. Her husband says God tells him she's not fit to mother in the verb sense. So basically, she's his whore.

She believes she's a sinner and a child in the eyes of God. She must remain humble and do as her husband says because she knows no better. When she has sinned terribly, like watched television for too long or talked out of turn, he won't let her eat dinner. Her own son treats her like a sibling.

Her husband won't let her put up the little birdhouses and wind chimes she loves because he says they're frivolous ornaments and false idols. She finds them in the trash, twisted and broken. The ones she saves, she gives to me.

I have a whole collection of wind chimes that I hang in my back porch on the hooks that hold up the blinds. They don't make much music lately, because the wind hasn't been blowing. The birdhouses, I put up along the limbs of my redwood.

Her husband won't let her garden. He says she spends too much time doing it and not enough time praying for God to forgive all her sins. She had a rose garden once, the kind that she tended until all the different blooms looked like they were from a painting, colors I didn't even know roses had. He set fire to them.

So she gardens at my house. I don't have a lot of land, but the land I do have, she tends. She told me that if she's already a sinner and not yet forgiven, she may as well sin in this way, until God pardons her.

I mostly just watch her when she gardens. I like the look on her face, serious as a pallbearer and steady like one, too. And she jams her foot so hard on the edge of that shovel—I wonder she doesn't slice it right in two. Her hair gets in her eyes, and she pushes it away with one of my old work gloves that's too big for her hands. She likes them because they are worn in. She says she's always kind of shaking my hand along the way.

I don't watch her for too long because I know it's her time.

When she's finished, it's dark outside. I know she will have to leave soon. I turn the porch light on and see her work. The earth is dark, churned to the core where the clumps are black and thick. Everything's turned inside out.


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