In the first place it wasn’t mine to sell. On the way to the antique shop, I thought, "Who’d want to buy some old diary?" But when my roommate Greta suggested I contact the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, they told me some publisher might be interested in printing it. I couldn’t imagine it though, never having actually read it myself.

That was March.

Before my mother died, she mentioned it once in passing, but I could tell she wished she hadn’t. It’s all gibberish, the pages are yellow and thin, she said. But what did she even know about him or the diary, having slept in the living room their last ten years together. Like all other wives like her, she said after he got back he wasn’t the same.

Louie Silvestri, my father, died the day after Christmas last year. It was his favorite holiday and even though he spent his last one in bed doped up on morphine, I know it meant something to him. The only other thing that meant anything was his vegetable garden. After he came back from the war, his garden took on a sort of spiritual presence in his life. He relished the way his hands felt submerged in the cold, moist, early morning soil and, even now, when I go there I can hear him breathing beside me. In his will he left me the house with the stipulation that I keep the garden going. Imagine me doing this. Till and turn over the soil every spring, and so on. He even left detailed drawings and diagrams of what I should plant and where. The only plant I ever had that lived was a Christmas cactus that could grow without water in the bottom of a closet.

"So I guess I can’t sell the house, then?" I asked Greta.

"Not unless you’re gonna go over there every day and pull out weeds," she said. She knew my father. He loved my cooking as did she, and on Sundays he used to come over and sniff the garlicky fumes of my homemade marinara sauce as I cooked. Greta sat beside him asking him questions about the war. All his answers were about the same.

To her question, "What year were you drafted?" he’d say something like, "Oh. Not until May or June. If you plant rosemary before that, it’ll die from the frost." He died with his brain cells fully intact. Our family prided in having no history of Alzheimer’s or senility of any sort, so that wasn’t it. He just kept the past zipped up in a pocket in his brain.

A publisher returned my phone call on Monday morning, wanting to discuss the contents of Louie’s diary, and I hadn’t a clue about it.

"What do you mean?" the woman asked me, incredulous. "He was your father, wasn’t he?"

"Yes," I replied. "He was."

Even after seeing a realtor about selling his house, it just hadn’t occurred to me to read it. The problem was, though, that in his will Louie left the diary to Malcolm Massey, his best friend and neighbor of forty-five years. I remembered Malcolm walking hunched over forty-five degrees and smoking a pipe. He and Louie played constant tricks on each other, things like stealing each other’s lawnmowers, sending life insurance salesmen to each other’s houses. This nonsense went on for years. When I walked across the street to deliver the diary to him, his wife told me he’d died ten months ago. Aside from the question of how I hadn’t known this, a larger one occurred to me: Now what do I do with it?

I moved some of my things into Louie’s house a week after he died, and each week after that I moved more. By January it was my primary residence. Everything felt weird in that house. There was a funny smell that I denied the existence of at first, and not just in the kitchen that had seen four decades of homemade pizza and calzones. Something stale but organic.

Death.

So I cased the joint like a bloodhound searching for the root of the strange odor. Finally, I decided the carpet that had absorbed two entire lives, a suicide and five grandchildren had to go. Two thousand dollars later, the smoothly buffed wood floors glowed with infant newness, like the skin beneath a shaved mustache. I started leaving my shoes outside the front door.

I bought a stack of used books on gardening techniques and tips. Followed the directions like a treasure map, I felt proud of something that I’d done for the first time in years. Within a larger square according to the prescribed planning instructions, the herbs followed a spiraling path along the perimeter of the wire fence with the vegetables in the middle, arranged by color. The garden was an organic investment. Nothing visible above the ground, I knew life was preparing to flourish within Louie’s magic soil. "It’s all in the fertilizer," he used to say. As a child, I remember being assigned the task of cutting tomatoes for my mother to put in the dinner salad. My hands were tiny cat paws back then, and the tomatoes were the size of grapefruits. It took me an hour to cut just one into bite-sized pieces.

The day I finished planting, I went to the grocery store to buy food for my celebratory feast. In the meat section, I ran into Mr. Gezzle who lived alone in a big house on Farm Hill Road. I think he was about a hundred when I graduated from high school. He was holding the hand of a large woman.

"Gloria," he said in a grainy voice, "I’d like you to meet my friend, Norma. I understand she’s going to publish some of your father’s memoirs." God, I thought rolling my eyes. Gives new meaning to the words small town.

I managed to dodge Norma Brandt for a month while I perused the contents of the diary myself. After all, I was between jobs, living off my inheritance money and needed something to do while I waited for the plants to sprout. Since Louie’s words weren’t meant for my eyes, I prayed silently that I wouldn’t uncover any scandalous secrets about him, about what he did or saw or wished for. I sat down in my bathrobe early one morning and started reading. I didn’t move until the sun went down.

"Shot down in a B-52 over Hanoi in December [1972]. ‘Linebacker II’ -- code name for Nixon’s bombing of Hanoi to force V.C.’s back to the peace negotiations table. Upon capture, spent one week in solitary, then in a cell with two others, then six. Lived with no ice, no toilet paper, pants with no pockets, given a daily ration of three cigarettes but without matches. As highest rank in building, organized lookouts; appointed heads of committees for security and morale, etc. and a chaplain for religious services. Ate two meals a day, gray mush in the morning and cabbage soup with stale bread for supper. Made chess pieces out of bread."

No pockets. He mentioned this several times throughout the diary. No pockets, I kept repeating to myself. Of course, though, it made sense. What did they need them for after all? Chess pieces out of bread. I searched for a way to fit these odd details into the square predictability of my life. The more I read about chess pieces, I discovered that after forming the dough and drying it out, they played chess from sometimes ten cells away. One man made his move and like an Olympic relay the move was passed down the line until it got to the other player. "We had lots of time," his diary explained. They slept on wooden crates, and Louie lost thirty pounds in ninety days.

For an entire week, I had pizzas delivered to the house at dinnertime, and usually didn’t eat before that. And like a scavenger hunt, on the last page of each diary were directions to another subsequent diary -- two hidden in the shed, one in the garage. Never did find the last one.

I got up and took short breaks during the afternoon to spy on the garden. It had been raining on and off all week, and now the sun laid its fertile upholstery over my germinating seeds. The eighty-degree weather thickened the sultry scent of peat moss and chlorophyll as I approached the back yard. I inhaled the pungent mixture as my eyes settled on the clearing.

The soil was as static as the morning after a snowfall.

Every day after checking the so-called garden, I walked back in my house disappointed and shaking my head. I took time to look at my hands. Was there something wrong with them? How could I not have inherited my father’s talent for horticulture? Even his father maintained an elaborate garden behind his house in Newport, Rhode Island. It had been photographed once by Architectural Digest.

I never found out where he got the diaries from. I could only assume that, under the circumstances, there was no Circle K located within the prison walls. So how was it that he came to procure such specialty items as an ink pen and paper? An ink pen, even to the dullest mind, could be a weapon. The second diary, nothing like the first one which was a black and white composition book, was a large manila envelope filled with folded bits of paper large and small, thin and thick and most of it rice paper that tore in my hand when I picked it up, the words barely legible.

The third diary described in torturous detail the penalty for behavioral transgressions. During the three days it took me to read it, I ate nothing and drank only water when I got up to use the bathroom. It was almost as if subjecting myself to some physical deprivation made the words on the page easier to comprehend. Every sentence, nearly, mentioned an enforcer named Liem Lam. Described as a thin man, five foot four who ate rice out of a bowl with his hands, he plucked his propaganda subjects from the death row decay of solitary confinement. Tiny windowless tombs, the cells measured five feet wide, six feet long and five feet high. Five feet high. I remembered from the previous diary that Louie had spent a week there when he first arrived at what they called the Hanoi Hilton.

Louie was six feet tall.

Earlier in the war, there were major penalties for refusing to participate in propaganda projects; but if you volunteered, special privileges were sometimes awarded. Things like cigarettes and matches. An extra slice of bread with supper.

Liem Lam’s presence inspired mixed feelings among the inmates. Louie, having eaten a piece of rotten pork in his soup, got sick for three days and two nights, and on the fourth day he couldn’t stand up. Even the water made him sick. He started dreaming and then hallucinating from the dehydration. So, in the middle of the night, one of the wardens brought in a bowl of water and some herbs rolled into a piece of cloth. The enforcer motioned for Louie to pour the herbs into the water, wait a while, then drink them. Deliveries of this hoary, Old World concoction occurred every hour until sunrise. The next morning Louie ate with the other men in his cell. A miracle. During the meal, Liem Lam walked by his table and gave him a surreptitious nod. But besides such occasional gratuitous behaviors, Liem Lam had another side to his personality.

He had a bad habit of burying people alive.

Andre, Louie’s confidante and cellmate, became one of Lam’s whipping boys. For one thing or another, he’d been assigned three consecutive stretches in solitary. Three weeks in the dark sitting on concrete collapsed his spine into a tortured fetus. Louie wrote, though, that there were prisoners who spent up to three years in solitary. They tried to bring him extra rations but access to solitary was impossible. If they could have slipped him a mickey to let him die in peace, they would have. It was rumored that Lam buried him in his sleep.

It got to be so I didn’t want to find the final diary. On my way to and from the brown-soiled flat garden, I gave cursory checks in the shed. On the last page of diary number three, it said to take five steps into the garage and look to the left. All I saw were tools hanging from nails.

Norma Brandt showed up at the front door at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. I was livid.

"Norma," I said with a question in my voice. "What do you want?"

"I’m here to discuss the diaries, Gloria. You know what I want." She was stiff-lipped, wearing dark lipstick and all-black. The whole thing felt like an FBI shakedown. I had what she wanted and now she was in my living room. Someone to capitalize on my father’s most dire memories, on the invisible threads separating his life from death. No way. Oh, but she’d pay me generously, up front and royalties, too, she said, as if this would change my tapestry of morals. While she talked shop taking up my whole loveseat with her huge body mass, I primped at my reflection in the bookcase glass doors. Making an obvious effort to ignore her, I was thinking back to how Louie looked at the airport that day, in April of 1973. Not even the smallest part of me recognized him. I was thirteen, and it was the worst day of my life.

The phrase "no pockets" kept turning up out of nowhere. I had been hoping, at some point, that Louie would describe in a little more detail why this inconvenient triviality impressed upon him so profoundly. I grew more puzzled every day. He was brutalized daily, at least, sometimes more than that. All of them were. His friends were buried alive during ceremonies he was forced to attend, he was malnourished, slept two feet from a hole in the floor into which six grown men urinated and defecated. I found it a fascinating quirk of human nature that, despite these atrocities, the loss of pockets in his pants resounded against Louie’s dignity more than anything else. "I had no place to put my hands," he wrote later on.

That night when I got up to use the bathroom, Liem Lam was standing at the foot of my bed with a shovel. Not knowing if it was real or not I yanked the chain on the lamp beside my bed. Just a weird smoky gray haze hung in his place. As if responding to some subliminal cue, I walked through the darkness to the backyard where I sat down in the dirt of the garden. By the dim light of the shed I saw the outline of my white hand against the black loam. I placed it on the soil and felt a vibration. Something was under there! I grabbed an old rusted shovel from the shed and in my bare feet and nightgown I started digging.

Plants gone. Seeds gone, bulbs gone. Nothing. Just dirt. Dirt.

I couldn’t understand it. Liem Lam was following me now, through the rooms in my house, but I wasn’t afraid. I knew it wasn’t really him. I’d never been prone to occultish things. A registered voter, I paid my taxes, ate a serving of vegetables every day. I was as regular as they come. Back in my bed there he was again, though, this time handing me the shovel. I raised my hands to touch my face. This act, the feel of my own skin, gave me a peculiar reassurance. He said nothing, of course, because he wasn’t really there. Or was he? He said nothing because he didn’t speak English, yet I understood, at that moment what he was trying to tell me. Was it Liem Lam that I was seeing? Was it Andre? Could it have been Louie himself? Either way, something was being communicated to me. I rubbed my eyes, collected all three of the diaries and walked out to the hole I’d made in the garden.

Greta came by with coffee and donuts sometime after ten a few days later. I hadn’t seen her in a month. I knew I looked terrible, I could just imagine what she was thinking.

"It would have been his birthday today," she said handing me a bouquet of flowers. Greta loved Louie. She thought he had a look in his eyes. I asked her what kind of look and she could never tell me. I told her the obvious things, about the diaries and the publisher and what they wanted to pay me for them. I left out the part about being haunted by apparitions.

"What did you ever do about his garden?" she asked me, and at that moment my hands tingled just like I felt when I laid my palms on the vibrating soil.

I just shrugged it off. "I planted some seeds and bulbs, but nothing came up. I must have done it wrong," I said.

"Gloria," she whined, "seeds take forever to come up. Why didn’t you plant sprouts?"

I just looked at her. She said it took months before you saw any growth.

"Lemme see," she demanded in a child’s voice.

It had been raining for two days and nights. I didn’t realize this until I found splotch marks on my nightgown the morning after Liem Lam’s visit. As we walked through the house, Greta had that sizing-you-up look on her face. I knew there was an inch of dust on everything, crusted dirty dishes in the sink.

"I just love what you’ve done with the place," she joked. It was awkward passing through the pantry to the back porch. The hallway seemed about six inches wide; I got mashed against the washing machine as she passed in front of me. I sighed with the humiliation of failure.

Rain clouds eclipsed every bit of lightness from the small town sky. Everything silent -- no birds, crickets, cars. No wind.

"Oh look!" she squealed as if at the sight of a newborn baby. "See, you’re doing just fine with it." Might as well have been hit by a stealth bomber, I lost my wind when I saw the new, green six inch sprouts anchored in the wet ground. My mouth hung open in disbelief. When I regained some control, I managed to step down the back staircase and walk to Greta who was kneeling now in the fresh mud. Her fingers flicked rain off the delicate plants. I could barely breathe. "I thought you said you dug up all your seeds," she said.

I took a minute to answer. A vision of my mother, Louie, Andre, and our neighbor Malcolm flashed through my consciousness. All dead. But now there was life. "Fertilizer," I answered, gazing down at my hands.