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The earth here is that deep, dark brown that Willie thinks he will miss. With a promise to himself, he runs his hands through it for the last time, everything dug from it that they will need in their new world. The wind whips some of it from his hand and away westward, light and loose and free. Willie looks after it and blinks into the setting sun.
~
Danny’s hair is that same brown, and Willie’s touch seeks its depth as hungrily as anything. The ship rocks them so Willie must hold fast to Danny this way. In the flickering gloom of their steerage cabin, Danny tells him the storm is a good omen. There had been one almost as vicious a few days before the escape, and another just before they were picked up by that ship bound for Sweden. Now another free country awaits them, but all Willie can hope for now is to make it through the night with everything he’s taken from home still by his side.
~
“Dig it deeper,” an exasperated Willie tells a flustered Danny in the little patch in front of their little house. “Like this, so the roots have room to breathe, down as well as out.”
Danny sighs. His trowel hangs limply in his hand and he rocks back onto his booted feet, knees planted firmly in the dirt-covered lawn by their front porch.
Just getting him to come out here and help Willie with the spring planting was enough. Willie doesn’t really care how well or how poorly Danny can manage this. It’s just something he needs to move past.
“Let me try here,” Danny says. He scoots away from Willie and pushes his trowel in the rain-softened ground. “Enough?”
“A few inches more, Danny, so they don't crowd,” Willie says kindly. The rosebushes are full-grown, only dormant in their wrappings, and Willie is confident that, given the room, they will take off quickly even in this lighter, rockier soil.
Danny grumbles and scoots again. The sound of tough sod being ripped away drowns out any further complaints, and Willie resumes the finishing touches on the first planting.
The earth here is different, but Willie knows it will be the same. Around the world it’s this basic stuff that’s the foundation, a mass of material from which they all grow. The light, dry, dusty earth of the camp had had that same potential, if not the same purpose.
"That's perfect, Danny," Willie says upon inspection of the new home Danny's excavated for their other rosebush, near identical to the one Willie made. "Set it in now, careful."
“These will grow, you are sure?” Danny asks as he and Willie tamp down the loose soil around the second stick that will someday bloom again.
“I am sure,” Willie says.
He and Danny finish, and they are knealt side by side. Danny has a smudge of dirt under his ear, where he must have scratched absentmindedly.
“I’ll make a proper English gardener of you yet, you know.”
The small smile in return invites Willie in for a kiss. Just on the cheek, and with Willie’s hand wrapped lightly in that thick dark hair.
Danny’s pleased blush afterward is the sunset that bathes the prairie, and Willie’s favorite part of where they live now. He watches Danny turn his trowel around his hands, watches him smile when he says:
“This digging is not bad. With you… I like it.”
Now Willie kisses him like he did when they agreed to come here, to follow a dream and to escape all over again. Soft, light, a press of Danny’s forehead to his afterward. Promise and potential, so that Willie nearly forgets where he is and why he’s covered in dirt past his wrists.
The rosebushes are only two, but the lilies are a sackful, tied tightly so their bulbs would not rattle about too much in the ship. With them in hand, Willie crawls a few feet away from Danny and sticks his trowel in the ground.
“About six or seven feet straight, we’ll dig a trench. Just a few inches deep now, Danny. We’ll meet in the middle.”
A grunt of assent, and Danny positions himself accordingly, begins to tear and dig. Tunnels and trenches and shafts, all scars made to be healed over by greenery. Danny’s dug things out from the earth his entire life, but now he’s putting things in that will grow, little drab bulbs dropped one by one and spaced by eye. Things that will not show themselves until days past this bright, cool morning in spring. Covered over with promises in turn sealed with kisses, and another start made together.
~