He went inside.
I sat down.
I waited.
Fourteen minutes later—I know because I was watching the clock—I heard it.
A sound from Gary’s yard that I can only describe as involuntary. Not a scream exactly. More of a surprised escalating vocalization that started as a sharp exhale and built into something that might generously be called an extended expression of distress.
Then I heard his back door open. Then his garden hose. He turned it on, and I could hear the water running, which suggested he was trying to cool his mouth. This does not work with capsaicin, which is oil-based and not water-soluble, but Gary did not know that.
The hose ran for several minutes.
Then there was a period of what I can only describe as active suffering audible through the fence—of the kind that confirmed Gary had eaten at least one and possibly more of my Carolina Reapers under the impression that they were cherry tomatoes.
Frances texted me from next door: “Is that Gary?”
I texted back: “Yes.”
She texted: “Outstanding.”
I went to bed at my normal time. I slept very well.
In the morning I went out to my garden and I tended my plants and I had coffee in the sunshine and I felt, for the first time in six years of living next to Gary Hutchins, something very close to complete peace.
But the story does not end there.
Because Gary, rather than reflecting quietly on what had happened and perhaps reconsidering his relationship with other people’s gardens, decided to escalate.
And escalating against someone who has been patiently planning for a year is almost always a mistake.
I want to give Gary some credit here. He is not a man without resources. He is, in his way, a problem-solver. The problem for Gary was that he had eaten something from what he believed to be my garden and experienced approximately forty minutes of significant oral distress, and he needed someone to blame for this, and he was not prepared to blame himself because that would require acknowledging that he had been in my garden without my permission.
So Gary told a story.
The story was this: He had been walking along the fence line in his own yard and noticed some red fruits growing near the fence, and believing them to be on the shared boundary, had picked a few. And these fruits had burned his mouth severely, and clearly I had grown something dangerous and toxic in my garden, and this was a community safety issue.
I know this is the story Gary told because two days after the August 9th incident I received a phone call from the Willowbrook Estates HOA board vice president, a man named Ted Blalock, who said, “Ellen, we’ve received a complaint from your neighbor Gary Hutchins about a potentially toxic plant growing in your garden.”
I said, “Ted, what exactly is the complaint?”
Ted said, “Gary says he accidentally ate some fruit from near your fence line and became seriously ill. He’s asking the board to investigate what you’re growing.”