TerraNova Practice Test 4

The Fence on Alder Street

¹The storm came through on a Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning half of the fence around the Alder Street community garden lay flat in the mud, its posts snapped like pencils. Felix saw it from the bus window and felt nothing in particular. The garden belonged to the old people on the block. He had never planted anything in it, and he did not plan to start.

²That changed on Saturday, when his mother volunteered him. "Mrs. Halvorsen needs a strong back," she said, handing him a pair of work gloves two sizes too big. "And you need something to do besides stare at a screen."

³Mrs. Halvorsen was waiting at the gate with a wheelbarrow full of new posts. She was small and straight-backed, with white hair tucked under a straw hat, and she looked Felix over the way a carpenter looks at a board before cutting it. "You've held a shovel before?" she asked.

⁴"Sure," Felix said, which was not exactly true.

⁵She handed him one anyway. For the first hour, neither of them said much. Felix dug where she pointed, and she tamped the soil around each post with the end of a broom handle, packing it down hard and testing every post with a shove. Twice she made him pull a post out and dig the hole deeper. "A fence is only as good as what you can't see," she said the second time, and Felix rolled his eyes when she turned away.

⁶By noon his palms had blistered under the loose gloves. He sat on an overturned bucket near the back corner, where a single rosebush leaned against what was left of the old fence. Unlike the neat rows of beans and peppers, the rose looked wild, its canes tangled and thick with thorns. A small wooden marker stood at its base. Someone had carved two sets of initials into it, M.H. and A.H., and below them, 1979.

⁷"Careful of that," Mrs. Halvorsen said. She had come up behind him with two cups of lemonade.

⁸"Sorry." Felix moved his foot. "Is it yours?"

⁹She was quiet so long that he thought she might not answer. Then she sat down on the edge of a raised bed. "My husband and I started this garden," she said. "It was a vacant lot full of broken glass. Arne planted that rose the first spring. He said every garden needs one thing nobody can eat." She smiled a little. "He'd have had this fence back up by Thursday. He never let anything stay broken for long."

¹⁰Felix looked at the rose again. He thought about the posts she had made him dig twice, and suddenly the extra work did not seem so much like bossiness.

¹¹They worked through the afternoon. Felix found that if he wet the soil first, the shovel bit deeper, and Mrs. Halvorsen nodded once when she saw him do it without being told. By five o'clock the last post stood straight in the back corner. Felix ran the wire himself, pulling it tight while she held each post steady, and when they were done he gave the nearest post a hard shove, the way she had all day. It did not move.

¹²"Huh," said Mrs. Halvorsen, which Felix was beginning to understand was the highest praise she gave.

¹³On Monday the bus passed the garden again. The new fence ran along the sidewalk in a clean, straight line, and in the back corner the rose had been tied neatly to the last post, its canes no longer dragging on the ground. Felix pressed his blistered hand against the cool window and watched until the garden was out of sight.