Hours each day, he toiled in the yard. He pulled weeds, trimmed trees, but more than anything he warred with the blackberries. Their brambles advanced through every fence, despite protests to the neighbors. They crept through the ground and burst skyward in the middle of his flower beds. Begonias and petunias were casualties when he dug for blackberry roots and ripped them out.

As he slept, he dreamed that the blackberry vines had planted inside him. In his sleep he scratched at the cuts where thorns had tasted his blood.

The next day, still fatigued, he sat beside the latest incursion through the fence. He looked up at the blackberry vines arching overhead and wondered for a moment what it would be like if he surrendered, if he accepted them into his yard and his life.

He found he couldn't stand. Roots had crept out from the ground and held him to the soil, or perhaps root had grown out from him and burrowed into the ground. He could feel them in his flesh. He reached for his clippers and held them to his throat.

He threw them over the fence. It was time to cultivate a different sort of yard.

"And if you go into the backyard of Old Mr. Gransom's house," Billy stared up at the bramble-entangled home, "in the middle of a giant blackberry bush is a great big root shaped like the old man himself. Sometimes, he still groans."