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offer ripe material for satire. Hence Billy’s tangle with the composite Luke Landisberg.
    I thought that my “spring” story, completing the seasonal cycle in Blackwood Beach, should, naturally, focus on growing things. Thompson and Morgan is a real seed company, but I’ve yet to find them offering such extraordinary seeds as they do here.
     
    Billy Budd
     
     
    Billy Budd didn’t find it hard being green.
    Despite what that stupid cloth frog always sang.
    How distressed Billy had been when that song had infiltrated the airwaves. How grateful he had been when it had vanished. Although the citizens of Blackwood Beach were, of necessity and habit, quite understanding of each other’s quirks, foibles, and unavoidable eccentricities, Billy had not enjoyed having his particular uniqueness the constant focus of everyone’s attention. During this period, while walking the twisty streets of his queer New England hometown, Billy felt that everyone’s eyes were upon him. The story of his strange birth, he imagined, had been resurrected among the townspeople, just when he had hoped it was forgotten. But after a time, other, more demanding events came to displace Billy’s temporary notoriety, and in the end he claimed no more attention in town than anyone else.
    Perhaps the reason Billy was usually so comfortable with the shade of his skin was that it was such a lovely, subtle hue.
    Picture the earliest spring leaf buds of a lilac, or the tender innermost layers of an artichoke. Lighter than a blade of blanched grass found beneath a mass of wet leaves in April, Billy’s skin was perhaps the lightest color that could still be called green. It was as if Billy’s veins ran not with blood colored by hemoglobin but with sap tinged by some exotic chlorophyllous substance, suffusing his skin from crown to feet.
    Which was, in fact, the case.
    Because Billy’s hair was a thick, unruly thatch of bright yellow, some said he looked, on the whole, rather like a dandelion. It was rumored that there was even a family connection between Billy and the dandelions, and one mentioned Taraxacum officinale in Billy’s presence only gingerly.
    This bright May morning, however, as Billy took his regular walk from Eva’s Boarding House to his business, he felt charitable even toward the dandelions that dotted the untidy front lawns of the houses in Blackwood Beach. The source of his good-natured happiness was a certain special plant growing in a secluded and laboriously chosen spot on the outskirts of town. This plant, sown from seed just a month ago, was already half as tall as Billy. In another eight weeks or so, it would reach its mature height and full growth, and Billy would gently harvest it, achieving a dream that had recently come to dominate his thoughts.
    But for now, all he could do was tend the plant lovingly. Fertilize its roots with 5-10-5, keep it free of mites and fungus, fence it diligently from gnawing rabbits and rodents, water it thoroughly but not over much— and read aloud to it from as wide an assortment of books as he could find.
    Billy, thinking warmly of his pet project, wished he could visit it this morning. But his greenhouse—Budd’s Plant Emporium—had to be opened and his more conventional stock there seen to. He would have to content himself with visiting at noon, and again after closing time. Those two trips should be enough attention at this stage, although as growth progressed, he might have to fit in a third each day.
    Walking beneath the greening trees that overhung the streets of the village, Billy, his thoughts running in such channels, soon came to Budd’s Plant Emporium.
    The greenhouse—the only one in Blackwood Beach—dated from the 1920s. It had not been run by the Budds all that time; Billy had only recently bought the business from its ancient proprietor and founder, who wished to retire. It had been quite a run-down structure then. After Billy’s restoration, it looked as it must have looked