The Neighbor Who Took My Harvest

Tammy and Rick put their gray house up for sale before the leaves turned. I do not know all the reasons and I do not much care. I know that a town has a long memory and a small square, and I know that a woman cannot sell jam or pickles or anything else on that courthouse lawn to people who watched her little boy tell the truth she was trying to bury. Nobody ran them off. Nobody had to. They just found that a place where everybody knows everybody is a hard place to be the person who robbed a grieving widow, and they went looking for a place where nobody knew them yet.

I think about that a lot. Tammy thought the garden was wasted on me. He is not going to eat them now, is he. They will just rot. She looked over that fence for eleven years and saw two acres of value going to an old couple she figured did not deserve it, and the day the old man died she reached over and took it, because in her mind a thing only belongs to the people strong enough to keep it.

She never understood what she was looking at. She thought it was tomatoes.

It was a man’s whole life. It was thirty years of one stubborn feed-mill worker teaching himself to grow something so good he could give it away. It was my name in his handwriting on a hundred little seed envelopes. It was the last living thing on this earth that he made with his own hands and called by my name. And you cannot steal a thing like that, not really, because it does not live in the crates. It lives in the seed, and the seed had gotten into half the backyards in this county years before Tammy Vaughn ever climbed my fence, given away free by a man who believed a good tomato was not something you kept to yourself.

She sold four crates of it on a Saturday morning and thought she had gotten away with something.

I have got a whole church community garden growing Gene’s Girl now, and a first-place card from the county fair with his name read out loud, and a seven-year-old boy somewhere who told the truth when the grownups would not, and if that little Cody ever grows up and comes back to this town, I hope somebody tells him that the honest thing he said over a toy dump truck gave a widow her husband back for one more August.

Gene used to say the garden would keep feeding us even after he was gone. I did not know how right he was. It fed me the summer I needed it most. Not with tomatoes.

With the truth, and with the people who came to stand in my yard once they knew it.