The Neighbor Who Took My Harvest

Here is the part I did not expect. I thought that was the end of it, the exposing, the packing up, the shame. I thought justice was Tammy driving off with her crates in the back of Rick’s truck while the whole town watched. But that was not the end. The end was better, and it was not about her at all.

Word went around that square faster than I could have carried it myself. By noon, half the people at the market knew that Gene Prewitt’s widow had four Glenda’s Girl plants still living in her cleaned-up garden, four plants the thief had missed in the dark. And people started showing up.

Not to gawk. To help. That is the thing about a small town that the sad stories leave out. The same square that will let a smiling liar sell you stolen tomatoes for an hour will also, the minute it knows, come stand in your yard.

Merle Henley came Monday morning with a soil test kit and a truck bed full of cedar stakes he had cut himself, because he said Gene’s stakes were the right idea and he would not stand for me buying metal ones. Loretta came with two other market women and they spent a whole day untangling and replanting the beds. The young mother who had set the tomato down, the one I did not know, turned out to run the community garden plots behind the Methodist church, and she organized a seed-saving day so that Gene’s Girl would never again come down to four plants in one widow’s yard where one cruel night could end it. The hardware store man donated the fencing. My grandson built me a proper garden gate.

And in August, when those four plants came ripe and heavy and dropped their seed into my saving jars, I took the very first ripe Glenda’s Girl of the season down to the Marion County Fair, in Gene’s name, and I entered it in the heirloom tomato class the way he had for nineteen years. I did not enter it to win. I entered it so his name would be read out at the fair one more time.

They gave it first place. The judge, who was Merle, read the card out loud over the little PA at the exhibit hall, and he did not just read the tomato’s name. He said, “First place, heirloom tomato, Glenda’s Girl, bred by the late Gene Prewitt of Sumac Street, entered this year by his wife.” And a whole exhibit hall full of people who had heard the story that summer stood up and clapped, and I stood there next to Merle with my hand over my mouth and I felt Gene as close as I have felt him since he left.