The Garden I Grew for the Pantry

It is nine steps from my kitchen table to the window over the sink. I counted them every morning that spring, the way you count stairs in the dark, and on the second Saturday in May I counted them slowly, because I could hear something I could not account for.

Diesel engines, for one. Not one engine. Several, idling low, out on the county road, where nothing stops except the school bus and the grain trucks in October.

And under the engines, people. A lot of them. Talking the way people talk before a church service starts, with their voices pulled down to the floor.

It was ten till six. The sky over the field had just gone from black to the gray of a dishpan.

Janelle had opened the curtain a crack the night before. I had let it stay that way, which tells you how tired I was. I put two fingers on the cloth and moved it aside.

I had not looked at that ground since February. I had not wanted to. And there it was, raked black and flat as a billiard table, with white string pulled tight from stake to stake across the whole half acre, the way Lyle used to lay it out with a ball of twine and a pocketknife.

The potatoes were already up. I could see the green ridges of them along the east fence, hilled and ankle high. I had not planted them. I had not so much as cut a seed potato.

Kneeling beside the strings were sixty or seventy people. I know the number now because Janelle counted. They were bent over in long lines with trowels, setting out plants.

Two big blond horses stood hitched to a wagon by the fence, heads down, patient as furniture. Stacked on the wagon bed, and on the tailgates of at least a dozen pickups, were flats and flats of green.

Under the black walnut at the corner of the yard, someone had set up two folding tables with coffee urns from the church basement. Nadine Brenner stood by them in her pantry sweatshirt, holding a clipboard against her chest like a hymnal.

Roy Tabor was out in the middle of it all, in his Sunday jacket, pointing.

I heard a floorboard behind me. Janelle was standing in the kitchen doorway in her robe, with her hair flat on one side.

“Mom,” she said. “Don’t be mad.”

“I am not anything yet,” I told her.

That was the truest thing I could have said. I stood at my own window with my hand on my own curtain, and I did not know what I was.

To tell this the right way, I have to go back to the ice.