The Garden I Grew for the Pantry

The box

In the winter of 1985 we lost our rented ground.

The man who owned it sold to a neighbor who wanted every acre he could get, which was the style then. It was the bad stretch for farmers, with the banks foreclosing on people who had never missed a payment.

Lyle was thirty-eight and had farmed since he was sixteen. He got a job driving a feed truck for the elevator at five dollars and ten cents an hour. We had Janelle, who was six, and the little house on four acres by the county road, which had been his grandmother’s.

He had never asked anybody for anything. He would let his truck sit dead on the road for an hour before he would walk up to a farmhouse and use the phone.

That December we ran short, the kind of short where you stop opening the cupboard to look because looking doesn’t change it.

On the twentieth of December, I went out on the porch to shake a rug, and there was a box on the boards.

A plain cardboard box that had once held canned peaches. No note. No name. Tire tracks in the lane, already half filled in with snow.

Inside were six quarts of home-canned green beans. A jar of peach butter with a strip of masking tape across the lid and the word peach on it in ballpoint, pressed so hard the pen had gone through the tape. A five-pound sack of flour. A sack of potatoes with the dirt still on them.

And one bar of Ivory soap, set on top of everything the way you would set a flower.

Lyle carried the box in and put it on the kitchen table. He stood there with his hands at his sides and looked at it for the longest time, the way a man looks at a letter he is afraid is about money.

Then he sat down and put his face in his hands. I had been married to him for twelve years and I had never seen him do that.

I did not say anything. I unscrewed the lid of the peach butter, and we ate it on saltines at nine in the morning, the three of us, standing up.

I never found out who left it. Lyle asked around quietly for years, at the elevator and the church and the Legion hall, and never got so much as a raised eyebrow. Somebody in that town knew how we were fixed and decided it was none of their business to say so.

In April, Lyle borrowed a tiller and turned the back half of the yard into a garden. He did not say a word to me about why.

That summer, when the beans came on, he took two bushels to the church annex before sunup and set them inside the door. He came home and ate his breakfast, and neither of us said a thing about it.

That was the first year. We just never stopped.

When Lyle died, six winters ago, I thought about stopping. Then I looked at the seed box on the shelf, with his handwriting on the divider cards, and I went and found my gloves. I kept it going with a hoe and a bad knee and Roy’s old Ford tractor to turn the ground each April.