The Garden I Grew for the Pantry

Who came

I sat in that lawn chair for four hours, and it took me most of that time to understand who was in my garden.

The first faces I knew were the neighbors, the church kitchen women, the man from the elevator who used to work with Lyle, the pastor in a feed cap setting out peppers like a man who had done it before. Then a dozen high school kids in work boots, signed up by their agriculture teacher for credit, who were still there at noon when the credit was long since earned. A girl named Macy watered the plants in with a bucket and a dipper, and she gave each one a drink and said something to it.

And the Amish.

Our corner of Douglas County has a lot of Amish families, and I have known the Schrocks thirty years, the way you know people you buy eggs from. Amos Schrock and his wife and six of their children had come in the wagon behind the team of Belgians, with three hundred tomato plants in four-inch pots and flats of cabbage and peppers from their greenhouse, the dew still on them.

“Peppers want warm ground,” Amos told me, when he came to say good morning. He took off his straw hat to say it. “They’d sulk in this. We’ll bring the pepper flats back the twenty-third, with the second corn. My oldest disked the ground in April. Roy put in your potatoes on Good Friday evening, so you wouldn’t see.”

“You did all this in my backyard,” I said, “and I never saw it.”

“Your curtain was shut,” Amos said gently. “That seemed to be what you wanted.”

I had no answer to that.

The strangers came last, and there were more of them than I expected. Among them a woman about forty-five in blue scrubs with a toddler on her hip, working a row near the fence.

Nadine came over with a thermos, and I asked her about them.

She sat on an upturned bucket beside my chair. She is sixty-three and has run the pantry for twenty-two years, and she has the kind of face that has seen the whole line and never let the line see her tired.

“They’re the line, Deloris,” she said.

“I don’t follow you.”

“On Saturdays. Forty years of Saturdays.” She poured me coffee into the lid of the thermos. “I told them in March, at the end of the morning. I said Deloris Mink is hurt and can’t plant this year, and I don’t know what we’ll do about June. I said that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

“You didn’t ask anyone to come.”

“I did not. I put a sign-up sheet on the table by the door in case anybody wanted it, and then I went to wash the coffee cups.”

She tipped her head toward the field.

“There were sixty-three names on it by the first of April.”

The pantry still opened at nine that Saturday. Two of the church women had left the field early to drive over and unlock it, so the line would not come to a dark door.

I looked down at the coffee in the lid. My hand was not entirely steady. In forty years I had never once stood on the other side of that pantry door and seen who it was that took the tomatoes.

That was on purpose. It was Lyle’s rule from the beginning. We did not want to be the box with a name on it. We did not want anybody to feel they had to thank us, because somebody had once made sure we didn’t have to.

So I did not know the face of a single person I had fed.