The Garden I Grew for the Pantry
The woman in the scrubs
She came over at about ten, once the tomatoes were in.
The toddler had gone down for a nap in the bed of a pickup with a quilt over him. She had her hair tied up in a bandanna and dirt to her elbows. She stopped in front of my chair and wiped her hands on her pants, over and over, and I understood she had been working up to this for three hours.
“Mrs. Mink? I’m Dee Ann. Dee Ann Lutz.”
“I don’t think I know your people.”
“No, ma’am. You wouldn’t.” She gave a little laugh with no air in it. “I work nights at the care center. Aide. My mom and me were on the line at the pantry in ninety-one and ninety-two. I was eight.”
I waited.
“I thought the pantry grew them,” she said. “The tomatoes. For two years I thought the church had a garden somewhere. Then I went to the grocery with my mom and saw tomatoes in the store, and I asked her why they didn’t have any dirt on them.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“She said, ‘Because those aren’t from the church.'” Dee Ann was not laughing. She had her arms crossed hard over her chest. “And the next Saturday we got our bag, and there was a tomato in it with the little leaf cap still on top, the star, and a smear of dirt down one side. I held it up to my mom and said, ‘This one’s ours.'”
She looked at her boots.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I wanted to say thank you and it came out as a tomato.”
“It’s a good place to start,” I said. My voice did not sound like mine.
“We never knew who. We just knew somebody dug it.” She shrugged, once. “It was the best thing we ate all week, every week, for two summers. My mom put them on bread with salt. Nobody’s made me a better supper than that since.”
She went back to her row.
It was not the horses, or the plywood, or the sixty-three names. A girl I had never met had held a tomato up for her mother in 1991 and said, this one’s ours.
I had spent forty years leaving the leaf cap on the stem so they would keep a few days longer. I had never imagined a child reading it as a signature.
The rest of the day
By two o’clock the whole half acre was planted.
Two hundred and twenty tomatoes, set deep, with the stem buried to the first true leaves so the plant roots along it and stands up in a wind. I said not a word, which was a feat of will. I saw Dee Ann bury hers a hand’s width deeper than needed, and I left it, because she was proud of it.
Lyle’s cages went around every plant. They had hung in my machine shed rafters since last fall, and somebody had gotten up on a ladder. A farmer from out by Lovington put in the first corn with a two-row planter in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee. Macy set a little stick with a red ribbon in each of the twelve zucchini hills, so we would know where the hills were after they came up.
“They will announce themselves,” I said. “Zucchini finds you.”
The church women had brought lunch, and everyone ate standing up with dirt still on their hands.
At one point I looked up and saw Roy sitting on an overturned crate with a sandwich in his lap, not eating it. He was looking at the field. He looked old. He had been up since before light, laying string.
I got my walker turned around and went to him, which took a while, and I sat on the bucket next to his crate.
“How long have you been planning this?”
“Since the ice,” he said.
“The ice was in February.”
“I know when the ice was, Deloris. I was there.” He turned the sandwich over. “I sat in the waiting room in Mattoon. And Nadine came with a hotdish nobody wanted, and we got to talking about June.”
“You never said anything.”
“You’d have said no.”
“I would have said no,” I admitted.
“So.” He shrugged. “Pearl did the hard part.”
“I am not good at this, Roy,” I said.
“At what?”
“Being given to.”
“I know it,” he said. “Nobody on God’s earth is worse at it than you. That’s why it took sixty-three of us.”
I did not cry. I just ate half his sandwich, and he let me.