The Garden I Grew for the Pantry

Summer

By three the last truck had pulled out and the road was empty again. From the kitchen I looked at what they had left: a garden in perfect rows, with cages and string and little red ribbons, and the horses’ prints in the dirt by the fence.

Janelle made me lie down. I slept until suppertime. When I came back to the kitchen there was a clipboard hanging on a nail by my back door.

The sheet on it was ruled in columns in Nadine’s square handwriting. Monday through Thursday, a name by every day: water, weed, pinch suckers. Friday: harvest, nine names, a star next to the ones with a pickup. Saturday: Nadine herself, unlocking the pantry door.

At the top it said Mink Garden, and beneath that, in the same hand, Do not argue with this. I did not. In forty years I have argued with seed companies, county commissioners, and the Lord on occasion, and I did not argue with that clipboard.

But the next six weeks were the hardest I have ever done anything, because I had to sit. I was put in the lawn chair under a canopy somebody had set up, and told to let people do the work. There is nothing in my body that knows how.

I found myself correcting them anyway. A boy would be pulling a weed and I’d say, “Get under it, honey, don’t snap it,” and he would get under it. A young woman who had signed up for Tuesdays asked me which shoots to pinch off a tomato, and I showed her the little sucker that grows in the crook between the main stem and a branch, pinched out with a thumbnail while it is no longer than a pencil. She wrote it in a notebook.

The Schrock girls took charge of the hornworms, fat green caterpillars the size of your thumb that will strip a tomato plant in a night and are exactly the color of the leaf. Amos’s youngest, a solemn nine-year-old named Ruthann, found them by the dozens with a coffee can in her hand. Roy paid her a nickel apiece out of his own pocket and told no one. I know because I did the arithmetic. By the end of the summer it came to almost eleven dollars.