The Garden Waiting by Mom’s Porch Steps

The dust was still hanging in the air when I pulled into Mom’s lane that Tuesday afternoon. I could taste it before I understood what I was looking at.

Where her garden had been for forty years, there was a flat, scraped pad of bare dirt the size of a church parking lot. Survey stakes with orange ribbon marked the corners.

The black topsoil, the dirt she had fed with leaves and manure and coffee grounds since before I could ride a bike, was shoved into one long pile against the hog wire fence.

My brother Keith was sitting on a rented skid steer at the edge of it, the bucket still down. He saw my car and throttled back, but he did not climb off.

I got out and walked to the edge of the pad. My sneakers sank a little where the bucket had cut. There was a tomato cage, flattened, sticking out of the pile like a broken rib.

“Barn goes here, Tracy,” Keith said over the idle. “Forty by sixty. Thirty thousand dollars of steel, and that’s with me and the boy standing it ourselves.”

“That was Mom’s garden,” I said.

He looked at me the way he used to look at me when I was nine and asking why the sky was blue. Patient, a little tired, sure he was the only grown-up in the conversation.

“She’s seventy-seven, Tracy. She broke her hip carrying a hose. She’s done weeding. Somebody in this family has to say it out loud.”

Then he pushed the throttle up and turned the machine away from me, and the noise ended whatever I might have said next.

I stood there in the dust for a long minute. I did not yell. I am not sure I could have, with my throat the way it was.

Yelling at my brother in a farmyard was not going to put one tomato plant back in that ground, and Mom was coming home in nine days. I had to decide what to do with those nine days.

The garden that fed a road

My mother is Bev Hulett. She has lived on that farm eight miles north of Marshall, in Saline County, Missouri, since she married my father in 1971.

She started the big garden in 1985, the spring after the bank almost took the place. Dad said later that her garden was the reason we never once went hungry that year.

It was a quarter acre on the high ground east of the house.

Sweet corn on the north end, tomatoes in the middle, half-runner beans in long rows, potatoes, onions, okra, and a row of zinnias for the church altar.

She never sold a thing out of it. She set a wooden box at the end of the lane every July with tomatoes and cucumbers in it, and a hand-lettered sign that said Help Yourself.

The widows on our road got green beans, snapped and ready. The young couples with babies got sweet corn. When the Schaefers’ house burned in 1994, she canned forty quarts of tomatoes for them before Thanksgiving.

Dad died in the spring of 2009, a heart attack in the machine shed with his gloves still on. Mom planted that garden two weeks later anyway, alone, crying into the furrows.

I asked her once why she didn’t skip a year. She said, “Because the ground doesn’t know he’s gone, and neither do the Hendershots’ kids.” She kept planting.

Keith took over farming her ground after Dad passed. He has his own place a mile west and rents Mom’s three hundred acres of crop ground at a fair price. Corn and beans, like everybody.

He is a good farmer. I want to say that early, because it is true and because what follows does not make him look good.

He works sunup to dark and he has never once been late on her rent.

I am the younger one. I am forty-seven, divorced, no children of my own, and I have driven a school bus for the Marshall district for eleven years. Route 7, the gravel loop north of town.

Sixty-two miles of gravel twice a day and forty-one kids. I can back a seventy-two passenger bus into a farm lane in the dark.