The Toast Under Mom’s Maple

Gina is forty-five. She is the one who remembers birthdays and sends cards on time. She is the one who sat with Daddy at the hospital in Lexington at night when the rest of us had to work in the morning.

I say all that so you know I am not telling this about a monster. I am telling it about my sister.

In March I sat on Mom’s porch steps with Gina and told her I was putting out six acres for real this year, with a contract, and I needed it reported right.

“I’ll put your acres on Mom’s report when I do hers,” she said. “Don’t worry about it, Shan. You’ve got enough to do.”

I was grateful. I told her so. I did not ask to see the form. You don’t ask your sister to show you her homework.

I started my float beds in the greenhouse at Rusty’s in March, tiny seeds in white trays on water, and I babied them like they were my own children. Our son, Aaron, fifteen that spring, called them my other kids.

In May we set them. Rusty pulled the setter with his tractor, and Aaron and I rode the seats and fed plants into the wheel, one after another, for two long days with the creek running high beside us.

Then the hoeing. Then the side-dressing. Then the hoeing again, in the heat, before my shift at the summer feeding program at school and after it.

By the first week of July the burley stood shoulder high and dark and even, with that wet green smell that hangs over a good patch at evening. I walked the rows and could not quit smiling.

Mom came down to look at it one evening, slow over the rough ground, and stood at the end of a row with her hands on her hips.

“Your daddy would have liked this,” she said. “He’d have found something wrong with it, but he’d have liked it.”

We topped it the second week of July, broke out the blooms by hand and sprayed for suckers. Rusty said it was as nice a crop as any on the road, and Rusty does not hand out compliments.

On the twentieth of July, a weekday, the sky over the ridge turned a color I have only seen a few times in my life. Green, almost, and then black. Mom called me at school, where I was washing pans.

“You’d better come,” she said. “It’s going to hail.”

I got to the farm just as it started. I stood on Mom’s porch and watched it come down the hollow, white and loud as gravel on a tin roof, bouncing off the yard.

It lasted eleven minutes. I know because I looked at my phone when it started and when it quit. Eleven minutes, and a whole summer.

When it stopped I walked down to the bottom. I did not run. I think I knew.

The sky was still heavy and gray over the ridge. The weathered barn at the field edge stood there like nothing had happened. And the burley lay flat in the mud, row after row of it, the big leaves shredded into ribbons, the stalks broken over and bleeding sap.

Some plants were snapped off at the ground. Some were bent at the middle. Some, along the creek side where the hill had sheltered them a little, still stood, torn but alive.

I knelt down in the row and picked up a leaf. It came apart in my hand like wet newspaper.