The Row I Planted From the One That Lived

Irwin

My husband Irwin drives a regional route for a freight company out of Nashville. He leaves Monday before daylight and comes home Friday evening, and that week he was hauling into Georgia.

He called me that night from a truck stop outside Calhoun. I could hear the reefer units humming behind him and somebody’s air brakes letting go.

I told him all of it. The tiller, the gas, the one plant, what his mother said on the phone. He did not say anything for a long time, and I could hear him breathing.

“She said that? That it looked messy from the road?”

“Word for word.”

“I’ll handle it Friday,” he said. “Don’t you go up there. Don’t you say another word to her. This is mine to handle.”

People have asked me since why I did not call the sheriff. I will tell you what I told Bobby Pruitt when he asked me the same thing over the fence.

It was her son’s land. It was her own tiller. And there is no phone call in the world, to a sheriff or a lawyer or anybody else, that puts a hundred and thirty years of seed back in the ground.

Bobby had driven past that morning in his feed truck while she was doing it. He told me he slowed down, saw Doris behind that tiller going like a woman possessed, and figured I had asked her to help.

“I should have stopped,” he said. “I’m sorry, Reba. I thought it was family business.”

“It is family business,” I said. “That’s the trouble with it.”

Friday

Irwin got home a little after six on Friday. He did not come in the house.

He parked the truck, walked down to the garden, and stood at the corner post looking at the one plant for a long time.

Then he went and got a can of gas from the shed, filled his mother’s tiller, and walked it up the ramps into the bed of his pickup.

He tied it down with two ratchet straps, the way his daddy taught him.

“Stay here,” he told me. “I mean it, Reba. I want you and Sophie to stay right here.”

I stayed. But our porch looks up the gravel to Doris’s place, and in the summer, with the windows down in the truck and the evening still, you can see and hear a good deal from a quarter mile.

He backed into her yard and unloaded the tiller onto the grass by her carport. Doris came out onto her porch steps with her arms folded.

She is seventy-one, small and straight, and she was wearing her church shoes even on a Friday.

I could not make out all of it. But I heard Irwin say, “You don’t come on our place again until you can tell her you’re sorry. Her and Sophie both. Not me. Them.”

And I heard Doris say, “For a few tomato plants? You’d shut your own mother out for a few tomato plants?”

“Those weren’t a few tomato plants, Mama,” he said. “And you know it.”

He got back in the truck and drove home. He sat down beside me on the porch, and he did not say anything for a while, and then he put his head in his hands.

Irwin’s daddy, Albert, died in 2017. Irwin is the only child. Every Sunday since the funeral, Doris has eaten dinner at our table. Shutting her out was not a small thing for him, and I knew it.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” he said. “If I let that go, the next thing she runs over is Sophie. Maybe not with a tiller. But she’d find a way.”