The Row I Planted From the One That Lived

The Summer Without Her

Doris did not come to Sunday dinner the rest of that summer. Irwin kept the door open. He called her every Sunday morning from the porch and said the same thing: “You know what it takes, Mama.”

She never said it, not that summer and not at Thanksgiving, when Irwin carried a plate up to her porch and set it on the steps.

She went to her own church on Sundays, and she ate at the Cracker Barrel in Cookeville with her sister Wilma, and she drove past our garden every day without slowing down.

And people talked. That is the thing about a gravel road in White County.

Bobby Pruitt had told his wife, and his wife told the ladies at the Dollar General, and by Wednesday the whole road knew what Doris had done.

Nobody said anything ugly to her face. That is not how it works here. But Doris noticed who stopped waving from their porches when she drove by, and I am told she noticed it hard.

I did not gloat about any of it. I want you to know that. When people brought it up to me at the post office counter, I said, “It’s between us and her,” and I changed the subject.

What I did instead was take care of that one plant like it was the last of something, because it was.

I put a new cage around it, a real one, cattle panel bent into a hoop. I tied it up with strips of an old cotton sheet.

I watered it at the root every evening, and Sophie carried her coffee can down and gave it a drink too.

She named it. I am allowed to tell you this one. She named it Lottie.

The green tomatoes swelled. By the middle of July the first one blushed pink on the bottom, and by late July Lottie had given us eleven ripe tomatoes, the big cracked-shoulder kind Mamaw used to slice for supper.

We ate two of them on the porch steps in our hands with salt, juice running down our wrists. The other nine went for seed.

Saving Seed

Mamaw saved tomato seed the old way, and I did it her way, because it was the only way I knew and it was the way that had worked for a hundred and thirty years.

You cut the ripe tomato across the middle and squeeze the seeds and the jelly into a pint jar.

You add a little water. Then you set it out on the porch rail in the shade and let it sit.

In two or three days it grows a gray scum on top and smells terrible. That is what you want.

The fermenting eats the gel coat off the seeds, and the good seeds sink to the bottom of the jar.

Sophie thought it was the most disgusting thing she had ever seen. She checked the jar every morning before breakfast and reported on the smell like a weatherman.

On the third day, we poured off the scum and the floaters, rinsed the good seed in a strainer under the hose, and spread it out on paper plates on the porch rail to dry.

When it was dry, it stuck to the plates in little tan flecks. We scraped it off with a butter knife into a new envelope.

I counted roughly four hundred seeds, which is more than enough for a lifetime of gardens if you keep at it.

I wrote Lottie’s Pinks on the envelope and the year, the way Mamaw did. Then I let Sophie write underneath it, in pencil, From the one that lived.

I put the envelope in Mamaw’s tin box on the top shelf of my closet, and I thought that was the end of it.