The Row I Planted From the One That Lived

Wilma

It was January before I understood anything about my mother-in-law. And I only understood it because her sister Wilma came by the post office counter in Sparta on a slow Tuesday.

Wilma is three years older than Doris, round where Doris is straight, and she has never once in eleven years taken her sister’s side just because it was her sister’s side.

She waited until the line was empty. Then she leaned on the counter and said, “Has she told you yet? About Mama’s garden?”

“Told me what?” I said.

Wilma looked at me for a long moment. “I didn’t think she would,” she said. “Reba, when is your lunch?”

We sat in her Buick in the parking lot with the heater running, and she told me about the farm. Their daddy had a hundred and sixty acres on the Calfkiller River road outside Sparta, cattle and burley tobacco.

Their mother, Rosa, kept the biggest garden on that road. Half an acre, Wilma said, right along the front where everybody could see it. Beans, corn, okra, potatoes, and tomatoes, always tomatoes.

“Doris was her shadow,” Wilma said. “I wanted to be in town with my friends. Doris wanted to be in that garden. She’d be out there at five in the morning with Mama, before the dew burned off.”

Their daddy got behind in the late sixties. Tobacco prices, a bad note at the bank, a barn fire he never recovered from. In the spring of 1971, he sold the farm to pay his debts.

“The new people moved in the first week of June,” Wilma said. “Mama’s garden was already up. Beans blooming. Tomatoes setting fruit. And the new man got on a dozer the first week and pushed every bit of it under for hay ground.”

I sat there with my hands in my lap.

“Doris was sixteen,” Wilma said. “She stood at the end of the road and watched him do it. Mama couldn’t watch. Mama went in the rented house in town and pulled the shades.”

“Rosa died two years later,” Wilma said. “Her heart, the doctor said. But Doris always said it was the garden. That Mama just quit once she didn’t have it.”

Boxwoods

I asked Wilma the question I already knew the answer to. “Has Doris ever had a garden since?”

“Not one,” Wilma said. “Not a tomato in a pot. Albert wanted one every spring, and she wouldn’t have it. She planted boxwoods. Boxwoods and grass, and she keeps the grass like a golf course.”

I thought about that for a long time after Wilma drove away. I thought about it on the route that afternoon, all hundred and twelve miles of it, with the heater going and the mailbox flags down.

Eleven years. Eleven years Doris had driven past my garden by the road. Every spring when it came up, every summer when it set fruit, every fall when it went brown and I left the cages standing.

And it was right along the front, where everybody could see it. Big and a little wild, with straw everywhere and tomatoes cracking on the vine. Just like Rosa’s.

I do not think Doris ever knew why she hated my garden. I think she just could not stand to look at it, and the not-standing built up for eleven years, and one June morning with Irwin in Georgia and me on my route, it broke.

That does not make it right. I want to be clear about that. She took something from me and from Sophie that cannot be bought back, and she called it a favor.

But I sat in my car at the end of the route that evening, and I knew what I was going to do.