The Row I Planted From the One That Lived

The Jar

It had been her idea. She had found a half-pint canning jar in the shed and filled it with what was left of the seed from the one that lived. About two hundred seeds, I would guess.

She had written a note the night before, at the kitchen table, by herself. She would not let me read it. She folded it into a little square and put it under the lid with the seeds.

She tied the jar to the first cage with baling twine, a double knot, and then a bow on top because she said it needed one.

Then Irwin put the tiller back under the carport exactly where it had been, and we got in his truck and drove the quarter mile home.

We did not go inside. Irwin backed the pickup into the grass by our road so the tailgate faced up toward his mother’s house, and the three of us sat on it and waited.

It was a long afternoon. Bobby Pruitt drove past in his feed truck around two, slowed way down at Doris’s, then backed up and stopped beside us.

“Lord, Reba,” he said through the window. “Did y’all do that?”

“We did,” I said.

He looked up the road at the row for a long time. Then he nodded and said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. That’s a fine-looking row of tomatoes.” And he drove on.

Doris

Her car came up the gravel a little before seven. We heard it before we saw it, the slow crunch of tires she always takes too careful on the washboard.

She turned into her driveway, and then she stopped halfway up it. She did not pull under the carport. She just stopped.

She got out of the car and stood in her driveway in her good coat with her purse still on her arm, and she looked at that row of twelve tomato plants along her road.

She stood there so long that Sophie whispered, “Is she mad?” and Irwin said, “Hush, baby. Let her look.”

Then she walked across her grass to the first cage. She saw the jar. She stood there another minute before she reached out and untied the bow.

She opened the jar and took out Sophie’s note and unfolded it. We were a quarter mile away, but I saw her read it, and then I saw her read it again.

She turned around and looked down the road, straight at the three of us on that tailgate.

And then she started walking.

She did not get back in the car. She walked down her driveway and out onto the gravel and down the road toward us, a seventy-one-year-old woman in church shoes, with the jar in one hand and the note in the other.

Irwin stood up. I put my hand on his arm, and he sat back down.

It takes a long time to walk a quarter mile when you are watching someone do it. She did not hurry. She did not stop.

When she got close, I could see her face, and I could see that she had been crying, which I had never seen in eleven years.

She stopped in front of the tailgate. She did not look at Irwin. She did not look at me. She looked at Sophie.