The Row I Planted From the One That Lived

The Row

Doris kept that row. I had planted it so she could if she wanted to, and she wanted to.

She watered it every morning at six, before the heat, with a sprinkler can she bought new at the co-op.

She pulled every weed by hand. She called me twice in May about leaf spot and once about a hornworm.

The hornworm call I will remember until I die. “Reba,” she said, “there is a green worm on my tomato as big as my thumb, and it is looking at me.”

I drove up and picked it off for her and fed it to her neighbor’s chickens. She stood on her porch steps with her arms folded and watched me, and when I was done she said, “Well. Mama never had to call anybody.”

“Rosa probably had you to call,” I said.

She did not answer that. But she came down the steps and stood beside me and looked at her row, and she put her hand on my shoulder for about a second and then took it away.

August

By the first week of August, both gardens were bearing more tomatoes than two families could eat. My forty plants by the road and Doris’s twelve along hers, every one of them from the one that lived.

Doris called on a Thursday evening. “I have six bushels on my porch,” she said, “and I’m not letting them go to waste. Come up Saturday and bring yours.”

So on Saturday, Sophie and I loaded our tomatoes in the truck and drove up the road at seven in the morning, and we canned under Doris’s carport the way her mother used to do it, outside, where the heat could get away.

She had a propane burner set up on the concrete, the kind people use for fish fries, with her big blue granite water-bath canner on top.

She had a card table, a stack of clean towels, and two cases of quart jars.

“Mama always canned outside,” she said. “Never in the house in August. She said a kitchen in August was for people who never learned better.” Then she almost smiled. “She said a lot of things.”

We worked all day. Doris scalded the tomatoes in a stockpot and dropped them in ice water, and Sophie and I slipped the skins. I cored and quartered them and packed the jars.

Doris put two tablespoons of bottled lemon juice in the bottom of every quart. “Mama didn’t do this,” she said. “But the extension office says to now, and I’m not going to be the one who makes somebody sick.”

We hot-packed them, wiped the rims with a vinegar rag, set the lids and rings, and processed them in the water bath for forty-five minutes, seven jars at a time.

Every time a jar sealed on the towel, that little ping, Sophie counted it out loud. By four in the afternoon she had counted forty-two.

The Jar Lifter

Around three, while the last load was in the canner, Doris went into her shed and came back with something wrapped in a dish towel.

She sat down in the lawn chair next to Sophie and unwrapped it. It was an old jar lifter, the wire kind with wooden handles, the paint long worn off where a hand had held it.

“This was my mama’s,” she said. “It’s the only thing I took out of that garden shed when we left the farm. I put it in my suitcase. I’ve never used it. I didn’t think I’d ever have a reason.”

She put it in Sophie’s hands. “When those jars come out,” she said, “you lift them. Straight up, don’t tip them. Mama would want it used.”

Sophie lifted all seven jars out of the canner that last time, slow and careful, with her tongue between her teeth. Doris stood behind her with her hands out, not touching, just there in case.

When the last one was on the towel, Doris sat back down in her lawn chair and put her face in her hands.

Sophie put the jar lifter down and climbed right into her lap, ten years old and too big for it, and Doris let her.

I turned around and checked the burner for a while, so they could have it to themselves.