The Pantry Rows on Our Farm

Mom showed up every morning at seven, because I went and got her every morning at seven. She does not drive anymore.

She gave up her keys after the wrist, and she gave them up without a fight, which told me more about how scared she had been than anything she said.

Erv set her folding lawn chair at the end of the rows.

She sat in it with her straw hat on and her coffee in a thermos cup and ran the whole show like a general.

“Four inches deep on those seed potatoes. Cut side down. Marnie, that is not four inches.”

“It’s close to four inches.”

“Close to four inches is three inches. Dig.”

The twins came out after school and on weekends. Iola and Hiram were fifteen that spring, and they had opinions about getting up early on a Saturday to plant potatoes for strangers. They shared those opinions freely.

Mom let them talk. Then she handed Hiram the hoe and told him his grandpa used to plant a row of beans straighter than a fence line, and she wondered if the gift had skipped a generation.

He planted the straightest row of beans I have ever seen. He does not know she did that on purpose. I am not going to tell him.

School does not let out in Iowa until the end of May, so through April and most of May I worked the garden from four o’clock until supper.

Erv took the mornings when he could, between his own field work. Mom was there every hour somebody else was.

We waited for the frost to be past before the tomatoes went in. Mom started them in the spring under a shop light in her basement, the way she always had, a hundred and forty plants in paper cups along a folding table.

The week before Mother’s Day, Rod called me at the school.

“Hester says Mom’s out at your place every morning.” His voice was tight. “Every morning, Marnie.”

“She sits in a chair, Rod. I bring her home at eleven, before it gets hot.”

“She’s seventy-seven years old. She broke her wrist out there.”

“She broke her wrist tripping over a stake at the end of the season, pulling vines by herself.” I kept my voice low because there was a second grader on my cot with a stomachache. “Out here she doesn’t kneel. She doesn’t pull anything. She points.”

“Hester says she’s tired in the afternoons.”

“She’s seventy-seven years old,” I said. “She’d be tired in the afternoons in a recliner.”

He breathed into the phone for a while. I could hear the elevator dryers going behind him, that big steady roar.

“I sold that lot so she’d sit still,” he said finally. “That’s all I wanted. I wanted her to sit still and be safe.”

“I know you did.”

“And you’re out there undoing it.”

“I’m not undoing anything. The lot’s sold. Ulysses’s pouring concrete next week.” I looked at the little girl on the cot. “You can come out and see for yourself any morning you want. The coffee’s on by seven.”

He did not come. Not in May, not in June. He called Mom on Sunday afternoons, the way he always did, and he asked her how she was feeling, and he never once asked about the garden. She never once told him.