The Pantry Rows on Our Farm

The tomatoes went in on the twentieth of May. Two hundred and some plants, counting the ones Gilford brought from the hardware store when he heard what we were doing.

That was how it started with the neighbors. Gilford came out the first week in his old Chevy and unloaded a stack of wire tomato cages from his barn. He did not make any speech. He set them down by the hydrant and said, “These were my wife’s. She’d want them used.”

The next Saturday, two women from Mom’s Sunday school class came out with a box of sweet rolls and stayed until noon with hoes in their hands. The Saturday after that, there were five of them.

Ulysses came out in early June. I did not expect him.

He pulled into the yard in his work truck and sat in the cab for a minute, like a man getting his nerve up, and then he got out and came to the end of the rows where Mom was sitting.

He had his cap in his hands. “Lois,” he said. “I didn’t know. Rod told me you were ready to be done with it. I wouldn’t have bought it if I’d known.”

“I know that, Ulysses,” Mom said. “You’re a good boy. You always were.”

He was fifty-eight years old and she still called him a good boy. He went red to his ears.

“Before we poured,” he said, “I dug what I could.” He went back to his truck and started setting five-gallon buckets on the ground. Rhubarb crowns. Her asparagus. The horseradish that had been coming up by the fence since 1981.

Mom sat in her lawn chair and looked at those buckets for a long time. Then she told him exactly where she wanted them planted, and he planted every one of them himself, on his knees, in his good jeans.

By July, the two acres looked like something. The sweet corn was over my head.

Mom had us plant it in four blocks two weeks apart, so it would not all come ripe the same week and rot on the stalk. She had learned that the hard way in 1996.

The beans came on first, the bush beans in late June and the pole beans in July.

Iola and her friends picked them into five-gallon buckets on Wednesday mornings, and they ate as many as they picked, and nobody said a word about it.

The tomatoes started turning the third week of July. The first ripe one, Mom made me bring to her chair.

She turned it over in her hands and smelled the stem end and then she gave it to Hiram, because he had complained the most.

“You earned it,” she said. “Eat it right here, with the salt.”

She had a salt shaker in her apron pocket. She had brought a salt shaker every morning since May, waiting for that tomato.

He ate it standing in the row with the juice running down his wrist, and he did not complain again for the rest of the summer.

Every Wednesday morning and every Friday afternoon, we loaded the pickup. Bushel baskets of sweet corn and tomatoes stacked in the bed, buckets of beans wedged between them, a cooler of cucumbers riding up front with Mom.