Rule Eleven C
Episode 2 of 3 of The Tomatoes Were His by Ada Rowe
“Somebody filed on you,” Verna Doak said.
She had the clipboard against her hip and a sun visor with the name of a bank that closed in 2009, and she read me the language off the sheet without being asked, because Verna believes a rule is only fair once you have heard it out loud.
“Rule eleven C. Where two plot holders make a competing claim on one planting and cannot settle it between themselves by season’s end, the committee decides the matter, and the holder with the shorter tenure surrenders the contested area together with the plot it sits in, for the balance of the year.”
“Somebody being Carl.”
“Carl Pinsky filed a disturbance report about raised voices at the fence line on three separate evenings,” she said, “which under the bylaws I am obligated to bring forward, and which I would rather have settled with a pitcher of lemonade on my own porch, but here we are, and the hearing is Friday at six in the annex behind the library.”
“And then what happens.”
“And then there are nine people on the waiting list,” Verna said, “and Dean Lasko has held eleven for nine years.”
She moved off toward the spigot, stopping to deadhead somebody’s marigolds on the way, and I stood in my own row doing the arithmetic that every person in that garden had already done for me.
For ten days after that we were polite, which was worse.
He pruned. I weeded. We said good evening across four feet of wire like two people at the funeral of somebody neither of us knew well. The tomato kept getting bigger. By the third week of August it was ridged across the shoulders and the underside had gone the color of a bruise healing, and it hung there with its own weight pulling the vine down into the diamond of the chain link, and neither of us touched it. Neither of us touched anything within a foot of it. There was a zone.
Then the Thursday storm put my bean trellis down flat.
I got there at seven the next evening and found the whole run collapsed into the squash, and Dean already on his knees in my plot with a hammer, resetting my corner post, his van backed up to the gate with the doors open and LASKO LOCK AND KEY painted on the side by hand.
“You’re in twelve,” I said.
“Post was in twelve.”
“So now you reach.”
“Now I reach,” he said.
He held the post. I ran the line. It took us the better part of an hour and we did not say much during it, and when it was done he sat on the back bumper of the van with a thermos and poured coffee into the lid and held it out to me. I drank out of the lid of a strange man’s thermos in a parking lot behind a middle school. Not a thing I had pictured.
“She gave it to me in 2012,” he said.
I waited. He is not a man you can pull a story out of. You set the cup down and let it come.
“My mother died that March. I’d had the shop two years and I was taking in about eleven dollars a day. Ruth had twelve and I had the empty plot beside her, and one morning she came over with a paper envelope and told me to put six in the ground and she would show me how to keep them.”
“She never mentioned you.”
“She mentioned you,” he said. “Every year. Niece in Columbus. Good at her job. Doesn’t call.”
“That is accurate on all three counts.”
“She said the seed goes back to her mother’s garden. Agnes. 1961.” He turned the thermos lid in his hands. “Nine seasons I’ve grown them. That plant is the one out of this year’s six worth saving seed off. It set in the heat. The others quit.”
“So we are not arguing about a tomato.”
“We were never arguing about a tomato,” he said.
Carl Pinsky’s headlamp came on down the row and swung our way, and the two of us looked at the ground like teenagers, and then Dean said he had a lockout on Ash Street at nine, and he got in the van and went.
I stayed until it was full dark. I stood at the fence with my hand under that tomato, feeling how heavy it had gotten, how it sat in my palm without me lifting anything at all.
Here is what I decided, standing there in the dark. I would pick it Friday morning. I would carry it into the annex in a dish towel and offer him half the seed in front of Verna Doak and nine people on a waiting list.
I got there Friday at ten after six in the morning.
The vine was flat on his mulch. The stem was cut clean an inch above the dirt, and his loppers hung off the fence post by one handle.
Dean had cut it down to the ground.