What He Saved
Episode 3 of 3 of The Tomatoes Were His by Ada Rowe
“You had no right,” I said.
The bell over his door was still swinging. He had a key in the cutter and he finished the cut before he looked up, and the shop smelled like brass and machine oil and the cardboard of four hundred little boxes.
“Hearing went four minutes,” he said. “Nothing to rule on.”
“That was not yours to end.”
“It was rooted in eleven.”
“Do not.” I put both hands flat on his counter. “Do not stand there and use my own argument back at me after taking a pair of loppers to a plant my aunt handed you in a paper envelope in 2012, because if the point was that it belonged to you, then congratulations, you have proved it in the stupidest way available to a grown man.”
He blew the shavings off the key and set it on the mat.
“You still have twelve,” he said.
“I didn’t ask you for that.”
“No,” he said. “You didn’t.”
I waited for the rest of it. He picked up the next blank. That is the whole trouble with him, that he will let a person walk out of a room rather than say one sentence with himself inside it, and I walked out, and the bell rang behind me, and I did not go back to the garden for eleven days.
September came in cool that year. By the middle of the month my squash had gone to powder and the beans were leather and the entire row smelled like the end of something, and I went down on a Sunday to pull it all out, because Ruth never once left a plot standing into October.
His van was at the gate. He was pulling eleven, same as me, hauling armloads to the pile by the fence.
We worked two hours without a word. Carl Pinsky came, looked at the both of us, and went home. The sun got low and orange behind the middle school and the lights over the diamond never came on, because the season was finished and nobody had booked the field.
“Verna came to me that Wednesday,” he said.
I kept my hands in the dirt.
“She read me the rule out loud. Twice. She wanted me to know what Friday was going to be.” He dropped an armload on the pile. “Contested area goes, and the plot it sits in goes with it, and you were five months in. Nine on the list. Ruth had twelve since 2007.”
“So you settled it.”
“There’s no dispute without the plant,” he said.
“That was your seed line. Nine seasons. You told me yourself it was the only one out of six worth keeping.”
“I know what it was.”
He went to the van and came back with something out of his shirt pocket, and he held it over the top of the fence, a small brown envelope with the flap folded down and printed on it in pencil, AGGIES, ROW 2, PLOTS 11 AND 12, 2026.
“Cut the fruit off first,” he said. “Thursday, about eight. Ripened it on the sill over my sink and pulled the seed Sunday. Eighty-one of them. That’s plenty for both of us and forty to spare.”
I stood with an envelope of seed in my hand, in a plot my aunt kept for nineteen years, across a fence from a man who had taken down the thing he loved best so a woman he had been arguing with all summer would not lose her Sunday afternoons.
“You could have told me that at the shop,” I said.
“You’d have made me put them all back.”
“I absolutely would have.”
“That’s why,” he said.
Then neither of us said anything else, and I understood that I had spent the whole summer waiting for six inches of that fence to stop counting. I put my hand on the wire. He put his over the top of it. The chain link out there is old and it has some give in it, and it came toward him about that far, and we stood with our foreheads on either side of it until the light went off the school roof.
He kissed me through a fence. It was not graceful. We tried again at the gate.
In October we took both plots down to bare dirt, and Verna crossed the dispute off her clipboard with a ceremony she invented on the spot.
He kept the envelope on the sill over his sink, and in March he brought it to Quill Street, and we started twenty of them under a shop light in Ruth’s basement, in the same pans she had stacked on the shelf with the year written on masking tape.
They were four inches tall by the first week of May.
We carried them down to Fairlawn on a Saturday morning and put them in along the line where the chain link runs, six in eleven and six in twelve, close enough that by August they would be coming through the wire again and there would be no telling.
Neither of us said whose they were.