In the January my mother rang me and said he had been agitated for two days about something and nobody could work out what.
It was the seed.
He had always started them in the last week of February under lights in the basement, and he knew what month it was, and he could not tell anybody, and he had been lying in that bed doing the calendar.
I brought the trays and the envelopes up to his room and I started them in front of him, on a card table, badly, with him watching and getting one word out about every third tray.
The word he got out most was “deeper.”
He died eleven days later and those plants went in that May and I have been doing it ever since.
Seven seasons. I am not a better gardener than my father and I never will be, and the honest truth is I have been running that line, not improving it. But it has been alive in my hands for seven years and there were forty-one plants of it in that bed in June.
Every one of them died.
Not quickly. That is the thing about that chemical. They curl and they twist and they put out deformed growth and they hang on for six or seven weeks doing nothing, and you go out there every morning and look at them.
I went out every morning for six weeks. I want to put that down because it is the truest thing in this account and it is the part that has no drama in it at all.
Coffee, six-forty, out the back door, down the path, and stand in front of a raised bed looking for one leaf that had come in flat.
Some mornings I tied things up. Some mornings I fed them, which the extension agent later told me was the worst thing I could have done and which I do not regret, because it was something to do with my hands.
In the fourth week I took one plant out — just one, the worst of them — and stood there holding it upside down by the stem with the root ball hanging off, and I could not make myself put it in the bin.
I put it back in the ground. I dug the hole again and put a dead tomato plant back in the ground at half past six in the morning like an idiot, and Trina watched me do it out of the kitchen window and did not say one word about it then or since, and that is the single kindest thing my wife has ever done for me.
The family found out in the July.
Trina’s mother rang me, which she has done perhaps four times in nineteen years. She had heard a version — that there had been “an issue with the gardens” — and she wanted to know whether it was true that I was going to make something of it.
That was the phrase. Make something of it.
I said the garden was dead and that I had a lab report.
There was a pause and then she said, “Well, it’s only vegetables, Des.”
I have known that woman since I was twenty-seven and I love her and she is not a cruel person, and that sentence was the closest I came in five months to saying something I could not take back.
What I said instead was that I would send her the report, and I did, and she has never mentioned it again.
PART 3 — THE NOTICE
Here is what that herbicide actually is, in the plain version, because it took me three weeks and two phone calls to a county extension agent to understand it properly.
It is a class of broadleaf weed killer used on pasture, hay, and some lawns. It is extremely good at what it does and it is legal and it is not, in itself, a scandal.
