Chapter 10 - The Garden Stakes
The second week of May brought the heat back to Cabarrus County—that thick, golden Carolina warmth that makes the blackberries bloom along the creek banks and turns the fescue from blue-green to the color of sweet hay.
At five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, the Hollis farm on Ridge Road looked as though the previous two months had been nothing more than an early frost that had melted before noon.
The white farmhouse had a fresh coat of oil-based gloss on the sills, painted by Daniel during three long, silent weekends while the kids played in the clover. The front porch had been jacked up two inches, leveled with four-by-four treated hemlock shims, and anchored to a new concrete pier that Daniel had poured with his own hands after work.
Beside the south fence, the twelve acres stretched away toward Dutchman’s Branch, green and unbroken beneath the spring sky.
Mabel was sitting on an overturned peach basket at the edge of the garden plot, wearing her denim overalls and red rubber boots, holding a bundle of natural jute twine that she had cut into twelve-inch lengths with her plastic safety scissors.
Theo was sitting in the soft red dirt twenty feet away, his bare toes digging into the warm soil, laughing as our old bird dog—a pointer mix we had adopted from the animal shelter in Kannapolis—sniffed through the dry grass looking for field mice.
Daniel came down the row from the barn carrying four rough-sawn cedar stakes over his shoulder.
He looked different.
He had lost ten pounds of the soft, desk-worker weight he had carried around Church Street. His arms were brown from three weeks in the sun, his gray polo shirt had been replaced by a faded denim work shirt with the sleeves cut off at the elbows, and he wore an old pair of Red Wing boots that were dark with cedar oil and ditch mud.
He was the new managing director of Baker Engineering & Surveying, Inc.—the reformed operating entity that he and Celeste had reorganized after the liquidation of the landworks LLC.
They had six employees. They had an office on Union Street that smelled of blueprint toner and fresh pine, and their only client for the summer was the Cabarrus County Parks Department, surveying the new greenway trail along Dutchman’s Branch.
He stopped beside Mabel's peach basket, set the cedar stakes on the grass, and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm.
"These are the ones your grandmother cut, Mabel," he said, his voice quiet, easy, carrying none of that tight, defensive hitch that had choked his words for seven years. "We’re going to drive them every four feet along the furrow."
Mabel looked up, holding out three pieces of twine.
"Mama said the tomatoes need the stakes so they don't lie down in the mud when the fruit gets heavy."
"Your mama's right," Daniel said, looking past the row to where I stood beside the garden gate.
I wore my old field trousers and a straw hat that had belonged to my mother, holding a tray of sixty young Cherokee Purple tomato starts that I had brought up from the greenhouse in Mount Pleasant that morning.
The leaves were dark green, pungent with that sharp, oily perfume that only tomato foliage has when the afternoon sun hits the resin.
Daniel walked over to the gate, took the heavy plastic flat from my hands, and set it on the cedar bench beside the pump house.
He didn't try to kiss me. He didn't offer an explanation.
We had spent thirty days talking in the kitchen after the children went to sleep—real conversations, the kind that don't end when the commercial breaks come on, the kind that require people to look at the wreckage of their choices without blaming the weather or their parents.
He had forty thousand dollars left on his individual indemnification note to the bank, which he was paying off at seven hundred dollars a month from his new salary. We still lived on Ridge Road; the Lynen Street house had been sold to a young couple from the textile museum for a fair market price, with every dollar of the equity placed into a college trust for Mabel and Theo that required my sole signature for disbursement.
"The soil's warm enough," he said, looking down at the red earth between his boots. "The frost is out of the ground all the way to the branch."
"I know," I said. "My mother always planted on the second Saturday in May."
He picked up the four-pound wooden mallet from the grass—the one with the hickory handle that my grandfather Hollis had turned on his lathe in nineteen forty-six.
He stepped to the first furrow, set the sharpened point of a cedar stake into the dirt, and swung.
The sound was solid, deep, and final: thump... thump... thump.
The stake went down eighteen inches into the subsoil, straight as a plumb line, rigid against the wind that was coming up the valley from the south.
Mabel stood up from her peach basket, took her first piece of twine, and walked to the stake, looping the hemp around the wood with small, careful fingers, the way her grandmother had shown me when I was six years old and the road outside was still gray gravel.
May you like
I picked up the first tomato plant, knelt in the red clay, and dug my fingers into the cool earth.
Above us, the high Carolina blue stretched from the ridge all the way to the Uwharrie mountains, without a single cloud, without a single paper, and without a single fence that didn't belong to the people who worked the dirt.
