8.05 / May 2013

Tomatoes For Your Silence

Some things remain unclear. How, for example, he came to have the seeds. Or where, among so many security cameras, the garden could exist. “I had some help,” is all he’ll say. I know what this means. There, like everywhere else, he is the likeable one, the one with a joke or story. The guards let him come and go. He paid for their silence with tomatoes.

By September at the trustee camp, there are zucchini and squash, peppers as large as hearts. What is served in the cafeteria is always covered in gravy. Mystery meat, he says. But at night, in his cell, he adds cilantro and celery to packets of strained tuna. He dresses up commissary beans with slivers of jalapeno and onion roughly chopped with a butter knife. His cellmates don’t go down to dinner anymore. They sit on the floor around the hotplate while my father stirs canned potato soup studded with green onion and thickened with smuggled cafeteria cream.

Who can say how the warden found out? She might have smelled the sizzling onion, the garlic smashed with the tines of a fork. But a warden’s job is a desk job—in at eight, out at five. They learned to listen for the clicking of her high heels, saved their cooking for after she was gone. They ate the stalks, the rinds, the leafy tops. They left no evidence. How, then? My father suspects it was the onion, rolling from beneath his bunk during a random shakedown. But I see instead a guard with the seed-studded jelly of an heirloom on his chin. I see the dirt-stained knees of my father’s coveralls. A woman doesn’t make it that far without being observant, persistent. She would have been ruthless in her questioning.

I want to know, who would deny a man a potato? Who could find danger in a stalk of celery? My father doesn’t have to tell me it wasn’t about the vegetables. They had become too much like their old selves, joking around a fire, telling stories, filling their bellies with food that didn’t come from a freezer or a vat or some factory line. They found another way. They said to her with their chewing-sounds, this part of us remains.

Was it anger that made her call him from his cell that day, or was it fear? He might have gotten someone sick. Other prisoners might have become jealous, then enraged. And then there are the men above her to whom she must answer. Where did my father get the shovel, the hoe? Is it so hard, they want to know, to keep track of one aging man?

What else could she do but escort my father from his cell when everyone is looking? What else, but march him across the field to the little plot behind the water tower? She gestures to the turned ground with the antennae of her walkie-talkie. There, the peppers have grown heavy on their stalks. Even she can’t deny it’s beautiful. She manages to find her voice in her throat. Just who, Mr. Anderson, do you think you are?

And this is the part I keep trying to forget, even now, years later, while my new husband and I sit on bar stools at the butcher block island in his kitchen. Three Dog Night is on the record player, and he is frying gulf shrimp while our steaks smoke on the pit outside. He buzzes around, a dishtowel flung over his shoulder, stirring this, adding that, cursing to himself in the way that makes us smile. He has been out almost ten years, but I still can’t forget the way he says, back then, his careful eyes on the ground: I’m just an inmate, ma’am.

There is something in the way he has given up so easily. If only he would have said something profane, spit at her, cursed or threatened her. She knows what to do with that. But this, a man with his eyes on the ground. She tests the firmness of a tomato with the toe of her stiletto. She has come so far. She wears her hair in a slick bun, no lipstick, her shirts buttoned to the neck. Always, she has been paid less. Always, some man has called her sweetheart. The stilettos are her one luxury. They make her feet sweat. They give her blisters. But she would not trade the sound they make on the linoleum. She would not trade the sharpness of the heel and the smell of the leather when she takes them off at night. She presses down, then harder, and the fruit gives. Her shoe is slick with juice. Something in her begins to hum. And then it is someone else pulling the first stake free. Someone else wrestling it from its ties. First one and then another and another, until the plants lay in broken heaps. But this is not enough. She steps into the garden. She has come back to herself. Her breathing slows. Everything, now, is clear. There is a place she must go, and the only way to get there is through this man’s garden. She brings down her spiked heel. Once. Twice. My father looks away. Soon, there is only soil and skin and bitter, broken rind.


Lauri Anderson Alford's fiction has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Greensboro Review, The Carolina Quarterly,The Common, NPR's All Things Considered Weekend, and elsewhere. She recently attended the Sewanee Writers' Conference as a Tennessee Williams Scholar. Read more at www.lauriandersonalford.com
8.05 / May 2013

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