“…something about who actually owns the land under your house,” Evelyn Benning said, and she held the yellowed booklet up toward the judge as if it were a hymnal. Harold had gone the color of old paper. His lawyer, a sleek man in a charcoal suit, leaned over and whispered something urgent, and Harold shook his head. The judge, a patient woman named Judge Ramirez, took the booklet from the bailiff and turned to the page. Half the street sat forward in the benches. I held my breath so long my chest ached. Somewhere behind me a child coughed, and the sound carried like a gunshot.
“Section Nine,” the judge read aloud, slowly. “Lot One, being the parcel conveyed to Arthur Nakagawa in consideration of the loan of forty two thousand dollars, shall be exempt from every covenant, assessment and restriction of this community, in perpetuity.” She looked up. “That is plain enough. And the second paragraph says that the parcel marked as the Model Home Corner, Lot Forty One, was held as security for that loan and was never released by recorded instrument.” She turned and looked at the man in the front row. “Mr. Benning, which lot do you live on?”
Harold opened his mouth, and nothing came out. Everyone in that subdivision knew the answer. Harold lived in the big stucco house on the corner by the gate, the one with the three car garage and the white Range Rover in the drive. He had lived there since his mother handed it to him in 1998, a gift for his fortieth birthday. “Lot Forty One,” his lawyer said faintly. The judge folded her hands. “Then, Mr. Benning, the land under your house, as a matter of recorded title, has been owned for forty five years by the man you are suing over tomatoes.”
Six staked tomato plants, a yellowed booklet from 1979, and a corner house that stood on a stranger land.
The courtroom erupted. People who had spent years being quietly fined for the color of their mailboxes were on their feet, laughing, some wiping their eyes. The bailiff had to call for order three times. Harold sat with his head down, perfectly still, a fifty five year old man who had just learned that his whole kingdom stood on a stranger deed. Evelyn Benning walked to him with her cane and laid a hand on his shoulder, as gently as she had laid it on Arthur. “Harold,” she said, “I have been trying to tell you for years. You never asked.”
Judge Ramirez dismissed the case before lunch. She dismissed it with prejudice, which I learned is the strongest way a judge can say no. She ordered the eleven fines voided and the lien released, and she said, with her glasses sliding down her nose, that in her experience the most dangerous document in any association is the one nobody has read. Then she asked Mr. Nakagawa whether he wished to say anything. He stood, a slight old man in a gray cardigan, hat in his hands. “Your Honor,” he said, “I would only like to ask if the tomatoes can stay.”
The judge did not answer for a moment. She was smiling too hard. “Mr. Nakagawa,” she said, “I believe the tomatoes may stay in perpetuity.” Mr. Nakagawa nodded and sat down. Afterward, in the hallway outside the courtroom, he did something I will never forget. He walked up to Harold, who was standing alone by the drinking fountain, and held out a small paper bag. Inside were four ripe Cherokee Purples, still warm from the sun. “You look like you have not eaten today,” he said. “Please. They are good with salt.”
Harold took the bag. His hands shook. He said that he did not understand, that he had been rude, that he had been petty, and that for eleven months he had told himself it was about property values. Mr. Nakagawa shook his head. “Mr. Benning,” he said, “your mother and father trusted me with a handshake in 1979. A good neighborhood is built on a handshake, not a binder.” He did not mention Poston, where his parents had been held, or the forty two thousand dollars that were the only money his family had ever been given. He did not have to.
The next month, at a special meeting of the association, a hundred and sixty residents voted. Harold Benning resigned as president, and nobody had to ask. A retired nurse named Mrs. Okafor took the clipboard. The first thing the new board did was repeal Section 4.2, the rule against front yard vegetation, and the second was to vote unanimously to rename the little park by the gate. It is now the Nakagawa Garden. Arthur designed it himself, in a week, on graph paper, with raised beds, a bench, and a long stone wall for climbing beans.
On a Saturday in April, Mr. Nakagawa asked me to come over. In his front yard stood Harold Benning, in work gloves and a straw hat, kneeling in the raised bed. He was awkward at it, and slow, and pulling out the wrong things, and Mr. Nakagawa was explaining patiently, for the fourth time, which were weeds. When Harold stood up, his knees cracked loudly. He looked at me over the tomato cages and grinned like a boy. “Diane,” he said, “I owe you an apology too. I was a fool.” I told him he was in good company.
Mr. Nakagawa signed over the deed to the Model Home Corner that summer, for one dollar, to Harold and his mother, with a single condition. It is written into the paper in his careful architect hand: the owner shall keep, in the front yard, no fewer than six tomato plants, and shall give the harvest to the neighbors. The house on the corner has a row of staked plants beside the walk now, heavy with fruit. Every August Harold goes door to door in his straw hat, carrying a basket, and nobody has ever once refused.