The tin sat between us on the back step with its lid pried loose, and the smell that came out of it was the smell of my whole married life: dry paper, old tobacco, and warm dirt. I unfolded the letter with fingers that did not feel like mine. It was written on the back of a feed store calendar page, in the square pencil hand of Leon, and it began: Dwayne, if you are reading this, you are standing in the garden of your mother with a tape measure.
“Son. I know you. You get an idea and you want to pour it in concrete. I love that about you, and it worries me. The garden of your mother is not dirt. I carried that soil in, one truckload at a time, from the place of my brother in the spring of 1974, because your mother said she could not live in a house without something growing. That garden has fed this town, this family, and the heart of your mother. Do not take it from her.”
“But I also know a young man needs a place for his own family to park a camper and be happy. So here is what I am leaving you. There is $4,000 in an account at the Dodge City credit union in your name. It is yours the day you ask your mother for permission to build on the side lot by the shed, the gravel part. Pour your slab there, where nothing grows. Then come and sit in the garden with her and shell some peas. Dad.”
Beside me Dwayne was quiet in the way he gets when something has gone straight through him. He took the letter from my fingers and held it as if it weighed more than paper. Then he said, in a voice I had not heard since the day his father died, “I was going to pour concrete over the work of Dad, Mom. That is what I was doing. And he saw it coming from years away.”
He told me about the camper. He had bought it in a rush of enthusiasm after a hard winter at the plant, a twenty eight foot trailer with a slide out and a payment that frightened him. He wanted a place to park it where the neighbors in town would not complain. The gravel behind the shed had not crossed his mind, because the shed was the territory of Dad, and he had not opened it since the funeral. That was why he had been in there on Saturday, at last, clearing it out.
On Monday morning we drove together to the credit union. The woman at the desk, a cheerful person named Lupe, looked up the account and smiled. It had been opened four years earlier, only weeks before Leon went into the hospital. The balance was $4,000 and a little interest. A note on the file, signed by Leon, said the funds were to be released to Dwayne only with a letter of permission from his mother. I wrote the letter on the spot, in my best penmanship. Lupe stamped it with a flourish.
A father who plants wisely leaves behind a garden for the mother and a place for the son.
Dwayne poured the slab the second week of May, thirty by twelve, on the gravel behind the shed, with a neat apron for drainage. He did most of the work himself and hired the concrete man only for the pour. I stood on the back step with a glass of tea and watched him smooth the surface with a long float, sweating through his shirt and humming. When the truck backed in with the camper, the neighbors came out of their houses to look. It fit with eight inches to spare.
That evening he found me in the garden. He knelt in the row of tomatoes without a word and began to pull weeds with his big careful hands. He pulled every one. Then he asked me to teach him how to stake a plant, because his father had never gotten around to it, and I realized with a pang that this was the first garden lesson I had ever given my son. He was fifty one years old. He staked the whole row.
The stand by the road grew too. Dwayne built me a proper one out of cedar, with a tin roof and a shelf for the scale of Leon, painted barn red. He made a sign with a router. It said Fresh Tomatoes, and under it, in smaller letters, Leon and Family. Customers come now from three towns away. The trucker still buys a box for his wife. Last Saturday I made $212.
In September he and his wife and the grandchildren took the camper to Colorado for ten days. They sent me a postcard from the mountains with a photograph of a marmot. On the back, in a square pencil hand so like that of his father, he wrote: Next time you are coming. I put the card on the refrigerator beside the picture of Leon. The tin sits on the windowsill above my sink now, with new packets in it in my handwriting, beside the ones Leon wrote.
This spring I planted the Brandywines first, as I always do. Dwayne came by on a Saturday morning and dug the rows with a shovel, with dirt he had hauled himself from the land of his uncle. He did not ask what I needed it for. He just kept coming. The straw hat of Leon still hangs on the fence post by the gate, and I water around it. It has never looked so shaded, so deep in leaves, so full of green.