OCR Text |
Show RTVER people and one of the last small-farm cultures in America. It was a place out of time. Rosie had found a new love, the tomato plant. She was tired of being poor, and so was I, but I wasn't prepared to do anything about it. She was. Richard had taken up farming and the two of them were going fifty-fifty on 3,600 tomato plants. Rosie and I set up housekeeping in an old log barn along with a raccoon named Moon, and I reluctantly set about learning how to farm trellised tomatoes. Raising "maters" was a lot of work, even with the right equipment, such as a tractor with a plow, disc harrow, stake driver, trailer, sprayer, and if you're really lucky, a machine to ride through the patch when the damn things get ripe. We had a garden hand sprayer and a wheelbarrow, but what Rosie lacked in equipment, she made up for in determination. She hit the field as soon as she got up and lived there while there was light. The blight, a gangrenous black growth, ate through the patch like a cancer. Rosie started spraying for it. Each rain washed the spray off, and since it rained every damn day, we spent a lot of time pumping up that damn sprayer. It was like pissing on a forest fire. I had no love for the mater patch and Rosie took most of the burden upon herself. The chemicals in the spray ate at her skin till she looked herself like an overripe tomato, though her disposition became more like that of a wounded she-bear. One evening we sat on the bed in our airy room in the tobacco barn. Rosie seemed distracted, distant as the moon: she seemed to be laying bricks in the wall that had come between us. "Whaf s the matter?" I said. "Whaf s happening to us, anyway?" "Everything's the matter," she said. "Whaf s happened to you? You're not the same person I went down the Mississippi with. You used to be.. .different." -133- |