I laid my hand on the white envelope. “Crystal, that company writes to me because they bought my watermelon rind pickle recipe,” I said. “My grandmother made it in Okmulgee, with cloves and a stick of cinnamon in every jar. They paid me four million four hundred thousand dollars in the spring, and my name will be on the label of every jar from Texas to Ohio.” I slid the contract across the table. “Dwayne told you that pickles were not a business. I have been putting up rinds on the Fourth of July since nineteen sixty six. Forty watermelons a summer, and a line at the farmers market every Saturday.”
Dwayne cleared his throat. “Mama, I told you, the pecan company went bankrupt.” “Pam at the office in Okmulgee told me otherwise,” I said. “The lease is current. Fourteen hundred dollars a month, paid by direct deposit, for thirty four months, into an account that ends in three zero nine two. My account at the Armstrong Bank ends in seven seven one four.” I laid the letter from Pam beside the pickle jar. “Roy planted every one of those trees by hand along the river bottom. He said they would feed me when he could not. And you let me sleep on a cot behind your garage, by the trash cans, and pay you four hundred twenty five dollars a month for it.”
Crystal pushed her chair back from the table. “Dwayne, the bass boat. You said it came from your overtime.” “It was overtime, Crystal,” Dwayne said weakly. “Most of it,” he added, and the room went quiet. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, a train blew its horn by the river, a long, low note that carried across the bottom land where Roy had walked every morning at dawn. Crystal looked at the jar of dill spears in her own refrigerator, the one with the same company name on the label, and then at her husband. I saw something close in her face, like a gate swinging shut.
A jar of watermelon rind pickles from a church van window gave one son the weekend to bring his mother back to the orchard in Muskogee.
I kept my voice level, the way I keep a pot just below the boil. “Here are my terms, Dwayne. You will call Pam tonight and tell her the truth, and from this month on the lease will be paid to me. You will repay the thirty four months, every dollar of it, in payments that Crystal and I will set, and you will not borrow to do it. The bass boat goes up for sale on Monday. And I will be out of the room behind your garage by Saturday, because I have found a little house on York Street with a porch and a kitchen big enough for forty jars.” Dwayne nodded and wept.
On Saturday morning I drove out to the orchard, and I found a surprise waiting. The harvest crew had stopped working. Eleven men stood in a row at the edge of the grove with their caps in their hands. The foreman, a stocky man named Mr. Tallchief, stepped forward. “Mrs. Birdsong, we heard what happened,” he said. “We have worked these trees for eleven seasons, and we have always paid on time. If we had known, we would have brought the check to your door.” Then he held out a paper sack filled with fresh Stuart pecans, still warm from the sun, and I closed my eyes and held it to my face.
The money consequences came without delay. Dwayne sold the bass boat at a loss of six thousand dollars, and he took a second job at the port, loading barges at night. Crystal moved their savings into an account in her own name. Her parents, who had offered to help the couple buy a bigger house, set the offer aside until they could see a year of honest work. The pecan company, being fair, agreed to pay me directly, by check, and added a note of apology. I read it twice and framed it in the new kitchen, between a picture of Roy and a calendar from the feed store.
I wanted to turn the sorrow into something sweet. With part of the sale money, I started a fund in the name of Roy. The Roy Birdsong Fund pays for the winter heating bills of retired farmers in Muskogee County who cannot afford to stay warm. Every fall I deliver a jar of rind pickles with each check, with a stick of cinnamon in the bottom. Last year we helped one hundred and six households. A man in Fort Gibson met me at his door and held the jar like a newborn. “Miss Ione,” he said, “my mother made these. I have not tasted one in thirty years.”
Crystal came to see me at the little house on York Street, carrying a basket of watermelon rinds and a nervous smile. She asked if I would teach her to put up a jar. I sat her at the kitchen table with a paring knife and a bowl of salt water. She cut the first rind too thick and the second too thin. By the sixth she had found the rhythm, and by the tenth she was humming. When the jars came out of the water bath, sealed and glistening, she lined them up on the sill and cried. “Miss Ione,” she said, “I think this is the first thing I have ever made that lasts.”
Dwayne took the longest. For two months he did not call. Then one Saturday, he showed up at the orchard before sunrise in his old work boots, carrying a thermos of coffee. Mr. Tallchief handed him a sack and a pair of gloves, and Dwayne spent the whole day gathering fallen pecans in the cold. By afternoon he could not straighten his back. At dusk he sat on the tailgate of a truck with the sack beside him. “Mama,” he said, “Daddy did this for forty years.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “And he loved it,” I said, “every single day.”
On the first Sunday of November, the whole family gathered at the church supper in Fort Gibson. A long table was spread with fried chicken, greens and my pickles in a cut glass dish. Dwayne carried the platters, Crystal poured tea, and the church van sat outside, its windows catching the last sun. When the blessing was said, Dwayne lifted a jar of rind pickles and held it up to the light. “To Mama,” he said, “and to Daddy, who planted a future he never got to harvest.” I wiped my eyes, and I passed the dish, and everyone took a piece.
