The Tomato That Took All Summer

The folding tables go out the first week of August. They stand on the mown strip at the end of the gravel lane, under the maple that has been dropping its keys all summer, and by mid-morning they are loaded. A hand-lettered board leans against one leg — TOMATOES, in paint that ran in the heat — as if the tables themselves did not make that clear. The stand is open, and for the rest of the month the gravel in front of it stays warm even after the sun goes off it.

The vines took all summer to get here. They were set out in the field while the soil was still cold, and through June they did nothing but hold their ground and grow leaves. Through July they flowered, and most of the flowers dropped in the heat, and where one held on, a small green fruit swelled in the deep shade of its own plant. Then August came on, with nights warm enough to leave every window up and days too heavy to rush through, and the green fruit began its slow change. The color comes in at the bottom first, a dull red rising past the middle while the shoulders stay green and stubborn. The green shoulder is not a flaw. It is the proof the tomato grew in the sun.

The First Bushels

The man who grew them walks the rows in the first hours, before the heat stands up off the gravel, with a picking bucket at his hip. The plants are staked and tied, coarse as rope, nearly as tall as he is, heavy with fruit down low, where the warmth comes off the soil. He turns each tomato in his hand like something he is being shown for the first time, finds the best side, and snaps the stem with the ball of his thumb. The sound is small and clean, the way a stem should come off.

He culls as he goes. The split ones go into a separate bucket — the ones that drank too much after a rain and outgrew their own skins. Nothing goes back to the field, not even the cracked and the scarred. When the good bucket is full he carries it up the lane while the dew is still wet on the gravel and sets it on the table in the shade. The woman who weighs them out has her own way. She handles a tomato like an egg that cost something — stem down, red side up, in rows, the ugly ones turned to show their best side. Nobody minds the ugliness. A tomato is the one thing in August that is allowed to look like it worked for a living.

The people who come are not browsing. They pick a tomato up, hold it to their nose, and smell the shoulder the way they would smell a melon, and then they buy. She weighs the bags on the hanging scale under the maple, reads the balance, and tells them the number. The change comes out of a tin box. It is a small, exact commerce, the same exchange over and over all month — and all month the tomatoes keep coming up the lane, and the table never quite empties.

Midday at the Stand

In the middle of the day the heat sits in the field like a visible thing. This is the stand's slow hour, but never a quiet one. People come anyway, on purpose, because the hottest part of the day is the best time for a thing that requires nothing of a person. A station wagon pulls in with the windows down and a dog in the front seat. A pickup backs up close to the table and honks, friendly, once. The woman comes out of the house and talks while she weighs, and whoever is standing there talks back. It is the one conversation of the afternoon for some of them, and it is perfectly adequate. An old man comes most days and says the same thing about a tomato he ate when he was young, in another state, and even the regulars listen as if they had not heard it the day before.

The tomatoes on the table give off the smell of their own vines — the same smell raised by brushing against a plant in the row: green, heavy, a little sharp at the end, like something that means to be eaten. It hangs in the shade of the maple all afternoon. It gets on the hands, and it stays there through supper, and nobody minds.

The man comes up from the field at the hottest hour, dark across the back, and the two of them eat their lunch at the end of the table with the tomatoes stacked three deep and giving off their smell. They take their time. By the late afternoon, when the sun drops behind the corn rows across the road and the tassels go dark, the stand fills up again with people stopping on the way home from wherever the day took them. A boy rides up on a bicycle with coins in his pocket and carries his tomatoes home in his T-shirt, held like a hammock. Nobody offers him a bag. The stand has known him since June, and he is too old for a bag in front of his friends.

The Last of the Month

The last weeks are the ones the vines were saving for. The lower branches have gone pale and bare, the fruit hangs higher now, and the late things are coming in all at once — more than the table can hold. The stand sets out a second table and still the tomatoes pile up, heavy, warm from the sun, almost too ripe by the end of the afternoon. It is the one time in August there is enough of a good thing. The canning people start arriving with their own jars, tin and glass, and they ask for the split ones on purpose. Nothing cooks down truer than a tomato that wore itself out getting ripe.

All month the tomatoes have been heavy and warm, and they get heavier and warmer as the month grows old. But the season is turning behind the heat, and the nights are the first to admit it. One night the house cools off, the way a house only cools off in the last week of August, and the morning has a clean edge that the cook stove is glad to see. The field feels it too. Any cold rain now will split what is left on the vine, and the man walks the rows in the slow evenings, not counting days, just reading the fruit, letting the field show him when it is done. That is September's business, and September can have it. For now the tables are still out, the gravel is still warm after supper, and every tomato that comes up the lane has the whole month behind it.