Story about Abram Epp

Story Told At Men’s Breakfast

Read more about Abram Epp here.

My father-in-law, Abram Jacob Epp, weeded quickly around the tomato plants, so he had time to talk. He  pulled out pigweed, bindweed, night shade, and grass like a whirlwind, chopped the  purslane and  chickweed with a  swipe of the hoe, and came over to help me because I was new at the job. Tomatoes didn’t like wetness he said.

“I would rather have seven years of drought than seven years of rain.”

This was in July of 1968, a wet year. By that time his black thumbnail was growing back from having been pinched between the tomato planter’s hitch and the tractor, and the tomatoes filled acre after acre with a green haze, in spite of one deluge after another of rain.

The brim of Dad’s tattered felt hat hid the wrinkles in his forehead, and the lip under his sandy moustache curled ever so slightly as he looked at approaching thunderheads one Monday morning. He said to them, “Why do you  always have to pour? Wouldn’t just a little rain do?”

We hid in the shelter of my brother-in-law’s shed as we watched the clouds sail overhead, fetching with them an impressive show of lightning and thunder, but they withheld their rain as if in response to dad’s reproach. I, my wife, and all the rest of the Epp family returned to the fields where  the bracken grew and hordes of mosquitoes thrived. Dad alleged he didn’t have any use for repellents. I said I did. After awhile he mumbled, “Give it here. I’ll see if it’s any good.”

I handed him a can of Off. He sprayed it indiscriminately before I could warn him. He blinked his eyes for awhile, but kept on hoeing. I felt relieved when he resumed his chatter. Meanwhile we went after the weeds – tall ones, small ones and creepy ones – to help the tomato plants achieve their purpose in life.

However, the clouds reneged on their promise, stole up at two o’clock in the morning and delivered themselves of yet another burden of water. I lay awake in bed  and heard heavy raindrops strike the window panes in our bedroom. I imagined my father-in-law getting up, putting on his boots and walking on the saturated ground carrying a spade, the dark green leaves of the tomato plants brushed by his boots, to dig trenches. I saw him trudging along the rows, lifting the sodden soil to make tiny silver rivulets. I heard the storm clouds muttering in the east as they lit up the sky through my bedroom window, in a final gesture of defiance to the lone figure in the fields.

The next morning when I came to work I saw new furrows in the ground. The sun came out and tried to set things right with Dad, only to make them worse. Bright and boiling hot, it baked the soil until it parted, and cracks appeared like those in the bottom of a dried out river basin. Between the fissures were islands of loam coated with thick, slick mud. Here Dad’s tomato plants wilted, their yellow leaves drooping from weary stems. One of my brothers-in-law appeared with his tractor and disc on the rim of the patch. He trudged over to where we were bent over pulling weeds. He told Dad that he might as well disc the “crap under.”

“Not yet,” Dad replied. “Give them a chance.” He rested on his hoe. “Give them a chance. A little nitrate and they’ll come ’round.”

I saw the weeds rising from the dead. The tiny white chickweed flowers winked at me from the dust they were supposed to be turning into, the roots of the purslane were feeling the soil, and the giant pigweed, in its supposed death throes, had been resurrected. Dad didn’t even look up as he plucked away at the bindweed, whose roots were entrenched deep in the row of tomatoes.

“The Trefflin got washed away.”

I bent over to extract another plant from the ever-present bindweed. My brother-in-law moved on. Dad called after him, “I’ll spray these rows again tomorrow.”

Tomorrow came. Dad went out into the field with his  tractor pulling a fat-bellied cask from which branched out two thick black hoses, connected to a boom furnished with nozzles. The morning breezes picked up the tiny droplets of mist that emanated from the needle-like holes and played with them until they reached the tractor where Dad was seated.

A piece of earth that was black as night lay north of the farmhouse; we called it “the back forty” or the “Land of Egypt.” Dad used to say to me, in the most serious tones, as he and I leaned on our hoes, “I tell you, there is oil here. There is oil, I tell you.”

And there was. Barrels and barrels of it. Only he didn’t live to see it.

There was the patch of early tomatoes that grew in a sandy field. While the late tomatoes were beginning to flourish despite the rain, these plants drooped unhappily, and yielded their fruit in sadness. We dropped our baskets, crouched beside them and scanned their fruit. Some tomatoes were green, some were not quite ripe enough, and then there were those that had just the right amount of redness. Off they came with a twist of the wrist. We made the same snap judgments over and over. One day Dad said, “This is the last time.”

We were pleased.

The next morning he said, “Let’s run through them just once more.”

So we all bent over these hapless plants again, and when I looked up I saw the vegetable dealer coming in his new dark green Chrysler.  His white shirt was open at the collar and he walked respectfully along the row to where Dad was kneeling. I heard him say that he would buy dad’s tomatoes for $2.50.

Dad got up. He nodded his head in agreement and talked to the man for quite awhile, his hands going all the time. An 11-quart basket for $2.50 was a good price. The next morning when we came to work, Dad said, “Let’s pick them once more.”

The next morning, when the sky was as blue as blue, and with absolutely no rain in sight, Dad said, “Let’s run over the patch just this one more time.”

And the next day, and the next.

The dealer came back. He came back to the field and stood there while Dad kneeled at the plant, and  told him in sad tones that he should have been at the market today, and seen it. Dad didn’t reply but kept right on swiftly removing the few tomatoes from the plants and putting them in a basket. The man continued in a pleading voice that it hurt him. Dad didn’t even look up. Finally the man blurted out $1.50.

Dad never missed a tomato, just kept right on picking. The man left.

The next morning I arrived at the field to find Dad carefully scraping the ground with a hoe to cover the exposed roots of a tomato plant. Its stem was coarse and bumpy. It carried only a tuft of leaves at the top, and no tomatoes. I asked dad why he didn’t chop the plant off and be done with it.

He replied, “Give it a chance.”

In the distance I saw row upon row of bushy tomato plants in a mist of green, greeting each other like long lost relatives, entwining their branches. There were hundreds of thousands of them, and nowhere was there a plant as sick as this one. They had survived the rains.  Dad had given them all a chance.

Late in October, when sometimes the rooftops already had a sheen of white, my brothers-in-law and Dad were still delivering double loads. One day the Windsor Star took a picture of Dad on sitting on his last load, brim full of large, red, perfect tomatoes. One arm rested on his knee the other on the edge of the wagon. His eyes peered from under the straw hat’s shadow, and looked directly at the photographer.

Later my mother-in-law told us that Dad frequently came into the kitchen hungry, but that he would put his bologna sandwich down after the first bite. His stomach refused to take the rest.

Shortly thereafter he went to the hospital and stayed there. One of my brothers-in-law picked up the brand new 1977 LTD Ford from the hospital parking lot and brought it back home. Three weeks later, Dad died.

My brothers-in-law and I shuffled disinterestedly among the array of coffins at the funeral parlour.  What difference does it make? We were in a daze. How could he have had cancer? Cancer from what?

“Give me some milk to drink,” he used to say to my mother-in-law when he came into the kitchen from the fields after spraying the tomatoes. Perhaps, we surmised, the bitter taste of the herbicides that passed over his lips had been the taste of venom, and he thought the milk would protect him.

He died on October 31, 1977. His grandchildren did not want to go out trick and treating. We buried him where he had wanted to be buried, near the edge of the graveyard.

“I’ll roll down into the valley,” he used to say jokingly.  We have often wished he might come back to talk to us for awhile.