and uncles and cousins there were, too.
“We have to plant the potatoes first,” he warned.
“Deal,” I said happily.
By the time we got to Jimmy’s, I had heard about
Dwight’s interview with Mrs. Harris and her daugh-
ter, who seemed to disdain the money her parents had
made.
“Not so disdainful that she’s not going to take it,”
I said. “Reid told me she wants to turn the house into
a migrant center or something. If Amy doesn’t get her
grant for the hospital, I’m thinking somebody ought to
introduce them to each other.”
“While Reid was talking, he happen to say what Buck
Harris did to so seriously piss off his ex-wife last spring?
Assuming she is his ex-wife and not his widow.”
“Besides taking a younger mistress?” I asked.
“You’re the one with the woman’s intuition,” he said.
“But Richards and I both got the impression that she’s
using the mistress as a smoke screen to keep from talk-
ing about what really happened.”
While I settled up with Jimmy, Dwight went on and
picked up Cal so that the three of us got home at the
same time. I called Daddy to see if he wanted to meet
us later, then changed into jeans and sneakers. By the
time I got outside, Dwight and Cal had cut the seed
potatoes into chunks, making sure that each chunk had
one or two eyes that would sprout into a plant. Seth
had opened a furrow about eight inches deep when he
was here with the plows, and Cal and I dropped the
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MARGARET MARON
potatoes in the furrow, cut side down, about a foot
apart. Dwight followed along behind with the hoe and
covered them with three or four inches of dirt. In a
week or so, after they’d sprouted, he would come back
and pull another few inches of dirt over the stems until
eventually they would be hilled up at least a foot deep
in the sandy loam.
“Why so deep?” Cal asked when the process was de-
scribed to him.
“Because the new potatoes form between the chunk
we’re planting and the surface of the soil,” I explained.
“We have to give them enough room to grow or
else they’ll pop through the ground,” said Dwight. “If
they’re exposed to light, they’ll turn green and green
potatoes are poison.”
With less than five pounds of potatoes to plant, it
didn’t take us long to get them in the ground.
Then we washed up and I put my guitar in the back
of the truck.
