Best Australian Yarn: A Tomato Grave for a Tomato Man by Abby Guy

Dad bought a tomato plant. He brought it home in the evening with a single, terracotta pot and a bag of premium soil. It was an insipid thing, as far as plants went—all twiggy stems and leaves with browned edges. ‘It was on sale,’ Dad told us. ‘Cheap.’ ‘Dead,’ I said, but Dad only grinned and handed me the pot. I followed him into the garden, younger brother Jake in tow, and we stood at Dad’s side as he re-potted the plant and set it down. It fit right in, that tired old tomato plant, looked just like the rest of our garden next to the thistle and crabgrass. If I had known then, what that tomato plant meant—would mean, for us—I’d have stood on it, snapped its twigs, removed its dying leaves one by one. But I didn’t know, and I wouldn’t for some time, and so I held the watering can while Dad turned the tap at the base of our rusted rainwater tank. ‘A good drink and she’ll be right as rain,’ he said. When Mum came home that evening, Dad was shooing spoggies from their perch on the edge of the back fence. Mum brushed two dead leaves from the dining table, and they crumbled into dust in her palm. ‘Where’s your father?’ she asked. Jake grabbed fistfuls of her scrubs in his hands and grinned. ‘Toh-mah-toh,’ he said. Mum frowned. She couldn’t eat tomatoes, her stomach had trouble digesting the seeds. It took three days for the tomato plant to grow a new leaf, and two weeks before small, pebble sized blooms of green sprouted from its stem. Dad dragged me from my homework to show me with a big, sweeping gesture of his hand and a ‘didn’t I tell you?’ Ten more weeks and the tomatoes had grown red and round and ripe. Later, Mum would tell us that maybe Dad had been bored. He’d been laid off from his job that week, his third in two months, and maybe he needed to busy his hands. He never did find a new job. I suspect he never tried. One tomato plant soon turned into two, then three. He always brought them home before Mum’s shift at work had ended, as though to hide the suspicious correlation between a growing population of tomato plants in our yard and the decrease in his resume printing. We started to eat a lot of tomatoes. Tomatoes in our salads, tomato casseroles, and tomatoes stuffed and oven baked. Mum blended them to make Bolognese sauce, and Jake and I packed Bolognese and cheese toasties for lunch at school until I worried that my classmates could smell the tomatoes on my breath, on my clothing, on my skin. Tomato soup, tomato chutney, tomato risotto, tomato omelettes. No matter how many tomatoes Mum tried to digest, she could not make the growing pile of tomatoes go away. Tomato crates lined the walls of our dining room, filled the bottom of our pantry, spilled out onto the deck. I worried I’d find tomatoes in my shoes or in my backpack or, worse yet, they’d fall out of my pockets at school, and I’d forever be known as Bolognese Boy. Ketchup Kid. Tomato Tosser. Dad complained about the bugs. There were bugs, he reckoned, eating his tomatoes. They clustered on the underside of the leaves, slowly eating away until the plants withered. One day, I returned home from school to find Dad at the dining table, books spread across the surface. Ten Tomatoes That Changed the World, Big Red Book of Tomatoes, Tantalising Tomatoes. ‘They’re aphids,’ he said, ‘the bugs. Shoulda added dishwashing liquid to the water.’ He emptied one of Mum’s spray-bottles and created a concoction of water and soap. He added garlic and rosemary, because another author said so, and spent the rest of the day spraying and wiping each individual leaf. Mum worked late, and when she came home Jake nagged for dinner. ’Where’s your father?’ Mum asked. ‘Bugs in the tomatoes.’ That weekend, Mum drove Jake and I to a farm down south and we hand-pick two chickens to gift Dad. Mum told us they’d eat the bugs, the snails and the slugs too, and we named the hens Teriyaki and Casserole. Teri and Cass. They liked to follow Jake around the garden. He turned over rocks and sticks to expose millipedes, beetles, and earthworms. Mum liked eggs, and she fried them sunny-side-up on Saturday mornings and baked a quiche pie on Thursdays—no tomatoes. But the chickens ran out of weeds to eat, and aphids, and snails, until all that was left were tomato plants. I woke one evening and the chickens were nowhere to be found. For the next week, we ate chicken pot pie, satay chicken, and chicken pasta. Jake cried. Mum didn’t speak to Dad. The first night, I vomited chicken pot pie in the toilet and watched as bits of Terri and Cass spun around the bowl between soupy carrots and peas. There was mould growing at the top of our kitchen window. Mum couldn’t reach it to scrub it away. She tried, but even standing barefoot on the kitchen bench she was too short to lean over the sink and scrub while keeping balance. On a rare day, Dad was sat at the dining table instead of outside, glasses perched at the tip of his nose as he read about tomato growth patterns in Australian winters. Mum chose this day to point out the spot of mould. ‘There’s mould growing in the kitchen,’ she said. Dad did not glance away from his book. It was called Know, Sow, Grow. ‘Perhaps there’s a leak, it’s been a wet year,’ he said. ‘I can’t quite reach it,’ she said. ‘Do you think you could…?’ Her voice trailed off. Dad didn’t raise his eyes, and I looked up from the comic book I was reading to glance at Mum. She was standing in front of the sink, staring at the spot. ‘No point cleaning it up, it’ll just keep comin’ back. Best get the leak fixed,’ Dad said. Mum stared directly at him now. ‘Could you call your friend? Stephen? Doesn’t he work in window installation?’ ‘Brett. And he’s a roof repair specialist. Did you know there’s a tomato species called Yellow Pear? Pear like the fruit. Apparently, they’re good for pickling.’ I could see Mum’s teeth grind. ‘Brett. Do you think you can call him, anyway? See if he’ll take a look?’ Dad made a noise of agreement. He never called Brett. Later, I helped Mum create a contraption from a broomstick handle and a sponge. She used it to reach the mould and scrubbed it away with a certain angry vigour. The mould regrew every two weeks. There was a dead magpie on our doorstep. I almost didn’t see it on my way inside, almost squashed the remains under the toe of my sneaker. It was a young magpie; the whites of its wings still a muted grey and it looked soft to the touch. The flies hadn’t found it, and there were no maggots beneath its wings. It looked like the young birds that used to line our fence in the spring, and there were red stains on the end of its beak. Tomato stains. When I found Dad in the yard, he was listening to the radio. One of those gardening talk shows was playing through the crackly system, the kind you can phone-in to ask gardening experts for advice, and he was nodding along as the host explained blossom end rot in tomatoes and calcium deficiencies and excess nitrogen in fertilisers. ‘Dad, there’s a dead magpie on our doorstep.’ He didn’t look at me, but he smiled. ‘Magpies were eating my tomatoes.’ Mum helped us bury the magpie in a corner of the garden later that evening. Jake and I scraped away at the earth with our hands until we had dug a shallow grave. Mum wrapped the magpie in one of Jake’s old baby blankets, coloured the soft blue of the sky in spring. She lowered him into the hole and asked us if there was anything we’d like to tell the bird before we wished him well. Jake told him his wings were magnificent, that his feathers were pretty and glossy and that he hoped the magpie knew how handsome he was. I told the magpie I hoped he came back as a bird again, that I hoped he got to use those magnificent wings to fly as far as he wanted. I reminded him to stay away from Dad. I reminded him that tomatoes taste gross. Mum left Dad on a Tuesday. I know this because Dad always browsed late at the hardware store on Tuesdays, and Jake went to Auskick in the evenings, so I was the only one home to witness as Mum collected our things into cardboard boxes. She packed methodically, and slowly, until the only thing left on the shelves was a mug Jake and I had gifted Dad, one that read ‘I love you from my head to-ma-toes’. I didn’t have to ask her why, and for how long, and where, because I knew. She was tired. Tired of tomatoes, tired of Bolognese sauce, tired of scrubbing the orange-red stains from Dad’s shirts, tired of sitting alone in the house while Dad tended to his garden. The mould from the damp spot near the kitchen window had turned black. And so, I was quiet as we reversed out the driveway, and quiet still as I waited in the car while Mum picked up Jake from the footy field. When Jake climbed into the backseat, he tried to ask about the boxes, but the words come out slurred and full of spit around his bubble-gum-blue mouthguard. Mum made eye contact with me in the rear-view mirror, and I smiled at her. I was tired of Bolognese sauce, too. We don’t see my dad again. He didn’t call, or at least if he did, Mum never said anything. I tried to imagine what it’d be like to come home to an empty house and no note. Dad never used the front door, so he wouldn’t have noticed our shoes missing in the entryway. He would have used the back gate and tended to the tomatoes first. Watered, trimmed, picked, checked, and fussed over. It would have been dark before he came inside, ushered in by summer mosquitoes. Perhaps he would have had his first inkling, his first sense of doubt, when the house was dark. Maybe he stubbed his toe on the kitchen island trying to find the light switch and spilled tomatoes from the crate in his hands and across the kitchen tile. Worst of all, I imagined that he hadn’t minded at all. Perhaps he’d pushed the mug aside because now he could fit the crates of tomatoes in the cupboards, too. Tomatoes where the cutlery should be, tomatoes where our toaster had been, tomatoes in the sink and tomatoes in the dishwasher. Maybe tomato vines climbed over my childhood bedframe, crawled into my closet, spurted tomatoes from the walls. Maybe Dad never called because there was nowhere for us to stay anymore. Perhaps if I had visited, I would have had to lie between the vines, feeling tomatoes squash beneath my shoulder blades and the heels of my feet, and wake each morning smelling like soil and last month’s tomato soup. When I finally visit Dad again, I’m too old to worry about tomatoes in the pockets of my jeans. Mum is travelling the northern peak of Western Australia in a beat-up panel van she named Lewis. She doesn’t call and sends postcards instead. She slides photos of herself into each envelope; pictures of the acidic burns on her arms after she’s worked in the mango farms; or her arms wrapped as far as they can reach around the thick, rotund base of a boab tree; and a blurry photo through the window of Lewis, capturing the long-legged gallop of retired thoroughbreds as she races them across the salt-flats. Jake rented an apartment in the city with his mates. He was scouted by the state football team at fifteen and had been preparing for drafting season ever since. I board at the University village while I study, eating instant noodles and picking the mould from bread.One day, my roommate brings home homegrown tomatoes from the local market, and I find myself standing at the gate of my childhood home. There are tomatoes hanging over the side gate. They are bulbous and over-ripe, and their vines choke the metal latch so that I must snap them with my fingers as I push my way through. I am met with a dense thicket of tomato vines and the smell of rotting vegetable. Magpies line the fence. Small magpies, big magpies, young magpies. They chortle to one another as I move through the yard, beating back tomato vines with my bare forearms. I expected to see magpies; I had prepared myself for the corpses that would line the front porch, their open bellies engorged with feeding worms. But these ones are loud, and they bustle against each other as more alight on the fence line. Dad’s red rainboots are in the garden. I see them when I round the corner to our deck, their scarlet toes pointed skyward and soles dirty with garden soil. At first, I think they’ve been discarded, forgotten and unused, because there are spider webs that stretch from the ground to the toe and the morning dew has collected along each thin strand. But then I notice the hem of his pants, and his legs, and Dad is still wearing the boots, which means that’s Dad, lying on the ground. Still. Unmoving. Dead. So dead that there are cobwebs on his red, rubber boots. The ground is slick with mouldy tomatoes, and they squish like thick chutney beneath my knees. The red juice feels as though it is seeping into my skin, and I would spend the following days scrubbing tomato seeds from beneath my nails until the skin was red-raw and weeping. The tomato vines have engulfed him, buried Dad in tomatoes and earth. The fruit that rots by his torso is lumpy and misshapen; picked apart by the birds that line the fence. Vines have weaved in through his clothing and beneath his skin and back out through his orifices until I can no longer tell where Dad begins and the tomatoes end. Aphids cluster behind his ears and in-between his fingers and all I can think about is the spray bottle in the kitchen full of soapy water and garlic cloves. Dad was consumed by the care of his garden, and it has eaten him whole. A tomato grave for the tomato man.