He gave me a bag, said, “From what you told me, you’re a farmer. You know how to gather ripe tomatoes without pulling down the vines and bruising the fruit, don’t you?”

I afforded that I did and went to picking. He had one row, and I had the other. We worked right along even with one another, getting hotter and sweatier as the day rolled on.

He said from his row, “You know, the tomato really is a fruit, not a vegetable.”

“It ain’t.”

“It belongs to the nightshade family, and there are nightshade plants that will poison you right down to the toes, but not the tomato.”

“The mater has a family?”

“Not with a mommy and daddy and three kids and a horse. No. Everything, plant or animal, bug and such, is said by science to be part of a specific kingdom, class, family, subfamily, genus, species, and so on. I don’t know all the names without having my books in front of me, but that’s how it is.”

“No shit?” I said.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you, son?”

“Reckon I don’t.”

“Then don’t be so goddamn agreeable. Let me explain it to you.”

Then he did. For most of the day I learned this about maters, that about corn, something about taters, and much about beans, which was called legumes; and there was a name for peas other than peas, though for the life of me I don’t remember it now. Maybe it had the same name. I don’t recall. Radishes had cousins. Sweet taters was distant cousins of the maters, which didn’t seem right, and he threw in that they didn’t belong to the nightshade family like the mater. He said this like I might be relieved to find out they wasn’t. He knew everything there was to know about plants. I myself had plenty of experience plucking, picking, pulling, and digging all that stuff, and I knew how to eat them, but it was beyond me there was more to it than that, or that I was eating plants with family names, which somehow made me feel like a cannibal.

When he had worn down on that topic, I made the mistake of asking him about how he grew such big plants and juicy maters. I remarked on the dark soil, which wasn’t common around East Texas, it being mostly red or sandy white. Well, now, that was like opening a door with a thundering herd of horses behind it, and here they come. It was all about how he turned the vines back into the soil and let them rot instead of pulling them up and tossing them out like lots of farmers do. That was what Pa had done—tossed them out. This fellow said you folded them back in with the plow along with the right amount of dried and cured chicken and horse and hog manure, and wood ashes if your soil was too acid, which it mostly was in East Texas.

I already knew about manure and wood ashes, which me and Pa had used, but by the end of the day I knew all about, or had at least heard about, how all the different kinds of dried shit could be mixed with all manner of wasted food, dead plants, and then heated up naturally as it broke down. He kept saying, “You have to layer it.” All of this made me sleepy on my feet, but to my good I endured it.

Later he sent me up to hitch the horses to a wagon and haul it out to where we had bagged our maters. That trip to the barn and back was nice; the silence was a relief. I, however, was not one who learned from experience. When I got back to him, I asked, “How come you ain’t got no mules, since you got all these horses? It looks like you could afford one.”

“They are good workers, smart and the illegitimate children of the donkey and the horse. But I figure with me on the place, one ass is enough.”

Gradually I was learning not to say anything that might start a discussion, cause he seemed to know a little about everything. Or, to be more exact, he seemed to know a lot about very little. I also had to take his word on matters. For all I knew, he didn’t know raccoon shit from coffee beans. Come to think of it, how the hell was a mater a fruit? I was beginning to have suspicions on the sweet tater. Maybe it was in the nightshade family, too.

We got all those maters hauled in, and it was only midday by then. He was a serious worker.

He said, “I tell you what. I got some chores need done, and if you’d like to do them while I go into town and sell these tomatoes, when I get back I’ll fix us up a good supper of fried chicken. I’ll rewarm the beans, and we’ll keep some tomatoes to go with it—some of the green ones I can batter and fry up. I might even bake us some sweet potatoes to split and butter. Hell, I’ll buy some brown sugar. You like brown sugar on your sweet potatoes?”

For him this seemed a question right up there with the greatest concerns a person might have. I agreed I liked brown sugar on sweet taters and that I could do those chores. It was work akin to what I had been doing all my life, and by the time he was heading into town, I was on my way to toss corn to the chickens, slop the hogs, and so on.

As I went about the chores, I begun to think maybe this fellow was touched, or had caught a musket ball or a chunk of cannon shrapnel in the head and his brain had been knocked loose; maybe even some of it had been blown right out of his skull.

Then something else hit me, and when it did I felt weak in the knees. It wasn’t a new thought, as you’ve probably already guessed, but it kept coming back, and each time it showed up it seemed as fresh as dew on a rose. I was worried again my farmer might be bringing Ruggert back with him. Could be he had just been making like he was nice so as to get a day’s work out of me, then he would turn me over to an old war buddy for castrating and hanging, and then it would be them slicing maters and pouring brown sugar on baked sweet taters, not me. He might joke with Ruggert about how he fooled me about the nightshade family.

I didn’t start thinking seriously on this possibility until late in the day, and about the time I had come to believe that was his purpose and was planning a swift decampment, here he come, clattering down the road in his wagon.

No one was on that road but my man himself, his wagon, and his team.

He was good as his word. After I helped unhitch the horses and we groomed them and put them away, he went out back and picked two fat hens and wrung their necks, doing them both by using his left and right hand at the same time. When he had their necks wrung out good, he popped them, causing their heads to come plumb off in his hands. The chickens hit the ground, spurting blood, running around like they had some place to go. I will tell you true, I have seen that done many times, and have done it myself, but I never did get used to it. It made me want to jump and holler.

Finally the chickens fell over. We took them, sat on overturned tubs, and went to plucking feathers. He had us toss the feathers in another tub, said they’d be mixed into his compost pile, as he called it, that being the layered business he had told me about.

It took some time, but we got them plucked, then he took a knife and cut them open, took out the sweetbreads, put them in a pan, then cut the chickens up quick and smooth, tossed their parts in the pan, too.

Wasn’t long after that that the chickens was washed, flour-rolled, salted and peppered, and set to frying. When it was done, we took a gizzard apiece to start with, then came the livers and hearts, then a leg apiece, and so on right down to the necks. I even chewed open a bone and sucked on it.

“I seen Sam Ruggert today,” he said when we come to the part where we was wiping our greasy fingers on nice white napkins.

“Say you did?” I tried to make the question casual, but for an instant I thought my fried chicken might come up, leave the house on its own, collect its head and feathers, and go back to the coop.

“Yeah. He was still all het up about the darky that come on to his wife and tried to take her womanhood, like he and everyone that ever knew her hadn’t already done that. Hell, I fucked her once. He said he fought you off and you stole a horse and run away. When your old pa tried to stop you from a life of crime, you killed him and burned him up and his house. He didn’t mention the hog.”