Two Gardens

Harold and Jim had lived next door to each other for thirty years, and for most of those years they had not been friends. They spoke over the garden wall about once a week, in short sentences about the weather, and each man believed, deep in his heart, that the other was the most difficult person in the village. The reason was the show.

Every summer, on the last Saturday of the season, the village hall filled with long tables, and the tables filled with vegetables, and a judge came out from town to decide which were the best. Every summer, for thirty years, the first prize had gone to Harold or to Jim, and never to anybody else. Whoever came second spent the winter thinking about it.

Harold grew beans. He grew them up tall sticks in the warmest corner of his garden, and in the evening he talked to them, quietly, when he thought nobody could hear. Jim grew potatoes. He did not talk to anything, but his potatoes came out of the ground clean and heavy and all the same size, and nobody in the village could explain how he did it.

In June, Harold's chest began to hurt. He said nothing for a week, because saying something would mean the doctor, and the doctor would mean the hospital. Then, one warm morning, he fell between his bean rows, and it was Jim, standing at his kitchen window, who saw him go down and called the ambulance.

The hospital kept Harold for six weeks. A small operation, the doctor said. Then rest. No digging. And no garden.

Harold lay in his white bed and thought about his beans. Nobody would water them. The weeds would come up through the soil and take everything. By the day of the show his garden would be yellow and dead, and Jim would win, and, worse than that, Jim would win against nobody.

What Harold did not know was this. Every evening that summer, when his own work was finished, Jim climbed over the wall with a bucket. He watered Harold's beans. He pulled the weeds out of Harold's soil, on his knees, in the dark, where nobody could see him. He tied the young plants to their sticks. He complained the whole time, very quietly, because a man has to be honest somewhere. And he told nobody, not even his wife.

Harold came home in the last week of the summer. He walked into his garden expecting to find it dead, and instead he found the finest beans he had ever grown. He stood still for a long time. A garden cannot look after itself for six weeks. Any man who has ever grown anything knows that.

He looked at the wall. He looked at Jim's kitchen window. Then he went inside and said nothing, because there are things you can break by talking about them.

On the day of the show, the judge stood over Harold's beans for a long time and then gave them first prize. The village cheered. Harold took the cup and carried it, slowly, across the hall, to where Jim stood beside his potatoes.

"Second again," said Jim. "You have all the luck."

"That is true," said Harold, and he put the cup down between the potatoes. "It grew in my garden. But I never said it was mine."

They drank tea that afternoon at the small table behind Jim's shed, and they argued about the right way to grow beans until it was dark. The show had cost them thirty years. It seemed only fair to let it pay a few of them back.