OUT OF our big front window I could see the ghost of the moon, sunlight still smouldering low in the sky. I balanced a red potato in the palm of my hand. It was just before supper, and the smell of roasting chicken wafting from the kitchen made me ravenous. When I held the potato between my fingers and up to the window, it eclipsed the moon’s milky light. I could hear the snicks of a knife and thud after thud as Mom sliced the seed potatoes and dropped them into a bucket by the kitchen sink. She made sure each piece had an eye.
At the table we filled our plates with mashed potatoes and creamed corn from a can. Dad always took my special piece of chicken, the smallest piece of white meat with the wishing bone inside, but I’d sneak it from his plate and he’d pretend he didn’t see. He carved the breast meat for himself and gave Barry both the legs. Mom claimed a thigh and the Pope’s nose, the polyp of fat and crispy skin that stuck out from the back end where the tail used to be. The four of us soaked everything with gravy Mom made from the drippings. The gravy was the best part of any meat Mom roasted.
After supper, my brother left the house for a marble tournament in the schoolyard; Dad sipped a beer. I cleaned the table and helped Mom with the dishes. Then we headed out to the yard. It had always been my brother who helped with the planting. But now I was old enough. In the porch I pulled on my rubber boots; Dad, his leather workboots with the hard toes; Mom, an old pair of curling shoes with the laces gone. Dad had tilled our long back garden the week before. The ground was dark and damp. Every spring when the snow melted, runoff streamed down the alley and pooled in that end of the yard. The tops of my boots rolled down so I’d look like a pirate, I waded into it until water leaked inside and soaked my socks.
Mom had planted the seeds for peas and beans on her own a few days before. Our task now was the potatoes. We started at the far end near the alley. Dad dug a hole, Mom dropped a piece of potato in, Dad let the dirt slide from his shovel to cover it, and I stamped the mound of earth flat. I followed my parents row after row, looking back after each was done to see my footprints mapping the spots where the green would push through. One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes, four. We worked through the twilight, our feet sinking in the turned earth. No one talked. My parents didn’t get mad at each other. We each had our job to do. Five potatoes, six potatoes, seven potatoes, more. The planting couldn’t have been done without me.
AFTER THE FIRST growth appeared, each stem and leaf erupting through the soil with the force of a small volcano, I walked down the rows beside Mom. She watered the plants with a black rubber hose. As the plants filled out, we’d peer closely at the leaves, checking for potato bugs. They had tan heads and orange-yellow backs with vertical black stripes, as if they’d dressed in their best dinner jackets for their juicy meal. Mom dropped the bugs we found into a large corn-syrup can with a few inches of kerosene in the bottom. I loved to crack them between my fingers first. We’d check the underside of leaves for tiny orange eggs that I’d squash. The ones we missed would hatch into larvae, horrid creatures that looked like a cross between a slug and a ladybug, two rows of black dots along each side, their red backs soft and sticky.
In late summer, after Mom had picked the peas and beans, she announced it was time to dig up the potatoes. She’d stopped watering by then, and the ground was dry. Dad dug near the bushy plants and pulled the tops. He and Mom collected the big potatoes underneath and dropped them into a bucket. I stayed behind while they moved to the next plant, reached my hands into the dark earth and scrounged for the small potatoes they didn’t get. Some the size of jaw breakers, others of robins’ eggs, they were beautiful, and I knew they were the best to eat, boiled in their skins and drizzled with butter. But I didn’t find harvesting potatoes as much fun as stomping them into the earth or killing the bugs that devoured their leaves. After a row or two, I ran to the alley to play with my friends.
MOM’S GOAL every year was to grow enough potatoes to last us through the winter. That wasn’t easy, because every day was potato day at our house. I hated peas from a can, I’d refuse a cooked carrot, but I never turned down a potato, boiled or mashed or scalloped, sliced and fried in bacon fat or pulped with a fork for the topping of shepherd’s pie. Mom would mix new potatoes with fresh peas and cook them in a cream sauce made from butter, flour, milk, and lots of salt and pepper. My father always asked for that. When he got throat cancer in his early fifties, and the cobalt dried up his saliva, few of his other favourite foods would be moist enough to swallow.
We couldn’t eat all the potatoes we grew, though. We had to save enough for planting. The seed potatoes were the ones at the bottom of the bin in the cellar. As the months passed, their fresh, outdoor odour gave way to fetid. The potatoes softened and turned wet and brown, as if we’d dug them from the muck of a slough instead of the parched summer soil. From the potato bin, they’d send out pale sprouts like underwater feelers, looking for the light that couldn’t reach them.
I never questioned why we ate so many potatoes. But the potatoes served for supper at my friend’s houses were definitely a different kind. Our garden’s earthy signature—the coldness of the ground in spring, the runoff from the alley, water from our hose, and the dirt my father sweetened with manure from my grandparents’ farm—was as familiar as the salt I licked from the sun-browned skin on my forearms. They were our potatoes, and I had helped make them. I had seen their beginning in the moon’s frail light.