My father is seventy-nine years old.

His name is Arne Lindqvist. He was born in this house, on this land, in 1947. His father was born here before him. He worked thirty-four years at the paper mill in town until it closed, and then he worked another twelve driving a school bus, and then he retired and did what he’d always wanted to do.

He grew things.

My mother, Marta, died three years ago this October. Pancreatic cancer. Four months from the diagnosis to the funeral. They’d been married fifty-one years.

After she died, I thought Dad would let the garden go. I thought he’d sell the house and move into one of those senior apartments in town, the ones with the little patios and the shuffleboard court.

He didn’t. If anything, the garden got bigger.

Dad lives alone. He eats like a bird. A bowl of oatmeal in the morning. A sandwich at noon. A piece of fish and some potatoes at night. That’s it. He’s thin as a fence post.

One summer, maybe two years ago, I stood at the edge of those nine rows of green beans and did the math in my head. There had to be hundreds of pounds of beans out there. Thousands of tomatoes. Enough potatoes to feed an army.

“Dad,” I said. “Who are all those beans for?”

He was on his knees in the dirt, tying up a tomato plant that had fallen over in the wind. He didn’t look up.

“People,” he said.

That was it. That was the whole answer.

I waited for him to say more. He didn’t. He just kept tying the tomato plant with a strip of old bedsheet, his big knotted fingers moving slow and careful.

I figured he was giving them away to the neighbors. Or taking them to church. Or maybe just letting them rot. I didn’t ask again.

I should have.

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The neighbor was a man named Brent.

Brent Hollis. He’d built the big gray house on the old Swenson lot last spring.