“This is against the law,” said Eva, squinting her eyes and taking a little puff. Still, she thought, remembering the backward-facing barbs on every grain of rice, how could a thing be wicked when it was so easy to harvest? She lay back on the bench and closed her eyes. Little red pinpoints of light spread and burst into sparkles.

“God wot!” said Eva.

“Yeah,” said Louis.

The summer day seemed to swell and ebb.

“There’s a bronze sundial under those Seven Sisters,” said Eva.

“Yeah,” said Louis.

“I broke a teacup here once.”

“Yeah.”

The next afternoon a little propeller airplane flew low over the house, dipping and circling. That night Eva and Louis pulled up every one of the plants and threw them over the fence to the cows. All night there was that rhythmic munch, munch, munch, and when the airplane came back in the morning, nothing was left but a few straggling rice plants, starved for sunlight, and three sweet-faced Jersey cows snuffling their wet noses against the fence.

In the 1970s, Louis’s sister Belle rode the bus out to California and married a poet. But she grew homesick, and she lured her husband back across the continent with poetical descriptions of Gulf breezes and the green evening mists in her great-grandmother’s old garden. They planted a little eucalyptus tree behind the roses, a memento of California, Belle went to work in the family feed mill, and Eva cleared out a space for the California poet in a back room where old guns had been stored. But the damp and heat didn’t agree with him, and no one understood his work.

“Nice-looking young fellow Belle brought back from California.”

“Calls himself a poet.”

“That’s a real poetical family out there. I remember old Miss Anna carving out that poem, something about a garden.”

“Sure did, chipped every letter out of a slab of marble she got down at the monument shop. Took her a whole summer.”

“This California boy, though, he writes his on paper. Uses a typewriter I believe.”

“Yeah, well, that ain’t quite the same thing, now is it?”

When the poet broke out in prickly heat rash at the end of his second August, it was the last straw, and he packed his typewriter up and headed back out West. The eucalyptus tree, however, got its roots down into the septic-tank drainfield, and within three years it was towering over the garden, shedding great ragged slabs of bark in the fringed pool and breaking Belle’s heart with the clean, sharp smell of her California love.