Plot Seventeen

For forty years plot seventeen had been Bill's, and Eileen had been the woman who brought the flask at eleven. That was the arrangement and it had suited them. Now Bill was three weeks in the ground and the runner beans did not know it. They went on. That was the cruelty and also, she would think later, the mercy of them. She came on the Tuesday because Tuesday was a flask day, and she stood at the gate with the flask in both hands and could not make her feet go in. The beans needed water. She could see from the gate that they needed water. A plant does not attend the funeral. A plant simply asks, and asks, and Bill was not there to answer, and so she went in, finally, and answered for him. The watering can was where he always left it. Of course it was. He had not known he would not be back to move it.