The Tomatoes Knew First

The caterpillars were eating the garden in a straight line.

Maya crouched at the end of the tomato row and pointed down it like she was sighting a rifle. Soren knelt beside her with his notebook open against his knee.

"Look," she said. "They started over there. By the fence. That plant is wrecked."

"Half the leaves are lace," Soren said. He wrote: fence plant, badly chewed.

"Then the next one. Then the next one. They're working their way down toward us."

"Caterpillars eat. That's the whole job."

Maya frowned. She picked a leaf off the plant right in front of them, the one at the far end, the one no caterpillar had reached yet. She bit the edge of it. Then she made a face and spat into the dirt.

"Try this one," she said, and handed him a leaf from the same plant.

Soren chewed a corner. Bitter. So bitter his tongue curled.

"Now try the fence plant," Maya said.

He walked down the row, picked a leaf from a plant that was barely standing, and chewed it. Bitter too. Same exact awful.

"Okay," he said, coming back. "They're both bitter."

"That's the problem." Maya stood up. "The fence plant is being eaten alive. Of course it's fighting back, of course it tastes terrible, the caterpillars are right there chewing on it. But this one." She tapped the far plant. "This one hasn't been touched. Not one bite. Look at it. Perfect leaves."

Soren looked. She was right. The far plant was whole, green, untouched.

"And it tastes just as bad as the one getting eaten," he said slowly.

"Why would it bother?" Maya said. "Nothing's eating it. Making your leaves bitter must cost something. Why spend it before you have to?"

Soren wrote: far plant unbitten but already bitter. Then he stopped writing.

"It knew," he said.

"Plants don't know things. No brain. No nerves. There's nothing to know with."

"But it got ready. Before the caterpillars arrived. Something told it."

They both looked at the row. Between the two plants there was a foot of dry dirt. No roots touching that they could see. No vines. Nothing connecting the eaten plant to the untouched one.

"Through the ground?" Maya said. "Roots talking to roots?"

Soren got down and pushed his fingers into the soil between two plants. Dusty. Loose. He pulled a whole young plant up gently to look. The roots were small, balled up, nowhere near reaching the next plant over.

"Not through the dirt," he said. "They're not touching."

Maya was quiet. She held a bitten leaf up to her nose. Then she held it there longer.

"It smells," she said.

"Leaves smell. Tomato leaves always smell."

"No. The chewed one smells stronger. Way stronger." She walked to the far plant and smelled its whole leaves. Then back to the chewed one. Back and forth, four times, her nose almost touching the leaves each time. "The hurt plant smells sharp. Green and sharp. Like cut grass but meaner."

Soren smelled both. She was right again. The wounded plant was throwing off a smell so strong he could taste it at the back of his throat.

"It's in the air," he said.

"It's in the air," Maya said.

They stood there in the hot row not saying anything. A smell. Coming off a plant being eaten. Drifting one foot, two feet, down the line. And every plant it reached turned bitter before a single caterpillar got there.

"So the fence plant gets bitten," Soren said, working it out loud. "And when it's bitten it lets off this smell. And the smell lands on the next plant."

"And the next plant smells danger," Maya said.

"Plants can't smell."

"They can do whatever this is. They catch it out of the air and they make themselves bitter. So by the time the caterpillars crawl over, the dinner's already ruined." Maya laughed, surprised. "The hurt plant is yelling. The whole row heard it. We just couldn't."

Soren wanted to argue. He looked for the hole in it. He couldn't find one. The far plant was untouched and bitter and there was nothing connecting it to the wounded plant except the air, and the air carried that sharp green smell, and that was the only message there was.

"There's no wire," he said. "No nerve. No root. Nothing we'd call a sense. Just one plant getting hurt and the smell of it going out, and the others reading the smell and getting ready."

"That's a kind of talking," Maya said. "Without a mouth. Without anyone meaning to."

"Or maybe it is meaning to." Soren stopped. "We don't actually know if it means to."

They looked at each other. That one sat heavy and wonderful between them. Nobody knew. The plant might be screaming on purpose to warn its neighbors, or it might just be bleeding out a smell the way you'd bleed, and the neighbors might just be eavesdropping. There was no way, standing here in the dirt, to tell warning from eavesdropping apart.

"The whole garden could be talking," Maya said. "Right now. All of it. The basil. The beans. The thing in the corner we can't identify."

"We're standing in the middle of it," Soren said.

"And we can almost smell it."

Maya reached out and crushed a single tomato leaf between her finger and thumb, hard, on purpose. The sharp green smell bloomed up off it, instant and strong, filling the air around her hand.

Down the row, much too far away to have touched it, a cabbage white butterfly lifted off a leaf and flew the other direction.