Benji and the School Garden

Standard Four’s garden had been growing for one full school year.

It was a real garden — not decorative, not symbolic, but a working vegetable plot that Miss Josephine’s class had planted in September and tended through every term: the carrots, the callaloo, the tomatoes, and in the far corner, a single row of okra that had become a matter of pride because okra was difficult and it had come in well.

The harvest was supposed to be in June. A formal harvest, at which the class would cook a meal from what they had grown and share it with the school.

On a Tuesday morning in May, someone had taken the tomatoes.

Not all of them. Enough to matter. Clean picking — they had been ripe, someone had gone through the row and taken what was ready.

Benji was at the garden fence.

“Third morning,” said a girl named Sasha, who was in Standard Four and had been the one to discover the first theft the previous week. She was nine and furious in the specific way that nine-year-olds were when something they had worked hard on was interfered with. “We’ve been coming early but we’re not early enough.”

“Whoever is doing this knows the school schedule,” Nadine said. “They come after the night caretaker’s last round and before the students arrive.”

“Which is about five in the morning,” Omar said.

“Which is when Benji arrives,” Clevie said. He looked at the dog. “You’ve been here three mornings. Have you seen them?”

Benji looked at the garden. Looked at the lane at the back of the school — a thin service lane rarely used.

“That lane,” Nadine said. “They come through the service lane. The garden backs onto it.”

“The fence on the lane side,” Omar said. “Is it locked?”

“There’s a latch,” Sasha said. “From the inside. But you can reach through the gap and unlatch it from the outside if you know where the latch is.”

“Which means someone has been inside,” Omar said. “And knows the latch.”

The caretaker, Old Percy — the same man who maintained the cricket ground — had been well enough to return to work in April. He used the service lane. He knew the latch. He also knew, because he was in the school grounds very early every morning, that he was not the one taking the tomatoes.

He had an idea, though.

“There’s been a car in the service lane,” he said, when Omar asked him. “Four, five in the morning. I’ve seen headlights from the back window. I didn’t think anything of it — people park there sometimes. But it’s been regular.”

“What kind of car?”

“Truck. Small truck. White.”

He said this, and then he said: “You know who has a white truck and works the early market?”

They did not know.

He said a name.

The name was a produce vendor who sold vegetables at the Thursday market — not the Cliffside market, a market further along. A vendor whose stall had, in recent weeks, been notable for very good tomatoes at very reasonable prices.

Sergeant Peart handled it. The vendor — whose name Sergeant Peart did not share with the children, because the children did not need to know — was spoken to and the visits to the service lane stopped.

The tomato plants still had fruit on them. Not what had been taken. But enough.

The Standard Four class made their meal in June as planned. They invited Nadine, because Nadine had helped, and through Nadine they invited Omar and Clevie, and through everyone they invited Benji, who sat outside the kitchen door and received a tomato, which he did not eat.

“He doesn’t eat tomatoes,” Clevie said.

“He didn’t come for the tomato,” Sasha said. She was nine and she was learning.