Cutting Matthew’s Beans you have another brother? The knife was sharp enough to slice through the tough bean seeds and flesh colored purple, green, or yellow wax. Mother always wrapped around and around my thumb, nail, hangnails and all, thick, sticky masking tape. The tiny bean shards pelted against the shine of the stainless bowl. I knelt on my stool to reach. The oscillating fan kept watch breathing in harvest air, blowing out cool onto our sweaty faces. “Mom, you’ve been planting beans for years.” For close to forty years, in fact. Through the big drought, through seven pregnancies. she stooped, in body ache, ripping weeds. Yes, her belly swelled in that acre garden and jumped with our kicking legs and hands. What of beans she gathered that August before the September of Matthew? I wasn’t there yet. I was still a decade away. Were her tears the pickling agent? Did each sob aid the force of her thumb? She said he ran through the sheets dangling over the clover-covered lawn. He swang high on his teeter-totter, leeter-lotter. Even the neighbors heard him sing, standing tall on the picnic table, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love,” Were these beans the children of the seeds gathered while he sang? I bet she used the same knife then to chop them. “That man was driving too fast… I should’ve been outside watching him.” She spoke of him while cutting beans. The big Christmas coloring book on the highest shelf was his. She wrapped it in plastic, just like his teddy bear. She patted my behind, told me to go outside and run. I ran then and hid under the picnic table. Friends don’t believe one is missing from the photo. The Martin flock is already large. We are not eight. We are nine. We eat Matthew’s beans at Thanksgiving from mother’s acre garden, green, purple, and wax yellow. Perhaps he still observes, breathing in harvest air, blowing out cool onto our sweaty faces. keeping watch.