As we talked he pulled up and picked some of the strange vegetables and put them in a basket he had brought along.
"You'll want to try them all," he said. "Some of them you may not like at first, but there are others that you will. This one you eat raw, sliced like a tomato, and this one is best boiled, although you can bake it, too…"
I wanted to ask him how he'd come on the vegetables and where they had come from, but he didn't give me a chance; he kept on telling me about them and how to cook them and that this one was a winter keeper and that one you could can and he gave me one to eat raw and it was rather good.
We'd got to the far end of the garden and were starting to come back when Heath's wife ran around the corner of the house.
Apparently she didn't see me at first or had forgotten I was there, for she called to him and the name she called him wasn't Reginald or Reggie, but a foreign-sounding name. I won't even try to approximate it, for even at the time I wasn't able to recall it a second after hearing it. It was like no word I'd ever heard before.
Then she saw me and stopped running and caught her breath, and a moment later said she'd been listening in on the party line and that Bert Smith's little daughter, Ann, was terribly sick.
"They called the doctor," she said, "but he is out on calls and he won't get there in time. Reginald," she said, "the symptoms sound like…"
And she said another name that was like none I'd ever heard or expect to hear again.
Watching Heath's face, I could swear I saw it pale despite his olive tinge of skin.
"Quick!" he said. Taking me by the arm, we ran around in front to his old clunk of a car. He threw the basket of vegetables in the back seat and jumped behind the wheel. I scrambled in after him and tried to close the door, but it wouldn't close. The lock kept slipping loose and I had to hang on to the door so it wouldn't bang.