The Harvest Her Neighbors Brought In

Around eleven a truck I did not recognize pulled in behind the others, and a young couple climbed out I’d only ever seen at the back pew on Christmas and Easter, Jeff and Marlene Osland, who farmed a half section two townships over and had three children small enough to still need car seats. Marlene unloaded all three kids and set them up at a folding table in the shade of my porch with a box of crayons and a stack of paper plates, and Jeff went straight to Hobie to ask where he was needed, no hello, no how are you holding up, just put me to work. I found out later that Jeff had lost his own father in a tractor rollover six years back, the October before harvest, and the Tarski name had been one of the first trucks in his own yard that year. He had been waiting, he told me quietly over a sandwich that afternoon, for six years to be the truck that showed up for somebody else.

A woman named Darlene Rask, who I knew mostly from quilting circle and not well besides that, put a cup of coffee into my hands around ten o’clock and did not say one single word to me, just stood there next to me at the fence a minute, and then went back to the kitchen to keep the sandwiches coming. I have thought about that minute of silence more than almost anything anybody said to me all week.

I asked Hobie, more than once that first day, why. Just why, flat out, because I could not make my mind settle around it. Forty two men and women from three townships, dropping their own combines, their own fieldwork, their own cattle, to come cut beans that were not theirs, for a woman most of them knew mainly as the one who kept the fire department’s books straight and brought a hot dish to every potluck.

“Walt would tell you to mind your own business and let us work,” Hobie said the first time I asked, which was true and also not an answer, and I let it go because the beans were coming off the field in front of me faster than I had let myself hope.