Forty Plates on the Tailgate

Kristin said it at noon coffee, in the machine shed, with the big door rolled up and the October wind coming in off the stubble.

She said it with a smile, the way people say things they have already decided are true.

“No offense, Julie,” she said, holding her coffee in both hands. “But roast beef and potatoes every single night is a little plain. This year, for the last day, we’re doing it right.”

There were eleven people on our harvest crew that fall, nine men and two women, and every one of them looked down at their boots.

Nobody wanted to be the one whose face showed anything. I knew most of those boots by now.

I was standing by the parts counter with a plastic tub of my oatmeal bars, because noon coffee is my job too.

I set the tub down very carefully. I remember thinking that if I set it down any harder, someone would hear what I was feeling.

“I booked a caterer out of Des Moines,” Kristin went on. “They do weddings. Twelve hundred dollars, forty people, brisket and smoked chicken and a real cheese board. Linen on the tables. I want to get pictures for the website.”

Eric, her husband, smiled at her like a man who could not believe his luck.

He is Dan’s younger brother, 48 years old, and he had been a bachelor so long that the whole county had given up on him. Then Kristin came along.

My husband, Dan, was leaning on the tire of the big four wheel drive tractor with his cap pushed back.

He looked across the shed at me. We have been married 28 years, and I knew that look. It said, please, Jules, not today.

So I smiled and said, “That sounds nice, Kristin.” Then I picked my tub of bars back up and passed them around, the same as I had for 26 harvests, and every hand took one.

Twenty-Six Harvests

I should tell you who I am, so you understand what that sentence cost me. My name is Julie Rasmussen.

I am 50 years old, and I married into a corn and soybean farm in north central Iowa when I was 22.

Dan’s mother, Joan, was still running the kitchen then. Every afternoon in September and October, she put a roast in a blue speckled enamel roaster, peeled a mountain of potatoes, and drove the whole supper out to the field in the back of a Chevy pickup.

The first fall I was married, she handed me a paring knife and said, “The men can’t stop, so the supper has to go to them.” That was the whole lesson. I peeled potatoes beside her for four harvests, and then her hip went bad, and the knife was mine.

I have done it ever since. Twenty-six harvests. Our operation is about 2,200 acres now, split between Dan and Eric, and in a good fall we are in the field from the third week of September until the last week of October.