Forty Plates on the Tailgate

That is five or six weeks of suppers. On a heavy day I am feeding twelve or fourteen people out of the back of my truck.

I plate everything at home, cover it in foil, stack the plates in two big coolers, and drive the field roads like I was born on them.

The combine operators eat in the cab most nights, one hand on the wheel. I climb up the ladder and hand the plate in.

The semi drivers eat standing at the elevator line in town. The grain cart drivers eat on my tailgate if the combines are waiting on trucks.

It is not fancy food. It was never supposed to be. It is roast beef, mashed potatoes, gravy, a green vegetable, a bar or a slice of pie, and coffee in a big steel thermos.

The kind of supper that will hold a person until midnight when the moisture is high and the dryer is running.

Kristin married Eric in April, in a little ceremony at our Lutheran church with lilacs on the altar. She was 46.

She had been divorced a long time and had grown up in a suburb outside Minneapolis, where her father sold insurance and nobody she knew owned a pair of boots.

I liked her. I want to say that clearly, because this story could make her sound like something she is not.

She was smart and quick, and she laughed at Eric’s terrible jokes. She came to church every Sunday and sat beside him with her hand on his knee.

She took over the books that summer from the woman in town who had done them for twenty years.

She bought a new computer for the office in the shop. She started a website with a picture of the bins at sunrise and a page called Our Story.

She had ideas. Some of them were good. She found us a better rate on crop insurance and caught a seed company billing us twice.

Eric told everyone at the co-op about it, and he had every right to.

But she had never been through a harvest. She had seen the suppers for exactly three weeks when she stood in the shed and called them plain.