The Last Four Rows He Left

The thing I did that my father never would

Here is where I have to tell you something about my father, because it is the part that let me do what I did next.

Virgil left the rows. But Virgil never organized a thing in his life. He left the corn standing and he let the pantry figure out the rest. Some years they came with twenty people and buckets and got every ear. Some years they came with three and the weather beat them and half of it rotted on the stalk.

He would not call them. He would not push. He said if a thing is a gift you do not stand over it with a clipboard. And I loved him, and he was wrong.

Because a gift that rots in the field feeds nobody. And I had just watched nine men give me a whole morning, and I was not about to let their rows and my father’s rows and all the rows I now understood were standing across this county go soft and black for want of somebody making a phone call.

So I drove back to the house, and I sat down at my father’s kitchen table with his old rotary phone, and I called the food pantry in town.

A woman named Pam runs it. She is about my age, and she has run it out of the basement of the Methodist church for twenty years, and she knew my father’s rows better than anybody alive.

I told her what had happened at the gate that morning. I told her there were not four rows coming this year. There were forty-four rows, or more, scattered across eleven farms I did not even have the full list of yet.

Pam went quiet on the phone. Then she said, Ruth, we do not have the people for that. We can barely glean the one.

And I said, then we will get the people. Give me two days.