The Man Who Drove the Harvest Share

That was the first time I ever saw Irene Kopp cry. I did not know what to do with my hands, so I picked up the milk jugs and carried them out to the dumpster.

Kent heard about it at the Rotary breakfast. He drove straight to the church and walked down the stairs in his good boots. He looked around for about a minute. He took out his checkbook.

“What does a new one cost?” he asked.

“Sixty-four hundred,” Irene said, “installed.”

He wrote the check right there. I will never take that away from him. It was his own money, and it was a great deal of it for a man who could have bought a bass boat instead, and the cooler came the next month and has not lost a pound since.

That spring Kent hired a sign painter out of Mondovi to make a banner, and the banner said “Hallstrom Harvest Share, Neighbors Feeding Neighbors.” Nobody had ever called the pantry run anything. It was just the Friday run. The painter needed a name for the banner, and Kent gave him one, and by the Fourth of July half the county was saying it.

In November, the county paper ran a photo on the front page. It was Kent in the church doorway with a turkey box in his arms and a little girl looking up at him. The caption said, “Kent Hallstrom’s Harvest Share Feeds Hundreds.”

I was in the picture. Not my face. My left elbow, and the handle of a hand truck, in the blurry corner behind him.

Lenore cut it out and put it in a drawer. She did the same in 2016, and again in 2019, and again in 2022. She calls it my picture. “That’s you,” she says, “right there, the elbow.”

What I did about it

You will want to know what I did. The answer is nothing, and I have had a long time to think about why.

The first reason is the one I told myself. The work was the point. The food got to the people and the people ate it, and if a banner and a photograph brought in more donations, and I believe they did, then it was a fine thing.

The second reason is the one I will tell you now that I am older. I did not like to be looked at. I drove a plow for thirty-six years, and the whole pleasure of that job was doing it all night in the dark with the radio on and nobody needing me to explain it. A man who cannot talk in front of people has a way of calling that humility.

Lenore did not buy it.

“Ron, you need to say something,” she told me, that November, the first time the paper ran the photograph.

She looked at me a long while across that kitchen table. “You are the proudest man I ever met,” she said. “You’ve just got it turned inside out.”

I did not answer that, then or in all the years after. I have turned it over a good many times since.

It was never one big moment. It was a hundred small ones. A woman in the church basement who said, “Isn’t Kent just a saint?” while I stacked green beans behind her. A man at the gas station who shook Kent’s hand and said, “Heck of a thing you do for this county,” and Kent said, “Aw, it’s a team,” and did not look at me, because he did not think of me. He was not stealing. He had simply never been made to look.

And there was a part of me that did not want to be the man who said it. A fellow who drives sixty miles for seventeen years and then complains that he did not get his picture taken. I could hear how it would sound at the Legion.