The Man Who Drove the Harvest Share

The Saturday

The Buffalo County banquet is held the third Saturday in October at the Legion hall on Main Street. Roast beef, scalloped potatoes, and about forty kinds of bars on a long table in the back. The high point of the evening is the Citizen of the Year plaque.

That night Lenore steered me to table four, front and center, with a white card at each place. The pantry’s name was on ours in Irene’s handwriting. Around it sat Irene, her husband, two of the Bethany volunteers, and Rollie Dunn, who drove plow with me for thirty years and had been told, I believe, to wear a tie.

Edna Tollefson was not at our table. She was way in the back, by the wall, with her walker, next to her nephew, who had brought her. I did not know she was coming. She is ninety-one and does not go out in the evenings. I waved, and she nodded to me once, as if she had been expecting me.

Kent was at the head table with the Chamber president and the county board chair, in a charcoal sport coat that must have cost four hundred dollars. When he came in, the whole room turned and said hello.

The reading

The committee that picks the Citizen of the Year is five people. They met in September in the back room of the Chamber office, and they had two nominations on the table. The Chamber had put up Kent, for the cooler, for the banner, for twelve years of putting his name and his money behind the pantry. Irene had put up me, in a letter three pages long.

Irene’s letter named me once, near the bottom, as “our volunteer driver.” The rest of it was about the work. She is not a person who puts a man’s name in a headline. She wrote the miles, the pounds, the Thursdays, the thirty-four households, the coulees and the ridges.

And she wrote, “This has gone on for seventeen years through the Harvest Share.”

That was how everybody in the county said it now. The Harvest Share. Irene had used the name on the banner, the way you use a name for a thing, without thinking about whose it was.

The committee read the two papers together. They saw one program, with Kent Hallstrom’s name on the front of it, and they gave all of Irene’s seventeen years to the name on the banner. Nobody on that committee did it to hurt me. Jerome told me so himself later, with his hat in his hand, and I believed him.

So that was what I was sitting there listening to. It was a letter about me, read out loud, about a different man.

Kent was listening too, and what I saw changed how I think about him. When Jerome said, “twice a week, in every kind of weather,” Kent’s face changed. When he said, “in the bed of his own pickup,” Kent looked down at the tablecloth. When he said, “boxes up the ridge roads on Thursdays,” Kent’s hand went up to his collar, as if the room had gotten warm.

He knew. But I think Kent had not thought about it in a long time, the same as I had not made him.

He stood up anyway. The room stood with him, the way a room will, and the applause was warm and loud. Lenore did not move her hand. I clapped. I want you to know that, because I would do it again. It was my neighbor, in a room full of people I loved, and I was not going to sulk at a banquet.

Irene was holding her napkin up to her mouth.

Kent walked up to the microphone. Jerome handed him the plaque, a walnut board with a brass plate, about the size of a cookie sheet. Kent shook his hand and took the plaque in both hands and looked at it for a moment, and then he turned and faced the room.

“Well,” he said. He laughed a little, the way he does. “I didn’t write a speech.”

He looked at the plaque again, and then he looked, not at the room, but at table four.