The Man Who Drove the Harvest Share

The back of the room

I do not know exactly what Kent was about to say. I think it was something honest, and I think it was going to cost him. I will never know the first words, because someone cut him off.

At the back of the hall, a chair scraped.

Everyone heard it. A Legion hall has a concrete floor and a tin ceiling, and a folding chair makes a sound like a shot. A hundred and eighty people turned their heads at once.

Edna Tollefson was standing up.

She had both hands on the grips of her walker. Her nephew had half risen beside her, with a hand out, and she shook him off with one elbow without looking. She is five feet tall in her good shoes. She had on a navy dress and the pearls I have seen in the frame on her mantel.

“Excuse me, Jerome,” she said.

Her voice was thin, but the hall was so quiet it carried to the kitchen.

“Edna,” Jerome said. “Are you all right?”

“I am ninety-one years old,” Edna said. “I have been to this banquet in 1962, 1971, and 1998, and I have never once said a word. I would like to say one thing, and then I will sit down.”

Nobody moved. In the kitchen, somebody had stopped running the dishwater.

“I am fed out of that church basement,” Edna said. “I have been fed out of it for fourteen years, since my husband Walter passed and I stopped driving. I have nothing against Mr. Hallstrom. I believe he bought the cooler. I am sure it is a very good cooler.”

“But in fourteen years,” she said, “Mr. Hallstrom has not been to my house. I would not know him if he came to my door. The man who has come to my door, every Thursday, with a box and the rest of it, is sitting at table four in a blue shirt. The winter my hip broke, he shoveled my steps before he carried in the food. He has never told a soul in this county that he did. I would like it said out loud who that is. That is all I have to say.”

She stood there another second. Then she lowered herself into the chair behind her, slowly, with her nephew’s hand under her elbow. She did not look at me. She folded her hands in her lap and looked straight ahead, at the plaque in Kent’s hands, and I saw that her chin was up the same way it had been on her back step in the first week.

Lenore’s hand came across the tablecloth and landed on top of mine. It was warm. It was shaking, and I could not tell if it was her hand or mine.