The Man Who Drove the Harvest Share

Irene

Irene Kopp was crying by then, openly, with her napkin pressed against her mouth and her husband’s arm around her shoulders. I have known her for seventeen years and I had seen it exactly once before, over a broken cooler.

She came around the table and stood in front of me.

“I should have put your name in the letter,” she said. “I wrote it so careful. I did not want to make it about you. I didn’t know it would turn out like this.”

“Irene,” I said. “I would not have let you.”

“I know you wouldn’t,” she said. “That’s why I didn’t.”

That was when I understood that I had been part of this, the whole of it, for seventeen years. I had made it very easy for everyone to leave me out.

The coffee line

I stood by the urn with the plaque under my arm, and people came to me. They did not say a lot. This is Wisconsin.

Rollie Dunn put a hand on my shoulder and kept it there. “We knew, Ron,” he said. “The whole highway crew knew. We saw your truck on E at five in the morning for nine years. Nobody knew how to say it without making you the story.”

A young man in a Packers jacket stood in front of me without speaking for a minute. He was one of the three boys from Teske Ridge, grown and nearly six feet tall, working now at the cheese plant. He shook my hand and held it a little longer than a handshake.

“I used to wait at the window for you,” he said. “I’d hear the gravel.”

That was all he said.

Then Kent was standing next to the urn, off to one side, holding a paper cup he had not touched. He had taken his sport coat off and hung it over a chair. He looked older to me than he had a half hour before, and also somehow more like a neighbor.

“I’m not going to say I’m sorry again,” he said. “I said it into a microphone.”

“But I’d like to ask you something,” Kent said. “Can I ride along Tuesday?”

I looked at him a long time.

I thought about the photograph in Lenore’s drawer, and the elbow, and the woman who called him a saint while I stacked her green beans. I did not feel forgiving, not yet. What I felt was tired and mostly relieved, and under that a small, hard piece of something that was not ready to leave.

“It’s a four-forty start,” I said. “I leave from the church lot.”

“I’ll be there at four-thirty,” he said.

“Wear boots that you don’t mind,” I said.