The Harvest Dinner I Set in the Shed

What Came Off My Ground

People who have never done it do not understand what feeds a threshing crew. It is not a stove. It is a whole summer.

It starts in April, on your knees in the cold dirt. Setting out onion sets. Planting six long rows of sweet corn so they come on in waves instead of all at once.

It is the green beans you pick in July heat with your shirt stuck flat to your back. It is the bending that your fifty-year-old spine remembers in the morning.

By August my kitchen looked like a cannery. I had the pressure canner rocking on one burner and the water bath going on the other.

The whole house smelled of vinegar and dill from first light until the ten o’clock news. Some nights I fell asleep to the hiss of the jars sealing, that little ping of a lid going down.

I put up better than two hundred quarts most summers. Beans and corn and tomatoes. Beets, pickles, piccalilli.

And the chow-chow nobody else around here bothers with anymore, because it takes all day to chop. Cabbage and green tomato and pepper, cut fine, soaked overnight in salt.

My garden ran a half acre behind the machine shed. I worked it before the sun got high and again after supper.

Roy tilled it for me in spring and hauled my pumpkins in the fall, but the rows were mine. The hoe was mine. The sunburn on the back of my neck was mine.

The beef came off our own steers. Roy would take one to the locker in Clear Lake every September.

The threshing roast came out of that. Forty pounds of it, braised down slow over two days, so eighteen hungry men could have seconds and not run me short.

I made nine pies the night before every bee. Apple from the old Wealthy tree by the pump. Pumpkin. And a sour cream raisin that Old Dale liked so much he would ask after it by name while the belt was still running.

None of that came from Faye’s four-o’clock stove. Faye’s part was to carry a pan the last forty feet, from her oven to her table.

Her part was to be standing there, aproned, when the crew washed up. That was the whole of it.

I am not telling you this to sound put upon. I loved the feeding, truly.

There is something in me that goes quiet and glad watching a hungry man clean his plate. Food I grew, gone into a body that worked all morning. That is a good feeling.

What I could not swallow, after eleven years, was the rest of it. Standing in the back of my own harvest, holding a roaster that burned my wrists, while somebody else took the thank-you for it.

That is a different thing from being tired. Tired heals overnight. The other thing does not.

I kept a little record, which I never told a soul about. A spiral notebook in the cupboard with the canning jars.

I wrote down what I grew and what I spent, the way my own mother did. The seed and the locker bill and the sugar for the pies.

That last year the beef alone ran me two hundred dollars at the locker, and that was our own steer. The groceries I could not grow came to another ninety.

I did not keep the notebook to hold it over anyone. I kept it because a thing written down is a thing that happened. I needed one place where it said, in my own hand, whose work it was.