The Harvest Dinner I Set in the Shed

Sweeping Out The Shed

We did it in secret, which was its own kind of fun. Two grown people keeping a thing from his mother, like a couple of teenagers.

Through the summer Roy and I worked the shed on Sunday evenings, after the stock was fed. He pulled the drill and the truck out and parked them along the shelterbelt.

He leveled a stretch of the dirt floor with the box blade. We laid down sheets of plywood for a clean deck, screwed flat so no heel would catch.

I scrubbed eleven years of grease off the north wall. I hung a string of work lights across the rafters on bailing wire.

Our daughter Megan came home from the city two weekends and helped me. We washed down every surface until the shed smelled of pine soap instead of diesel.

We borrowed folding tables from the church. Eight of them, the long eight-footers, the ones they use for funerals.

I sewed cloths out of a bolt of red gingham I found on clearance in Watertown. Forty yards of it. I hemmed it on the machine over three nights while Roy watched the weather.

Roy rigged a plank-and-sawhorse serving line along one wall. He wired in a strip of outlets so I could run six electric roasters and two coffee pots at once.

He thought of the breaker before I did. He is like that. He thinks of the thing that will quit on you at the worst moment.

By the first week of October I had a shed that did not look like a shed. With the big doors slid open to the south, you looked straight out across Earl’s oat ground.

It had gone gold and stubbled. The light came in long and low in the afternoon and lay down across the plywood like something poured.

I told nobody but Megan and Roy. Earl mailed the postcards he always mails, the ones that say the bee runs the second Saturday of October, bring your appetite.

Faye, I am sure, planned her four-o’clock stove. I did not warn her. I have made my peace with that part and I have not made my peace with it, both.

The hard part was the invitation. The men needed to know where to eat without it turning into a thing beforehand.

So I kept it simple and I let Roy carry it. A wife announcing it would sound like a fight. A husband saying it sounded like a fact.

That Saturday morning the crew gathered at the separator. The first bundles went up on the racks.

Roy walked the line of men and said it plain to each one. “Dinner is down at our place this year. The shed. Noon. Sheila has been cooking.”

He said that last part to every man. Sheila has been cooking.

He did not say a word against his mother. He did not have to.

He just said my name, once, to each of them. That was the one thing that had never been said out loud on a threshing day.