The Harvest Dinner I Set in the Shed

The Morning Of

I was up at four, which is the hour Faye always claimed. For once the claim was mine.

The beef had gone in at ten the night before. It came out falling apart off the fork.

I pulled it into six roasters and set them to hold on low. I had sixty ears of sweet corn shucked and ready in the cooler.

The beans with bacon were done. A dishpan of my potatoes waited by the stove, peeled and sitting in cold water so they would not go dark.

By ten the shed smelled like a church basement on funeral day. That is the best smell there is, and I will not hear otherwise.

Megan ran the coffee and set out my canned goods down the center of the tables. The beets and the pickles.

And nine pint jars of chow-chow, lids off, a serving spoon stood up in each one. I wanted them right out where a man could reach without asking.

I could hear the separator a quarter mile off. That steady thresh and roar, the tractor holding the belt, now and then a man’s shout over the top of it.

It is the sound a good harvest makes. I have loved it my whole married life.

Around eleven I stood in the open shed doors with my apron on. My hair was already coming down.

I looked at what I had made. Eight tables in a row. Red cloth. Food enough for thirty. The gold field running out past the doors.

I will tell you I was scared. Not of the work. The work I could do in my sleep.

I was scared that noon would come and the men would drive up to Faye’s out of habit. I would be standing in a full shed with nobody in it.

I had cooked for eleven years to be seen for one day. And I had gambled the whole thing on one bet.

On whether eighteen tired men would turn down a lane they had never turned down before. A different lane than the one their trucks knew.

Roy came down at half past eleven, covered in chaff, to check on me. He looked at the tables and he took off his cap and held it, which he only does in church.

“Sheila,” he said. “It looks like something.”

Then he went back up the line to the field. I heard the separator wind down to feed the men. I heard trucks start.

I stood in the door and I could not breathe right. I put my hand flat on the frame and I waited.