The Harvest Dinner I Set in the Shed

Old Dale’s Recipe

The clapping died down and the men sat and went back at the pie. The way men do. Feelings are feelings, but pie is pie.

Faye did not sit. She stood by the door a while longer.

Then she turned and went out. I watched her walk back up the section line toward her cold stove, small against the gold field.

I will not pretend I did not feel it. Winning a thing and watching the loser walk away are the same moment, and they do not feel the way you think they will.

But before I could decide what to do about Faye, Old Dale pushed back from the table. He came around to where I stood by the roasters, turning his cap in his hands.

Dale is near eighty. He ran racks at this bee before Roy was born.

He lost his wife Marion two springs ago. He has eaten alone every day since. Everybody knows it, and nobody knows what to do about it.

“Sheila,” he said, quiet, just to me. “That chow-chow on the table.”

He stopped and worked his jaw. “My Marion made chow-chow. Nobody has made it since she went.”

“I had forgot the taste of it. Until I put it in my mouth just now.”

He had tears standing in his old eyes, right there in the noise of the shed. And he was not ashamed of them.

“I know it is a lot to ask,” he said. “But if you would write that recipe down for me sometime.”

“I would like to make a batch this winter. It would be like having her in the kitchen again.”

I set down my pan. I took that old man’s cracked hand in both of mine, right there in front of everybody.

I told him I would do better than write it down.

“You come to my kitchen the first cool Saturday after harvest,” I said. “And I will teach you to make it, Dale.”

“We will put up a dozen jars. And they will be yours, and Marion’s.”

He nodded fast and looked at the floor and could not say anything. I squeezed his hand.

That was the thing I carried home from that whole day. Not the standing ovation. That.