The Last Day on the Potato Digger

The digger

When we got to the Hansens’ shop, the crew was standing around in the cold with coffee. There was frost on the truck windshields. Nobody digs before the frost burns off, because frozen spuds bruise and rot in the cellar.

There were eight or nine kids from the high school, two older men who had worked for Arlo for twenty years, and a woman about my age named Kim who drove one of the trucks.

The kids looked at me like I was somebody’s lost aunt. Then one of the girls from my bus route, a sophomore named Kaylee, yelled, “Mrs. Rasband!” and the whole thing got a little easier.

Arlo came out of the shop pulling on his coat. He looked at me for a long time. At the gloves, at the flannel, at the cap. I could not tell what he was thinking.

“Platform’s open,” he said finally. “Second digger, with your boy. Tom’s driving the tractor. Don’t put your hand anywhere near the chain.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Michelle.” He lowered his voice. “Your checks. Both of them. They’re already written.”

By ten the frost was off and we were in the field. If you have never seen a potato harvest up close, here is how it works.

The tractor pulls the digger down the rows. The digger lifts the whole hill, dirt and vines and spuds and all, up onto a long chain that shakes most of the dirt loose and drops it back on the field.

What is left rides up past a sorting platform where people like us stand and pick off what does not belong.

Clods of dirt the size of a fist. Rocks. Tangles of dead vine. Anything that would rot or bruise in the cellar.

Then the potatoes go up the boom and pour off the end into a truck that drives right alongside the digger, matching its speed, so close you could reach out and touch the box.

When the truck is full, another one pulls in behind it and takes its place.

It is not complicated work. It is just constant. The belt does not stop for you, and the clods do not stop, and the dust does not stop. You pick and toss, pick and toss, for hours, swaying with the digger.

Within an hour my shoulders burned. I had dust in my teeth and dust in the creases of my eyes, and I understood why my son had been coming home every night and falling asleep in his clothes.

Bridger worked right beside me. He was fast. His hands went in and out of that river of potatoes like he had been doing it all his life.

He would catch a clod I missed and flick it off without saying a word about it.

For the first hour he did not talk to me at all. Kaylee was on his other side and they talked about some teacher and some football game. I did not mind. I just worked.

Marjean’s lunch

At noon Tom shut the tractor down at the end of the row and everybody climbed off. Marjean Hansen came out across the field in her pickup with a cooler in the back like she does every day of harvest.

Marjean is sixty-four and has fed the Hansen crews for over forty years. She has a way of handing you a sandwich that makes you feel like it is the only sandwich she made all day.

She handed out the lunches from the tailgate. Ham and cheese, an apple, a bag of chips, a can of pop.

When she got to Bridger she reached into the front seat instead and handed him a brown paper sack with his name written on it in marker.

“Not that one,” she said. “This one’s yours.”

Bridger looked confused. He sat down on the edge of the truck bed next to me and opened the sack. Inside was a sandwich, two of Marjean’s oatmeal cookies, and a small yellowed envelope.

It was a pay envelope, the old kind with a little window in it. Somebody had written on the front in faded pencil: “Arlo. First harvest. October 1974.”

Bridger looked at me. I shook my head. I did not know anything about it.

He opened it. Inside was a folded piece of lined paper, soft as cloth from being handled. He unfolded it and read it, and then he held it out so I could read it too.

The handwriting was old-fashioned and slanted. It said: “Arlo, this is yours. You earned every cent of it on that platform. Don’t let anybody tell you a man’s first pay belongs to anybody but him. Spend it like you earned it. Dad.”

Bridger read it twice. Then he folded it back up very carefully along the old lines and put it back in the envelope.

He did not say anything. But I saw his chin go tight, the way it did when he was little and trying not to cry in front of the other boys.

I looked over at the cab of Marjean’s pickup. She was sitting there with the window down, pretending to do a crossword. She did not look at us. But I saw her wipe her eye with the back of her wrist.

“She wants that back,” I told Bridger quietly. “That’s Arlo’s. That’s from his dad.”

“I know,” he said. He held the envelope in his lap for the rest of lunch. When we got up to go back to work, he walked over to Marjean’s window and handed it to her with both hands.

“Thank you, Mrs. Hansen,” he said.

“You keep that sandwich bag,” she told him. “I’ll pack you another one tomorrow.” Then she remembered there was no tomorrow, it was the last day of the break, and she laughed at herself and patted his hand.