The Last Day on the Potato Digger

The afternoon

The afternoon was the long part. The sun got low and the dust went gold in it, and the field stretched out flat and brown in every direction toward the foothills.

Way off past the fields, where the sky met the ground to the east, you could see the Tetons, faint and blue-white, like somebody had drawn them on the sky with chalk.

The red tractor kept pulling. The digger kept shaking and clanking and lifting. The truck kept running alongside, catching the potatoes off the boom with a sound like rain on a tin roof.

I picked clods until I could not feel my fingers through the gloves. My shoulders had gone from burning to numb. And I was happier than I had been in a month.

Somewhere in there Bridger started bumping my elbow with his. The platform is narrow and the digger sways, but this was on purpose. Every so often, bump. Like a little knock on a door.

He did not say anything. He did not have to. When he was six years old he used to do the same thing to me in the pew at church, a little lean against my arm, just to make sure I was still there.

Around four o’clock Kaylee climbed down to take a turn riding in the truck, and it was just the two of us on our end of the platform.

Bridger leaned over the belt toward me so I could hear him over the chain.

“Mom,” he said. “Is this about the check?”

I thought about how to answer that. I thought about saying no, and I thought about telling him everything, the letter and the payments and the fight I did not have.

“This is about you,” I said.

He looked at me for a long second, with dust on his eyelashes. Then he nodded once, and went back to picking. And a minute later, bump.

We dug until the light started to go. Tom ran the last row of the field, and then the last truck pulled away toward the cellar, and the digger stopped, and the quiet after it was so big it rang in my ears.