The Last Day on the Potato Digger

The cellar

The Hansens hold the crew supper every year on the last night of harvest break, in the front of the big potato cellar on the home place. I had heard about it my whole life but never been to one.

If you are not from here, a potato cellar is a long, low storage building built half into the ground, with a dirt roof that keeps the spuds cool through the winter.

You can smell it before you get to the door. Cold earth and potatoes and diesel.

The cellar was full to the rafters by then. A hundred thousand hundredweight of russets piled twenty feet high in the dark behind a plywood wall.

The front alley, where the trucks unload into the piler, had been swept and hosed down.

Marjean had set up folding tables end to end down the middle of it, with paper tablecloths and Crock-Pots plugged into extension cords. Roast beef, funeral potatoes, green beans with bacon, rolls, and three sheet cakes.

I went home first to shower and change. Lance was in the garage with the door up, working on somebody’s skid steer for side money. He had seen my note. He did not say anything about it.

“I worked the digger today,” I told him.

“Heard you did,” he said. Bingham County is small. Somebody had already told him. “How’s your back?”

“Sore,” I said. Then I told him plainly. “Arlo’s going to hand Bridger his second check at the supper tonight. Mine too. They’re both made out to Bridger. I asked him to.”

Lance put down the wrench he was holding. He stood there and looked at me with his hands at his sides.

“So you went around me,” he said.

“I went to work,” I said. “I’m asking you to come to the supper. I’d like you to be there. He’d like you to be there.”

I did not say anything else. I did not say one word about the snowmobile or the letter or his dad. I went inside and put on a clean shirt.

At ten to eight, when Bridger and I went out to my car, Lance’s truck was already running in the driveway.

The supper

There must have been forty people in that cellar. The whole digger crew and all the truck drivers and their families, and some of the neighbors who had loaned trucks or come to help on the cellar piler.

Lance sat at the far end of the table near the door, with his arms folded on the paper tablecloth.

He ate a little roast beef and did not touch his potatoes. Bridger sat down by Kaylee and some of the boys from the crew.

It was loud and warm and happy. Somebody’s baby was asleep on a coat on top of a seed potato bin.

Halfway through the sheet cake, Arlo stood up at the head of the table. He just stood up, and the room got quiet by itself, the way rooms do around men like Arlo.

He had a white envelope in his hand.

“Every year I say the same thing,” he said, “and every year Marjean tells me to keep it short, so I’ll keep it short. We got eleven hundred acres dug, counting the Jensen ground, and nobody got hurt but the Jensen boy, and that was football, not me.”

Everybody laughed. The Jensen boy held up his cast.

“I want to say thank you to these kids,” Arlo said. “I’ve been running a harvest crew for forty-four years. Some years the kids are good and some years I wonder about the future of the human race. This year they were good.”

More laughing. Then he looked down at the envelope in his hand, and he got quiet. And then he looked straight down the long table to the end of it, where my husband was sitting by the door.

Then he said, “Bridger. Come up here a minute.”