The Supper for Dad’s Hired Man

Noon

Here is the part I did not know about until later.

Every day that spring, at noon, Clem drove the two miles back to the home place and walked up to Dad’s kitchen door. Nobody asked him to. Garrick had not asked him. I had not asked him.

The home health woman told me about it in May. She said she had stopped bothering to cut Dad’s dinner up because by the time she had it on the plate, Clem was in the doorway with his cap in his hand.

He would sit down across from Dad and pull the plate over without saying anything.

He would cut the meat into small pieces, the way you would for a child, but he never once made it look like that. Then he slid it back and they would talk about the crop.

That is how Dad learned about my eighty. Not from me. From Clem, at noon, one slow sentence at a time.

“Straight rows,” Dad said to me one evening when I came by with groceries. It took him a while to get it out. “Clem says. Straight.”

“They are, Dad.”

He nodded and looked out the window toward the west, where you cannot see my eighty from the house but where he knew it was. “Good,” he said. “Good man.”

I sat with him a while. He had his good hand on the table and his bad hand in his lap, and I held the bad one. It was warm. It just would not hold back.

The idea

I do not remember exactly when I decided to throw the supper. I think it was in church, the last Sunday in May, when the pastor read the names of the graduating seniors and everyone clapped.

I thought: nobody ever clapped for Clem. Thirty-one years and he walked off the place with a check in a folded envelope.

No cake. No card. Not one person standing up to say they saw what he did.

I talked to Ansel that night. He asked Elden at the co-op about the meeting room, the big one they use for the annual meeting and the agronomy breakfasts.

Elden said it was ours for a Saturday in June for the cost of the cleaning.

I called it a 31-years supper. I did not call it a retirement party, because Clem was not retired. I did not call it anything about Garrick, because it was not about Garrick.

I put a notice in the church bulletin and a card on the co-op bulletin board by the scale house.

Roast beef supper, Saturday the thirteenth, six o’clock, for Clem Brekke and his thirty-one years on the Roesler place. Free will offering goes to the Lutheran food pantry.

I ordered sixty pounds of roast beef from the locker in Sheldon.

Inez and the other ladies from church said they would do the potatoes and the green beans and the bars. I figured on fifty people. Maybe sixty, if the weather was nice.

Clem finds out

Clem saw the card at the co-op on a Tuesday, when he went in for a part.

He drove straight to the dental office and sat in the waiting room in his chore coat until I came out between patients.

“Take it down,” he said.

“No.”

“Marnie, I don’t want a fuss.”

“It isn’t a fuss. It’s supper.” I sat down beside him. There was a little girl across from us coloring a tooth with a smiley face. “You fed this family for thirty-one years. Let somebody feed you once.”

He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “Your brother will think it’s aimed at him.”

“Then he can come and see it isn’t.” I put my hand on his arm. “I am not going to say one word about him. Not one. You have my word on it. I promised you I wouldn’t make a fight, and I won’t.”

He nodded slowly. “Your dad,” he said. “Will he come?”

“I’m going to ask him tonight.”