The Supper for Dad’s Hired Man

The line

I did not plan the line. It just happened.

Clem came in with Ansel at six, in a pressed blue plaid shirt and his good jeans. He stopped in the doorway like a man walking into cold water.

Then old Elmer Wiersma, who is ninety-one, got up from the first table with his cane and walked over and shook his hand.

That was all it took. Somebody else stood up behind Elmer. Then somebody else. Inside of a minute there was a line from the door halfway down the room, men waiting their turn to shake Clem’s hand.

Nobody made a speech. Nobody said anything about Garrick. They just shook his hand and said things like “Good to see you, Clem” and “Thirty-one years, that’s something” and “You ever need anything.” One man just squeezed his shoulder and walked away without a word.

I knew a lot of those men. I knew that a lot of them bought their crop insurance from my brother.

I knew that every one of them knew exactly what had happened in March, because I had not told one soul and it had gotten around anyway.

Garrick came in at six twenty. He stood at the back, by the coffee urn, in his good khakis and a polo shirt from his agency.

He did not get in the line. He did not sit down.

A couple of men nodded to him. One of them, a big man named Smitty who farms south of town, shook Garrick’s hand on his way back from shaking Clem’s.

Nobody was rude to him. That was the hard part, I think. Nobody was rude.

Supper

Ansel went and got Dad from the car. He came in slow, on his walker, in the brown corduroy sport coat over his plaid shirt. His thin white hair was combed wet. The room went quiet for a second and then a little ripple of people said “Verlin” and “there he is.”

It took him a long time to get to the head table. Nobody rushed him. Clem stood at his chair and pulled it out and held the back of it while Dad lowered himself down.

The pastor from Clem’s church said grace. He kept it short. He thanked God for the rain and the roast beef and for thirty-one years of a good man’s work, and that was it, amen.

Inez’s ladies brought the plates out to the head table first. Roast beef and cheesy potatoes on divided paper plates, the green beans to come around in bowls. A cup of coffee at every place.

And Clem reached over, without a word, and pulled Dad’s plate in front of himself and started cutting Dad’s roast beef into small pieces.

He did it the way he did it every noon. Quiet. Careful. Like it was nothing. When he finished, he slid the plate back in front of Dad and picked up his own fork.

I looked down the table and saw that half the room had seen it. Women had their hands over their mouths. Smitty’s wife was crying into a paper napkin. Arlis was staring at his plate.

I looked at the back of the room. Garrick had seen it too. He was holding a paper cup of coffee and not drinking it.