The Taco Trailer That Crossed the Street

It does not belong to the village, and it does not belong to the village board, and the ordinance, as I understand it, says nothing about private property.”

“That’s what I read.”

“Friday,” Clyde said. “Noon. Park by the shop door. I’ll have the boys put out cones.”

“Clyde, I’d like to pay you something.”

“I’ll tell you what I’d like.” He cleared his throat. “The county food pantry is low. Corn, canned goods, everything. Maybe a dollar a plate.”

I did not even get to ask Mallory. I told her over breakfast, and she said yes before I got to the end of the sentence.

Thursday was the longest day I have ever spent not doing my own job.

Mallory and I and two women from the Legion auxiliary, Eunice and Marge, stood in the Legion kitchen from six in the morning until after eight that night. We braised sixty pounds of pork shoulder in six roasters with orange halves and onion and Nell’s cumin.

We sliced and chopped and made pico by the bucket. Mallory had the recipe cards in her apron pocket, the pencil marks soft and gray from years of her fingers.

At noon she stopped and put her hand flat on the lid of the biggest roaster, the way Nell used to. “Mom,” she said, “what if nobody comes?”

I had been thinking the same thing for twenty hours. “Then we’ll feed the pantry volunteers,” I said. “And Marvin. And your cousins. We have sixty pounds of pork. Somebody is going to eat it.”

She laughed, and it was a shaky laugh, but it was real.

I copied forty flyers on the elevator copier and taped them up at the feed store, the post office and the Casey’s out on the highway. Mallory wrote one post for the Fenwick Community page: date, time, three tacos for eight dollars, and a dollar a plate to the county food pantry. It had four likes by supper. I went to bed at ten and did not sleep.

Friday, the ninth of October, came up bright and cold, thirty eight degrees and clear. Maple leaves were turning yellow along the edge of the dealership lawn.

I was at the elevator by seven, because I do not take days off in harvest, and I told Sandy I would be back at eleven for the whole afternoon.

At ten thirty, Marvin and Mallory and I towed the trailer across the implement lot. Clyde Haldane came out of the shop in his coveralls and his work boots.

He stood by the big bay door and looked at the trailer, and then he looked across Main Street at the front window of Russ’s Diner.

“Well,” he said. “He’ll see it from there.”

“Yes, Clyde.”

“Good.” He went back inside. At eleven thirty, there were thirty. I stood on the blacktop with a roaster in my hands and my mouth open.

They were all there. They were the ones who had been in Russ’s diner at five on Tuesday morning, the road men and the farmers. They were the Methodist ladies and the Lutheran ladies.

Two school bus drivers in their orange vests. Three men from the elevator with grain dust still in the creases of their jackets. A woman with a baby in a front pack.