Part Fifteen: The Open Doors
At eleven, I stood in the open doors of the machine shed.
Roy had slid them all the way open. Both sides. Forty feet of open door.
Inside, eight long tables ran in two rows down the middle of the shed. Covered in red gingham. Set with plates and silverware borrowed from the church.
The white café lights glowed in the rafters, even in the daylight.
At the far end, a long serving table. My blue roaster. My kettles. My pies in a row.
And past the doors, out the other end of the shed, the gold field.
Roy’s oats. Ripe and waving in the August sun. And beyond them, a quarter mile up the lane, the home place. The big barn. The black smoke from the steam engine.
The sound of the threshing machine, roaring.
And I was scared sick.
I stood in those open doors in my apron with my hands shaking.
I was scared they’d drive up to Faye’s out of habit.
Eighteen men. Hungry. Tired. Done at noon, walking to their trucks. Starting their engines.
Turning right. Up the lane. To the home place. Like they had for thirty-four years.
I was scared I’d stand in a full shed, empty.
Eight tables. Red cloths. White lights. Forty pounds of beef.
And no one.
Eleven years of cooking, riding on one lane.
Roy came and stood beside me.
He’d come down from the bee at eleven. He was covered in chaff. His face was sunburned.
He took my hand.
“They’ll come,” he said.
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” Roy said. “But I told every one of them. And I looked every one of them in the eye.”
Megan came out of the house in a clean dress. Blue, with little white flowers. She’d braided her own hair.
She stood on my other side. She took my other hand.
The three of us stood in the open doors of the machine shed.
And waited.
Part Sixteen: Noon
Noon came.
The whistle on the steam engine blew.
I heard it from a quarter mile away. That long, high scream. The signal that the crew was breaking for dinner.
The threshing machine went quiet.
I held my breath.
For a long time, nothing happened.
Thirty seconds. A minute. I could hear the men’s voices, far off, up at the home place. Laughing. Talking.
I could see Faye on her porch. Tiny from here. Standing at the top of her steps in her flowered apron.
Waiting.
Then I heard an engine start.
A truck turned down our lane.
Old Dale’s rusted Ford.
A 1979 F-150. Brown and tan. More rust than paint. With a cracked windshield and a Hardin County Farm Bureau sticker on the bumper.
It came down the gravel lane slowly, raising a little cloud of dust.
It turned in at our place.
Then another behind it.
The Vogel boys’ blue Chevy.
Then another.
Harold Mertz’s white Dodge.
Then another.
A whole string of them. Raising dust. Coming down the lane one after another, the way they used to come in a funeral procession.
Every one turning in at our place.
Not one went on up to Faye’s.
I stood in the open doors of the machine shed and watched them come.
Eleven trucks. Eighteen men.
Roy squeezed my hand so hard it hurt.
Megan was jumping up and down.
Dale Kruse pulled his rusted Ford up beside the shed. He shut off the engine. He climbed out.
He’s seventy-eight. He’s been on the threshing crew since 1958. He’s had both knees replaced.
He stood in front of the open doors. He took off his seed cap.
He looked at the eight tables. The red gingham. The white lights in the rafters. The blue roaster at the far end.
He looked at me.
“Well now,” Dale said.
He shook his head slowly.
“Well now, Sheila,” he said.
Part Seventeen: Whose Food
They sat.
I carried.
Megan poured the tea.
Eighteen men at eight long tables, in a machine shed with red gingham and white lights and the gold oat field through the open doors.
I carried the beef first. The blue roaster. Forty pounds. I didn’t wrap my wrists in a towel this time. I used oven mitts. Good ones.
I set it on the table in front of Dale.
He looked up at me.
Then the potatoes. The gravy. The green beans with bacon. The corn. The rolls in their baskets with dish towels over them. The pickles. The beets. The applesauce.
Megan went down the rows with a big glass pitcher of iced tea. Pouring every glass. Not spilling a drop.
Then Harold Mertz picked up an ear of corn.
He looked at it. He looked at me.
“This your corn, Sheila?” he asked.
The whole table went quiet.
“It is,” I said. “Off the half acre out back.”
Harold looked at the corn for a long time.
Then he nodded.
“It’s good corn,” he said.
Then one of the Vogel boys picked up a green bean.
“These your beans, Sheila?”
“Mine,” I said. “Put up in July.”
Then Ed Larson, holding a pickle.
“Your pickles?”
“Mine.”
Then a young man I didn’t know. A nephew of the Kruses, maybe, from Ames. Holding a roll.
“Ma’am,” he said. “Did you make these?”
“Up at two to get them rising,” I said.
He looked at the roll in his hand.
“These are the best rolls I’ve ever had in my life,” he said.
Down two long tables, one by one.
Each man asking whose food it was.
The beef. Our own steer. Off the pasture behind the barn.
The beets. Off the half acre.
The applesauce. The old trees by the grove.
The gravy. Mine.
Each one thanking me.
By name.
Thank you, Sheila.
Thank you, Sheila.
This is wonderful, Sheila.
Sheila, you outdid yourself.
Eighteen men.
Eighteen times.
I stood at the end of the serving table with my oven mitts in my hands and tears running down my face.
I didn’t wipe them away.
Megan came and stood beside me. She put her arm around my waist.
“Mom,” she whispered. “They know.”
Part Eighteen: The Doorway
Then I turned with a pan of corn.
The second batch. Fresh off the stove.
I turned around from the serving table.
And there in the doorway stood Faye.
She was standing in the open doors of the machine shed.
In her flowered apron. Her hair set in curls. Her lipstick on.
She’d walked down the lane. A quarter mile. On her bad hip. In the August heat.
She was holding nothing.
Her own stove a quarter mile off, going cold.
The shed went quiet.
Not all at once. The men at the near tables saw her first. They stopped talking. Then the men behind them. Then the whole shed.
Eighteen men. Forks halfway to their mouths. Looking at Faye in the doorway.
Then looking at me with the pan of corn.
Nobody said anything.
I didn’t know what to do.
I stood there with the corn. Faye stood there in the doorway. Thirty feet between us.
Eleven years between us.
Then Earl stepped up beside her.
Part Nineteen: Earl
My father-in-law, Earl Hemmingsen, is seventy-six years old.
He’s tall and thin and bent a little at the shoulders. He has big hands like Roy’s. A face like a dried creek bed. He’s worn the same pair of bib overalls to the threshing bee since 1971.
He’s run the steam engine every year since his father died.
He was still covered in coal soot. Black on his hands. Black on his face. Black in the creases around his eyes.
In thirty years, I never heard that man make a speech.
Not at Roy’s wedding. Not at Megan’s baptism. Not at his own fiftieth anniversary party in the church basement, when the whole congregation chanted speech, speech, speech and he just shook his head and sat back down.
Earl doesn’t make speeches.
Earl talks about the weather. And the price of beans. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, the engine.
He walked into the shed.
Past Faye. Past the first row of tables.
He walked down the aisle between the tables. In his sooty overalls. With eighteen men watching him.
He stopped at the head of the second table. Right in the middle of the shed. Under the white lights.
He picked up a spoon.
A plain steel spoon from the church silverware.
He tapped it twice on a coffee cup.
Clink. Clink.
The whole shed went still.
The men set down their forks.
Megan set down her pitcher.
Faye stood frozen in the doorway.
Earl looked right at me.
Past his own wife.
Part Twenty: What Earl Said
He didn’t say anything for a long moment.
He just stood there in the middle of the machine shed with a spoon in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. Looking at me. With his coal-black face and his tired eyes.
Then he set down the cup.
He cleared his throat.
“I’m not much for talking,” Earl said.
His voice was low and rough. Like a gate that hasn’t been opened in years.
“Most of you know that.”
A few of the old men smiled.
“But I’ve got something to say,” Earl said. “And I’ve waited eleven years to say it.”
He looked at me.
“Thirty-four years, really,” he said.
Nobody moved.
“I’ve eaten this dinner every August since I was a boy,” Earl said. “My mother made it. Then my wife made it. Then my son’s wife made it.”
He looked around the shed.
“And not once,” Earl said, “in all those years, did anybody thank the right woman.”
The shed was dead silent.
“My mother,” Earl said, “told this crew for twenty years that she cooked the threshing dinner.”
He looked at the doorway. At Faye.
“She didn’t,” Earl said quietly. “Faye did. My wife. From the time we married in 1972 until my mother died in 1992. Faye was up at four every August. Faye canned the beans. Faye made the rolls.”
He swallowed.
“And my mother stood on those porch steps,” Earl said, “and told every man in this county it was all her own doing.”
I turned and looked at Faye.
She was standing in the doorway with her hand over her mouth.
“I never said a word,” Earl said. “Not once. Twenty years. I let my mother take that from my wife. Because I didn’t know how to correct my own mother. Not in front of eighteen hungry men.”
He looked at his boots.
“I told myself it didn’t matter,” he said. “I told myself Faye didn’t mind.”
He looked up.
“She minded,” Earl said.
“When my mother died,” Earl said, “Faye finally got her turn. Her turn on the porch. Her turn to be thanked. And she’d waited twenty years for it.”
He looked at me.
“And then her hands got bad,” he said. “And she couldn’t cook anymore. And Sheila came along and started doing it all.”
He shook his head slowly.
“And Faye couldn’t let go,” Earl said. “Couldn’t give up the only thanks she ever got.”
He looked back at his wife in the doorway.
“So she did to Sheila,” Earl said, “exactly what my mother did to her.”
Faye made a sound. A small, broken sound.
“And I let that happen too,” Earl said. “Eleven more years. I stood by that steam engine every August and watched my son’s wife carry forty pounds of beef up the porch steps behind my wife, and I never said a word.”
His voice cracked.
“That’s thirty-one years I kept quiet,” he said. “Thirty-one years of watching the wrong woman get thanked. Twice.”
He turned to face me.
He took off his seed cap. His gray hair was matted with sweat and soot.
“Sheila,” he said.
“Thank you,” Earl said.
“For eleven years of threshing dinners. For your beef and your beans and your corn and your rolls.”
He looked at the eight tables. The red gingham. The white lights.
“For this,” he said.
Then he looked at the men.
“This dinner,” Earl said, “was cooked by Sheila Hemmingsen. Every bite of it. For eleven years.”
He paused.
“Before that,” he said, “it was cooked by Faye Hemmingsen. For twenty years. While my mother took the credit.”
He looked at the doorway.
“I’m sorry, Faye,” he said quietly. “I should’ve said it in 1972.”
Then he looked back at me.
“And I’m sorry, Sheila,” Earl said. “I should’ve said it the first year.”
He put his cap back on.
He sat down.
He picked up his fork.
Part Twenty-One: Faye
Nobody moved for a long time.
Then Faye walked into the shed.
She walked slowly. On her bad hip. Between the tables. Past eighteen men who wouldn’t look at her.
She walked all the way down the aisle. To the far end of the shed. To the serving table.
To me.
She stopped in front of me.
I was still holding the pan of corn.
She looked at it.
“That’s the second planting,” she said quietly.
Her voice was shaking.
“The one you put in three weeks after the first. So it’d be ripe the week of the bee.”
I stared at her.
“You noticed that?” I said.
“I noticed everything,” Faye said. “Every year. The tomatoes in the beef. The bacon in the beans. The sour cream raisin pie for Dale.”
She looked at the jars of pickles on the serving table. My handwriting on the masking tape.
“I noticed,” she said. “I just couldn’t say it.”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Earl’s mother stood on those steps for twenty years,” Faye said. “And every year, I stood behind her holding the roaster. And every year, the men thanked her.”
Her voice broke.
“I was twenty-two the first year,” she said. “I cried in the bathroom. Earl’s mother found me and told me to wash my face and stop making a scene.”
“And then she died,” Faye said. “And I finally got to stand on the porch. And the men finally thanked me. And it was the best day of my life.”
She looked down at her hands. Gnarled and swollen with arthritis.
“And then these started,” she said. “And I couldn’t hold a paring knife. And I couldn’t punch down bread. And you came along. Young and strong. With your garden and your jars and your home economics degree.”
She looked up at me.
“And I thought, She’s going to take it,” Faye said. “The only thing I ever got thanked for.”
“So I took it first,” Faye said.
I didn’t say anything.
I couldn’t.
“It was wrong,” Faye said. “I knew it was wrong. Every single year. I’d stand on those steps and say I have been cooking since four, and I’d hear Earl’s mother’s voice coming out of my mouth.”
She wiped her eyes.
“And I couldn’t stop,” she said.
“I’m sorry, Sheila,” she said. “I’m sorry for eleven years.”
Part Twenty-Two: What I Said
I set the pan of corn down on the serving table.
I took off my oven mitts.
I looked at my mother-in-law. Standing in my machine shed in her flowered apron. Her hair set in curls. Her lipstick smudged now from crying.
At her hands. Gnarled and swollen.
At twenty years of standing behind somebody else on the porch steps, holding a roaster that burned her wrists.
“Faye,” I said. “Who made the pie crust?”
She stared at me.
“What?”
“The pie crust,” I said. “On the sour cream raisin. The one Dale asks for every year.”
Faye didn’t answer.
“It’s yours,” I said. “Your recipe. You gave it to me the first year. On a recipe card. In your handwriting. With lard, not shortening. And a splash of vinegar.”
I looked at her.
“I’ve made it every year since,” I said. “Exactly the way you wrote it. I never changed a thing.”
Faye put her hand over her mouth.
“And the beef,” I said. “Braised with tomatoes. That’s yours too. You told me that first August. Always put a pint of tomatoes in with the chuck roast, Sheila. Earl’s mother never did. It’s what makes the gravy.”
Faye was crying now. Openly.
“I didn’t think you remembered that,” she whispered.
“I remember everything,” I said.
I turned around.
I picked up a pie. The sour cream raisin. The one with Faye’s crust.
I turned back to the room. To the eighteen men at the eight long tables.
“This pie,” I said, loud enough for the whole shed to hear, “is made with Faye Hemmingsen’s crust recipe. She’s been making it since 1972.”
I held it up.
“Nobody ever thanked her for it,” I said.
The shed was silent.
Then Dale Kruse stood up.
Seventy-eight years old. Two new knees. Chaff still in his hair.
He took off his cap.
“Faye,” he said. “I’ve eaten that pie every August for fifty years.”
He looked at her.
“Thank you,” he said.
Then Harold Mertz stood up.
“Thank you, Faye.”
Then the Vogel boys.
Then Ed Larson.
Then the young man from Ames, who’d never been to a threshing bee before and didn’t know anything about any of it.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said.
One by one. Eighteen men.
Thank you, Faye.
Thank you, Faye.
Thank you, Faye.
Faye stood in the middle of my machine shed and cried.
Part Twenty-Three: Two Chairs
There were eighteen men at eight tables.
There were two empty chairs at the end of the second table. Right under the white lights. I’d set them out that morning without knowing why.
Megan pulled one out.
She looked at her grandmother.
“Grandma,” she said. “Sit down. You walked all the way here.”
Faye looked at the chair.
Then she looked at me.
Megan pulled out the second chair.
She looked at me.
“Mom,” she said. “You sit too. You’ve been standing since four.”
I hadn’t sat down at a threshing dinner in eleven years.
Not once.
Faye and I sat down.
Side by side. At the end of the second table. Under the white lights.
Megan put a plate in front of each of us. She piled them with beef and potatoes and beans and corn. She poured us each a glass of iced tea.
She didn’t spill a drop.
Earl was sitting across from us.
He looked at his wife. Then at me.
He didn’t say anything.
He’d said enough for one day.
He just passed the rolls.
Part Twenty-Four: The Dishes
After dinner, the men went back to the bee.
The whistle on the steam engine blew at one. They threshed until four-thirty. Every bundle. The best oat crop in ten years, Earl said.
When they came back down the lane at five, to get their trucks, Dale Kruse stopped at the shed door.
I was inside, washing dishes in a big tub of hot water on the serving table. Faye was beside me, drying.
She’d stayed. All afternoon.
“Sheila,” Dale said. “Faye.”
We both turned around.
“Same time next year?” he asked. “Here?”
Faye and I looked at each other.
“Here,” Faye said.
Dale nodded.
“I’ll bring my wife’s rhubarb dream bars,” he said. “She’s been wanting to bring something for twenty years. Nobody ever asked.”
Part Twenty-Five: Every August
That was three years ago.
The threshing bee still runs at the home place.
Earl still fires up the old Avery steam engine at six in the morning. The black smoke still rolls out of the stack. The whistle still screams across the section.
The eighteen men still pitch bundles into the 1928 Case separator.
But the dinner is in our machine shed now.
Eight long tables from the Lutheran church. Red gingham tablecloths. White lights strung across the rafters.
And a sign.
Roy made it the second year. Out of an old barn board. He burned the letters in with a wood-burning tool from the hardware store in Iowa Falls.
It hangs over the big sliding doors.
THRESHING DINNER
Cooked by Sheila & Faye
Since 1972
Faye comes down to our house at four in the morning now.
Every second Saturday in August.
She can’t cook much. Her hands are worse every year. She can’t hold a paring knife. She can’t punch down bread.
But she can sit at my kitchen table and tell me when the gravy’s right.
And she can roll a pie crust. Slowly. With her knuckles. The way she’s done since 1972.
I make the beef. The beans. The corn. The rolls. The pickles. The beets.
Faye makes the crust for the sour cream raisin.
At noon, when the whistle blows and the trucks come down the lane, we stand together in the open doors of the machine shed.
Side by side.
The men come in and sit down. Megan pours the tea. She’s twelve now. She doesn’t spill a drop.
I carry the beef. Faye carries the pie.
And every year, before the men pick up their forks, Earl stands up.
He picks up a spoon. He taps it twice on a coffee cup.
Clink. Clink.
The shed goes still.
He doesn’t make a speech.
He just says two sentences.
“This dinner was cooked by Sheila,” he says. “The pie crust is Faye’s.”
Then he sits down. And the men say thank you.
To both of us.
By name.
Last August, after the dinner, after the dishes, after the trucks went home, I found Faye standing in the open doors of the machine shed.
Alone. Looking out at the gold oat field. And past it, up the lane, at the home place. Her own porch steps.
The sun was going down. The white lights were glowing in the rafters behind her.
“Faye?” I said. “You okay?”
She didn’t turn around.
“I was thinking about Earl’s mother,” she said quietly. “Standing on those steps.”
She was quiet for a long time.
“I wish somebody had built me a shed,” she said. “In 1972.”
I stood beside her.
I didn’t say anything for a while.
Then I took her hand. Her gnarled, swollen hand. The hand that rolled out pie crust with its knuckles because it couldn’t hold a rolling pin anymore.
“Somebody did,” I said. “It just took fifty years.”
Faye laughed. Then she cried. Then she did both.
Standing in the open doors of my machine shed, in her flowered apron, with the gold field going dark in front of us.
Megan came out of the house a few minutes later.
She was carrying a recipe card. An old one. Stained with lard and splashed with vinegar. In Faye’s handwriting, from 1972.
Pie Crust. For Sour Cream Raisin. Lard, not shortening. A splash of vinegar. Don’t overwork it.
“Grandma,” Megan said. “Will you teach me this? Next year?”
Faye looked at the card for a long time.
Then she looked at me.
Then she looked at her granddaughter.
“Only if you put your name on it,” she said. “When you make it. Every time.”
Megan thought about that.
“Grandma’s crust,” she said slowly. “Mom’s filling. My pie.”
She looked up.
“Is that a lie?” she asked.
Faye smiled.
“No, honey,” she said. “That’s a family.”
