Dinner Is Where the Cook Says It Is
Part One: The Steps
Every fall, the threshing dinner came off my garden and my canning.
And every fall, my mother-in-law told the crew of eighteen men it was all her own doing.
She met them on the farmhouse steps.
The same way she did every year. The second Saturday in August, at noon, when the whistle on the old steam engine blew and the men came walking up from the oat field with chaff in their hair and sweat dark on their shirts.
Faye stood at the top of the porch steps in her flowered apron. Her white hair was set in curls from the beauty shop in Eldora. She’d put on lipstick.
She raised one hand to shade her eyes from the sun.
“I have been cooking since four,” she told them.
I was right behind her with the roaster.
Forty pounds of beef. Chuck roast, braised since five that morning with onions and carrots and a pint of my own canned tomatoes. It was so heavy my arms were shaking. The handles were so hot they were burning through the dish towel I’d wrapped around my wrists.
I stood there on the porch behind her, holding it.
Not one man looked at me.
They looked at Faye. They took off their caps. They wiped their foreheads with red handkerchiefs.
“Smells wonderful, Faye,” said Dale Kruse, who’s farmed the section to the east for fifty years.
“You outdid yourself again,” said one of the Vogel boys.
“You’re a saint, Faye,” said Harold Mertz. “A living saint.”
Faye smiled and patted her curls.
“Oh, go on,” she said. “Wash up. It’s getting cold.”
The men went to the pump by the windmill to wash their hands.
I carried the roaster past Faye, through the screen door, down the hall, into her dining room. I set it on the long table. On the trivet. Next to my green beans and my sweet corn and my bread-and-butter pickles and my dinner rolls.
I said nothing.
I had been doing that for eleven years.
Part Two: The Half Acre
My name is Sheila Hemmingsen. I’m forty-three years old.
I married Roy Hemmingsen when I was thirty-two. A little late, by the standards out here. Hardin County, Iowa, where most girls marry the boy from the next farm over before they’re twenty-two.
I wasn’t from the next farm over. I was from Des Moines. I’d been a home economics teacher in Ames for nine years when I met Roy at a church supper in Iowa Falls.
He was quiet and shy, with big hands and a sunburned neck. He asked me what was in my potato salad. I told him. He asked me again the next week, at a different church supper, even though I knew he remembered.
We were married in June. I moved out to the farm in July.
Two farms, really. Roy and I live in a little white house on the east eighty. A quarter mile up the gravel lane is the home place. The big farmhouse where Roy grew up. Where his parents, Earl and Faye, still live.
Out back of our little white house, there’s a half acre.
When I moved out here, it was weeds and an old rusted hog feeder. Roy pulled the feeder out with the tractor that first fall. I tilled it the next spring.
I’ve gardened it every year since.
I grow everything.
Green beans, three kinds. Sweet corn, two plantings, three weeks apart, so it all doesn’t come ripe at once. Tomatoes, forty plants. Cucumbers for pickles. Beets. Carrots. Onions. Potatoes. Peppers. Squash. Pumpkins in the corner by the fence.
I put up two hundred quarts every summer.
I mean that number. Two hundred quarts. I count them.
Green beans, sixty quarts. Tomatoes, fifty. Pickles, thirty. Beets, twenty. Corn, cut off the cob and frozen, another forty bags. Applesauce from the old trees by the grove. Peach jam. Strawberry jam. Rhubarb sauce.
I stand at my stove in August with the windows open and the canner boiling and the sweat running down my back. I do it every day for six weeks.
My jars line the shelves in our basement. Floor to ceiling. Every one labeled with masking tape in my handwriting.
Part Three: The Threshing Bee
Every August, the Hemmingsens host the threshing bee.
They’ve done it since 1948.
Most farmers out here quit threshing oats the old way sixty years ago. Combines came in. Nobody wanted to shock bundles by hand and feed them into a separator anymore.
But Earl’s father, Arnold, kept a 1928 Case threshing machine in the big barn. And a 1916 Avery steam engine to run it. He brought them out every August for the neighbors. To thresh a few acres of oats the old way. For the memory of it.
When Arnold died, Earl kept doing it.
It’s become a big deal. People come from all over Hardin County to watch. They bring lawn chairs and sit along the fence line. The kids climb on the old tractors.
And eighteen men work the crew.
Pitchers and bundle haulers. A man to feed the separator. A man to run the engine. A man on the grain wagon. A man on the straw stack, getting chaff down his collar. Old men who’ve done it since they were boys. Young men who’ve never done it before.
They work from seven in the morning until the oats are done. Usually four or five in the afternoon.
And at noon, they stop for dinner.
The threshing dinner.
Out here, dinner is the noon meal. It’s the big one. Meat and potatoes and vegetables and bread and pie. Enough to keep eighteen men going through a hot August afternoon of pitching bundles.
For thirty years, Faye made it.
Then, eleven years ago, I married Roy.
The first August after our wedding, Faye called me on the phone.
“You’ll help with the threshing dinner,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Of course,” I said.
That first year, I helped.
I made the green beans. I made the rolls. I peeled potatoes in her kitchen while she made the roast and the gravy and the pies.
The second year, Faye’s arthritis was worse. I made the green beans and the rolls and the potatoes and the gravy.
By the third year, I was making all of it. 