The Gleaners

That first season the gleaners came out only at sundown. They parked their vehicles, battered Chevrolets and rusted Datsun pickups, well away from each other on the road along the potato fields. Caps pulled low across their foreheads, gunnysacks flat shawls across their backs, the gleaners crossed the ditch and entered the field. Under a pink and blue sky, the air belled with September chill, the gleaners hurried along the black, heaved furrows, the damp and tangled vines at their feet. They had come to look for potatoes that the great mechanical harvesters had missed or discarded.

There—a fat, muddy russet, big as a man’s hand.

There—in the empty trough of the irrigator’s wheel, another fat one.

There—in a clump of vines, two keepers.

Ahead, beside a heavy stone brightly scarred, among a small maze of boot prints and a blacker stain of oil, a whole peck of spilled potatoes!

Stoop, stoop, and stoop again, in this way the gleaners moved steadily downfield. They measured their progress against the dark silhouette of the irrigator, its long drooping lengths of pipes and tall stilt legs. Intermittently, like prairie dogs remembering to look about, the gleaners stood fully erect: they glanced at the other pickers, to the road, and to their own cars—after which they dipped ground-ward again and kept moving. In the bluing twilight their bags humped darker and darker on their backs.

Later, the gleaners staggered through the last, plum-purple light to their cars. Sacks thudded and trunk lids slammed. Engines raced and gravel chattered sharply against wheel wells as their vehicles accelerated away, without headlights, toward the highway.

The second season the gleaners came out earlier in the day. Some appeared already in the afternoon, and the boldest waited in the cars beside potato fields as harvesters worked the last rows. Word was that Universal Potato Company had nothing against gleaning. It had bigger things to worry about—like hot spots in the new storage bins, like nailing down the Burger King contract, like the union sniffing around. Universal Potatoes wasn’t about to bother people who picked up a few stray spuds. Just don’t drive in the fields or otherwise pack down the dirt—that was the unofficial word. Otherwise, have at them, plenty of spuds for the taking, enough for the whole town of Sand Lake (population 2,650)—that was the word in the cafes and stores on Main Street. With spuds free for the picking, why would a person even fool with potatoes at home in the garden?

That second autumn better vehicles drove slowly along the potato fields, newer and shinier Ford sedans, late model Pontiacs, an occasional older Cadillac. Often they stopped, amber parking lights on, radios playing faintly through open windows as their occupants watched the gleaners. The spectators were mostly older retired couples, people like Shirley Kelm and her husband, John.

“Look at them,” Shirley remarked, staring past her husband at the gleaners. “Don’t it remind you of the Depression?” She was seventy-four, had short white curly hair, and wore a gauzy blue head scarf tied loosely over her permanent, knotted tightly at the chin. She was neatly dressed in knit pants, blouse, and sweater. From the side of her eyes she watched for her husband’s reaction.

John’s heavy white eyebrows drooped slightly as he squinted. He remained silent, his heavy knuckles wrapped around the steering wheel.

“You wouldn’t think, in modern times like these, a person would ever see this, would you?” Shirley said, clucking her tongue briefly. She watched as a heavyset woman stooped for a potato, then another and another like a fat old hen picking her way across a chicken yard. She speared six spuds in quick succession. Shirley felt her heart pick up a beat.

“Depression days are coming again,” John said. He clenched the steering wheel harder; his fingers reddened. “Things can’t go on the way they are!”

“Some people would agree with you,” Shirley said quickly. She didn’t want to anger him, have him drive off. It had been difficult enough getting him to take her on the dirt roads past the potato fields. Shirley did not drive, had never had a license. Their car was a white 1976 Oldsmobile with 24,532 miles on the odometer and no rust spots or paint chips, a town car.

“I mean, why can’t people raise their own food, like we do?” she added, turning the angle of her vision an inch, watching him closely.

He continued to stare somewhere into the field.

Shirley turned her eyes back to the gleaners. The fat woman dragged her gunnysack forward. Shirley’s heart beat slightly faster still. She put her hand inside her jacket pocket, felt the cool plastic there.

“Easier to steal them, everybody steals nowadays—” John said, pointing. His voice rose sharply.

Shirley swung her gaze away, out her side window and across the road to a drifting hawk which she pretended had caught her interest. With John she had to go carefully. At age seventy-nine he was an increasingly silent, unpredictable man. Conversation with him was like speaking with their son who lived in Alaska. His phone was hooked up to a satellite, and the words had to bounce off something (was it the earth or was it the satellite? she could never remember), then float back. There was a delay. You had to wait. You couldn’t talk fast and you couldn’t interrupt.

“Though,” Shirley said evenly, looking back to the potato field, “you couldn’t really call it stealing, could you?” She paused. “I mean, Universal would just plow them under, wouldn’t they?”

John stared across the field. Shirley watched the fat woman shake a clump of potato vines. Dirt showered in the sunlight.

“Their potatoes are poison,” John said. “The chemicals!”

Shirley waited. She watched the big woman stoop five more times, then drag her bag forward, leaning into the task, using both hands now.

“Oh I’m not sure about that,” Shirley said, drawing in a little whistle of air through her teeth to show that she wasn’t in any way serious about the topic at hand. “Some people say they taste just as good as homegrown.” Inside her pocket she gathered up the heavy plastic bag.

A car came from behind. Shirley quickly turned to look. A battered pickup rattled past, its dust rolling briefly upward, then tilting slowly toward the ditch. John, staring into the sunset, did not even turn his head.

She eyed her husband for a long moment, then said, “Maybe we should give them potatoes a try.” She laughed briefly—loud enough so that he was certain to hear. “Why don’t I just step out there and find a couple of spuds for our supper?”

In the silence a small airplane droned overhead. Its single red light blinked slowly across the sky, crawling toward the Dakotas. Suddenly John’s hand dropped from the wheel onto the gear shift and the car lurched forward.

They passed a second potato field where a shiny blue car parked in the shallow ditch drew Shirley’s eyes. A car from town. A familiar car, though she couldn’t put the person’s name to it. The owner, a well-dressed woman about her own age, with white hair and a gauzy pink scarf, was a few yards into the field. She carried a white plastic grocery bag which only could be gotten from Marketplace Food and Deli, the new grocery store in town. Shirley leaned forward through her window to squint at the woman who, at the same moment, looked toward the road. It was Thelma Haynes, a widow who worked in the floral shop at Marketplace Food and Deli. Their eyes locked. Thelma turned quickly away toward the field; Shirley ducked her head out of sight below the car’s window.

John turned to stare at her. Shirley pretended to see something on the floor, then sat up straight again. The car moved on.

As they drove she kept her eyes peeled, as usual, for cars over the center, for farm implements or stray animals on the road, but her mind was filled with another vision: Thelma Haynes’s plastic grocery bag. It bloomed white on top but hung dark and heavy below (she thought of a bull’s scrotum) with potatoes. Shirley’s gaze swung around to the interior of the Oldsmobile. She stared at the steering wheel. The dashboard. The levers. She watched the pedals, how John positioned his feet. She knew which pedal stopped the car, which gave it gas. Two pedals, two feet. She looked at the shift lever. The little window above the steering wheel said “P R D 2 1,” and momentarily she thought of the Wheel of Fortune game show, the bonus round. How Pat gave people the letters “R S T L E.” How, often well before the contestants, she figured out the words.

Later, as they drove on blacktop, a sharp smell drew up her gaze. They were passing Universal Potato Company, the long, new, airport hangar–sized building that stood at the edge of town. Its walls were concrete, windowless panels, and high atop the gray front was the company’s logo, a giant potato that radiated yellow sunbeams. Above the logo, steam billowed from vents and shiny turbines that spun out a hot, starchy odor of french fries.

Universal Potatoes had come last year to northwestern Minnesota from Idaho where the land was tired and the water expensive. Around Sand Lake the soil, graded perfectly flat by some long ago glacier, was loam on top with clean gravel below and a water table that rose up to within twenty feet of daylight. The combination was ideal for irrigation and big machinery. It was a wonder, Shirley thought, that farmers around here had not thought of growing potatoes themselves.

But people, especially farmers, were creatures of habit. Before potatoes this land had supported only dairy cows, and barely enough of them for farmers to scratch out a living. Shirley had grown up on such a farm—the white house, the red sheds, the black, winter hills of manure that rose up behind the barn. In spring the manure went back onto the fields and the whole country stank so strongly that, while waiting for the school bus, her eyes ran tears; and if she tied her head scarf across her face, bandit-style, to cover her nose, then when she arrived at school her hair smelled of cow shit. There were kids, rough-looking boys and tomboy girls, who always smelled of the barn because they did chores before school, and she steered clear of them. Her friends were town kids.

After high school Shirley took a teller’s position at First Farmer’s Bank and married John Anderson, who ran the hardware store. Her bank was the most modern building in town with its fluorescent lights and a continual cool, humming breath of air conditioning. In town the only time she had to smell manure was when farmers came in for their loans.

Looking back, something Shirley did often after she retired, she saw a trend among the farmers who came to the bank. It had to do with the smell of manure. In the 1950s only a few farmers came in for loans, and they stank strongly of cow dung and occasionally of DDT. In the 1960s more farmers came for loans. They smelled sweeter and dustier with the scent of commercial fertilizers such as nitrogen, phosphate, and sulfur, along with the orange-rind flavor of 2,4-D, the brush-and-slough grass killer. In the 1970s, when First Farmer’s grew in assets from one million to six million, the farmers had come in droves. More chairs were added to the waiting room, and their fabric soon gave off the sharper, nose-itching smell of ag-chemicals. Herbicides. Pesticides. Atrazine, Roundup, Lorsban. By the end of the 1970s the odor of manure was gone altogether. Farmers dressed better, sometimes even wearing ties for their meetings with the loan officers. By 1980, when First Farmer’s built its new building and simplified its name to First Bank, the farmers had at long last joined modern times. And Shirley, as retired chief teller, was proud to have played a part.

Of course with changing times some things were lost. The twenty-cow dairy farm disappeared by 1975, and even forty-cow farms were rare nowadays. But an omelette could not be made without first breaking the eggs; it was survival of the fittest—that’s the way Shirley saw it. The farmers who could adapt changed to irrigation. Square fields rounded under central pivot irrigators that sprinkled corn day and night through July and August. Dairy barns, empty of cows, stanchions removed, now leaked #2 yellow corn from their window sills and ventilators. Farmers read market news, went to seminars in Minneapolis or Fargo, stayed in touch with world events.

Those who didn’t, lost out. Went under. In the bank Shirley had seen it close up. It was sad initially—especially the dispersal auctions—but a farmer losing his land wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be: by then the potato growers had arrived. Universal Potato Company gave top prices for irrigable land, and usually gave the farmers jobs besides. Farmers stayed on in their own homes, continued to work their own land. Now they drove tractors and harvesters that belonged to Universal Potatoes, and they no longer had to worry about maintenance, about breakdowns, about the high price of parts. In the evening there were no barn chores, no more getting up at midnight to birth a calf. For the first time in their lives the men had time to watch TV, to go fishing, to drive their families on a Saturday afternoon to the mall in Fargo.

In Sand Lake the stores improved. A Hardee’s came to town, and Marketplace Food and Deli followed. An antique store opened on Main Street where old milk cans and separators were the best sellers. Sometimes Shirley browsed through the store, clucking her tongue at the things people bought. A pedal grindstone. Blue mason jars. Wooden kraut cutters. Washboards. She wondered what had become of things like her family’s old ice chest, the crank phone; some items were worth an astounding amount of money. But antiques were a laugh. Shirley had grown up with antiques. Why would she want to buy them back? She had no desire to return to the old days. To Depression days. To the flat frozen fields, the black winter mountains of manure.

The next morning, early, Shirley woke up with a vision of white. Frost. She sat up in bed, remembering she had not covered the squash or the muskmelons. Quickly she dressed, put on a jacket and rubber boots, and went out. A white rime of frost coated the steps, and beyond it—she saw immediately—the tall squash plants lay flattened and brown in the garden. On their shrunken vines the cantaloupes sat up high and shiny like skulls.

Among the wet, flattened garden the only green was the row of peas and carrots that John had planted. Somehow, in planting, he had gotten the seeds into the same trench. In June the row came up frothy green like a wave of sea water rising from the garden, threatening to spill over everything. By late July the row crested, collapsed under its own weight, and delivered no peas and no carrots. It remained now in September so dense and jungle-like that even frost could not penetrate it.

No matter. The garden was finished now, and good riddance, Shirley thought. She looked briefly back to the house, then across to the neighborhood. The houses around were narrow, white, and tall with dark, steep pitched roofs and caragana and lilac bushes rising up untrimmed toward the windows where shades remained pulled; their neighbors—all older couples like themselves—were still sleeping. They weren’t worrying about gardens and frost. All of them had long ago figured out that it was cheaper to buy food. John and Shirley had the only garden in sight.

Now she walked along the mess of pea vines and carrots to the four rows of potatoes where there was a plant here, a plant there. Long gaps of weedy dirt between. Had he planted them too deeply? Cut the seed potatoes wrong, left them with no eye? Put the eye staring down, sent its white shoot on a death march to China?

Shirley went to get the wheelbarrow for the squash and melons. In the garage she paused by the Oldsmobile. In the dim window light its paint glowed whitely. She ran a finger along its roof, then down the cool window glass to the chrome door handle. Quietly opening the door she eased into the driver’s seat. She raised her hands to the steering wheel, felt her palms dampen. The little grooves—how well they fit the fingers! She turned the wheel left and right. She sat there staring through the windshield and the garage window, beyond which she could see only sky and the vague, darker peaks of the neighbors’ roofs. She sat there until she heard shouting in the garden.

Shirley blinked—then scrambled from the car. In the garden she saw John in his pajamas, with no jacket, no shoes.

“The kids, they’re stealing again!” he shouted. He waved his arms.

“Here! Hush!” Shirley called. “Stop that crazy talk!”

“The kids,” John said. “Look at the garden. It’s all gone.”

“There’s no stealing because there’s nothing to steal,” Shirley said. She grabbed his arms, and her words came out faster than she wanted but she couldn’t slow them or pull them back.

“That stealing stuff is all in your mind because your mind is not so good anymore—you can see that by the way things are planted.”

John let his eyes slowly fall to the thick green row of peas and carrots.

“You’re too old to plant a garden just like I’m too old to work in one,” Shirley said. “Things change and you’ve got to get that into your head. Don’t you see?” she said, softer now, “we’re old! Old.”

In a long, slow turning of his head John brought his gaze around to hers. The morning light shone in his eyes, and for an instant she saw him when he was a young man, with coppery hair and shiny blue eyes. Now he looked down, down to his own hands. He stared at his fingers, his palms, turned them over, then back, then over again.

She went to him. “Come on in now,” she said.

He let himself be led to the house.

Later in the morning, since it was Saturday, they went grocery shopping as usual. John drove. Shirley watched him warily but he drove well enough and they arrived at Marketplace Food and Deli without trouble.

“You want to come in this time?” Shirley said.

John looked across the parking lot to the new store. Marketplace had slanting, coppery-colored angles to its metal roof and several colored flags flying on top; it was what Shirley imagined a Spanish train station must look like. There was also a drive-up window for grocery pick-up that kept people out of the rain and snow and sun. Under one roof there was a bakery, coffee shop, florist’s shop, video section, film processing station, a delicatessen plus grocery aisles that went on and on under bright fluorescent lights.

“Too big,” John said. “A person could get lost in there.”

“Well sit there then,” she said with some relief. “I’ll be right back.”

Halfway across the parking lot she looked back to see him, alone in the car, nodding yes.

Inside the store, from the smell of the bakery Shirley realized she had not finished her own breakfast. Now she had to shop on an empty stomach, something she tried never to do. She found a cart, and before moving an inch made herself read aloud the list. “Crisco. Yeast. Baking soda. Flour. Milk. Turkey (leg). Navy beans. Hand soap.”

In vegetables she passed by eggplants, jalapeño peppers, kiwifruit, artichokes, gingerroot, guavas—who in this town ate such things? Briefly she hefted an avocado, then put it back. At home she had jars and jars of perfectly good green beens and tomatoes and pickled carrots. She found Idaho red potatoes, a ten-pound plastic bag for $3.99! She hefted the bag, held it up toward the light. The potatoes were all as firm and round as apples and scrubbed a fresh, chapped red. She thought of the scattering of her own potatoes—droopy, sprouted, and brown—which remained in the root cellar. She let the bag of Idaho potatoes balance on the edge of cart. She turned it sideways for another look. Finally she thudded the sack back onto its shelf.

In fruits she passed baby coconuts, Asian pears, and papayas on her way to the California seedless grapes. Though down a nickel since last Saturday, they were still sixty-nine cents per pound. She moved on. Blue plums caught her eye; she stopped to smell of them, to squeeze their little purple bellies. Her stomach growled. She swallowed, checked her list, then tore off a plastic bag and chose two of the fattest plums.

The turkey leg took longer. “Most people want the breasts,” the manager said cheerfully. He was a round-faced man who wore a white plastic hat with a short bill, and as he dug through the freezer bin, the round white packages clacked against each other. “I’ll have to look in back,” he said.

As she waited she added up the total so far, then thought about eating one of the plums. But it would not be washed, and besides, someone might think she was not going to pay for it.

The manager appeared in the doorway. “Fresh or frozen?”

“Frozen,” Shirley said quickly.

Heading toward hand soap she passed through the feminine-products section, shelf after shelf of shields, liners, rinses, all packaged with drawings of women in white dresses in sunny fields of daisies or at the seashore where their long hair blew lightly in a breeze. She thought of her own cotton that she had washed every month, of it hanging on the far end of the clothesline, waving in the wind during the summer, swinging stiffly in winter. Today there was none of that for her. As she passed by the little plastic boxes and packets she had to look twice to figure out what some of the things were for.

In the soap section she sneezed twice—had to steady herself against her cart until the dizziness passed. After some searching she found the single bars of Ivory. She paused to look at the woman and her baby on the blue-and-white soap wrapper. She had read once that one of the models was a notorious actress in pornographic films. What a laughable notion! The things one heard! A young mother with two stumbling toddlers turned to stare. Shirley quickly covered her mouth, pretended to cough.

Coming down the final aisle Shirley was so hungry that she held tightly to the cart and let it pull her along. Rounding the corner she smelled flowers, and at the same moment saw Thelma Haynes. Thelma was dressed in a white apron with a fresh carnation on her blouse, her hair done up far too blue; she stood polishing the glass counter of the floral shop.

“Shirley Kelm,” Thelma called out in an artificially cheery voice, “what can I do for you today?”

“Me? I’m here for groceries,” Shirley said.

“Special on fresh carnations,” Thelma said brightly.

“I grow my own flowers,” Shirley said immediately. The fool idea that she didn’t drove away, for the time being, her hunger.

“Well they are cheaper that way,” Thelma said, lowering her voice. A young manager fellow passed. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a thin black tie, and Thelma turned quickly to adjust some dried flowers in a fancy teakettle pot.

“Everything is too high priced here,” Shirley said, loud enough for the manager to hear.

Thelma fussed with the stems—weeds, really, just spray-painted weeds—until he passed around the corner.

“I agree,” she whispered.

“Take potatoes,” Shirley said to Thelma, narrowing her eyes slightly. “Nearly forty cents a pound.”

Thelma’s small, blue eyes flickered briefly around her before they came back to Shirley. “I guess it depends on where you get them,” she winked.

“Yes, I suppose it does,” Shirley said.

Thelma leaned forward. “You know how many potatoes I’ve got?” she whispered. Her eyes widened with a sudden surge of light.

Shirley held tighter to the cart’s handle.

“Twelve bushel. Maybe fifteen. They take up the whole closet and part of the bedroom of my apartment,” Thelma whispered. She giggled briefly.

Shirley felt the grocery cart push her backward an inch, as if it moved by itself.

Thelma leaned closer. “I tell myself I won’t go out there again,” she whispered, “but the next thing I know, there I am again.”

“You could give some away!” Shirley said.

Thelma was silent.

“Other people, who can’t get around by themselves, people who don’t drive—they might like some of those potatoes,” Shirley said.

Thelma turned sideways to wipe at something on the glass. “I’ve got myself to think of.”

“But fifteen bushel!” Shirley breathed.

Thelma looked up at Shirley, then to the store behind—the aisles, the displays, the people with their carts, the children. She turned her gaze back to Shirley and lowered her voice. “No one knows what’s going to happen,” she whispered. “I could live on potatoes if I had to.”

At the till Shirley waited behind a heavyset woman with a cart topped off with two twelve packs of Mountain Dew. She breathed lightly through her mouth as she watched the cashier swing the items across the red light that burned beneath the counter. The beeping went on and on. To speed up things when her turn came Shirley counted out exact change, $13.68. She clutched the money. Her hand shook slightly. Ahead, as the beeping of her groceries went on, the fat woman stood leafing through a Teen Beat magazine; she had no idea of what things cost, Shirley realized. What kind of person did not know the price of things? She felt a fine cool sweat come on her forehead.

When Shirley at last passed through the electric doors, the grocery boy behind her, the wide parking lot outside for an instant tilted—then righted itself—then tilted again.

“Lady, are you all right?” the boy said. His voice sounded far away.

“Of course I’m all right,” Shirley said. “Just a little hungry.”

For some reason he grabbed her, roughly, and the next thing she saw was his face staring down at her. She was lying on the asphalt.

“Call 911!” the boy was shouting.

“No!” Shirley said sharply. The potential cost of an ambulance gave her a surge of energy and she managed to sit up. “Those are my groceries—” she barked at the boy. Her sack lay tipped over on the asphalt. She struggled to her feet and shook her finger at him. “I paid good money for those!”

That afternoon, as John read the local paper, she tried to nap. She kept thinking about prices. The high price of things. How prices never stopped rising. How they went up day after day. When she closed her eyes she saw price tags. She saw herself drifting down endless aisles where the prices on their own, untouched by human hands, went higher and higher; as she reached for things—the California grapes—little wheels of numbers ratcheted upward at a dizzying pace: she set herself, then lunged for the grapes but they jerked upward out of reach.

She sat up and blinked. Her hand waved high in the air, as if she were asking to be recognized. As if she had a question. But what was it?

Across the living room John sat tilted back in his chair, the paper limp across his lap, his mouth slack. Her hand jerked back to her body and she caught her breath: for one long instant she thought he was dead.

At twilight that same day, in the chilly, silent yard, Shirley stood beside their bedroom window and listened. John snored on; he was out for the night.

Wearing one of his old caps and carrying a flat flour sack over her shoulder, Shirley went to the garage. There she stowed the bag in the trunk of the Oldsmobile, then got behind the wheel. Taking a deep breath, she started the engine.

Its noise made her flinch and duck her head for a moment. Then she looked up, swallowed, and began to back from the garage. On the street she paused to catch her breath, then put the little arrow on “D” and got ready. She wrapped her fingers tightly around the wheel, her fingernails biting back into her palms, and felt her heart beating around and around the wide, hard hoop of the wheel. Or maybe it was the humming pulse of the engine she felt. Swallowing once more, she took her foot off the brake.

She crossed Main Street without event. On the side streets, each time a car approached she held her breath and at the last moment as they passed, jammed shut her eyes. Remarkably, when she opened them, the street was clear again.

Heading toward the city limits, two cars flashed their lights at her. Then a third. Was she too far over? What was she doing wrong? Cars passed her from both directions, sometimes tooting, sometimes flashing their lights. The headlights! She began to pull buttons along the dashboard—the wipers came on—until yellow beams shot down the road in front of her. After that she set her jaw and brought the Cutlass up to forty.

In a few minutes she began to look for the dirt road which turned west toward the potato fields. In gray dusk everything was smaller, narrower, farther off, a flat dusky plate with an occasional looming grove of trees, and she almost missed the road. Turning sharply the car tilted over the corner, bounced once on something—a stone—that clunked underneath, then found the gravel road again. She drove another mile, then another and another. About to turn back, she saw, in silhouette, stretched across the field, the long black spine of an irrigator.

A car was just pulling away from the field. Shirley sped up suddenly, then braked to a halt near where the car had been parked. In the bottom of her sack she lifted the cool heavy cylinder of the flashlight, checked its beam, then headed quickly down across the ditch. She had not walked twenty steps before the narrow beam of her light speared a potato.

Then another.

And another.

Rapidly she plucked them into the sack.

But they were so small. In the next moment she realized that these were potatoes other people had passed by. She dumped them from her sack, headed deeper into the field. Ten minutes later she found a furrow that no footprints followed, and began to find better potatoes. Heavy-bodied russets. One would make a meal. She began to think of them in that way. Meal.

Meal.

Meal.

Meal.

She hurried forward, following her light, stooping and stooping again, the sack bouncing on her back. It what seemed no time the neck of the sack began to chafe sharply across her shoulder. And her arm was cramping.

She stopped. She looked back toward the road where the Oldsmobile, small and faraway, drew light from the falling dark and glowed like a lighthouse beacon. She pressed on. Three more, she told herself. Three more good ones, that was. One by one she found them—five, actually—then made herself turn back.

By the time she reached the Oldsmobile her breath came in short gasps. Her arms were numb. She slumped against the car and tried to breathe evenly. It took her several minutes to regain her strength. As she stared off across the dark she gradually came to see how few lights there were on the land. A white pinprick of a yard lamp here and there. Four, possibly five farms if she looked in all directions.

She thought of neighbors from her childhood. The van den Eykels. The Lanes. The Grunheims. The Niskanens. The Petersons. She wondered what had become of them. Other memories, images from childhood rose up from the darkness. The bright Surge milking kettle that her father swung from cow to cow. The oiled leather surcingle strap from which the milker hung like a second belly beneath the cow. The Watkins salesman with the glass eye and his sweet jars of orange and purple nectar that her mother sometimes bought. The slivers of ice her father chipped from the blocks that he fished, with black tongs, from beneath wet sawdust. The April melting, the wide, field-ponds where she and the other farm kids had sailed shingle boats with cornshuck sails. Where had it all gone?

Turning, she looked back toward Sand Lake. The new sodium vapor street lamps threw up an orange umbrella of light over the whole town. Foolishness. No town needed to be lit up so brightly, and certainly not all night. Nowadays the town was too light, the land too dark.

She raised her flashlight and turned its beam to the fields. Where its light stopped, the present ended and the past began. Her yellow beam trembled. Quickly she swung the light back into the trunk where its yellow glow was brighter. There she emptied her sack and began to count the potatoes; the light bobbed across the night’s gleaning, but too soon she was finished. Afterward she took up her empty sack and followed the short yellow trail of her light back into the field.