The burlap sack sat on the white tablecloth between the dessert cart and the candle, tied shut with a length of orange baling twine, and it gave off a smell I knew at once, damp earth and cold, the smell of a cellar in October. Mr. Larsen laid both hands on it. He is eighty one, thin as a fence post, in a pressed western shirt and a bolo tie, and he had driven four hours down from Challis in a truck older than his granddaughter. “Mr. Bryce,” he said, “my wife and I have a ranch. You know our son. You know his money. You do not know us.”
Bryce had his glass of red in his hand, a handsome, tanned man of fifty in a quarter zip vest, and the toast he had given about Kelsey still rang off the beams of the lodge. He had said that the man who parked his car made more than she did, and that his hands were warm. The whole table had laughed. At the next table sat the investor, Eric Larsen, whose money was building the condos of Bryce, with a face gone very still. Mrs. Larsen, eighty, small as a wren, reached over and squeezed the hand of her husband twice.
“Kelsey did not know who we were,” said Mr. Larsen. “In October of 2018 our buyer went out of business in Burley. We had three semi loads of Russets in the cellar and nowhere to put them. They would have rotted by Christmas. A girl from the warehouse in Shelley heard about it on her break. She stayed after a twelve hour shift, with her hands cracked open, and called every food bank from Pocatello to Boise from the break room. By morning she had trucks. By the end of the week she had driven the first one herself.”
A burlap sack tied with baling twine sat beside a dessert cart at a ski lodge and gave one grandfather the length of a cup of coffee to bring his son in law back to his granddaughter.
Kelsey had her napkin pressed to her mouth. “I only made phone calls, Mr. Larsen,” she said. “You made a great many phone calls,” said the old man. “And then you made them again the next fall, and the next. Eight falls. Three semi loads, and then six, and last year eleven. Do you know how many meals that is? My granddaughter worked it out on a calculator. Two point four million.” He untied the twine with slow, thick fingers. “We never told you what it did for us. Without it, we would have lost the ranch.”
He folded back the burlap. Inside lay a heap of small red potatoes, fat and clean, each one with a date in black marker. “One from every load,” he said. “From our own cellar. Eight of them. My wife kept the seed.” Beneath the potatoes lay a cream colored envelope. Mrs. Larsen took it out and held it across the tablecloth to my granddaughter with a shaking hand. “The Larsen Family Foundation has funded the drive in perpetuity,” she said. “Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. We would like you to run it. Full time. Sixty two thousand a year.”
Kelsey did not move. She is twenty seven, plain faced and steady, with her mother chin, and she looked at that envelope as if it were a bomb or a bird. Then she began to cry, the quiet way, with her shoulders. At the next table Eric Larsen stood. “Bryce,” he said, in a low voice that carried, “I have put eleven million dollars into your project. Tonight my parents asked me to bring them to meet the man I trusted with it. I did not know I would be introducing them to this.” Bryce sat down slowly. “The second phase is on hold until we talk.”
Bryce looked ill. He looked, I thought, like a boy who has been told he cannot go on the trip. He turned to my granddaughter, and for the first time I saw that he was frightened, not of the money, of her. “Kelsey,” he said, “my hands are warm because I have never done a thing with them.” She wiped her face. “Uncle Bryce, I like the work,” she said. “You do not have to be sorry for me. Be sorry for you. You have a lovely view, and nobody to share it with who is not on your payroll.” The table did not laugh. Not one of us did.
I am her grandfather, and I told Bryce the price. A shift on the line at the warehouse in Shelley, in November, twelve hours, five in the morning to five at night, no phone, in the cold, in whatever gloves the rest of them wore. And a cold storage building, for the drive, so that nothing more would rot in a cellar, built by his company at his cost and without his name on any door. Bryce nodded. “I would like to see the line,” he said. It was the first honest thing I had heard him say in years.
He stood at the conveyor for twelve hours. By the fifth he had a hand like raw steak. A rotten spud burst in his face at nine, and the whole line cheered, and he laughed, a real laugh, and wiped his chin on his sleeve. Kelsey stood at his elbow and passed him a pair of thermal liners without a word. At the lunch break he sat on a pallet with a baloney sandwich from the break room and said to no one, “Eight falls.” By the end of the shift he had sorted, by his own count, nineteen thousand potatoes. He went home and slept for fourteen hours.
The cold storage building went up in Shelley that spring, a plain steel barn with no sign on it. The drive grew to fourteen semi loads that year and crossed into Oregon. Kelsey runs it now, in a warm office, with a phone and a forklift and a dozen volunteers. At the ski trip dinner this winter, Bryce stood with a glass, and I held my breath. “To Kelsey,” he said. “Who knows what a potato is worth.” On my kitchen windowsill in Idaho Falls sits the burlap sack, and in one of its folds a single red potato has begun, stubbornly, to sprout.