And high above them, in the clean washed sky, the first geese of the season flew south in a long, ragged line, and the children pointed and shouted, and the storm was over, and the work of rebuilding had begun, and the table, Sylvia thought, would be longer by winter.
The idea had come from Olive Penn, the way most good ideas in Copperton came from Olive Penn: stated plainly, over coffee, as if it had always been obvious and everyone else had simply been too busy to notice.
"A harvest supper," Olive had said, three weeks after the storm, when Martin's new roof was half-built and the valley was still clearing fallen trees from the lanes. "Not in the hall. Out of doors. One table, down the middle of Main Street, long enough for everyone. Sylvia's pies at the center of it, and everyone else bringing what they have. And when the council sits down to eat beside the people they govern, we will ask them — politely, in front of God and the whole valley — to license your kitchen."
Sylvia had laughed, and then she had not laughed, because Olive was not joking, and because the more Sylvia thought about it, the more it felt like the truest thing anyone had proposed since the subscription book began to fill. A table is an argument you can sit down at. A table does not shout. A table simply makes room, and room, once made, is hard to take back.
The preparations took two weeks, and they took the whole valley. Samuel Ortiz built trestles from lumber left over from Martin's roof, and he built them strong, because a table that is meant to hold a valley must not wobble. The farmers' wives brought tablecloths, and when there were not enough tablecloths, they brought clean sheets, and when there were not enough sheets, they brought their good quilts, and the long table down Main Street became a patchwork of every color the valley owned. The men carried benches from the hall and chairs from their own kitchens. The children — Ned and Alice among them, with Hope toddling behind carrying a wooden spoon like a marshal's baton — ran up and down the street with garlands of dried corn and late asters, decorating everything they could reach and some things they could not.
Sylvia baked for three days. She baked in her own kitchen, with the door open and the windows steamed, and the whole lane smelled of apples and cinnamon and butter. She baked apple pies and pumpkin pies and pies of dried plum, and she baked bread enough to feed a regiment, and she baked a great chicken pie in her largest pan, the one Henry had bought her the year they married, dented now and darkened with use. Alice stood on a stool beside her and crimped crusts with her small fingers, tongue caught between her teeth in concentration, and Ned carried trays to the pantry with the solemn care of a boy entrusted with treasure. Martin came and went, hammering, hauling, organizing the delivery of dishes from houses all over the valley, and every time he passed the kitchen door he paused, just for a second, to breathe in the smell of it, as if the smell itself were proof that something had survived.
On the morning of the supper, the sky cleared to a hard, bright blue, the way autumn skies clear after a storm has washed them. By four o'clock, Main Street was closed to wagons, and the long table stood down its center like a riverbed waiting for water. The women of the valley arrived with covered dishes: stews and roasts and pickles and preserves, corn bread and potato cakes, jams in jars tied with string. The men arrived with cider and beer and coffee in great pots. The children arrived in their good clothes, scrubbed and shining, and were told, repeatedly and without effect, not to run.
Sylvia stood at the head of the table in her good dress, the one she had worn to church before Henry died and had not worn since, and she looked down the length of it — tablecloths and quilts and benches and chairs, stretching from the store to the hall, farther than she could see clearly in the late light — and her throat closed. Two years ago, she had set a table for one. Last winter, she had set a table for two, and then for a neighbor and his children. Now the table ran the length of Main Street, and it was not her table anymore. It belonged to everyone who had brought a dish, a chair, a garland, a hand.