Lisa Knopp   TENDING (AN EXCERPT)      Danny, Shawna, and I are distributing noodles, walnuts, instant potatoes, egg mix, cans of apricots, green beans, pork, corn flakes, frozen peaches, and tubes of frozen ground beef. Most people who come through the line want everything we’re giving away. But Danny always asks before he puts an item in a bag. “Noodles? English walnuts? Instant potatoes? Egg mix?” he asks each person. Because of his Kentucky accent, Danny says “egg” with a flat, drawn out “a.” Newcomers don’t understand what he’s saying, so often he has to repeat it. Sometimes, he has to show them the packaged egg mix before they know what he’s offering them. Shawna and I simply tell people what we’re putting in their bags. If they don’t want an item, they can tell us or give it to someone else in the line.      Danny says he’s tired. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning he arrives at 7:15 to carry boxes of food from the loading dock into the warehouse. After food distribution ends at three or four in the afternoon, he cleans the warehouse. “We need more good help,” he says, as he surveys the heap of empty cardboard boxes to be broken down. Danny has worked as a volunteer at this agency ever since he retired after thirty years on a garbage truck in Kentucky. “I can’t just sit home,” he says. I believe him. Danny is skinny and sinewy; his face is brown and deeply creased: a body accustomed to physical, outdoor labor.      Danny moved to Nebraska because his wife has family here. “When we got married five years ago, she said, ‘Come and see the place. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to stay.’ But I liked it,” Danny says.      For most of the afternoon, so many people are pouring in, that we can’t leave our posts to replenish supplies. Even though it’s not her job, an AmeriCorps worker loads boxes of food from the freezer and the back of the warehouse onto a dolly and wheels it over to us. People are coming through so fast that sometimes we can’t complete an order until we pull boxes off the dolly onto the pallets, tear them open, and pull out cans or packets. “Noodles? English walnuts? Instant potatoes? Egg mix?” Danny asks 186 times. By three-thirty, the rush is over. Danny and I pull wadded up Wal-Mart bags out of a clear garbage bag the size of a washing machine and flatten and stack each bag so we can grab them fast during the next rush.      “She’s my third wife,” he says, as if there hadn’t been a two-hour break in his story. “My second wife started running around with colored guys. That’s how I got these.” He points to the dark gray blotches on his cheeks beneath each eye. “I met my third wife when I was a patient at the hospital where she worked.” I wonder if Danny was hospitalized because of what the “colored people” did to him or if he has begun a new story with a different reason for his hospitalization. Either way, I’m glad that my daughter, who is half black and half white and who often helps me with food distribution, is at violin camp today.      Danny stops flattening sacks and gives himself completely to his story. “When she come into my room, I heard a voice. It said, ‘She’s the one for you.’ I looked at her. Right at that second, I knew that I’d marry her. Some people don’t believe it when I tell them about the voice. But that’s what it said, ‘She’s the one for you.’”      “Whose voice was it?”      He points toward the ceiling.      “God’s?”      Danny nods. “I heard it clear as a bell.” He flattens a Wal-Mart bag.      I tell him that I have no doubt that God speaks to people. For a moment I consider stopping there. “A couple of years ago,” I begin cautiously, “my son was in trouble. I was praying really hard for him each day and whenever I couldn’t sleep at night. One day, I heard God tell me to stop praying for my son and to . . .”      “So I asked her if she was married. Nope. You going with anyone? Nope. Would you give me your phone number? Yup. When I got out of the hospital, we started going out. We got married two months later. She’s nothing like my second wife.”      My unacknowledged story or rather, the beginning and the rising action of my story hangs in the air like a bad odor. I look around, hoping that no one else heard it. No one is registering in the next room, since food distribution is almost done for the day. But perhaps an AmeriCorps worker is assembling an emergency food basket or the black man who does paperwork at a desk in the back corner of the warehouse heard Danny’s story and my attempted story.      Perhaps Danny hadn’t heard me. Perhaps he’d brought his story to fullness and could only tell it whole, his voice alone. Perhaps he was so certain as to whose voice he’d heard that he didn’t need the validation I was offering him.      “So how did God sound?” I ask.      “Just like you and me,” Danny says. Read the entire essay in the Spring 2005 issue of Rock & Sling.   Copyright © 2005 by Lisa Knopp. All rights reserved.