The Sign She Held At The Fence
“Is it too much?” I said.
“It’s not enough,” Mrs. Tate said. “Come here.”
She had me bend down, and she took the little gold cross off her own neck and fastened it around mine. Her fingers shook and it took her three tries and I held still for all of them.
“You bring that back Monday,” she said. “And you bring me the whole story with it. Now go. You’ll be late, and he’s a D.”
I parked on the east side, on the grass by the ag barn, where the trucks park for ball games. There were already people along the fence. Fifteen or twenty, I’d say. Somebody’s uncle in a seed cap. A big family with a baby in a wagon, who had six kids and four tickets and had drawn straws.
“Shelly,” said the uncle in the seed cap. It was Gene Yoder, who farms west of us. “What in the world are you doing out here? That’s your boy.”
“Four tickets, Gene,” I said.
He looked at me. He looked across the field at the stands. He is a man of about seventy and he has known Rick since Rick was in diapers.
“Well,” he said. “You want the good spot, then. Right here by the gate, you can see their faces when they come off the steps.”
He picked up his own chair and moved it down six feet. He did not say another word about it, and I have loved him for that ever since.
I unfolded my lawn chair, the green and white webbed one from our porch, and set it right against the chain-link by the walk gate. The fence there is four feet tall, with a pipe rail along the top that had held the sun all day and was warm under my hand. On the other side was the track, eight lanes of it, and then the field.
They had put the stage on the fifty-yard line, facing the home stands, a flatbed trailer skirted in blue bunting with wooden steps at each end. Sixty-one folding chairs sat in rows on the grass.
Across the field, in the stands, I found Rick in about one second.
He was in the fourth row with his good white shirt on, the one with the pearl snaps. Kim was on his left in a yellow dress. Her parents were on the other side of her, a small white-haired couple, the father in a bolo tie. And on Rick’s right, on the aluminum bench, there was his straw hat, sitting crown down.
He was saving me a seat.
I had to look at my lap for a minute.
Then I took the sign out of the flat box and laid it across my knees, face down, and waited for the band.
I did not see what happened in the stands next. I mean I saw it, but from two hundred feet, the way you watch people through a window. Rick told me the rest of it later, sitting on the tailgate in the dark, and I will put the two together the way they go.
The band had started tuning. Rick looked at his watch and then at the gate and said to Kim, “Shelly’s cutting it close.”
Kim said, “Is she coming in? I thought she was watching from the fence.”
Rick said, “Why would she watch from the fence? She’s got a ticket.”
And Kim said, “Rick, there’s only four. Me, you, Mama and Daddy. Trevor told me she said that was all right.”