The Sign She Held At The Fence
He told me he did not hear the band after that. He said it was like somebody had turned the sound off on the whole field.
What I saw from my chair was my husband stand straight up in the fourth row. He turned his whole body and looked down the length of the fence, left to right, slowly, the way he looks down a row of bolts.
He found me.
I know the exact second, because he went still. Kim’s mother told me afterward that he went as white as his shirt, and that she had put a hand on his arm because she thought it was his heart.
It was his heart. Just not the way she meant.
He picked his hat up off the bench. He took one step toward the aisle.
I stood up out of my lawn chair and shook my head at him. Big, so he could see it across a football field. Then I pointed, with my whole arm, down at the gate behind the north goalpost, where sixty-one children in blue gowns were lining up two by two.
Sit down, Rick. It’s his night.
He stood there. I could see him fighting it. Kim said something to him. Her father said something.
The band struck up the march.
Rick sat. But he did not put the hat back on the bench. He held it in both hands between his knees, and from the first note to the last he never once looked at the stage unless Trevor was on it. He looked at me.
They came in two by two, around the curve of the track and right past the east fence, close enough that I could have reached over the rail and straightened a collar.
Trevor was near the front. He is a D. He had the cap on level, the way I told him, not tipped back like a ball cap. The gold welding stole lay flat on his shoulders. He was looking straight ahead with his jaw set, the way he does when he is trying not to grin.
He walked by not eight feet from me and never turned his head.
I did not call out. It was not the time. I just watched the back of his neck go by, the place where his hair makes a little swirl to the left, the place I used to hold a washcloth against when he had a fever.
There was a prayer and the anthem. The valedictorian, the Lutz boy, talked about how a small town is a place where somebody always knows whose child you are.
Then the superintendent, Mr. Hobbs, stepped up to the microphone with his list, and Mrs. Pomeroy came and stood at the bottom of the far steps.
I have not said enough about Mrs. Pomeroy.
Nancy Pomeroy taught kindergarten in Harlan Creek for nineteen years. Then she went back to school nights and summers, and for the last eight she has taught senior English and sponsored the senior class. She tells people she got those children coming and going. Ours is a small school, kindergarten through twelfth on one lot.
She is the one who taught Trevor to tie his shoes. Both of them.
Her job that night was to stand at the foot of the steps and steady each one coming down, because the steps were plywood and the gowns were long. She had on a navy dress and a clipboard under her arm.