The Chair at Signing Day

The man in the back of the room

The second thing that went through my head, standing there in that library, was my father.

Daddy was in the back of the room by the window, where he always stood, in his canvas work jacket and his feed-store cap. The cap said Rausch Feed and Seed, which is the store he ran for thirty-one years before he sold it to the Hendersons and kept the caps.

He was seventy-two that winter. His knees were bad and his hearing was worse on the left side, and he had driven my son more miles than any man in Texas has a right to drive a teenage boy.

Our school is small. We are a 2A town of about 3,500 people, and the wrestling program there was started eight years ago by an ag teacher who wrestled in college and talked the school board into buying mats.

It was a good program for its size, but a boy who wanted to wrestle in college needed more partners than our room had. So from the time Caleb was fourteen, he went to a wrestling club in Amarillo three nights a week.

Amarillo is forty-four miles from our house. I worked until five-thirty every day, and practice started at six.

Daddy did not wait to be asked. The first Monday, he was sitting in the school parking lot at 4:15 in his old Silverado with the engine running and a thermos of coffee and a sack of sunflower seeds.

“Get in,” he told Caleb. “We’ll be late.”

He did that for four years. Three nights a week, eighty-eight miles round trip, and most Saturdays a tournament somewhere farther: Lubbock, Abilene, Wichita Falls, once all the way to Oklahoma City in an ice storm.

That truck rolled over 300,000 miles while my son was in high school. Daddy put a new transmission in it the summer before Caleb’s junior year and never told me what it cost.

He sat in a hundred cold gyms on a hundred bleachers. He learned what a half nelson was and what a takedown scored. He learned to yell “Hips!” from the stands like he had been doing it since birth.

And when Caleb lost, which he did plenty those first two years, Daddy would hand him the sunflower seeds on the drive home and not say a word until the boy was ready to talk.

That was the man standing at the back of the library, with his cap in his hands now because he had taken it off when Sue Ann raised the camera. That was the man who had not thought, for one second, that the chair might be for him.