The Pinewood Derby in Our Hayloft

On Friday night, Kevin got home. He drove out to the farm before he even went home to shower, and he stood in the barn with his hands in his jacket and looked up at the track for a long time.

“Dad,” he said. “This is better than the one in the gym.”

“It ought to be,” Dad said. “The one in the gym is plastic.”

Kevin ran his hand along the guide rail and then put both hands on Carter’s shoulders and told him it was the best track he had ever seen.

Then he went home to his wife. I did not ask what they said to each other that night. I still have not asked.

Saturday came in cold and bright, nine degrees on the thermometer by the back door at seven in the morning, with no wind for once, which in South Dakota in February is about as much as you can ask the Lord for.

Dad and Carter swept the barn floor and scattered fresh straw around the finish line so nobody would kneel on bare concrete.

I made two big jugs of hot cocoa and a pan of bars. Dad set up a space heater by the finish line, well away from the straw, and checked it three times.

Right at one o’clock, the first pickup turned in at the mailbox. It was Shelly and Tyler.

Behind them was another truck, and behind that one a minivan, and behind that a car I did not recognize at all.

By one thirty there were vehicles parked all the way down our lane to the road, and Dad had to go out and wave people into the hay field so the mail carrier could get by on Monday.

I counted the kids twice because I did not believe it. Thirty. Thirty kids in snow pants and stocking caps and mittens, holding cars in shoeboxes and bread bags and coffee cans.

About half of them were from the pack. Some of them had raced last Saturday and some of them had not, and some of them, I found out later, had stayed home from the gym race on purpose.

The rest were just kids from town, and two from Vermillion, and the lunch lady’s granddaughter.

One little girl brought a car she had made out of a scrap of two-by-four with her grandmother, painted pink with a yellow lightning bolt.

It weighed almost seven ounces. Dad looked at it and said, “That one’s going to be fast,” and she glowed.

There were grownups everywhere, standing along the barn walls, sitting on bales, drinking my cocoa out of paper cups. Their breath made little clouds in the cold.

Somebody had brought a second space heater. Somebody else had brought a crockpot of little smokies. It felt like a church supper with racing.

Dad stood at the top of the ramp in his barn coat and his glasses, looking down at all of it.

He held the first two cars, one in each big hand. Carter and I knelt in the straw at the finish line, side by side, our knees cold through our jeans.

“Racers ready?” Dad called down. The whole barn went quiet.

That was when I heard tires on the frozen gravel outside the barn door.

I turned around and looked out through the open doors. Jen’s gray minivan was pulling slowly into the yard.

It stopped by the machine shed, away from the other cars, like it was not sure it was allowed to park.