The Service We Held at the Sale Barn

Word Of Mouth

Ray Oberdieck has owned the Pettis County Livestock Auction for twenty-two years. My father worked for him the entire time.

When I called Ray and told him what Charlene had done, there was a long silence on the line.

Then Ray said, “The barn’s yours. Whatever day you want. No charge, and don’t you dare offer me a dime.”

We set it for the next Saturday, two weeks out. A cold, clear Saturday in December with no sale to compete with it.

Then we did the only kind of advertising my father’s world runs on. One man telling another man at the counter of the feed store.

I did not take out an ad. I did not make one of those internet event pages with a little map on it.

We called people. They called people. That is how news has always moved out here.

Dewey Prater worked the Vandalia sale and the Kingsville sale with his phone in his hand. He told every cattleman he knew.

Harlan Beckett had passed, he said, and his boys were giving him a proper send-off out at Pettis County.

The order buyers heard. The truckers heard. The vet who had pregnancy-checked cattle in our chute for twenty years heard.

He closed his office that Saturday morning and hung a note on the door. Gone to say goodbye to a good man.

The woman who ran the sale barn cafe, Miss Judy, called me herself. She and her church circle would do the food.

She would not take no for an answer. She would not take a dollar for it either.

“Your daddy ate my chili every Tuesday for fifteen years,” she said. “You let me feed his people. That’s final.”

The man at the feed store in Green Ridge put a paper sign on his counter. Service for Harlan Beckett, Saturday, Pettis County barn, it said in black marker.

He told me every man who came in for range cubes or baler twine read that sign and nodded and said he would be there. Some of them had not seen my father in years.

An old boy who ran cattle down by Cole Camp called me out of the blue. He said Harlan had helped him load a bull in a blizzard in 1998 and never asked for a thing, and he would not miss it.

That was the kind of man my father was out there. That was the man the obituary did not mention one time in ninety words.

By the Thursday before, Lonnie called me. He had been counting the callbacks, and he thought we might get a hundred.

I told him a hundred would be more than showed at the funeral we were not invited to. A hundred would be enough.

I was wrong about the number. I was wrong by a lot, and I have never in my life been so glad to be wrong.