The Service We Held at the Sale Barn

The Hat On The Nail

The night before the service I went out to the barn alone to set up chairs. I let myself in with the key Ray had left under the scale house.

I turned on the big arena lights. I stood in the empty ring by myself and let the quiet come down around me.

I had not been inside that building since I was a kid riding along with Dad. It smelled exactly the same.

Sawdust and cattle and diesel and old coffee. For a second I could hear my father’s voice calling a number down the alley.

Clear across thirty years, like he was standing right behind me. I had to turn around to be sure he was not.

In the little room off the ring, where the yard crew hung their coats, there was a row of nails on the wall.

On one nail was my father’s sale-day hat. A sweat-stained gray felt hat with a feed-store brand under the band.

The one he wore every single Tuesday. The one Charlene had not thought to collect, because she did not know this room existed.

She never once came out here. Why would she. This was his world, and she had no use for it.

I took the hat down and I held it. I turned it in my hands and looked at the shape his head had worn into it.

Then I smelled the inside of it, and it smelled like him. Like nothing else on this earth smelled.

I sat down on an overturned feed bucket and I cried. I cried the way I had not let myself cry in the parking lot.

Not on the phone with my brothers. Not in Lonnie’s shop. I cried until my chest hurt and the arena lights swam.

I did not take the hat home with me. I hung it back on its nail. It felt right to leave it there one more night.

In the room where he hung it ten thousand times. In the place that was more his than any house Charlene ever put curtains in.

Then I dried my face and I set up two hundred folding chairs. Lonnie had said a hundred, but I wanted to be ready.

I went home a little after midnight and I did not sleep. I lay there and listened to the furnace and waited for light.