The Courthouse Steps Sixty Five Years Later

Three hundred people

At the top, I turned around and looked out.

People lined both sides of the front walk, all the way back to the street, and more stood around the sides of the building under the gold maples, where I could not see the end of them.

Farmers whose combines Grandpa had kept running through forty harvests, standing with their caps off.

Old women who had sat beside Grandma in the alto section for half a century. My own kindergartners, eleven of them, with their parents, waving at me with both hands like I might not see them otherwise. A man in a Deere jacket who had driven down from Fargo. The woman from the cafe, still in her apron.

The editor of the weekly paper counted later, from the photographs. Just over three hundred people.

Nobody had brought anything, the way I’d asked. Nobody needed to.

Grandma looked out at all of them. I watched her face, ready. I was waiting for the fear Glen had warned me about, the not knowing, the narthex at Easter. I had my hand an inch from her elbow.

It didn’t come. She lifted the little black-and-white photograph and held it up in front of her, high, so the whole lawn could see it. Two kids on these steps. The same steps. The same veil.

A sound went through the crowd. Not applause. Something softer than that.

And then I saw Uncle Glen.

He was standing at the very edge of the lawn, by the sidewalk, in his work clothes, with dust from the soybean field still on him. He had not come to the steps. He was just standing there at the back of everything, like he’d stopped on his way to the elevator to see what all the cars were about, and then couldn’t make himself leave.

People saw him. Of course they saw him. This is a small town, and everybody knew he held their papers, and some of them had probably heard about the money. Heads turned toward him, one and then another, all across the lawn.

He could have turned around and gone back to his truck. I would not have blamed him.

He started up the front walk instead.

And three hundred people stood quiet on both sides of it while he came, the way they stand for a family at a funeral.

He came all the way up to the bottom of the steps and stopped there, looking up at his mother in her mother’s veil, and his face was doing something I had never seen it do.

“Mom,” he said. His voice cracked right down the middle of the word.