The Sack Race I Ran Behind the Barn

Six Sacks

“She said what?” Dale is a quiet man. He got quieter, which with him is how I know it is bad.

I told him at the kitchen table while Bo washed up. Dale listened with his hat still on, turning his coffee cup a quarter turn at a time.

“You want me to go talk to her?” he said. He would have. He is a big soft-spoken man and Lorene has never once been able to look him in the eye.

“No,” I said. “If you go, it’s a fight between grown-ups, and Bo’s still the boy who got pulled.”

“I want to give it back to him,” I said. “I want to give it back to all of them.”

I don’t know exactly when the idea finished forming. But by the time I said it out loud it was already whole.

We had burlap in the loft. A stack of old gunny sacks my dad had saved from back when he grew seed potatoes in the garden.

The real woven kind, stiff and smelling of dust and twine. He never threw out anything that still held a shape.

I counted them out on the kitchen floor under the light. Six good ones, no holes a foot could catch in.

Six was enough to start. I sat up past eleven at the machine, taking in the torn seams, folding the tops so no sharp edge would scratch a child’s belly.

The old Singer my mother left me still runs on a knee pedal. It stitched through burlap like it was proud to be asked.

The thread kept breaking on the stiff weave. I kept rethreading it by the lamp, pricking my thumb twice, and I did not care.

My mother taught me that machine. Her hands and my hands had both pushed cloth under that same needle.

Dale sat up with me and oiled the pedal and did not say much. Around ten he started cutting lengths of clothesline to tie off the sack tops for the littlest kids.

“How many you figure,” he asked. “A dozen,” I said. We would be wrong by thirty.

Bo came down in his socks to see what the noise was. I told him we were having a race Saturday, our own, and that he was going to help me run it.

Something came back into his face that I had watched go out on that courthouse lawn.

“Can Petey come?” he asked. “And the Hoff kids?”

“Every kid on this road,” I said. “You make me the list.”

Then I went to the cedar chest for the ribbons. I had not planned on the ribbons, but once I thought of them I could not think of anything else.

In the bottom of the chest I keep a feed sack from my mother’s kitchen. The printed cotton kind they used to sell flour and chicken feed in, little blue flowers on a cream ground, soft as a worn pillowcase.