The Sack Race I Ran Behind the Barn

Old Walt from the grain elevator offered his battery megaphone so the kids could hear the start.

A woman from the Catholic parish I had met exactly once left two dozen caramel apples on my back step and would not stay for coffee.

Nobody asked me why. In a small town, a free thing for the children does not need a reason.

But some of them had heard about the courthouse lawn, I am sure of it. I think that is part of why they came.

By Friday supper I had a yard list in Bo’s block printing stuck to the refrigerator. Eleven kids’ names on it, and I knew for a fact three more were coming who were not on it yet.

Dale mowed the back lot short and dragged the old hay wagon up to use as a judge’s stand.

He set two straw bales at the far end for a finish. He lined a row of pumpkins from the garden down the grass to mark the lanes.

He chalked a start line with the field marker we use for the garden rows. A bright clean white line thirty yards up from the barn door.

He strung a length of baling twine between two T-posts for a finish tape, the way they do it at the county fair.

He hung a cowbell off the hay wagon for me to ring between heats. He did all of it without being asked.

When I thanked him he just said the back lot needed mowing anyway.

“How many sacks we actually got,” he asked me Friday night.

“Eight,” I said. “And I’ll run it in heats. Everybody races, nobody sits.”

The Morning Of

Saturday came up clear and cold and then warmed. The kind of October morning that smells like cut stalks and somebody’s woodstove.

The sky was that hard clean blue you only get after the first hard frost.

I was up at six with a knot in my stomach the size of a softball.

I kept thinking nobody would come. I kept thinking I had built a party for my own hurt and dressed it up as a gift for my boy.

Dale made pancakes. Bo could not eat a bite.

He stood at the kitchen window in his race jeans, watching the lane like a dog waiting on a truck.

At nine thirty the first car turned in. It was Marge, early, with a folding table and two coffee urns and a coffee cake.

“Thought you might feed people,” she said, and started setting up like it was her own yard.

That was the kindest thing she could have done. It meant the morning was not just mine anymore.