The Sack Race I Ran Behind the Barn

Then the Hoff girl came with a van full of little ones. Then the Petersen pickup. Then cars I half knew and cars I did not.

They came down our gravel lane in a line, dust hanging gold in the cold sun.

By ten there were maybe forty people in my back lot and more still coming.

Kids peeled off toward the chalk line. Parents dragged lawn chairs out of trunks. Marge poured coffee like the Lord’s own hostess.

The Schmidts came, who milk forty head and never go anywhere on a Saturday morning. The young couple who bought the old Reinke place came with a baby on a hip.

The Hoff girl’s whole Sunday school class came, it seemed like, in mismatched coats and stocking caps.

Somebody’s beagle got loose and ran three victory laps of the course before a boy caught him by the collar.

Bo stood by the start line with the stack of sacks in his arms. I watched him count the kids, his mouth moving.

I watched the number get bigger than he could hold in his head. And I watched him start to laugh.

I had not heard that laugh since the Tuesday before.

Cars In The Lane

I was lining up the first heat, the little ones, Maddie-sized, when I looked up and saw Kim’s minivan come slow down the lane.

My stomach dropped. I thought, she has come to say something. She has come to make it a thing in front of everyone.

Then the side door slid open and Tyler and Maddie came out of it at a dead run for the start line.

Kim got out slow behind them, not meeting my eye.

“They wouldn’t quit asking,” she said, looking at her own shoes. “The whole town’s talking about it. Mom doesn’t know I came.”

I could have said a hundred things. Tyler had taken my boy’s spot four days before, and here he was wanting a sack of his own.

But he was a seven-year-old in a cowboy shirt. None of this was his to carry.

Peggy voices in my head said one thing and the better part of me said the same thing, both at once.

“Bo,” I called. “Two more racers. Get them a sack.”

And my son walked over to the boy whose grandmother had called him not family, and handed Tyler a burlap sack, and showed him how to bunch the top so he would not trip.

“You gotta hop, don’t run,” Bo told him, serious as a coach. “Running’s how you bust your lip.”

Kim turned away and put her hand over her mouth. I pretended not to see.

I went and got the little ones lined up on the chalk.

“On your marks,” I called, and forty parents hushed their own talk to watch a row of five-year-olds fall down.