The Nine Names on the Hay Wagon

The porch swing

The porch swing was the second to last lot of the day. Vernon had held it back, because people always wait for the porch swing.

Dad built it in 1968, out of white oak from the grove, for Mom’s birthday. It hung on the front porch for fifty-seven years. I sat on it with Mom the last Sunday before she died, and she told me which of the cats in the barn was going to have kittens.

Vernon started it at fifty dollars. A young couple from Peoria bid. Somebody else bid. It went to eighty, then eighty-five.

Then Ernie Bauer raised his bidder card from the back of the crowd, without a word, and held it up there, and did not put it down.

The couple from Peoria looked back at him. Then they looked at me, sitting on the wagon. Then they shook their heads at Vernon and smiled at Ernie.

“Sold,” Vernon said. “Ninety dollars. To Ernie Bauer, who’s earned it.”

Ernie hung it on his own front porch that same week. I drove past on the Wednesday and saw it, across the road from Mom’s empty house, facing her front door.

Lois called me that night. “Ernie says he bought it so you’d have somewhere to sit when you come by,” she said. “He won’t say it to you himself, so I’m saying it.”

The buttons

It was nearly dark by the time the last buyers loaded out. The yard was trampled and the tables were stacked and Carl was sitting on the tailgate of his truck, adding up his lot sheet one more time.

Lois came across the yard to me carrying something in both hands, the way you carry a pie. It was a round tin. An old Christmas cookie tin, blue, with the paint worn off the edges.

“This was in box lot four eighty-six,” she said. “Miscellaneous sewing. It was going to go for a dollar to somebody who wanted the tin. I bought the lot.”

She opened it.

It was full of buttons. Hundreds of buttons. I knew that tin. It had sat on the top shelf of Mom’s sewing closet my whole life.

Lois put her finger in and stirred them gently, and pulled one out. A brass Army button, with the eagle. “That’s your dad’s,” she said. “From his dress coat. She cut it off when the coat wore out.”

She pulled out another. A tiny pearl button. “That’s from your christening gown. And these,” she said, holding up two red plastic ones, “are off the coat you wore the winter you were six. I remember that coat. You wore it to every basketball game.”

I could not say anything.

“Your mother cut a button off every coat and every dress you kids outgrew,” Lois said. “Every one. She said she couldn’t keep the clothes, but she could keep one button. She showed me this tin forty years ago, and she said, ‘If anything happens to me, Lois, don’t let this go in the junk lot.'”

She put the lid back on and put the tin in my hands.

“I almost didn’t find it in time,” she said. “I want you to know that. I almost didn’t. Carl had it priced with the bobbins.”

I held that tin against my chest and cried in the farmyard, in front of whoever was left, and Lois held on to me, and neither of us said anything for a long time.