The Feed Bucket at the Sale Barn Door

In late July it holds the heat of the day long after the sun goes down.

When we walked in, the hog sale was already going. Lyman was calling a market barrow for a girl from the FFA chapter, and the pigs in the back pens were squealing, and the whole place smelled of sawdust and pig and popcorn from the stand by the door.

I looked around without meaning to and saw my sister. Shawna was at the back by the hog pens, where she helped every year, holding a sorting board and talking to one of the Ohlde cousins. She did not see us. I looked away fast.

Toby saw her too. He did not say anything. He took the sale sheet out of his pocket and unfolded it and squared his shoulders.

“I’m going to start at the top,” he said, “and go down.”

The first name was Merv Kemper, who sells seed corn and soybeans out of a metal building on the highway.

He was sitting in the third row of the bleachers in a seed company cap with a sale card on his knee.

Toby climbed the wooden steps, slowly, one hand on the rail. I came up behind him.

When he got to Merv, he held out his hand and said, “Mr. Kemper, I’m Toby Lammers. Thank you for buying my steer, sir. His name was Rooster.”

Merv looked at him for a second. Then he took off his cap and held it against his chest, and he shook Toby’s hand.

“You’re welcome, son,” he said. “He was a good steer. You showed him right.”

Toby pumped his hand once more and moved on down the row. Noreen Kline, the bank president’s wife, was two seats down.

She did not wait for him. She stood up and took his hand in both of hers before he could say a word.

“Thank you for buying Rooster, Mrs. Kline,” he said. She nodded and could not answer, and she sat back down with her hand over her mouth.

Her husband, beside her, patted her knee and looked at the rafters.

Then Tuck and Merle Schaefer, who farm beans down by the Grand River. Then the man from the implement store.

Then a retired schoolteacher I did not know had bid at all, a tiny woman named Edna in a church cardigan who had put in fifty dollars from her Social Security, which I learned later.

Somewhere around the sixth name, people began to notice. A whisper went along the bleachers, and then some of the buyers lower down began to stand and come toward the ring, so he would not have to climb to them.

It was like a receiving line after church. They came down off the wooden bleachers and lined up along the rail of the sale ring, men in feed caps and seed caps, women with their purses on their arms, and they waited their turn.

Lyman was calling a hog. He looked up from the auction block and saw what was happening, and he slowly stopped talking.

He did not make an announcement. He just set his microphone down on the table and folded his arms and watched.

Toby used his sanitizer between people when he remembered. Twice I reminded him.

One of the women in line had a bottle of her own and squirted some into his palm herself, like a grandmother, and he thanked her for that too.