Nine Saturdays at the Sale Barn

By the sixth Saturday, we were making five dozen. I was going through flour so fast that Randy started buying it in fifty-pound sacks from the co-op. He never once showed me a receipt. He said that was the deal.

That was the Saturday Emmett Becker got on the microphone.

Emmett is the auctioneer, and he has a voice like gravel in a coffee can. He had been watching all this from the block for weeks. That morning, between the first and second draft of steer calves, he leaned into the microphone.

“Folks,” he said, and the whole ring went quiet, because Emmett does not usually talk about anything but cattle. “Before we go on. Out in the south hallway there’s a young lady named Hailey Pittman with the best cinnamon rolls in this county.”

I was standing by the cash box. I nearly sat down on the floor.

“She’s going to the national FFA convention in Indianapolis,” Emmett said. “Her daddy’s buying the flour. Her mama’s doing the baking. And they’re about out, so I’d hurry. All right, boys, lot fourteen.”

And then he went right on selling cattle, like he had not just done anything.

The line went out the south doors and into the lot. Men who had never even looked at our table walked out of the ring to buy rolls. We sold out in forty minutes. The box came to two hundred three dollars.

I looked down the hall at the cafe. Gene had his head down over his coffee. His ears were red all the way to the top.

I am not going to tell you I felt good about that. Some people might think I should have. But that man was my husband’s father, and he had taught my daughter how to drive a tractor the summer she was eleven, and it was a hard thing to watch a proud old man get small on a stool.

I did not walk over there. I did not say anything. I also did not stop it. The rolls were selling because people wanted to buy them. That was not mine to fix.

That Sunday at church, Gene sat in his usual pew, three rows ahead of us. During the last hymn, it was “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” I saw his shoulders shaking. I thought at first he was coughing.

After the service, he walked straight out to his truck without stopping to talk to anybody, which he had never done in my memory.

Week seven was two hundred fourteen dollars. Week eight was two hundred thirty-one.

The tape on Hailey’s new coffee can was going around the lid now, just like the old one had. She added it up every Saturday in the car. After week eight, she showed me the number.

“Thirteen hundred and forty-four,” she said. “I need fifty-six more.”

“You’ll get it next week,” I said. “You’ll get it in the first twenty minutes.”

“I know,” she said. Then she was quiet a while. “Mom, do you think Grandpa hates me now?”

I pulled the car over onto the shoulder of the county road. The milo was turning rust-red on both sides of us and a combine was working the far end of the Unruh field, throwing dust into the sun.

“No, honey,” I said. “I think your grandpa is ashamed of himself. That’s different. It’s a lot harder to carry.”