The Fourteen Steps to Row Nine

Fourteen Steps

November twenty-second was twenty-eight degrees, with a wind off the plains that went through a coat as if you had not worn one.

Mike pulled the van into the lot behind the grain elevator at nine-fifteen, where Pete Anders had left an orange cone in my father’s old parking spot by the east tunnel, the one grounds crew men got and nobody else did. He had taped cardboard to it that said Gordy in his square carpenter printing, and I read it and had to turn my face to the window.

My father sat in the back in his camel overcoat over the sweater my mother knitted him in 1989, with a wool cap pulled to his ears. He had a program in his breast pocket and the stub of a pencil, the same pocket he has kept a pencil in since before I was born. His hands were very still in his lap.

“Is that my cone?” he said.

“That’s your cone.”

“Pete Anders,” he said, as if the name explained the whole arrangement. “That boy always did put the paint on too thick.”

Pete was waiting at the bottom of the east tunnel. When he saw Dad he crouched beside the chair and took his hand, and neither of them said a word. They looked at each other like men who had once stood together at five in the morning in a wet field.

The tunnel smells like concrete and popcorn and forty years. Dad kept his eyes shut. I think he was listening. Then we came out at the bottom of Section 14 into cold light, and Gene Ruzicka stood at the foot of the stairs in his blue vest.

“Gordy,” said Gene.

Dad opened his eyes. “Gene. You got fat.”

“I got older. You’re the one who got handsome.”

Then Gene stepped back and raised one hand, and I saw them standing on either side of the stairs: Mike and Ed and Pete and Josh Hendrickson, Roy and his brother Arlen, and behind them Pat Wiebe with both arms held out to spot. They had all taken their gloves off. I do not know why. I think it was respect.

“Mr. Gordy,” Gene said formally, “if you’d allow us, we’ll take you up.”

My father looked at the stairs for a long time.

“It’s a lot of steps.”

“Fourteen,” said Gene. “We’ve counted.”

“I used to run them.”

“You did.”

My father put both hands on the arms of the chair, and nodded.

“Frame on three,” said Gene. “One. Two. Three.”

They lifted the chair level, Mike on the left rear, Ed and Pete in front, Josh on the other rear corner, Roy and Arlen at the sides. Gene walked backward up the stairs a half step ahead of them, calling it low and steady. “Step. Step. Hold level. Step.” Pat followed with his arms out, a foot from the back of the chair. I walked beside them and counted. I could not stop.

People were coming down the aisle behind us for the game, and they stopped. A woman with a child on her hip pressed herself flat against the wall. A man in a letter jacket said, “Hey, hold up,” to the people behind him, and they held. Nobody asked what was going on. They looked at an old man in a camel coat being carried up the stairs by six men and an usher, and they understood, because most of them had somebody.