The Sign on the Horseshoe Pit Post

The Rematch

We ate dinner. Rudy sat in his usual chair. He had two helpings of roast and did not complain about the coffee once. He asked Gideon about school.

He asked him how he learned to pitch like that, and Gideon told him about the summer and the shed and the short step.

Rudy listened the whole way through. I had never seen him listen to anybody that long.

After pie, they went out to the pits. My wife and I brought the lawn chairs.

Emmett had driven out from town when my wife called him, and he sat down with the chalk and wiped a clean space on the board.

Rudy threw two of Great-Grandpa Wiebe’s shoes. Gideon threw the other two. It was a close game, closer than the first one.

Rudy threw like a man who wanted to win, and so did Gideon.

Rudy won it, twenty-one to eighteen. When Emmett chalked the last number, Gideon walked over and shook his grandpa’s hand, before Rudy could offer it. “Good game,” he said.

Rudy held on to his hand. “One and one,” he said. “Next Labor Day, we play the rubber match, in front of everybody. Deal?”

“Deal,” Gideon said.

Then Rudy did one more thing.

He walked over to the post, took the marker off the nail where Emmett had hung it, and found a little space at the very bottom of the board, under all the other names.

He signed it. Rudy Stoltz. And after it, in shaky capital letters he had to go slow on, he wrote one word.

Witness.

The Sign Today

The sign is still on the post. It has been through a South Dakota winter now, and the white letters have faded a little, and some of the marker names have run in the rain.

My wife says she will touch it up in the spring. I do not think she will. I think she likes it the way it is.

The hundred dollars is in the coffee can with Great-Grandpa’s shoes. Gideon will not spend it. He says it is not that kind of money.

Rudy still comes out every Sunday. Some Sundays, if the weather is nice, he and Gideon pitch a few games after dinner.

Rudy still needles him. But now Gideon needles him back, and Rudy laughs like he means it.

I asked Gideon not long ago what he liked best about the whole thing.

I figured he would say the winning, or the sign, or all those names. He thought about it for a minute.

“When Grandpa said good game,” he said.

I think about that afternoon a lot when I am driving my route.

Not the twenty-one to nine, though I will never forget it. Not the sign, though I am proud of it.

What I remember is my wife’s father walking slow across the lawn on a sunny Sunday, with five twenties in his hand, to ask my boy for a rematch.