“Did you see that?” he yelled. I had seen it. I had been leaning on the shed watching every pitch for an hour. I told him I saw it, and he went and threw about forty more trying to do it again.
After that, I did not have to ask him to practice. He went out every day after chores, sometimes twice.
My wife would look out the kitchen window and see him out there in the heat and shake her head and smile.
He learned the flip. He learned to hold the shoe so it turned over once and opened toward the stake, the way my grandpa held it.
He wore a groove in the grass from the gate to the pit.
I would come home from my route and hear the clang of steel on steel from the driveway.
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There is no better sound in the world, to me. It sounded like my grandpa’s yard on a Sunday afternoon.
One evening in August, we were sitting on the tailgate after he threw, and he asked me if Great-Grandpa would have liked him.
I told him Great-Grandpa would have liked him more than he ever liked me.
He laughed. Then he got quiet and turned one of the old shoes over in his hands and said, “I’m going to win with these. For him.” I did not say anything. I could not have, just then.
The Game
The Stoltz reunion is held at our place now. It used to rotate, but we have the biggest yard and the shade trees, and my wife likes hosting.
It runs from Saturday noon of Labor Day weekend through Monday afternoon.
People come from Huron and Yankton and as far as Omaha. That year there were about sixty-five of us.
There were coolers on every tailgate, a roaster full of sloppy joes, and enough bars and kuchen to feed a threshing crew.
The two horseshoe pits are on the west side of the yard, past the clothesline. I built them myself years ago with real clay and sand boxes and oak backstops.
Rudy said they were the best pits in the county, which is as close to a compliment as I ever got from him.
The tournament itself had already been played that morning. Rudy won it, the way he always did. He beat his nephew in the final, 21 to 14, and Emmett wrote “Rudy, 31st year” on the chalkboard, and Rudy took a bow to the lawn chairs.
That would have been the end of it. But in the afternoon, the kids were taking their turns on the pits, and Gideon had gone up to play his cousin.
His cousin quit after one game to go to the creek with the older boys.
That was when Rudy came over with his two shoes and his coffee and that grin. He had watched Gideon throw one game. He must have thought he knew what he saw.
“A hundred bucks says you can’t beat me.”
Gideon looked over at me. He was not asking whether he should. He was asking whether it was all right. He had never in his life played for money.
I nodded. I did not like the bet, and I did not like how Rudy had said it.
But I knew what was in that boy’s arm, and Rudy did not, and I was not going to tell him.
Uncle Emmett got up out of his lawn chair.
He is Rudy’s older brother, eighty-one years old, a retired rural mail carrier, and he walks with a cane he does not like anybody to mention.