The Sign on the Horseshoe Pit Post

The Laugh

Gideon turned around looking for me. He was still holding Great-Grandpa’s shoe in his right hand.

His face was red from the sun, and his hair was stuck to his forehead, and he was smiling so big it looked like it hurt.

I will see that face until the day I die. I have seen him happy before.

I had never seen him proud. There is a difference, and I did not understand it until that minute.

Some of the cousins whooped. Somebody’s husband said, “Well, I’ll be.” My wife’s hand tightened on my arm. And then everybody turned to look at Rudy, because everybody knew what came next.

Rudy laughed.

It was not a good laugh. It was the loud kind a man uses to cover something. “I wasn’t even trying,” he said. “I’ve been pitching all day. My arm’s shot.”

Then he said, “And you know that bet was a joke, right, bud? Nobody pays a kid a hundred dollars for a backyard game.”

Gideon’s smile did not go away all at once. It went the way a fire goes when the wood is wet. It just got smaller and smaller until it was gone.

Rudy picked up his coffee cup. He folded his lawn chair.

He said he had to get home and check on the dog, and he walked across the yard to his truck and drove off down the gravel toward town.

He did not shake the boy’s hand. He did not say good game. He did not even say goodbye.

The yard was quiet for a while. Then people started talking about other things, the way people do, and the kids drifted off, and somebody started up the grill for supper.

Gideon came over and put Great-Grandpa’s shoes back in the coffee can, one at a time. Then he looked up at me and said, “It’s okay, Dad. I don’t need the money.”

It was not okay. But I did not say so, because he was trying to be big about it, and I was not going to take that away from him too.

The Hundred Dollars

I want to answer the thing some people have asked me since, which is why I did not just go after Rudy for the hundred dollars.

The truth is I never wanted his money. Not one dime of it.

A hundred bucks from his own grandpa was not worth a family fight, and it was not worth my wife losing sleep over her father.

The money was never the point. The win was the point.

My boy had beaten the best horseshoe pitcher in the family, fair and square, with sixty-some people watching, and the man he beat had stood there and told everyone it did not count.

I did not want the hundred dollars. I wanted the win to count. I wanted the family to see it and remember it, and I wanted my son to know they did.

My wife did not say much the rest of that day.

She sat out on the porch steps with a glass of iced tea she never drank, and she looked down the road her father had driven off on.

“He did that to me, too,” she said finally. “When I was a girl. Every time I almost beat him at anything, it was a joke, or it didn’t count, or he wasn’t trying.”

I sat down beside her. “I know,” I said.

“I always told myself he was teaching me something.” She turned the glass in her hands. “I don’t know what it was.”