The Sign on the Horseshoe Pit Post

Sunday

Sunday morning, we went to church in Mitchell like we always do, and a lot of the reunion crowd came with us and filled up three back pews.

The pastor preached on the talents. I am afraid I did not hear much of it.

I was thinking about a board.

When we got home, I went out to my shop and found a one-by-twelve, about four feet long, left over from the new feed bunk.

I sanded it down and gave it two coats of green paint, the dark green we use on the gates.

I did not have a plan, exactly. I just knew I wanted something that said it, in plain words, where everybody would see it.

My wife found me out back with the board drying on two sawhorses. She looked at it for a long time. She did not ask a single question.

She went into the house and came back with the small brush from her craft drawer and a can of white paint.

She has the better hand. She always did. She lettered the cards for our wedding and every birthday cake our kids ever had.

She knelt down on the grass beside the sawhorses and started in.

Reunion Horseshoe Champion. In big white letters across the top.

Then she stopped and looked at me. I nodded. She set the brush down. “No name,” she said. “Everybody knows who won it.”

She did not put the year on it. I asked her about that later. She said a year makes it sound like it’s over.

When she finished, she wiped her hands on a rag, and she was crying a little, and she laughed at herself for crying. “My dad is going to be so mad,” she said.

“Probably,” I said.

“Good,” she said. And then, quieter, “No. Not good. I just want him to see it.”

Labor Day

Monday was Labor Day, the last day of the reunion. I had to run out that morning on a propane call, a farm north of town with an empty tank and a dryer full of wet laundry.

In my line of work, there is no such thing as a holiday.

I got back a little after one in my blue work shirt, sunburned from the cab window.

The yard was full again. Everybody had come back for the last big potluck before they started for home.

Gideon was out by the pits in his gray T-shirt, sandy hair sticking up in back.

He was throwing with his cousins, using Great-Grandpa’s shoes. He was not limping any less, but he was walking taller. I noticed that.

I got the board out of the shop, and a hammer, and a handful of sixteen-penny nails. Then I walked across the yard past the lawn chairs toward the pit post.

That post stands at the head of the west pit. I set it there years ago to hang the scoring chalkboard on.

Everybody who plays horseshoes at our place walks past it. Rudy has hung his hat on it every Labor Day for as long as I have known him.

People saw me carrying the board. Conversations stopped.

Gideon saw it too and came over with a horseshoe still in his hand, and he read it, and he did not say a word. He just grinned.

I held the board up against the post at about eye level, a grown man’s eye level. Then I drove the first nail.

The sound carried across the yard. Somebody started clapping. Then somebody else. By the third nail, half the lawn chairs were clapping, and a couple of the cousins were hollering.

I drove four nails, one in each corner. Then I stepped back and looked at it. Green board.

White letters, all in my wife’s handwriting. It looked like it had always been there.

I did not make a speech. I did not say anything about Rudy. I put the hammer in my back pocket and stood next to my son.