The Sign on the Horseshoe Pit Post

Emmett

Emmett came over first. He came slow, on his cane, and stood in front of the sign for a long time and read it.

Then he reached into his shirt pocket and took out a black marker he uses to label his garden stakes.

He uncapped it and wrote his name, right under the white letters, in his old mail-carrier handwriting. Emmett Stoltz. Then he wrote one word after it.

“Witness,” he said, and capped the marker.

Then he looked at me. “Can I tell you something about my brother?”

We walked a little way off and sat on the bench by the clothesline. He leaned his cane on his knee.

“Our dad never let us win at anything,” Emmett said. “Not checkers. Not arm wrestling. Not horseshoes. Not once in his life. If you got close, he’d cheat or he’d quit. He said the world wouldn’t go easy on us, so he wouldn’t either.”

He shook his head. “I figured out pretty young that it wasn’t about the world. It was about him. Rudy never figured that out. He thinks that’s what made him tough.”

“Is it?” I asked.

Emmett thought about that for a while. “It made him something,” he said. “I don’t know that tough is the word. Lonely, maybe. He’s never been able to lose at anything. Not a game, not an argument, not a dollar.”

He looked over at Gideon, standing by the sign. “That boy just did something Rudy never got to do. He beat his own grandpa fair. And Rudy can’t stand there and take it, because nobody ever showed him how.”

Then he patted my knee and got up on his cane. “That sign’s the right thing, Hal. He’ll come around. He always does, eventually. It just takes him longer than most.”

Sixty Names

When I got back to the post, there was a line.

Cousin Myrtle, who is seventy and runs the church kitchen like a general, had borrowed the marker from Emmett and signed her name, big and loopy. Under it she wrote, “Saw it with my own eyes.”

Then her husband signed. Then their grandkids. Then my wife’s cousins from Omaha, and the nephew Rudy had beaten in the morning final, who wrote “He beat me too, almost” next to his name.

Hank, who farms the next section over and comes to our reunion every year even though he is no relation at all, signed his name and drew a little horseshoe next to it.

A little girl of about six, one of the second cousins, could barely spell her own name.

Her mother held her hand around the marker and helped her make the letters. When she was done, she looked up at Gideon like he was a movie star.

Nobody said one word against Rudy. Not one person. I listened for it, and it never came. They did not sign it to shame him.

They signed it to stand by my boy. There is a difference, and every one of them knew it.

The names went down the board in rows, and when the board was full, they started writing on the post itself, and then down the sides.

Somebody went and got a second marker from a car.

By supper there were sixty names on that sign. I counted them twice. Gideon counted them three times.

Before folks left that afternoon, almost every one of them stopped by Gideon to shake his hand. The men shook it like he was a man. The aunts hugged him. Emmett gave him a dollar bill and said, “Down payment on the next one.”

When the last car went down the driveway, Gideon stood by the post a long time, reading the names.

Then he went to the shed and got the coffee can and set it at the foot of the post, right under the sign.

“So Great-Grandpa can see it,” he said.