The Gym That Walked Down Main Street

My dad helped me lay the mats. He drove to Rapid City twice in his own pickup for used plates off a man who was closing a gym down. He built my first two benches out of square tubing in his shop, and they are still the ones everybody fights over, because he padded them wider than the store-bought kind.

He died four years ago in February. Heart. He was shoveling the walk at the church, which is about how he would have wanted to go, doing something for somebody else before the service started.

I do not run a fancy gym. I want you to know that too.

My members are ranch wives who come in at nine after the chores are done. They are nurses from the hospital who come at six in the morning before a shift or at seven after a night one. They are retired men doing their knees, who came in scowling and stayed for the coffee.

I had about 110 members that fall, at forty dollars a month. Some paid in elk steaks when money was short. I never turned anybody away for money, and Dad never let me feel foolish about that.

And I had Ingeborg Lund.

Ingeborg came to me at seventy-seven, two months after a knee replacement, with a walker and a daughter who drove her. The surgeon in Rapid City had told her to strengthen her legs. Ingeborg had told the surgeon she had milked cows by hand until 1971 and her legs were fine, thank you.

They were not fine. She could not get up out of a kitchen chair without pushing on the table with both hands. She told me that on the first day, very quietly, so her daughter would not hear. “I would like to get out of my own chair,” she said. “That is all I want.”

So we worked on that. Three mornings a week, for three years. Sit down, stand up. Sit down, stand up. By the second spring she drove herself, and she left the walker at home, and she told everybody at church that she was lifting weights, which made the pastor laugh out loud in the middle of the announcements.

She was eighty now. She came every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at nine. She had never missed a Saturday unless there was a funeral.

I left Trevor on the sidewalk and walked into the hardware store.

The bell over the door rang. It smelled the way it has always smelled in there, like oiled steel and bird seed and the burnt coffee in the pot behind the counter. Two men stood at the key machine and a woman was looking at furnace filters. My uncle was behind the counter with his glasses on, writing in his ledger like it was any Saturday.

“Uncle Cyrus,” I said.

He did not look up right away. He finished the line he was writing. Then he set the pen down and folded his hands on the counter.

“I figured you’d come in,” he said.

“My equipment is on the sidewalk.”

“It’s your equipment,” he said. “I wasn’t going to keep it.”

The woman at the furnace filters stopped moving. The two men at the key machine got very interested in a key.

“You changed the lock,” I said. “On a Saturday. With my 9 o’clock class coming in forty minutes.”

“I need the room, Paige.” He said it flat and even, like he was reading a price off a tag. “Trevor’s going to open a shop. Screen printing, shirts for the teams and the rodeo and the businesses. He’s got the machine on order. It comes Thursday.”