The Gym That Walked Down Main Street

He stopped right in front of my uncle. He did not set the bar down.

“Morning, Cy,” he said.

“Arvid.”

The two of them stood there. They had known each other since grade school. Arvid had carried that man’s mail for thirty-one years, his electric bill and his seed catalogs and the card from the hospital when his wife was sick.

“I need some fence staples,” Arvid said. “And a box of three-eighths lag bolts, and a new heat tape for the stock tank.”

My uncle’s face changed a little. He started to turn toward his door.

“I’ll get them in Spearfish,” Arvid said.

That was all he said. He did not raise his voice. He shifted the bar on his shoulder, nodded to my uncle exactly the way I had nodded through the window, and walked on down the sidewalk toward the feed store.

My uncle stood there. Then he looked at me.

I had the chalk bucket in my hand. I did not have anything to say that would not be gloating, and my dad raised me better, and so did my mother, and so did the church I grew up in.

“Morning, Uncle Cyrus,” I said.

I walked back down Main Street, and I held the 10 o’clock class at ten o’clock, on time, on a cold concrete floor with no mats and the boom box playing Patsy Cline because it was the only tape in it.

Ingeborg stayed and watched the whole class from a folding chair by the plate tree with her plate on it. When it was over, she got up out of that chair without touching anything with her hands. She did it slow, on purpose, looking right at me.

My husband got home at a quarter after two with a check for the calves and a sore back from the drive. He and his brother brought both their pickups down Main Street, and we loaded the mats and the rowing machine and the last of the dumbbells, and they were in the feed store by three.

He stood in the middle of that room with his hands on his hips and looked around at all the iron.

“You did this before lunch?” he said.

“Forty people did it before ten,” I said.

“Huh,” he said. He picked up one of my dad’s benches by himself and moved it six inches to the left, under the window, where the light was better. “That’s where he’d have wanted it,” he said.

He was right. I don’t know how he knew that, but he was right.

I would like to tell you that my uncle came down the street that afternoon and apologized. He did not.

What happened instead was slower, and it happened the way most things happen in a town like ours, without anybody deciding anything out loud.

People stopped going to the hardware store.

Not all of them, and not all at once. But Arvid drove to Spearfish for his fence staples, and so did the two ranchers from north of town, and so did the highway man, and the ranch wives, and the football coach, and the woman from the bakery.

It is ten miles to Spearfish. It is a nuisance to drive ten miles for a box of screws. People did it anyway, all that fall and on into the winter.

Nobody organized it. I never once asked a living soul not to shop at my uncle’s store, and if anybody had asked me, I would have told them to buy their bolts wherever they pleased. Nobody asked me.