The Name I Read From the Bleachers

He read the third name. The fourth. The fifth. He read every name in the Vietnam column, and then every name in the Gulf column, and he did it in that steady voice the principal liked, never once looking toward the front row.

Dad’s hand stayed up. Halfway. Through all of it. He did not lower it and he did not raise it higher.

He just held it there, an old wheat farmer’s hand, big knuckles, a white scar across the back from a combine belt in 1974.

I watched the back of his neck turn red under the cap.

I watched him lean a little to look at the podium, the way he does when he cannot hear the pastor and does not want to admit it. He thought he had missed it. He thought it was him.

Lonnie read the last name on the sheet, a young woman from the Air Force whose mother works at the grocery.

That made forty one. Forty one names out of forty two. He set the paper down and smiled at the gym.

“Let’s give all of our veterans a big round of applause,” he said, and four hundred kids clapped, and the band teacher started lifting her arms for the next part of the program.

Dad lowered his hand to his knee very slowly. Then he raised it again, just a few inches, and looked at it, like a man checking whether a tool still works. Then he set it down for good.

That was the part that did it. Not the skipping. The way he checked his own hand.

The fence

I need to tell you about the fence, or none of this makes any sense, and then I will tell you about the bleachers.

Dad farmed wheat on the same ground south of Ellinwood for sixty one years.

He came home from Korea in August of 1953, married my mother in 1955, and bought the home quarter with a loan from his uncle and a handshake from the bank.

When Dolores married Lonnie, they bought the quarter section that borders Dad’s on the south side.

It was good ground, and for a lot of years it was a fine arrangement. Lonnie borrowed Dad’s grain cart. Dad borrowed Lonnie’s sprayer.

In the spring of 2006, Lonnie pulled out the old hedge row along the line between them and put up new posts.

He said he was cleaning it up. He also set the new line thirty feet north of where the old hedge had stood for ninety years.

Thirty feet on a half mile of fence is a little under two acres. It is not a fortune.

But it was Dad’s ground, and Dad knew every stone on it, and he walked that line with my mother’s old tape measure and found the original corner post still in the dirt.