Two hundred and eleven people sat in the cinder block hall of Post 6931 on the Saturday before Veterans Day, and every one of them was waiting on me to say something I had never said out loud in that building.
The fish fry grease still hung in the air. The flag stood in its corner, and the folding chairs were packed so tight that nobody could get to the coffee without apologizing to six people.
Lanny Spangler stood three feet to my left with a glass jar of cash at his elbow and the same smile he had worn for three weeks. It was warm and patient, the smile of a man who has never once been in a hurry to be forgiven.
My name is Mettie Bickford. I am sixty-two years old, a life member of the Post, and I have called bingo in that hall every Thursday and every other Saturday for fourteen years.
I live in Hobbs, Kansas, a town of nineteen hundred and four people according to the sign, and I spent thirty-one years at the farm co-op parts counter, where a man learns to hear what a customer is not saying.
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I took the microphone off the stand. My hands were steady, which surprised me, because my stomach was not.
“Before Brother Lanny draws a single ticket tonight,” I said, “I need to tell you about the summers I spent working for a carnival.”
Somebody near the back laughed, because they thought it was the start of a joke.
Lanny Spangler laughed too, a half second later and a little louder than anyone else. That was the first time in three weeks I saw him miss a beat.
I want to tell you how we got to that microphone, because it did not start with courage. It started with me sitting on my hands for a week, and I am not proud of that week.
Lanny Spangler came to Hobbs in the third week of October, in a long gray Buick with Oklahoma plates and a magnetic sign on the door that read Heartland Honor Raffles, a nonprofit benefiting Honor Flights for our nation’s veterans.
He was a big, soft, silver-haired man somewhere past sixty, with a camel overcoat, a pocket square, and the kind of voice that belongs in the back of a church on a Sunday morning.
He never said God. I noticed that later. He said “bless you” to everyone and “friend” to the men, and he said it so easily that you felt like he had known your mother.
He walked into the Post on a Tuesday afternoon with a folder, and he sat down with our commander, Elwood Rasmusson, and within twenty minutes Elwood had agreed to let him run a Friday fish fry raffle.
The folder held a county registration, signed and stamped, and a letter of thanks from an Honor Flight hub in Wichita. I learned later it was a photocopy of a letter written to some other group.
It also had a check for five hundred dollars, made out to the Post roof fund, and Elwood had been trying to raise that roof money for four years.
Elwood was no fool. He was a tired man with a leaking roof and a Post that had not seen a new member in years, and Lanny Spangler walked in carrying the one thing he needed.
The deal was simple. Tickets were twenty dollars apiece or six for a hundred.