Forty Alumni and One Blue Jacket

Forty names

Inside, folded in white tissue paper, was the sheet of notebook paper from Marge’s counter. On it, in forty different hands and forty different colors of ink, were the names. Some had a class year. Some had a town. One just said Good luck, kiddo. A friend.

Everett’s name was at the very top, shakier than the rest.

Under the sheet lay a bank envelope, thick with fives and tens and twenties.

“The jacket and the freight came to a hundred and twenty-six dollars,” Marge said. “That leaves two hundred and eighty-six. It’s for Brookings. Entry, gas, a room for two nights.”

“Brookings is state,” Josie said. “I haven’t even won district.”

“Nobody asked you to win,” said Bob. “We asked you to go.”

Josie looked at the sheet for a long time. Then she looked up at me, at her grandfather leaning on the gate, at the old woman and the old man standing in the frozen yard with their hands in their coat pockets, and she said quietly, “Thank you for all of it.”

“There’s a woman in Gregory who wants a picture,” Marge said gruffly. “She’ll have my head if I don’t.”

I looked at that picture a long time afterward. In the back of the frame, if you look hard, you can see my father leaning on the gate with his hat pushed back, grinning like a boy.

He had said only one thing when he saw them drive up. “Well,” my father said, “that’s how it ought to be done.”

What Shauna heard

I was not going to tell Shauna. I want that understood. I simply had no wish to put a single word into that house.

But the thing about a phone tree in a county of six thousand people is that it does not stop where you want it to.

Word got around Winner by Friday, the way it does, and Alvin kept his. When Josie’s next weekend came, the one after district, he picked her up and took her to his mother’s place on the other side of town, where there was a spare room and a cat and a grandmother who made kolaches.

Alvin stayed there with her. Shauna stayed in the house in town by herself.

“I told her,” Alvin said. “I told her I’d be at Mother’s until I know what kind of house Josie is coming back to.”

Alvin’s mother, Doris, called me the next evening. I had known her twenty years and I had never heard her cry.

“I am not going to excuse her,” she said. “But you should know something. Her daddy kept sled dogs in a lot behind the trailer outside Pierre, and the children at school called her Dog Girl. She has been afraid of that smell since she was nine years old.”

I thought about that for some time after I hung up.

I did not excuse it. I understood it, which is not the same thing.