Forty Alumni and One Blue Jacket

District

District was held that Saturday at the high school in Chamberlain, an hour and a half northeast, near the interstate, in a classroom with the desks pushed to the walls and a long folding table at the front for the three judges.

We left the farm at six. I drove, with my father beside me in his church shirt and Josie in the back with her speech cards in her lap, wearing the jacket over a white blouse, her hair in a French braid I had done at the kitchen table.

“You don’t have to say anything,” I told her at a gas station outside Winner. “You just have to say the speech.”

“I know.”

“Say it the way you said it in the barn.”

“I know, Mom.”

When we pulled into the school lot, I saw them.

They had come in pickups, in a church van from Gregory, in a horse trailer from Mellette County. Marge and Bob, and Lowell from the class of 1983, and thirty or forty more I did not recognize at all.

They were standing in the parking lot in small groups, in barn coats and good wool, and a few of them, a few of the old ones, were in their jackets.

I mean their own jackets. Forty and fifty and sixty years old, the corduroy gone soft as flannel, the gold faded to the color of straw.

Josie stopped at the edge of the lot.

“Mom,” she said. “Who are those people?”

“I think they’re the ones who signed the paper.”

The seats at the back

Speeches in the prepared category are open to the public. By the time Josie was called, around ten-thirty, there were over fifty people in a room built for thirty, standing along the walls and in the doorway.

I sat in the second row with my father. The alumni filled in everywhere. Everett Lindquist had come after all, in a wheelchair, brought by a grandnephew from Colome. I saw him from across the room, a small man in a faded blue jacket two sizes too big, with a dignity so complete it made me look away.

The doors at the back opened once more as the previous contestant was finishing. I turned my head.

Alvin had come in. He stood by the wall with his hat in his hand.

And beside him, half a step behind, in a long tan coat with her hands pushed deep in the pockets, stood Shauna.

She did not look at me. She looked at the floor, and then, because she could not help it, at the room, at all those people in their old blue jackets, and her face did something I had not seen it do before. She went the color of paper.

I turned back around. I did not want her to feel watched.

“Josephine Hoffman,” the judge called. “Prepared public speaking. Seven minutes.”