Forty Alumni and One Blue Jacket

The speech

My daughter walked to the front of that room in a jacket the color of a summer sky, and she stood with her feet apart, the way her grandfather taught her to stand in a show ring.

She waited two full seconds. I counted. That is the longest silence I have ever heard a sixteen-year-old command.

“I have spent three years in a pen with a steer,” she began. “I have learned that a steer does not care what you look like. He does not care what you wear or what your house smells like. He cares whether you showed up.”

She had a way of speaking I had not heard before. It was low and clear, a voice that went to the back of the room without being pushed.

She talked about the smell. I had not heard that part in the barn.

“People say the barn has a smell,” she said. “It does. I have carried it on my clothes to school, and to church, and into houses where I could feel it was not welcome. And I want to say, to anyone who has ever been embarrassed by where they come from, that it is the smell of somebody getting up early to feed something that depends on them.”

I heard a sound from the back of the room. I did not turn.

She did not mention the burn barrel. She did not say a word about Shauna. I had wondered, all week, whether she would, and I had been prepared to love her either way.

Instead, near the end, she put her hand flat over her heart, on the pocket where the sandwich bag was, and she said something that was not in any of the four drafts.

“This week I learned something about what a jacket is. I thought it was something you buy. It turned out it was something you are given, again and again, by people who owe you nothing. Forty of them gave me this one. Some of them I have never met. One of them is eighty-four years old and he is sitting in the front row.”

Everett Lindquist, in his wheelchair, in his borrowed blue, put one hand over his mouth.

“I will wear it,” my daughter said, “for the ones who cannot.”

She finished at six minutes and fifty seconds. For one full breath nobody in that room moved. Then somebody clapped, and then everybody did, the whole crowd of them on their feet in a stuffy classroom in Chamberlain, South Dakota, applauding a girl in a blue jacket.

Second place

The results came in the early afternoon, posted on a sheet taped to the gym door. Josie placed second in the district, which sent her to state in Brookings in April, and the alumni got to her before I did. Marge hugged her so hard her fleece vest squeaked.

The woman from Gregory got her picture. Josie stood in the middle of fifty people in the corridor, in the blue jacket, with Everett Lindquist’s wheelchair pulled up beside her and the old jackets lined up behind them like a fence row.

When the crowd opened, I looked toward the doors at the back, where Alvin had stood.

Both of them were gone. A woman from Mellette County was standing in that spot now, tying a scarf. Nobody in that building had said a word to Shauna. Nobody had needed to.