Supper for Fifty Two Boys

Milo called at ten minutes to eight on Thursday morning, while I was standing at the kitchen counter with a coffee in one hand and Cole’s clean practice jersey in the other.

“Bernice, I need to tell you something and I need you not to say anything until I’m done.” That is how a man talks when he has already decided you will not like it. I set the coffee down and waited.

“I sold the hog,” he said. “A fella came by with a trailer at six this morning and gave me four hundred and eighty dollars cash for her. She’s gone.”

I looked at the clock on the stove. The team bus was set to leave from our curb at four o’clock on Friday afternoon, a little over thirty hours away. Fifty-two boys were due on my driveway first, to eat.

“Milo,” I said. “That hog was for the boys.” “I know what she was for.” “You told Coach Hanson in September. You told him at the Legion hall with the whole booster club standing there.

You said the team would never go to a playoff game hungry as long as you had a hog in the lot.”

He did not answer. I could hear a pickup engine running somewhere behind him, and the wind on the phone. “Things got tight,” he said finally. “I can’t get into it. I’m sorry. Tell Lavern I’ll call him.”

Then he hung up.

I called back. “Can you get her back?”

“That fella is halfway to Kansas with her.”

He did not say he would make it right. He did not offer a single dollar of the four hundred and eighty back.

I stood there holding my son’s jersey, maroon with a white number seventy-four on the chest, and felt something go cold and steady inside me.

I want to explain why I did not call him back and tear into him, because everybody I told that week asked me the same thing.

It was not that I was too gentle. It was that it would not have fed a single boy. Milo was my husband’s only brother.

Their mother, Noreen, was seventy-four and lived in the little house on the edge of Burkett, and she believed both of her sons hung the moon.

A screaming match on the phone would have cost Lavern a brother, and it would have left me with the same fifty-two empty plates.

So I did the only thing that made sense. I called the man who had been counting on that hog, and I told him the truth.

Coach Hanson picked up on the second ring. He had been the head coach at Burkett for nineteen years, and he sounded like a man who already knew bad news was coming at him from somewhere.

“Bernice. Tell me it’s not the hog.” “It’s the hog.” He was quiet a long moment. I heard him breathe out through his nose, the way he did on the sideline when a flag came down against us.

“We’ve got the first playoff game since two thousand eleven,” he said. “These boys have been talking about that supper since September.