Supper for Fifty Two Boys

“My boy played for Hanson. He ate that team supper in two thousand eleven, and he still talks about it.”

My throat got tight in a way I had not expected. I paid him. I carried the paper-wrapped shoulders out to the truck two at a time, and each one was heavy and cold in my arms like a sleeping child.

Lavern came home from the elevator at noon. He drives a grain truck for the co-op in the fall, and the harvest had him on twelve-hour days, but he heard the news from his shift boss before I could tell him and he drove straight home.

He came into the kitchen with his seed cap in his hand. He is a big, quiet man, forty-one years old, with sunburn on the back of his neck from the combine seat that never fully fades.

He stood in the doorway and did not say anything for a while.

“Milo called me,” he said. “I let it go to voicemail.” “What did he say?” “I haven’t listened to it.” He turned the cap in his hands.

“I can’t make sense of it, Bernice. He’s never once gone back on his word. He sat up with that hog for a month.”

“He sold her for four hundred and eighty dollars.” “That’s not Milo. Milo doesn’t do that.” “Well,” I said, “he did.”

Lavern looked at the floor. He is not a man who finds it easy to say a hard thing about his own blood. I watched him work it through, one slow step at a time, the way he backs a trailer.

“What do you need?” he finally said. I will love him for that sentence until I die. He did not ask what I planned.

He did not say it was too much, or that we should let the booster club figure it out. He asked what I needed.

“The smoker, scrubbed down. Oak, a few armloads, and some hickory chunks if Glen has them. Two thermometers. And somebody to sit up with me.”

“I’ll sit up with you.” “It’s going to be cold.” “I own a coat.”

He lifted the smoker down off its block at one o’clock and scrubbed the grates with a wire brush, and by three the whole yard smelled like wood and steel and an October afternoon.

I rubbed the shoulders in the kitchen. Eight of them, one at a time, working Lloyd’s rub into the fat cap and into every crease with my bare hands, then a second coat of mustard and black pepper that my own grandmother taught me.

It took the better part of two hours. When I finished I could not feel my fingers, and I did not care.

At six we lit the fire. Lavern laid the coals and the splits in the firebox and brought the smoker up to two hundred and fifty degrees, then held it there.

Four shoulders on the top grate. Four on the bottom, packed in tight. I wrote the start time on the back of an envelope and taped it to the lid: six o’clock Thursday evening.