Supper for Fifty Two Boys

Fifty-two boys in maroon jerseys sat along the fence with paper plates on their knees, laughing with their mouths full, and not one of them looked at that chair.

Then a sophomore lineman I hardly knew got up from the fence with a plate he had not touched. He had stacked it with pork and beans and a roll, and he carried it down the table and set it in front of the empty chair, with a plastic fork beside it. He wiped his hands on his jersey and went back to his friends without a word.

Nobody said anything about it. The steam went up off the plate, and then it stopped, and the plate was still sitting there when Glen folded the table at four.

“Somebody’ll tell him,” Lavern said. “I expect somebody will,” I said. Neither of us said anything else about it, then or for a good while after.

At four o’clock Mr. Nash climbed behind the wheel and started the bus, and the boys began to gather their trash and carry their plates to the trash barrels, because Coach Hanson has them police the whole yard.

Coach stepped up onto the bottom stair of the bus, took off his cap, and waited until the yard went quiet. Fifty-two boys stopped talking. Even the sophomores stopped talking.

“Boys,” he said, “I want you to turn around and look at that smoker.”

They turned. I stood behind it with the lid up and my apron smeared to the hem, and Cole was beside me with the fork, standing a little taller than he had that morning.

“A woman sat up all night with that thing,” Coach said. “Nobody asked her to. Nobody paid her. She did it because she said she would, and you were hungry.”

He put his cap back on. “We have a game to win,” he said, “and she already did the hard part. Single file. Say it to her on your way by.”

The first boy up was a skinny freshman I did not even know. He stopped in front of me, looked at his shoes, and said, “Thank you, Mrs. Keller,” in a voice that cracked in the middle.

The second boy did the same, and the third. By the tenth, one of the seniors had reached out and tapped the black lid of the smoker with two fingers, the way they touch the sign over the locker room door before they run onto the field.

After that every boy did it. Fifty-two of them walked past me in a long maroon line, and each one touched the lid on his way by and left a gray smudge of soot on his fingertips.

Rollie Weiss came last. He did not say anything at all. He touched the lid and then put his big hand flat on my shoulder, once, and went up the bus steps with the foil pan held out in front of him.

Cole climbed on behind him. He looked back out of the window, and I will remember his face in that window for the rest of my life.

Lavern and I followed in the truck, ninety miles west to a town called Holdrege, under a sky that was clear and cold and enormous, and the dark came down before we got there.