Supper for Fifty Two Boys

We got there with forty minutes to spare. The visitors’ bleachers were half full already, a patch of maroon and white under the lights, and half the town of Burkett seemed to be sitting in it.

Word travels in a small state. Lloyd Vogt had driven out from the locker in his good coat, and he held out a paper cup of coffee and said, “I told everybody at the elevator.” Glen Sutter had told the Legion hall.

Noreen came late, bundled in her good wool coat with a stadium blanket over her knees and a neighbor holding her elbow. She is seventy-four and nobody has ever gotten much past her.

She climbed up past the row directly behind the bench, the one Milo had promised my son he would sit in. It was empty. She looked at it, and then she took the seat next to it and put her purse on the empty one.

“I heard about the hog from three different people in church parking,” she said. “I did not hear it from either of my boys.” She patted my hand. “I heard about the pork from all fifty-two of them.”

“Noreen,” I said. “Don’t you apologize for him,” she said. “He can do that himself, when he’s ready.”

The game was cold and close. Holdrege had a quarterback who could run like a deer, and we went into halftime down seven. Cole came off the field with grass in his face mask and his eyes huge.

In the third quarter our running back broke loose on a sweep behind my son’s block, and the whole sideline went up, and the whole bleacher went up with it. Noreen stood too, and she hollered louder than the rest of us.

I watched Cole run out of the huddle after the touchdown. For one second he glanced up at the row behind the bench and saw the purse sitting there.

Then he turned around, put his helmet back on, and went back to work. We won, twenty-eight to twenty-one.

The next week we lost in the second round, to a team with a bigger line and a longer bench, and I wept about it in the truck all the way home. Coach Hanson said it was the best group of boys he had ever coached.

On Monday Lavern came home from the elevator and stood in the kitchen with his cap in his hands.

“Bert in the office told me something,” he said. “Milo owed the co-op four hundred and twelve dollars on his feed account. Since August. They were going to cut his credit off Friday morning.”

I put down the dish towel. Thursday morning. Six o’clock, a man with a trailer, and cash in a hand.

“That’s why,” I said. “That’s all I can figure,” Lavern said. “He could have called me. I’d have covered him in a minute.” He turned the cap around once. “He knew that. That’s the part I can’t get past.”