The Cowbell at the Last Hill

The last of it

We stayed until the tent came down. Kevin brought us hot chocolate in paper cups from a stand by the parking field, and he handed Marlene hers with both hands like a gift. She patted his cheek, once, hard enough to remind him she had raised him.

He and I stood a little apart while Nathan collected his bag.

“Dad, I don’t know if I can fix it. All those years I made him feel like what he loved was small.”

“You don’t fix it,” I said. “You show up the next time, and the time after that, until it isn’t a surprise anymore.”

“How long did that take you?”

“About an hour,” I said. “I stood on a hill and rang a bell. I’m still not finished.”

He looked at the bell in my hand, the dent catching the last of the sun. “Granddad’s bell. He used to ring it from the porch.” He stopped. “I always wondered whether he missed things too.”

“He missed a lot. He just never said so. I’d like it to end with us.”

My son nodded. He took the bell out of my hand, weighed it a moment, and gave it back. “Next year you ring it, and I’ll ring it with you.”

“Deal.”

On the way home I rode in Kevin’s truck with Marlene beside me. My old Ford followed behind with Nathan at the wheel, because his father had said, “Let him drive it, he’s got his license, he’s earned it,” and handed him the keys.

I watched our own headlights in the mirror, a boy at the wheel with his medal swinging from the rearview, and all the way home they stayed right behind us.

Marlene slept with her head on my shoulder. Kevin drove with both hands on the wheel and the radio off. After a long time he said, “Dad. Did you ever see me play? Even once?”

“Once. You were nine. Pee-wee league. You dropped the ball and cried.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“I do. I was behind the fence on the tractor. I was not supposed to be there.”

Kevin was quiet a long moment. “I’d like to hear about that sometime.”

“I’d like to tell you.”

It was dark by then, the highway empty, the cotton stubble rolling past on either side like black water.

In the spring I went to every home meet at the little school track with Marlene and a lawn chair. Kevin was there too, at the rail, in his work jacket, with a stopwatch from the sporting goods store.

The first Tuesday he rang my daddy’s cowbell on the far turn, loud and flat and ugly, and Nathan lifted his head in the middle of the second lap and found him.

That was the whole thing. A boy looked up, and his father was there.

I sat in my lawn chair with my wife’s hand in mine and the sun warm on the infield, and I watched my son stand at the rail, and I thought: some men learn it late. It does not mean they did not learn.

The bell hangs by my kitchen door now, on a new nail, where I can see it when I come in from the field. Nobody has to tell me what it is for.

It is for the hill, and for calling someone home. It is for the thing I should have done thirty years ago and did this fall, a little late and a good deal clumsy, with a cold wind at my back and my wife’s fingers in my sleeve.

I like to think my father would have understood.