The Cowbell at the Last Hill

What I had missed

I farm cotton and soybeans in Stoddard County, down in the bootheel, on ground my father broke and my grandfather before him. Seven hundred acres, most of it rented, all of it mine to answer for.

When Kevin played football for the high school, the season ran from August to November. That is the same stretch of the year that decides whether a farm makes its note at the bank. Beans come out in October, and cotton right behind, and you run the combine until dark and past dark, because a rainy week can take a tenth of your crop.

I told myself every Friday that the money was for him. That was true, as far as it went. His cleats cost money. The camp in Cape Girardeau cost money.

Marlene went to the games. She sat on the home side alone with a thermos of coffee and a seat cushion, and she came home late and told me the score, and I nodded as if hearing it counted as being there.

Kevin was good. I know because the county paper said so, and I read it at the table the next morning. Two seasons of headlines. A quarterback with an arm like a gate latch, they wrote.

The night he threw four touchdowns against Dexter, I was on a combine four miles from the field and could see the stadium lights through the dust. I heard the crowd, faint as a radio in another room. I did not turn off the machine.

I thought about that night after he left. I thought about the lights in the dust. Marlene stood at the stove with her arms folded, waiting for me to finish thinking.

“Ansel,” she said. “How long is the drive to Columbia?”

“Four hours if we don’t stop.”

“Then we leave at four in the morning.”

She did not ask me if I wanted to. She never has, about the right things, and I have been grateful for that for fifty-one years.

Nathan’s eyes were wet and he was pretending they were not. I have known that look since I was a boy. “Grandpa, you don’t have to,” he said. “It’s a long way. It’s cold.”

“I know it’s long. Do you want us there?”

He swallowed. “More than anything.”

“Then that’s settled.”

After supper I went out to the machine shed and found the thing I was looking for, hanging on a nail by the door under a coil of baling twine. My daddy’s cowbell.

Brass, dented on one side where it fell off a hay wagon in 1958. He rang it from the porch at noon to call us in from the field for dinner.

When he died I hung it in the shed and told myself I would fix the leather strap one day. I fixed it that night with a punch and a piece of harness leather, and it took an hour, and I could not have told you why I was doing it.

I knew a little. I was not going to stand at the side of a course with my hands in my pockets.