The Cowbell at the Last Hill

The course

We pulled in a little before nine. The parking was a field, with orange cones and a man in a reflective vest waving trucks into rows. The sky was clean as a washed plate, and the frost was burning off the grass in long bright strips. It was cold enough to see your breath and clear enough to see the far side of the valley.

The state meet is held in early November, at the Gans Creek course outside Columbia, where the ground rolls and folds. I had never been to one. I did not know a single thing about it, and I learned it in an hour.

There were tents in team colors, and families with folding chairs and blankets, and coaches with clipboards in their coats. A little girl in a puffy jacket was ringing a cowbell. Then I saw another, and another. I had thought we were the only ones.

Marlene laughed out loud. “Ansel, you are not the first man to think of this.”

White chalk lines and orange flags marked the course in long snaking loops. Oaks stood along the ridge in rust and brown, still holding half their leaves against the blue. Nathan walked the loop with us before his race, in warm-up pants and a jacket over his green singlet, and he talked me through each mile like a man giving a tour of his own house.

“First hill’s a trap, everybody goes out too fast. This stretch by the trees is flat, you can settle. Here’s the creek bed. It doesn’t look like much but your legs get heavy right after.”

“How long is the whole thing?” I asked.

“Three point one miles. Five thousand meters. About eighteen minutes if I’m having a good day.” He grinned, small and wry. “A lot longer if I’m not.”

We came around a bend and he stopped. In front of us was a long slope, grass all the way up, rising maybe three hundred yards toward a ridge where the finish chute opened onto a flat green field. It looked like a pasture.

“That’s the last hill,” Nathan said. “That’s the one that decides it. You’ve run three miles and your lungs feel rubbed with a wire brush, and you look up and there’s that. Guys quit on that hill. Not out loud. They just let somebody go by.”

“Then that’s where we’ll be,” Marlene said.

Nathan turned and looked at her a good while, and something eased in his face. “Okay.”

I lifted the cowbell out of the canvas bag on my shoulder. The new strap held fine.

“Grandpa, people will stare.”

“Let them.”

“It’s loud.”

“That’s the idea.”

He put his hand over his mouth and his shoulders shook, and it took me a moment to understand he was laughing, the first real laugh since the night before. Marlene took the bell and gave it one hard shake, and every head on that slope turned, and two women in matching team coats laughed too.

I walked him to the start. The chute was packed with boys in singlets and tight shorts, shaking out their arms, bouncing on their toes, thin as fence posts every one. Some were praying.

I shook his hand like a man. I had never done that with him before. It seemed time. His hand was colder than mine, and mine is seventy-two years old.

“Go on,” I said.

“Grandpa. Thank you for coming.”

I could not say anything to that. I nodded, and walked back toward the hill with my eyes on the grass so no one could see my face.