The Cowbell at the Last Hill

Waiting

Marlene and I climbed to the foot of the last hill and found a patch of grass trampled flat by boots. Other families had strung out along the slope on blankets, with thermoses and foam cushions and stadium chairs.

A man with a gray beard nodded at the bell. “You with a runner?”

“My grandson. Number two fourteen.”

“By the time they hit this hill they can’t hear their own feet,” he said. “But they hear the bells. My daughter ran here two years ago. I rang one the whole way up and she told me she heard it from half a mile out.”

I put my free hand in my coat pocket. My phone was in there, and I could feel its edge against my knuckles. I had already taken it out once in the truck that morning and pulled up my son’s number, my thumb above it. Then I had put it away.

I did not know how a man says sorry for something he did over thirty years, one Friday night at a time. But I knew I was going to say something, and that it would be today. If I waited until I had the words, it would be next year, and then I would be dead.

“Ansel,” Marlene said. “You’ve got your daddy’s bell in one hand and the phone in the other pocket. Don’t think about both at once. Do the one in front of you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The gun went off a long way across the valley, a flat crack that rolled back to us a second late. A rattle of cheering moved around the course like wind through standing corn. “Not yet,” Marlene said, watching the first bend.

It was a long wait. The first group went out of sight behind the trees, and all we could see were the orange flags and a few heads bobbing along the far ridge.

Marlene watched the ridge. Her face in the cold sun was pink, her gray hair lifting in the wind, her red fleece zipped to the chin. She is seventy-one, and she has stood at the edge of more things than I will ever know, alone, with a thermos.

I thought about all those Friday nights on the home side. She had never said one word about it. I put my arm around her, and she leaned in.

“Ansel, you’re shaking.”

“I’m cold.”

“You are not.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

The loudspeaker crackled. The lead pack was through two miles. A cheer went up from somewhere near the creek, and then boys began to come around the last bend in ones and twos, faces gone gray, arms swinging like they were wading through water. They did not look like boys anymore. They looked like men trying to outrun something.

The bells began. All along the slope, little brass voices went off, one and then a dozen. Parents shouted names. A girl screamed, “Go go go go go.” The sound rolled up the grass like a wave.

A boy in blue went past, face purple. Another in orange. Marlene covered her mouth.

“Look for green,” I said. “Number two fourteen.”

“Ansel, I know his number.”

“I know you do.” I was saying anything so I would not drop the bell.

And then, around the last bend, with his head down and his arms pumping and his thin chest heaving, came a green singlet.

Number two fourteen.

Marlene’s fingers dug into my sleeve so hard it hurt.

I lifted the bell.