The Cowbell at the Last Hill

The awards

The medals went out late in the afternoon, in one ceremony for all the boys’ classes after the last race. We waited three and a half hours. Marlene and I sat on a blanket in the sun and fed Nathan peanut butter crackers and watched him stretch.

Medals went to the top twenty-five in each class. Nathan had finished twenty-third, out of two hundred and four. A boy from a school no one had heard of.

He did not talk much. He sat very still and drank water, and now and then he looked toward the parking field. I knew what he was looking for. He did not ask.

“Your father is coming,” I said, finally.

“You told him.”

“I called him from the hill. He said he was coming.”

Nathan nodded slowly. After a long while he said, “I’m not going to act like it’s okay.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“What if he says something stupid?”

“He might. He’s your father and he’s a Hatfield, and we are slow at this. But he is going to try. I was the same, and still am, and nobody got me to where I’m sitting by giving up on me.”

Nathan gave me a long steady look, older than sixteen. “Grandma never gave up on anybody.”

“That’s right. She didn’t.”

A few feet away, Marlene pretended to be busy with the thermos.

By three o’clock the sun had dropped enough that the oaks threw long blue shadows across the grass. They lined the boys up by the tent. A man read names off a list. I watched my grandson climb two steps onto a low wooden platform and bend his head so a woman could hang a medal around his neck.

I had my daddy’s cowbell in my lap. I did not ring it. It did not seem the time. I just held it, and watched him stand there with a ribbon on his chest, back straight as a fence rail.

That was when I saw my son.

He was standing at the edge of the crowd, to the left of the tent, in his work jacket and ball cap, both hands jammed in his pockets. He had grain dust on his boots from the morning.

He had come in quietly, shoulders pulled in, eyes on the platform, and he wore a look I had seen on a man’s face only once before, in a mirror, the night my father died.

Marlene’s hand found mine on the blanket and held it. Neither of us said a word.

Nathan stepped down with the medal swinging against his jacket, and then he saw his father, and stopped dead.

Kevin did not rush him. I will give my son that for the rest of my life. He stood where he was and let the boy decide.