The Gavel I Owed Delmer

The Chair

On the last Saturday of October, at a quarter past eight in the morning, I sat down in a green nylon lawn chair thirty feet from a man I had wronged when he was sixteen years old, and I could not feel my own feet.

I am Alden Wiebelhaus. I am eighty-three. I have called sales for sixty-six years, the first six in my father’s barn in Minnesota and the rest here in Norlund County, Iowa, and I have called, by my son’s count, something over eleven thousand of them. You have already heard from Delmer Sundquist what I said to him on the fourteenth of August in 1971. He told it straight. He left nothing out and he put in nothing that did not happen. I want to tell you the part he could not tell, because he did not know it, and because I let him not know it for longer than any man ought to let another man stand in the dark.

I should not have been in that chair. I had a new hip put in on the eighth of September, and two doctors and my son and my daughter in Des Moines had all told me in nearly the same words to stay home and let it heal. I told Conrad I would come to keep an eye on the clerking. He set up the chair at the end of the line without a word, put a blanket on it, and asked me whether I wanted coffee.

It was thirty-four degrees, with frost white on the corn stubble, and three hundred people in barn coats stood around Verda Meinhardt’s machinery with foam cups, and every one of them was going to watch Delmer Sundquist open his mouth.

That is why I could not feel my feet.

I had told my son, on the twentieth of October, “He’ll lock up on lot three.” Conrad repeated that to Delmer, because Conrad is an honest man, and Delmer heard it as contempt. It was not contempt. It was the most frightened thing I have said aloud in my life, and I said it in the voice of a man giving a weather report. I knew exactly what a freeze sounds like. A boot on gravel. A cough, and somebody else’s cough in answer, the way a dog barks across a valley. I knew I would be the one sitting thirty feet away when it fell on him a second time.

At nine o’clock Delmer stood next to a box of old wrenches and opened his mouth.

I had my cane planted and my weight forward on a hip seven weeks old, and I was going to stand up. I do not know what I meant to say. Maybe, “Take your time, Delmer.” Maybe I would only have stood there like a post, with the whole county looking at me instead of him, and I would have counted that a fair trade.