The Gavel I Owed Delmer

Elm Street

The light was already going when we got to Elm Street. It goes early the first week after the clocks change, and you are never ready for it.

His house is a plain white one with a maple in the front yard that had let go of most of its leaves. He was in the yard with a rake. I knew him at once, though I had not stood this close to him since 1979. He is a big man now, gone gray, with a stoop from years of leaning into engines. He turned and looked at the truck.

Conrad pulled up to the curb and stopped, and said in a low voice, “Do you want me to come?”

“No,” I said. “This is mine.”

It took me a long time to get out of that truck. I got the cane down first. I got my good foot down. I held the door with one hand and stood up an inch at a time, the way the therapist had shown me. I had the gavel under my arm. I looked at the walk, forty feet of it, cracked concrete with a leaf on every seam, and I started.

He did not come to help me. I want to say how right that was. He leaned the rake against the maple, and went up onto his front step, and stood there with his hands at his sides, and let me come. I could not tell whether he meant to receive me or to be able to go in. His wife came out of the house behind him and stopped. Nobody said a word. A truck went by on the next street. I counted the cracks. At the bottom of his steps I stopped, and I had to lean on the cane with both hands, because my own were shaking so hard I was afraid I would drop what I carried.

I looked up at him. I have thought for fifty-five years of what I would say to him, and in all that time, I had never once got past the first word.

“Delmer,” I said. “I am fifty-five years late and I am slow now. I would be obliged if you would wait on me.”

He did not say anything. He did not say it was all right, and I did not ask him to say it. He stood there, a gray man in a work jacket, who had sat down on the end of a bench in 1971 because I told him to, and he looked at me for what I would guess was ten seconds. I counted them. I had it coming.

Then he came down one step, and then the second one, so that we were standing on the same piece of ground.

I unwound the baling twine with fingers that would not work, and took off the sale bill, and held out my father’s gavel the way he had held it out to me, across both palms.

“I heard you, Delmer,” I said. “That Saturday in 1971, in the sheep barn. I was at the door. You had found it, and this was yours from that afternoon, and I have held it for fifty-five years.”