The Gavel I Owed Delmer

He got to nine, by my count. I heard somebody cough in the second row and I looked up and found him looking right at me.

Then he started, and it was not like anything I had ever heard from a man starting late. He did not reach for a word. He went straight for the music under the word, the way you go for the rail on a staircase in the dark. “Dollar, dollar, dollar bid, now two, now two.” And there it was. It rolled out of him, easy as a creek, and I sat in a lawn chair with my cane across my knees and I could not tell you, to this day, whether I was breathing.

I did not stand up. I believe it is because I had been given the answer to a question I had been afraid to ask for fifty-five years, and the answer was that he had been fine all along. He had gone and done it himself, in front of my own son and my own county, and I had nothing to add.

I have to go back to explain how I came to be sitting there with my feet gone. It begins in a town in southern Minnesota called Lund, in the fall of 1958, with a boy who could not say his own name.

Lund

My father, Gustav Wiebelhaus, called the Saturday consignment sale at the Lund sale barn for thirty-one years. He had a chant like a flock of starlings, and he could sell a bred sow in forty seconds and then lean down and ask the buyer about his mother’s hip without losing his place.

I was his only son, and I could not get through a sentence.

I am not telling you this to be pitied. I am telling you because it is the secret, and for fifty-five years it was the thing I was most afraid of in this world. I stuttered from the time I could talk until I was seventeen. Not a catch on a hard letter, but the whole door going shut, my jaw locking, my face going red while the word stood on the far side of a wall. I could say any word I wanted to, alone. I could not say my own name to a teacher.

I stopped answering in class. I learned the one seat in the sale barn bleachers where nobody would look at me.

In the fall of 1958, when I was fifteen, my father’s best friend, a heavyset man named Pete Rindahl who called the Wednesday dairy sale, let me stand up at the end of a Saturday sale in front of fifty men and give the chant a try. My father was down with the flu. I had wanted it more than anything. I had listened to him at the supper table every night for years.

I got up there and I could not say the first word.