The Gavel I Owed Delmer

I stood with a microphone in my hand and my face on fire. I counted. Somebody laughed, not meanly, the way you laugh at a calf that has fallen over in the ring.

And Pete Rindahl, who loved me, who had held me at my christening, leaned into the microphone and said, “Sit down, son. Nobody buys from a man they have to wait on.”

I have never in my life forgiven those thirteen words, and I will tell you the thing I did not understand about them until I was seventy: he meant it kindly. He was trying to end my misery quickly. He believed the quickest mercy is a hard sentence, and that if the laughing was going to happen, it was better done fast. It was the wrong mercy. It left a mark on me that lasted past my father’s death, and one day I would hand the same wrong mercy to a boy who was not my own.

I sat down, and I did not say another word in public for a year and a half.

My father said nothing until the spring of 1959. Then one night he put down his fork and said, “Alden. Come out to the hog barn.”

He took me out in the cold with a flashlight, leaned on the rail of a farrowing pen, and said, “Say the chant to the sows.”

“I can’t,” I said. It came out in pieces.

“You can say it to me,” he said. “Say it low. Say it like a song. Do not start on the word. Start on the sound.”

I did not believe him. I did it anyway. I hummed up a number out loud, the way you hum up a note for a hymn, and said, “Dollar, dollar, dollar bid, now two,” and the words came out in a row like fence posts. All the way through. I said it three times. The flashlight shook a little in my father’s hand.

“It’s the music,” he said. “The catch can’t live in the music. I don’t know why. Say it again.”

Every night after chores for a year I stood in that barn and said the chant to the sows. Nobody knew. In the spring of 1960, at seventeen, I stood up at the Lund sale and called a full pen of feeder calves without a catch, with my father on the platform behind me and Pete Rindahl in the third row with his hat in his lap.

After the sale my father went into the office and came out with something wrapped in a feed store calendar page. It was his gavel. Hickory handle, a hard maple head with a band of copper wire around each end where it had split twice, the head worn smooth on the one side. His own father had given it to him, and the day he got it he cut his initials into the head with a pocketknife, G. W., crooked where the knife slipped.

“This does not come with the business,” he said. “It comes with the voice. You hold it until somebody else gets his. Then you hand it on.”

I thought he meant my own children. I held that gavel in my hand like a man holding a live bird. That night I cut A. W. under his letters, with the same knife.

I never told anyone the stutter had been there, except my wife Greta, once, in 1984. Nobody in Norlund County knew. To every man at every sale I called here, I was Alden Wiebelhaus, the man who could talk like a river. I had built a business, a house, a name and a loan at the bank on that voice, and I was afraid of the boy I had been every day of my life.