The Gavel I Owed Delmer

The Fourteenth of August

I came to Norlund in 1966 with Greta, a pickup and four hundred dollars, and started my own auction service in 1970. By the summer of 1971 I had a note at the First State Bank for the sale ring equipment and the good microphones, and I was twenty-eight. The fair board asked me to run the junior auction contest because nobody else would do it for free. It was an easy hour. Seven kids on a platform at the end of the show ring, each calling a lot or two for a little ribbon.

I sat on the platform with my own microphone and a clipboard.

I remember the sixth boy was thin, with a cowlick, and a good plaid shirt his mother must have ironed that morning. They read his name off the sheet, Delmer Sundquist, and he climbed up. He took the second microphone. I saw how his hand held it, like a man who has been told it might be wired.

He opened his mouth.

I will tell you what happened in me, because this is the account I owe. It was not contempt. It was not impatience. For about two seconds, I did not know who I was.

He stood there with his jaw locked, his face going slowly the color of a brick, his eyes fixed on a point over the bleachers where nothing was. I knew the point. I had picked it out myself. I knew what he was counting, because I was counting it too, and I had stopped being twenty-eight years old with a bank note. I was fifteen, at the Lund sale barn, with fifty men looking at me.

And the bleachers did what they always do. Somebody laughed. Then everybody did. I could hear it go up the rows like a wave. I saw his mother in the third row put her purse in her lap with both hands.

Something in me, the oldest, most frightened thing in me, did what had been done to me. I leaned into my own microphone. I said, “Sit down, son. Nobody buys from a man they have to wait on.”

I did not decide to say it, and I do not offer that as an excuse. It came out the way a man’s hand comes up when a ball is thrown at his face. It had been thirteen years inside me, the words of a man I loved, and it fired. Thirteen words, and I knew them like my own phone number.

And I watched him sit down.

I will carry for the rest of my life the way he sat. He did not stomp off. He did not cry. He folded himself down onto the end of the bench like a man who has been told where to put himself, and he looked at his hands. The laugh went around once more and settled. I called the next boy, who did a fair job, and I handed out ribbons.

It was done. I had said it into the best microphone in the county, and four hundred people had heard it, and you cannot buy back words from four hundred people. You cannot call a recess.