The Gavel I Owed Delmer

The Sheep Barn

At a little after five, when the crowd had thinned, I walked down the long row of livestock barns with my hat in my hand, looking for a thin boy in a plaid shirt.

I had no plan. I thought I could walk up to him and say, “I’m sorry, I did that wrong,” and that it would fix itself like a bad weld. I had not thought one step past those words.

The sheep barn was at the far end, away from the rides. The door was propped open with a feed bucket, and there was a heat coming out of it, wool and straw and August. I stopped at the door. I heard something inside.

It was a boy’s voice. Cracked a little, a boy of sixteen, and low, the way you talk when you are alone and trying not to be caught. It was chanting.

“Dollar bid, now two, now two, will you give me two. Two-dollar bid, now three.”

It ran like water over stones, without a catch. I stood in the door with my hand on the wood and listened to a boy call a perfect sale to a pen of ewes, and in all the years since I have not heard anything like the sound of that boy’s voice.

He was good. He had the rhythm and the lilt and the breath, and he was sixteen and had never been taught a day in his life.

And I knew exactly what I was hearing. It was what I had found in a hog barn in Minnesota with a flashlight. A boy in a plaid shirt had found it too, alone, in a sheep barn, in the hour after I had done what I did to him. And he did not know what he had. I could hear that he did not. He was saying it the way a boy says something he does not trust.