The Gavel I Owed Delmer

I had my hand on the door. All I had to do was push it open.

If I walked in, what would I say? “You are good, and by the way, I am a stutterer too”? I would have to tell him I had done to him what was done to me. I would have to tell him, at twenty-eight, with a business loan and a pretty wife and a name built on a county’s best voice, that the voice was borrowed.

I could not do it. That is the plain truth, and I will not dress it. I was twenty-eight years old and I could not pay it. I stood in that doorway for a count of maybe a hundred. I took my hand off the door. And I turned around and walked back through the heat to my truck, and I drove home, and told Greta I had a headache.

That was the second thing I did, and it is the one I am ashamed of. The first was said into a microphone by a frightened boy of fifteen who had grown up into a man’s body. The second was done with my eyes open, and my hand on a door, and no one watching me at all.

Ten-Count

I told myself it would keep. I told myself I would find him at the next fair, or the next sale, or on the street, and make it right when I had the words. There is always a next fair.

I watched him grow up. I never looked for him, and I always knew where he was. He never signed up for the contest again. He stood at the back of every crowd, by the pickups, in the one place no one would look.

In the spring of 1979 a loader on my tractor lost a hydraulic cylinder, and I took it to Norlund Implement, and the man at the parts counter said, “Delmer will look at it.” Delmer Sundquist came out from the shop with a rag in his hand. He was twenty-four. He turned the cylinder over and said nothing. I told him what was wrong, and he wrote the part number on a pad and slid it across the counter, in a good square hand, without looking up.

The man at the parts counter, a big loud fellow, said, “Don’t wait for Ten-Count to tell you, Alden, you’ll be here till Easter,” and laughed.

I stood in that shop and heard a nickname that had grown out of my sentence, and it was costing him something every day.

I paid the bill. It was forty-one dollars. I said nothing, not a word. I carried that cylinder out to my truck like a thing I had stolen.

That was the third thing, and I have never told anyone about it until now. The first was the line, the second was the doorway, and the third was the parts counter. There were thirty or forty others, small occasions in a county of eleven thousand, a funeral, a ball game, a bank lobby, when he was in the same room and I could have crossed it. I never did. In all the years since, I said his name to him perhaps twice, and both times it was about the weather.