The Gavel I Owed Delmer

Greta

I told my wife once, in 1984, at the kitchen sink, after a young man who stuttered badly had asked me for a job and I had given him a card and nothing else. I told her all of it, the boy in Lund and the hog barn and the line and the gavel, and then, because I could not stop, the fair, the sheep barn, the door.

She dried her hands on her apron. She was a plain woman and she did not waste breath. She said, “Alden, you need to go and see that man.”

“I will,” I said. “After the fair.”

“You said that after the last fair.”

“I know it.”

“Go and see him,” she said. “Not for his sake. For yours. You’ll rot, Alden. It’ll sit in you and go sour.”

I did not go. There was always another fair. Greta did not raise it again. She let me be a coward in peace for thirty-six more years.

She died in March of 2020, in a hospital in Des Moines, when they would not let me past the door. I stood in the parking lot and held up my hand to a window on the fourth floor. I do not know that she saw me.

I handed the business to Conrad in 2015 and told him I would retire. I did not. I sat in a lawn chair at every sale with a thermos and watched my son call. He is better than I was, and he does not have a loan on his voice. I think that is because he never had to build one.

And this past August, at the fair, I sat on the platform at the end of the show ring and could not look at the bleachers without seeing a boy in a plaid shirt. I do not know what it was. Age. The hip coming. A man’s account comes due, and there is no one at the counter to talk to but himself.