The Gavel I Owed Delmer

Lot One

On the nineteenth of October, Hank Lunde went into the hospital in Mason City to have his gallbladder out, and by lunch the next day my son was standing in my kitchen with a legal pad, saying he had a sale on the thirty-first and no second caller.

“There’s a man I’m going to try,” he said. “Delmer Sundquist. He’s been calling benefit sales for the squad and the FFA and the band. I went to the ambulance sale in September. Dad, he can hold a crowd.”

I put down my coffee.

What I felt first was not shame. It was terror. The old floor dropped out, and the loudest voice in me said, he’ll freeze, he’ll freeze, and I will have to watch it.

“He’ll lock up on lot three,” I said.

Conrad stared at me. “You don’t know that. You’ve never even heard him.”

I had. I had heard him through the door of a sheep barn fifty-five years before. But I could not say that to my son, because I would have had to say everything else.

“It’s been fifty-five years,” Conrad said. He had put it together, the way a county does, in pieces. “Dad, whatever happened out there was a long time ago. He’s seventy-one.”

“Call him,” I said. I did not know why I said it. “He’ll say no.”

He called him. Delmer said yes.

I told myself, for the next ten days, that I would stay home. I told the doctors. I told my daughter on the telephone. And on the morning of the thirty-first I put on my canvas coat and told Conrad’s boy that I would need the lawn chair after all.

I sat through the wrenches, and the second lot, and the tenth. Somewhere in the first hour I understood that I was not going to get up and stop anything. I was going to sit in the cold and listen to the boy I had told to sit down call a sale as good as any I ever called, and I was going to have to bear it.

By a quarter to noon, I could not.

It was too much. Every number he called was a thing I had taken. Fifty-five years of Saturdays. Every time the parts man said Ten-Count. There is a pain in hearing a thing done beautifully that you took from someone, and I had not known there was such a pain.

I stood up. It took me a while with the hip. I folded Conrad’s blanket in four and laid it on the seat, because Greta taught me to fold what I had been lent. And I went back to Conrad’s blue Silverado, parked by the machine shed, and I got in and rolled the window down, and I sat there with my coat buttoned and my cane across my knees.

I heard every lot after that. You can hear a good caller over a long distance on a still, cold day. He called for three and a half hours more, and I did not once close the window. I heard the Farmall go. I heard two brothers from Dunlap bid it up and a roar come off the crowd. I heard the last lot sell, a box of kitchen things, at twenty past three, and a long hum of applause go up from three hundred people in the cold.

I did not get out of the truck. I watched Verda Meinhardt take his hand. I watched his wife Carleen come up and put her hand flat on his back. I watched him laugh at something, and I thought, he is laughing. I can see it from here.