The Gavel I Owed Delmer

Sunday and Monday

The clocks went back in the night. I woke at what the stove clock said was six, which was five, and lay there listening to Greta’s quiet house.

On Sunday night after supper I went out to the machine shed behind the house and took down a cedar box from the shelf above the workbench, where I had put it away in 2015, and I took the gavel out of it.

I had not held it in a long while. Hickory handle, dark from three men’s hands. G. W. cut crooked on the head where my father’s knife had slipped, and under it A. W., which I had cut in 1960 with the same knife. It had come down more times than I could count. I knew the weight of it like my own arm.

You hold it until somebody else gets his. Then you hand it on.

I had known for a long time what my father meant. He had not meant my children. He had meant the next boy like me, the next one to find his voice the hard way. I had thought for years I would hand it to Conrad, and I had not, because Conrad did not need it. He had never had to find a voice. It had been given to him whole.

There was one person in the county who had found his the hard way, alone, with sheep for an audience.

I turned the gavel over in the light of the shop bulb. Then I took out my pocketknife, the one with the worn bone handle, and cut two more letters into the hickory handle, small and crooked, under my father’s and mine. D. S. It took me twenty minutes. My hands are not what they were.

On Monday I rode with Conrad into town and did not say a word to him, and he did not ask. On Tuesday morning he came back from the telephone and said, quietly, as if talking in a sickroom, “He’s booked for the twenty-first, Dad. And the twelfth of December. I told him he could have as many as he wants.”

I said I was glad. I meant it.

I meant to go on Tuesday. I got as far as the shed and stood there, and I heard Greta say, in my own kitchen, you said that after the last fair.

On Wednesday, I wrapped it in the sale bill from the week before. It is the only paper I own that is not a bill or a prescription. I tied it with baling twine because I could not think of anything better. I asked my son to drive me.

“Where?” he said.

“You know where,” I said.