The Locker I Filled for My Son

A man in the back who had a doe on the trailer outside said it was a good-sized doe and he had a long drive. Somebody told him to hush.

Selby had put out the plates on the cutting table in four rows of ten.

On each plate was a thin slice of ribeye seared dark, cut across the grain and fanned a little, a spoonful of a sharp green sauce, and a smear of dark glaze.

Avis had cut a leaf of flat parsley off her kitchen window sill for every plate.

She stood at the end of the table with her cane, in a green cardigan, and gave me a nod as if she were counting a vote.

I climbed up on the old lard bucket.

It is the one my son stood on at five years old, and it does not hold a man my weight easily, and Selby put a hand on my back to steady me.

I said, “Most of you were here five years ago. You heard what I said to my boy at that end of the table.”

Nobody moved. The compressor ran.

I said, “I said a man who plays with little plates will never feed a family. I said it loud so you would hear it, and I want you to hear this just as loud. I was wrong. I knew I was wrong while I was saying it. I have known it every day since.”

My voice did not sound like mine. I kept going, because I knew that if I stopped, I would never start again.

I said, “My son is a cook. I do not know if he is a good one, because I told him a lie about the one plate he ever made me. He is the best taster I have ever stood next to. He is better at it than I am, and I could not stand to say so.”

A woman near the front set down her coffee cup so hard it rang on the scale. A man I had sold venison sausage to for thirty years stared hard at the floor.

I said, “I do not know if he will ever hear this. I do not know if he wants to. I am not asking him to come back, and I am not asking you to say anything. I only want it said in the same room, in front of the same people, as the other thing.”

Then I got down off the bucket, and my knees were not what they were, and I picked up the first plate.

I walked down the line and gave a plate to every person in that shop, one at a time, and said the same thing to each of them.

I said, “Try the first one. It is a little plate.”

They ate standing up, forty-odd hunters in blaze orange holding white salad plates the size of their hands, and for a long time nobody said anything at all.

Then Vance Ruckle, who has hauled his hogs to my shop for twenty-five years and had not said a word to me when he came in, took a bite, chewed it slowly, and said, “Alton, that is the best thing I have ever had in this building.”