“Never more. Never less. Then he paid, loaded it in his own truck, and drove it to the Pleasant Valley school the next morning. He bought more than three hundred children’s first wagons.”
I stood very still. I had not known. Aaron had not known. In all the years I had known him I do not believe Garland Underwood had said one word of it to anyone in his family.
“A child’s first wagon doesn’t have a price,” Amos said. “It has a lesson. If it sells too low, the child learns his work is cheap. If it sells too high for the wrong reason, the child learns that too.
“Your grandfather figured out twenty dollars was the right amount to say, you did good, and not enough to spoil you. He never took credit. When he died in February, I thought, who will do that now? I thought nobody.”
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He looked out at the benches.
“I should not have worried. I should have known better than to think that a man like Garland plants only pumpkins.”
Wyatt looked at the benches too. Four hundred people looked back at him, and a good many of them were looking at the floor, because that is the kind of country this is. Nobody wants to be caught being kind.
“Thank you,” Wyatt said. Just that. His voice cracked on the second word and he kept going anyway. “Thank you all very much. My grandpa would’ve, he would’ve said thank you too.”
Somebody in the back said, “Amen.” Somebody else blew their nose.
I held my son’s shoulder, and I did not say anything at all, because there was nothing I could add that would not have made it smaller.
Then Ellsworth Hershberger stood up on the front bench with his hearing aid in and a paper in his hand.
“One more matter,” he said, “and then Amos can sell the rest of the Friday lots. The board met in the lobby a half hour ago. It was a short meeting.”
He did not raise his voice. He did not have to.
“Number forty-one, Jordan Underwood, bid a price he never meant to pay, to shame a child, and refused the slip when it came. Under the rules of this association he answers to the board. The board has voted.
“Number forty-one will not hold a card at this auction for the rest of this season and for all of next, through the last Friday in October. His account is closed. His deposit stays with the association. The lot sold for more than he bid, so the boy loses nothing. I want that said.”
He folded the paper and put it in his pocket.
“Any man in this room who has a quarrel with that may bring it to me. I will be in the lobby. I am eighty, I am not in a hurry.”
Nobody had a quarrel with it.
I looked at the south door. Jordan was standing in it, with his seed cap in his hand. I had not seen him come in. He had been there, I think, from the first bid, from the moment Levi Raber stood up.
His face was the color of putty, and he was looking at my son the way a man looks at a thing he has dropped and cannot pick up.