The Sledding Hill the Town Built

But I knew why the wire was there. Everybody in town knew by supper.

The Saturday before, my son Landon, who is fourteen and weighs one hundred thirty-eight pounds on a good day with his boots on, had wrestled in the final of the junior high conference tournament in the next county over. His opponent was Tanner Hartman, Merle’s grandson, also fourteen, also one hundred thirty-eight pounds.

The two of them had been best friends since the church nursery. They had also been circling each other all winter like two roosters in one yard.

It was a good match. I’ll say that for it. It went to the third period tied at four, and then Landon got a lucky ankle and took Tanner down and rode him to a pin with eleven seconds left.

I jumped up and screamed. I’m not proud of it. I’m a school secretary with a reputation for composure, and I was on my feet in the bleachers shouting like a woman at a sale barn.

Across the gym, Merle sat with his arms folded and his seed cap pulled low. Tanner lay on his back on the mat, staring at the ceiling lights, and then he turned his face toward the wall. His shoulders were shaking.

Landon stood over him for a second. Then he reached down and pulled Tanner up and hugged him right there on the mat, which is not what you’re supposed to do.

Merle didn’t clap. He stood up before the medals, took his coat off the bench, and walked out of the gym without waiting for his grandson. Tanner’s mother, Kari, had to drive him home.

Monday morning, he strung the wire.

Tanner is his only grandson. Merle’s son Duane lives in Omaha and drives a truck for a beverage company, and Tanner is the one grandchild who still comes out to the farm on Saturdays to feed cattle.

Merle has been telling the coffee crowd at the co-op since the boy was nine that Tanner would be a state champion.

And then my boy, my red-coated, gap-toothed boy, whom he’d once taught to tie a bale knot, beat him in front of the whole county.

None of that makes it right. A man who locks a hundred children out of the one hill they love because a fourteen-year-old lost a match is wrong, and no amount of understanding makes him less wrong.

But I understood it. That was what made it so hard to sit in the truck and do nothing.

I went home that night and told my husband. Gus was at the stove with a spatula, making grilled cheese for Landon, who was in the next room pretending not to listen.

“He did what?”

“Put up wire. Four strands. The whole top of the hill.”

Gus put the spatula down. He is a big, slow, patient man who runs the loader at the Brockton Farmers Co-op, and I have seen him get angry exactly twice in sixteen years of marriage. This was the third time.

“Because of the match?”

“Because of the match.”

“That is the lowest thing I ever heard of,” my husband said, very quietly.