The Board Amos Never Owned Up To

The Board

I made that board. Nobody in Ellard knows it but Maynard knew, and Maynard is dead.

In the spring of 1991 the cardboard checkerboard at Ulrich Hardware finally split along the fold. Ewald Ulrich, Glenda’s father, taped it, and then taped the tape. I was thirty-nine, teaching shop, with a stack of walnut and hard maple offcuts too good to burn and too small to sell. I made the board in four weeks of lunch hours: thirty-two walnut squares and thirty-two maple, glued up face down against a flat plate, then planed, scraped and oiled until it felt like the inside of a violin case. I did not sign it.

I walked it into the store on a Saturday in a feed sack and said I had picked it up at an estate sale in Cresco for four dollars. Ewald ran his thumb along the miter at the corner and said, “Well, that is a nice one.” It has been on the bank table ever since. I have no good explanation for the lie, except that I would rather make a thing and leave it where it is needed than stand next to it while somebody says it is nice.

Maynard came in four years later, in March of 1995. He had been selling seed corn out of a pickup for a decade and had finally hired a man to run his routes, which freed up his mornings. He sat down across from me in a seed cap and said, “I hear you are the best player in three townships.” I said I did not know about that. He said, “We will find out.”

We found out. I beat him three straight the first morning and he did not take it well, and by Friday he was penciling the score on the underside of the board so he would have something to hold over me. “Every game goes on the record, Ruebush,” he said. That was the beginning of the tally. A slash for the winner, a column for him on the left, a column for me on the right, five-bar gates with the fifth a diagonal. Thirty-one years of it.

One summer morning in 1996 he ran his thumb down that miter and said without looking up, “Cresco, huh?” I said, “That is right.” He said, “Walnut grows pretty good down there,” and took his turn.

He never mentioned it again. For thirty years. He saw the thing and decided it was mine to keep, and he kept it for me.