The Board Amos Never Owned Up To

The Underside

I did not sleep Thursday night.

I had carried that pencil fourteen weeks without writing with it. I had put no mark on the board since the thirty-first of July, and a month of games had gone by unwritten. By my count, the one I keep without trying, Vesta had won twenty-six since the twelfth of October and I had won seventeen. If I wrote those down, I would pass him. I did not know whether a man ought to do that. But I had told Maynard I would keep it honest.

On Friday morning, the sixth of November, the sun came in the big south window and fell across the bank table. I sat a good while with a king in front of me. Then I said, “Vesta, I would like to show you something,” and I stood the board on its edge and tipped it toward her.

I have looked at that underside every day for thirty-one years and could not have told you what it looked like. It looked like a ledger. Two columns of pencil, stroke after stroke, every game between her husband and me since a March when I was forty-three. In the middle, a clear space the width of a woman’s hand with a pencil box around it, faint as breath. Maynard drew that on the thirty-first of July. He gave no reason. He said, “Leave that,” and I did.

I watched her find his last mark, the one with the tilt on the seven. She put her fingers on it. I could not have spoken if the store were on fire.

I said, “He kept the books on this board. Somebody ought to keep them now.” And I took Maynard’s pencil from my shirt pocket and gave it to her.

She wrote her twenty-six in the box, five groups and one, the kind ones too, every one of the nineteen I had thrown. I did not argue. Then, without being asked, she put my seventeen in my column, steady as a clerk, and sat back with her lips moving, and I counted the two long columns myself. “Well, I’ll be,” I said. “Four ahead of him.”

“Then you had better stay ahead,” she said.

I had waited thirty-one years to pass Maynard Rigby on that board, and I got the news from his wife with his pencil in her hand. I did not feel a bit of triumph. I felt like a man who has finally set down a very long ladder. I think he knew it would go that way. I think that is why he laughed so hard, every time he beat me.

Glenda, at the paint counter, blew her nose and said it was the dust.

And I said it. I had practiced that sentence in the shop with the lathe running. “I could bring it by Sunday, if you want. Glenda says the board can go home for an evening. I could bring it to your kitchen and let you beat me honestly.”

She looked at me across the board, with the king between us, and said, “I have a pot roast.”