Chapter 10
GARY
The Harvest Festival runs the weekend before the state fair, out on the fairgrounds by the reservoir, and Opal's had a selling booth at it every fall for as long as I've known her.
She sells the year's overflow — jars that don't go to Suzette, the odd lots, the peach butter she puts up when the orchards come in.
I'd been maybe four times in thirty-one years.
Walk through, buy a corn dog, tell her the booth looked nice, and go find somebody to talk golf with.
This year I took Friday off. Then took Saturday.
Nobody asked me to. Could've looked like penance — a man doing his sorry where his wife can watch — but she didn't ask and I didn't announce it.
Just told the dealership I had personal days to burn, which was true, and showed up at the fairgrounds at six in the morning in work clothes while it was still gray, and started unloading her truck before she could.
The boxes are heavy. I'd never once thought about how heavy.
Opal packs a case of half-pints tight, twelve to a box, and a box of twelve full jars is a real load, and she's been lifting them in and out and up onto tables by herself twice a year for thirty years while I hauled a golf bag that weighs nothing across a lawn.
Somewhere around the sixth box I did the count — thirty years, twice a year, however many boxes to a fair, all of it hers, all of it while I was off reading a green.
It's not a number that makes a man feel good.
I carried every box that Saturday anyway.
Set up her tables, her cloth, her little tiered stand.
Hauled her cooler. My back was telling me about it by ten, and I was glad it did, because a thing you've never once had to feel the weight of is a thing you've been letting somebody else carry.
She ran the booth. I want that clear too — it was hers, her prices, her arrangement, her call on everything.
I was labor. I restocked. When a shelf went thin I went to the truck for a box and filled it in.
When the money box needed change I ran to the office.
Mostly I stood a step behind her and to the side, doing the one thing I'd never done in my life, which was hand my wife's name to strangers.
A woman stopped at the blackberry. Turned a jar in the light the way people do.
"My wife made these," I said. "Every one on this table.
She's the best preserver in this county — took first out of forty-one, judges wrote her a card.
" I pointed. Opal had the card propped in a little stand by the register, the one that said best in show consideration, because I'd asked her to bring it and she'd allowed it.
"That card. Read it. She earned every word. "
The woman bought three jars — blackberry, strawberry, the peach butter.
Told Opal it was the nicest set she'd seen all day, and Opal thanked her, and the woman left, and I felt something I don't have a good word for.
Not pride in myself. Closer to the opposite.
Just the plain rightness of a true thing finally traveling the road it should've traveled for thirty years.
I caught Opal watching me after that one.
Not warm exactly — she wasn't ready to be warm, and I wasn't owed it.
Just watching, checking whether the thing I was doing was the thing or a performance of the thing.
I let her check. That's the only answer to that kind of watching — you don't argue it, you just keep doing the thing till the watching wears out. So I got another box.
I did it again. And again. Every jar somebody picked up, I said it.
My wife made these. She's the best in the county.
Card's right there. I didn't make it a bit.
That was the hard part and the whole point — no crown, no jam queen, no room to win.
Just the flat true sentence, handed over, and then I'd step back and let her jam and her card do the rest.
It's harder than it sounds, saying a plain true thing and then shutting up.
My whole life I've followed a sentence with a bigger one, kept the ball rolling, kept the room mine.
Standing behind Opal's table I had to say the true thing and then physically make myself stop talking, let the quiet come, let the customer read the card and not look at me.
Couple times I felt the old engine turn over — a joke coming up, a story, some way to make the sale about the charm of the man making it — and I bit down on it and let the jam talk.
My jaw was tired by noon from biting down on myself.
Good. Figured a tired jaw was about the right price.
By afternoon I'd said my wife made these maybe forty times, and it had quit feeling like a line I was performing and started feeling like a fact I lived next to.
Then Barry Toller came up the aisle.
I hadn't seen Barry in thirty years. We played golf together in high school, back when I was the man to beat and Barry was a decent number three. He'd gone thick and gray like the rest of us, but I knew him at forty feet, and he knew me, and his face lit up the way faces used to light up for me.
"I'll be damned," Barry said, loud, hand already out.
"Gary Deene. Gary Deene, state champ. Eighty-six.
Fellas, you know who this is?" He said it to the strangers around the booth, to nobody, to the air.
"This man was the best high school golfer this state ever put on a course.
State champion. I watched him shoot a sixty-nine at regionals with a busted three-iron. Gary Deene."
Everything in me lit up when he said it.
Thirty years fell off. That word — champ — went straight to the old place it always goes, the place my father built, warm and bright and mine, and for about one second I was seventeen and the best thing in the room and I wanted to stand in it.
Wanted to shake Barry's hand and say, tell 'em about the three-iron, Barry, tell 'em about eighty-six.
I felt Opal go still beside me. She didn't look at me. Just kept ringing up a jar, gone still the way a room goes still, and I knew she was waiting to see which Gary I'd be.
"That was a long time ago, Barry," I said.
I shook his hand, because he's an old friend and you shake an old friend's hand.
Then I turned it, on purpose, with my whole chest. "Have you tried my wife's preserves?
This is Opal. She just took first at the county out of forty-one, headed to state next week.
Best hands in four counties. Try the blackberry — I'm telling you, it'll ruin store jam for you forever. "
Barry blinked. You could see him reset, the champ story he'd loaded up losing its air. "Oh — yeah?" He looked at Opal, really looked at her for the first time. "You're the one made all these?"
"Every jar," Opal said.
"Well," Barry said, picking up the blackberry, a little off his script but coming around. "Champ says try the blackberry, I'll try the blackberry."
"Don't buy it because of the champ," I said. "Buy it because it's the best in the county. The champ's got nothing to do with it. He retired a long time ago."
And I meant both halves. Meant that was a long time ago, and meant have you tried my wife's preserves, and meant them at the same time, which I couldn't have done a month before.
A month before I'd have ridden Barry Toller's memory all afternoon and let Opal ring up jars behind me.
That day I set the champ down like a box I was done carrying and picked up the heavier one, which was her.
Barry bought two jars, clapped me on the shoulder, and moved on down the aisle.
After he was gone, I didn't stop. There was no crowd left to prove it to.
The recognizable minute had passed. Opal was busy with a man buying peach butter, and the strawberry shelf had gone thin, so I walked back to the truck for a box and knelt down behind the table and filled the shelf in, jar by jar, labels facing out, the way she likes them.
Opal glanced down at me kneeling there in the sawdust restocking her strawberry.
She didn't say anything. But she reached down without looking and put her hand on my shoulder for a second, just one second — the first time she'd touched me on purpose in a month — and then went back to her customer, and I went back to the shelf and filled it all the way to the end.
Labels facing out. Rows straight. It's not much, a straight row of jars.
But I'd spent a lot of years being a man rooms light up for, and never once learned the quieter thing, which is how to make yourself useful to the person beside you when nobody's watching.
I was learning it on my knees in the sawdust at fifty-seven, and figured that was about the right posture for it.