Nine Names
Part One: The Wagon
Vernon Sutter had just sold the last box lot off the folding tables.
Box of Pyrex, three mixing bowls and a casserole with a lid, twelve dollars, sold to number forty-one. Then the auctioneer’s chant faded, and the crowd started drifting toward the machinery lined up in a row past the red barn. The old Farmall. The disc. The flatbed wagon. The rusted grain truck Dad bought used in 1974.
It was a Saturday in early October. Bright and cool. The kind of fall day in central Illinois when the beans are out, the corn is half out, and the sky is so blue it hurts your eyes. A hundred and fifty people had come. Pickups lined both sides of the gravel road for a quarter mile.
I climbed up on the hay wagon.
It was parked by the yard gate, where Vernon had been standing to sell the household goods. An old flat hay rack with plank sides, gray and splintered. Dad built it in 1968.
I climbed up the back end in my jeans and my maroon fleece. My knees complained.
I walked to the front, where Vernon stood with his microphone.
“Vernon,” I said. “Can I borrow that for a minute?”
He looked at me.
Vernon’s been the auctioneer in Woodford County for forty years. He’s seventy. He sold my grandfather’s farm in 1983. He sold Dad’s cattle when Dad got sick in 2011. He wears the same white cowboy hat to every sale and the same bolo tie with a silver steer head on it.
He tipped back his hat.
He didn’t ask why.
He handed me the microphone without a word.
Part Two: Mom
My mother, Verna Krueger, died in March.
She was eighty-one.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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