Beside Harlan, two women from the church ladies circle stood up and joined him.
Up on row four, Rachel, our county record clerk friend, set her program on her lap and stood up, smoothing her navy skirt with her hand.
Then the row behind them moved, bench by bench, the aluminum bleachers clattering as wooden boots and heavy work shoes shifted all at once.
Within ten seconds, seven hundred people were standing in the Oelwein high school gym.
The noise rolled down from the top row of concrete blocks like dry corn spilling out of an overhead auger into an empty wagon.
It was not just polite applause for a senior middle hitter in a maroon uniform.
It was for fifty-one years of morning milkings in the dark, for pulling neighbor trucks out of winter ditches, for staying on the land through three bad droughts, and for showing up when
