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I nodded and smiled and gave it to him. He was obviously the more generous one. He wheeled off and Cricket stood beside me.
“He’s a very nice man.”
I watched him struggle with the chair and it broke my heart. “Extraordinarily.”
Around five o’clock, the auctioneer began the auction and things took off at an entertaining pace. I found a chair at a table near the back and sat.
“Can I roll in here?” I heard Amos McAllen ask me.
“Of course,” I said, sliding out the chair next to me so he could wheel himself in.
“Faye tells me you liked her cooking.”
I laughed. “Yes, I did. I miss her daily baskets, but I think my love handles are thanking me they’re no longer around.”
Amos chuckled.
“So how long have you been a rancher?” I asked him.
“I’ve lived on that property since I was born.”
“No kidding. What a life you’ve had.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he said.
It turns out he was not seventy but seventy-nine and he’d fought in Korea when he was seventeen. He said he saw things no human should ever witness and to this day detests communism with every fiber of his being. He told me when he first got home, the slightest noise would send him back to Korea and that Faye was the only one who could bring him back to the present.
He told me that when he’d left for Korea, Faye was just a wispy fifteen-year-old with curly red hair and buck teeth, but when he came home, she was a steamy eighteen-year-old redhead with curves for days and the prettiest face he’d ever seen. He said he knew he had to have her five minutes after seeing her in town for the first time since he’d left. “I was smitten,” he said simply.
He talked about marrying Faye. He put me in stitches when he said he thought he’d died and gone to heaven their very first time and how they didn’t leave their bedroom for practically a year straight. He also told me it was how they got their first son. I was almost rolling on the floor by that point.
He talked about how he lost that first son in Vietnam, but that’s all he mentioned of that. It was obviously too painful to talk about, so I didn’t press. He spoke of hard times and good times, of feasts and famines, of disease and health. And before I knew it, two hours had passed and I had heard his life story.
I’d discovered that Amos McAllen was the kind of man whose name would never make the history books or national headlines, but there was something so extraordinary about him. It pained me that America would not know him personally. I imagined there were many people as incredible as Amos, but I would never get to know them. They would pass and their memories of people before them would die with them.
That seemingly short conversation with Amos told me that life is more than what the media wants you to think it is. He taught me that your world shouldn’t be any bigger than the people around you, that you should serve those around you with fierceness, but we still had an obligation to care for those who needed our caring, even if they were half a world away.
It seems such a contradiction, but the way he explained it made perfect sense to me. Basically, care nothing for celebrity, love only your God, your friends and your family, and be generous with your neighbors, even if they’re very far away.
When Amos McAllen rolled away from that table, I felt my entire world shift and tilt and I knew I would struggle to find its balance for a very long time.
When Amos left, I went out to my truck, grabbed an envelope I kept in the glove box for emergencies and came back into the schoolhouse. Inside, I made sure everyone was good and distracted before I stuck one thousand seven hundred and thirty-seven dollars in the donation jar, wishing I had a whole hell of a lot more with me.
I began to walk away when that voice startled me again, making my heart pound in so many different ways.
“Spencer Blackwell,” Cricket teased, “aren’t you one big, giant softie.”
I pursed my lips. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”
“I know.” She winked. “That’s what makes it all the more fun.”
I shook my head and smiled.
“The auction’s almost over, and they’re about to serve dinner. Would you like to sit with me?”
I turned around and searched the crowd behind me before facing her once more. “Are you talking to me?” I joshed.
She smirked. “Yes, you.”
