The Fairgrounds

He took the letter to the blue door at eight.

He walked, because it was two miles and he had a bicycle and he wanted to walk; and the town was asleep, or at church practice, or at the lake, so that he went the whole length of its main street without seeing anybody but a dog, which looked at him and lay down again. The Methodist church. The third house past it. A white frame house smaller than the farmhouse, with a garden in front full of tomatoes on canes and something tall and yellow, and a porch, and a door painted a blue so dark and so clean that it looked wet.

He knocked.

Mrs Sixkiller opened it at once, as though she had been standing behind it. She was in a housecoat with a pattern of small green leaves, and her grey hair was down, not cut level at the jaw at all but long, to her shoulders, which he had not known, and she had a cup of coffee in her hand, and she looked at him on her step and did not look surprised.

He held out the envelope.

She took it, and looked at it. It said, on the front, in the bait-shop pen, The Secretary of State of the Cherokee Nation, Tahlequah. By hand, with thanks, from the farmhouse. She turned it over and looked at the flap, which he had sealed, and then back at the front; and then she looked at his hand, the right one, holding the edge of the envelope, on the back of which, faint, in blue, because there had been no showers, were the two characters she had written there at the well.

“You’ll want to wash that off,” said Mrs Sixkiller.

“I know.”

“In the lake.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She looked at his hand a moment longer.

“Or not,” she said, and shut the blue door.

---

The fair opened at ten with a parade, and the parade went down the main street of Vinita, the wide one with the brick shops and their names a yard high, from the railway at one end to the courthouse at the other, and the whole of Craig County stood on the pavements and watched it go by.

Castellanos had driven them. There was no van on Saturdays, Earl did not run, and Castellanos had said, in the yard, at nine, with the car door open and the cold air coming out of it, that he had been very patient, and that he was going to drive them to Vinita in the air conditioning, all four of them, with the seats up and nobody on a bicycle, and that if anybody wanted to argue about whether this counted as ordinary they could argue with him on the way. Nobody had argued. They had sat in the back in the cold like four people who had come in out of a desert, and Felix had put his face against the air vent and made a noise like a cat.

Now they stood on the pavement outside the shop that sold guns and fishing tackle and wedding dresses, in the shade of its tin awning, in a crowd, and watched the parade come.

It came slowly. Everything in Craig County came slowly. First a police car, Deputy Tidwell’s, with its lights going and no siren, at walking pace, with Deputy Tidwell at the wheel in his wide hat looking straight ahead with tremendous dignity. Then a man on a horse, an old man in a white hat on a grey horse, carrying a flag, the State’s green and gold. Then tractors. Twenty of them, perhaps more, old ones and new ones, red and green and orange and blue, polished until they shone, each with a farmer at the wheel and his family in a trailer behind it waving, and each with a cardboard sign on its side, 1952, 1961, 1948, RESTORED BY THE GRANDKIDS; and the noise of them, all their engines going at once, deep, uneven, coughing, like a herd of something large and contented going by. Then a float on a flatbed trailer, made of chicken wire and paper flowers, in the shape of a barn, with a girl in a sash and a tiara standing on the roof of it, waving with her whole arm, very slowly, the way you wave from a great distance: CRAIG COUNTY FAIR QUEEN. Then children on bicycles with streamers. Then a fire engine, which did use its siren, once, and made every child on the pavement scream with joy. Then men in fezzes, in very small cars, going round and round in circles in the road.

Then the band.

---

Marcus heard it before anybody. He was standing next to Frederick, and Frederick felt him go still, the whole of him, the way a dog goes still when it hears its name, and turn his head towards the courthouse end of the street, where the sound was coming from: drums, first, a long way off, and then the brass over them, a march, ragged, loud, going in and out of tune in the heat.

“High school,” said Marcus.

It came down the street towards them in rows. Forty children, perhaps, in black and orange, in the heat, with plumes on their hats, marching, more or less in step, with a girl in front of them walking backwards with a long silver stick, and the drums behind, and in the middle of them, in the third row, the trombones. Four of them. Going out and in, out and in, in the sun, flashing.

Marcus watched them come.

He did not say anything. He watched them with his whole face. And Frederick watched Marcus’s face as the band came level with the shop, and went by, and saw it do a great many things, very quickly, one after another: criticise, first, because the second trombone was flat, flat all the way down, and the slide positions on the fourth were wrong, and the whole section was dragging behind the drums; and then something else, which was not criticism, as the band went past and the four trombones went out together on the long note at the end of the phrase, and held it, ragged, too loud, slightly flat, four children in black and orange in a hundred degrees, blowing for all they were worth.

“Well?” said Felix, when the band had gone by.

Marcus did not answer for a moment.

“The second one’s flat,” he said. “All the way down. And the fourth doesn’t know where seventh position is.” He watched the plumes go away down the street. “They’re really good.”

---

The fairgrounds were at the edge of the town, on the road out towards the highway, behind a long white fence, and the gate in the fence had a sign over it, an arch of iron painted white, with letters cut out of it against the sky:

CRAIG COUNTY FREE FAIR.

And under it, on a board, hand-painted, newer:

NO ADMISSION CHARGE. NEVER HAS BEEN. NEVER WILL BE.

He stood under the arch and read it twice.

“It’s free,” said Theo, beside him. “It’s actually free. You don’t have to pay anything.” He looked at Frederick. “You can do the whole fair. Without money. Legally.”

“Then it’s not on the list,” said Frederick.

“It is on the list. Number six. Go out at night.” Theo looked at the sky, which was white, and at the sun, which was nowhere near setting. “It’s just not night yet.”

---

The barns were first. There were five of them, long and low, with open sides and tin roofs and fans hanging from the rafters, enormous, going round, pushing the heat from one end of the barn to the other and back; and they were full of animals, and of the smell of animals, and of children.

He had not known about the children. He had thought a fair was for farmers. But in the cattle barn, in the long rows of pens bedded with wood shavings, under the fans, every steer and every heifer had a child with it, a girl or a boy of ten or twelve or fifteen, in jeans and boots and a shirt with a collar, and the child was washing it. With a hose, and a brush, and soap, a great deal of soap, until the animal stood in a cloud of white foam like a cake; and then rinsing it, and then, which he watched three times before he believed it, drying it. With a blower. A thing like a vacuum cleaner going backwards, with a long hose, roaring, that the child played over the animal’s back and flanks and legs and tail until the hair stood up, dry, fluffed, gleaming, and the steer stood perfectly still under it with its eyes half shut, as if it were at the barber’s.

“They’re doing its hair,” said Felix.

A boy of about twelve, with a blower in his hand and a black steer the size of a car beside him, looked round at Felix with contempt.

“You got to,” he said. “For the judge. The judge wants to see the shape. You can’t see the shape if the hair’s flat.” He went back to blowing. “Ain’t you never been to a fair?”

“No,” said Felix humbly.

The boy looked at him, and at the other three, with the deepest pity, and at Frederick last, for exactly as long as at the others; and then he turned the blower off, and the steer opened its eyes.

“Then you got to see the hogs,” said the boy. “Everybody’s got to see the hogs.”

---

The hogs were in the barn at the end, and you could tell which barn it was from a long way off, with your eyes shut.

They were in pens, low ones, made of metal hurdles, and they were large and pink and black and spotted and enormous and asleep, most of them, flat on their sides in the shavings under the fans with their legs out like overturned furniture; and the children who belonged to them were sitting on upturned buckets in the aisles, eating, or asleep too, or doing things to the hogs with brushes and spray bottles of water, very seriously.

At the pen at the end of the aisle, by the big doors that opened onto the yard behind the barn, there was a girl having an argument with a gate.

She was about fourteen. She was small and freckled and sunburnt, with red hair in two plaits and a green shirt with a four-leafed clover on the pocket and the letters 4-H above it, and she was standing in the aisle outside her pen with her hands on her hips, looking at the gate of it, which was a metal hurdle hung on two hooks with a latch at the other end, a sliding bolt; and inside the pen, behind the gate, lying in the shavings with her eyes open, there was a pig. Black, with a white band round her middle, as if she had been dipped halfway into paint, and very large, and very calm, and looking at the girl with an expression of the most complete and patient superiority.

The girl slid the bolt across. It went into its keeper. She took her hands away. The bolt slid back out of its keeper again, by itself, with a small iron click, and the gate swung open an inch.

The pig looked at the gate. She did not get up.

“Mabel,” said the girl, through her teeth, to the pig, “if you so much as think about it.”

She slid the bolt across again. It went in. She took her hands away. It slid out. Click.

“It’s bent,” said Felix.

The girl turned round. She looked at Felix, and at the others, and at Frederick, and he watched her face see him and know him and be astonished, all the way, much more astonished than anybody had been yet, because she was fourteen; and then, unlike anybody else, she did not decide anything at all. She simply turned back to the gate, because the gate was more important.

“I know it’s bent,” she said. “Everything in this barn’s bent. It’s been bent since 1970. I asked Mr Baggett and Mr Baggett said he’d send somebody. That was Thursday.” She slid the bolt. Click. “Mabel’s shown in the gilt class on Wednesday. If she gets out before Wednesday, she goes straight through them doors,” she pointed at the big doors at the end of the barn, open, with the yard beyond them, and the trees, and the edge of the fairgrounds, “and she’s in the creek before I can catch her, and I’ve been raising her since February.”

“Will she get out?” said Marcus.

The girl looked at the pig.

“Not if she doesn’t want to,” she said. “She doesn’t want to. Not yet. She’s waiting.”

“For what?”

“For when I’m not here,” said the girl darkly. She took a length of orange baler twine out of her back pocket and tied the gate to the hurdle beside it, round and round, in a knot like a fist. “Rae-Ann Coker,” she said, without turning round. “Langley 4-H. Mabel. Hampshire gilt. Don’t touch her, she bites.” She pulled the knot tight. “Not hard. But she means it.”

Mabel, in the shavings, closed her eyes very slowly, as though none of them were worth keeping them open for.

---

The exhibit hall was a long white building with a concrete floor and fans in the ceiling and it was the most beautiful room he had ever been in, and he had been in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, twice.

It was full of the summer. That was the only way he could think of it. Everything that the county had grown or made or cooked or sewn or preserved since the spring was in it, on long tables covered with white paper, under the fans, with a card beside each thing and a number; and some of the cards already had ribbons pinned to them, from the judging that had been done that morning, blue and red and white, and purple, very rarely, with rosettes. Vegetables, first. Tomatoes, three to a plate, red and yellow and a kind that was nearly black, and every three on every plate the same size, exactly, as though they had been made in a factory, except that you knew they had not. Onions with their skins polished. Okra, in rows, like green fingers. Beans. Peppers. Squash, yellow and green and one, at the end of the table, a pale green marrow, enormous, as long as a child, on a plate of its own, with a card beside it that said LARGEST, OPEN CLASS and a blue ribbon.

Then the jars.

They were on shelves, three high, against the long window down one side of the hall, so that the light came through them; and he stopped in front of them, and the others stopped with him, and nobody said anything. Hundreds of jars. Jam and jelly and preserves, peach and plum and blackberry and grape and a kind of jelly that was a clear pale gold that the card said was wild plum; and pickles, green and yellow; and tomatoes, red; and peaches in halves, packed so tightly and so perfectly in their syrup that each half lay against the next like a row of small suns; and the light came through all of it, from the window, so that the whole wall glowed, red and gold and purple and green, like the windows of a church.

“Mrs Sixkiller,” said Theo, reading a card.

It was a jar of the peaches. It had a red ribbon on it. Second.

“Who beat her?”

They found it. A jar exactly the same, as far as Frederick could see, of peaches exactly as perfect, with a blue ribbon on its card and a name.

D. Shaw, Ketchum.

“Darlene,” said Felix.

---

The quilts were hung from the rafters at the end of the hall, on poles, so that you walked under them and between them, a whole street of them, and they turned very slowly in the wind from the fans.

He walked under them by himself. The others had gone to look at the pies.

There were stars. A great many of the quilts had stars on them, eight-pointed, made of diamonds, like Ida Truesdale’s, in every colour, red and white and blue and green, and one enormous one, as big as a bed, as big as two beds, with a single star that filled the whole of it, made of hundreds of diamonds, going out in rings of colour from the centre, yellow and orange and red and purple and blue and back to yellow at the points, so bright it hurt; and he stood under it with his head back and looked up at it turning very slowly over him in the breeze from the fans, and the card beside it said LONE STAR, OPEN CLASS, MRS JUNE MAYFIELD, BLUEJACKET (1935 - 2024), ENTERED IN HER MEMORY BY HER DAUGHTER, and it had a purple rosette.

He stood under it for a long time.

He thought about the box marked JUNE’S THINGS in the cattle trailer behind Royce Pettit’s, which he had carried in, in his arms, without opening it; and about the daughter in Tulsa who could not look at any of it, who had let all of it go to a pawn shop for three pounds a box, all of it except this one thing, which she had kept, and brought to the fair, and entered, and hung from the rafters here where the whole county would walk under it.

He thought that he understood about keeping a little better than he had last night, and that he did not understand it at all.

---

Theo bought him a taco at one o’clock.

It was from a stall at the end of the row of food stalls behind the exhibit hall, a stall with a hand-lettered sign that said FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF KETCHUM - CHEROKEE CONGREGATION - INDIAN TACOS - FRY BREAD - LEMONADE, in English and then underneath in the syllabary, the same as the sign at the edge of the town; and behind the counter of it there were four women frying bread in a deep pan of oil, round flat pieces of dough that went in white and came out gold and puffed, like enormous blisters, and were then covered in beans and meat and lettuce and cheese and tomato and onion, a mountain of it, on a paper plate, and handed over the counter.

“It’s not on the list,” said Theo, at the counter, with his money out.

“I know.”

“Food’s not on the list. Number five’s eat at a counter and pay. This isn’t a counter. It’s a stall.” He held out the money to the woman behind the counter, who took it without looking at either of them. “So I can buy you food. It doesn’t count.”

“It counts to me.”

“Then it counts to you,” said Theo, and gave him the plate, “and it doesn’t count to the list, and you can pay me back on Friday.”

He ate it standing up, in the shade of the exhibit hall, with a plastic fork, and it was so hot that it burned his mouth, and the bread under the mountain was crisp and soft at once and tasted of something he could not name and wanted to eat for the rest of his life; and one of the four women behind the counter, the oldest, with her hair in a grey bun and her glasses on a chain, watched him eat it, from the counter, with her arms folded, and did not say anything, and when he had finished it, all of it, and was scraping the plate with the fork, she nodded once, to herself, and turned back to the pan.

---

Mr Clifford Baggett found him at the lemonade.

He was a man of seventy or so, long and thin and brown, in a white straw cowboy hat and a white shirt with pearl snaps instead of buttons and a string tie with a silver clasp in the shape of a steer’s head, and a badge on his shirt that said CHAIRMAN - FAIR BOARD; and he came across the gravel between the food stalls towards them with his hat already in his hand, which he held against his chest, and stopped in front of Frederick at a respectful distance, and did not bow, and did not quite not.

“Sir,” said Mr Baggett. “Clifford Baggett. I’m the chairman of the board.” He looked at the lemonade in Frederick’s hand. “I hope it’s cold enough.”

“It’s very good. Thank you.”

“The Methodists,” said Mr Baggett. “They’ve done the lemonade since 1931. The Baptists do the tacos and the Methodists do the lemonade and if anybody tries to change it there’ll be blood.” He turned the hat round in his hands, once. “Sir, I’m not going to take up your time. I know why you’re here. Everybody in the county knows why you’re here, and nobody’s going to say anything, and they’re right. I just wanted to ask you one thing, and then I’ll go away, and if the answer’s no, then the answer’s no, and I’ll never ask again.”

“Yes?”

Mr Baggett looked at his hat.

“The premium sale,” he said. “Friday night. In the show barn. It’s the end of the fair, the big night. The grand champion steer and the grand champion hog, and the reserve, and the kids sell them, and the businesses in the county bid for them, for the kids, for their college. It’s been going since before the war. And the grand champion gets a ribbon. A big purple one, as long as your arm. And somebody gives it.” He looked up. “Every year we ask somebody. The Premier came once, in 1998. The Governor came in 2011. We’ve never had…” He stopped. “Well. We’ve never had.”

Frederick looked at him.

He looked at the long brown face under the white hat, and the string tie with the steer’s head on it, and the hat going round and round in the long brown hands, and the badge that said CHAIRMAN; and he understood that Mr Baggett had been thinking about this since Tuesday, at least, since Ida Truesdale’s niece’s girl at the bank had seen a boy go by on a bicycle; and that Mr Baggett had probably thought about not asking, and decided that he would rather ask once and be told no than not ask and wonder for the rest of his life; and that Mr Baggett would mind very much. And that there was a girl called Rae-Ann Coker in the hog barn with a gilt called Mabel and a gate tied up with baler twine who had been raising her since February, and a boy with a blower and a black steer the size of a car, and forty other children in the cattle barn with their animals in clouds of foam; and that on Friday night one of them would win.

“Mr Baggett,” he said. “May I tell you why not? It isn’t because I don’t want to.”

“Sir.”

“If I give the ribbon,” said Frederick, “it’s the King’s ribbon. Everybody will remember who gave it, and nobody will remember who won it. There’ll be a photograph, and I’ll be in the middle of it, and the steer will be at the edge.” He looked at the hat. “It’s their ribbon. It ought to be given by somebody who knows what it took. Somebody from here.”

Mr Baggett did not say anything for a long moment.

Then he put his hat back on. He put it on carefully, with both hands, and settled it, and looked at Frederick from under the brim, and his long brown face did something slowly that Frederick had seen Earl’s do, in the mirror of the van, when somebody had asked him a question nobody had asked before.

“Well,” said Mr Baggett. “That’s the right answer.” He thought about it. “That’s the right answer, damn it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. My wife said you’d say that. She said, Cliff, he’ll say no, and he’ll be right, and you’ll come home looking like a dog that’s been told to get off the sofa.” He shook his head. “I’ll give it myself. Like I’ve done for twenty-three years.” He looked at Frederick. “But I’ll tell you what, sir.”

“Yes?”

“If you can’t give one,” said Mr Baggett, “then you’ll have to win one.”

Frederick stared at him.

“Open class,” said Mr Baggett. He pointed with his whole long arm, back across the gravel, at the exhibit hall. “Anybody can enter the open class. Anybody at all. You don’t have to be from the county. You don’t have to be a farmer. You don’t have to be anything. You fill in a card at the office with your name and the class, and you bring your entry in by six o’clock Tuesday, and the judges judge it on Friday morning by the number on the card, and they never see the name till after.” He looked at Frederick under the hat. “Pies. Vegetables. Canning. Woodwork. Photographs. Anything you made.” A pause. “With your own hands.”

He touched the brim of the hat, and turned, and went away across the gravel between the food stalls, long and thin and slow, in the heat, towards the show barn.

Behind Frederick, Felix had stopped drinking his lemonade.

“Pie,” said Felix.

---

The midway was at the far end of the fairgrounds, beyond the barns, in a field of trampled grass; and they went to look at it at four, in the full sun, and it was not the same thing at all.

It was rides, mostly. A giant slide, yellow, in long humps like a frozen wave, with a stack of sacks at the top of its stairs and nobody on it. A thing like an octopus with arms that went up and down. A carousel with horses that had been painted so many times that their faces had gone soft. Swings on chains that went round and out. A tent with a sign that said FUN HOUSE. Games, in booths, with stuffed animals hanging from the roofs of them, enormous, pink and purple and yellow, faded on the side the sun was on. And all of it was running, or most of it; but in the daylight, in the heat, with nobody much on it but a few small children and their mothers, and the music coming out of the speakers on the poles, tinny, too loud, the same song over and over, and the men who ran the rides sitting on stools in the shade of them looking at their telephones, it looked tired. It looked like a stage set with the lights off.

“It’s not night,” said Theo, at the edge of it.

“No.”

“It’s different at night. It’s got to be. All the lights.” Theo looked at the swings, hanging still on their chains against the white sky. “Something with lights.”

“Number six,” said Marcus.

Frederick looked at the midway. Then he looked back, over his shoulder, at Castellanos, who was standing at the edge of the trampled field ten yards behind them, in his jacket, with his hands folded in front of him, looking at the slide and the octopus and the fun house and the men on the stools and the two hundred places in it where somebody could stand in the dark, one after another, the way he looked at a room.

Castellanos felt him looking. He did not turn his head.

“Sergeant,” said Frederick.

“Sir.”

“Number six.”

“I know, sir.”

“Go out at night. To something with lights.”

“I know, sir.”

There was a pause.

“Not tonight, sir,” said Castellanos. “And not tomorrow. Give me the week.” He looked at the octopus. “The fair ends next Saturday. Last night. Fireworks. Everybody in the county. I’ll want to walk it four times in the dark first, and I’ll want Sergeant Kimura to walk it four times, and I’ll want to talk to the sheriff and to Officer Hummingbird, and to the man who runs the rides.” He paused. “And I’ll want you to tell me now that you’ll stay where we can see you.”

“Yes.”

“I mean it, sir.”

“I know you do.”

Castellanos looked at him, at last. He looked at him for a long time.

“Saturday,” he said. “The last night. If I’m happy.” He looked back at the rides. “I’m not going to be happy, sir. I want you to know that. But I’ll be happy enough.”

---

In the car going home, at six, in the cold, with the sun going down at last behind them over the flat country, enormous and orange, Felix sat with a printed sheet on his knee that he had taken from the fair office, and read it out, slowly, all of it, by the light that came in sideways through the tinted window.

“Open class, section F, baked goods. Class 1, pie, fruit, two-crust. Class 2, pie, cream. Class 3, pie, nut. Class 4, cake, layer…” He turned it over. “Entry cards to the fair office by six p.m. Tuesday. Woodwork, handicraft and canning to the hall by six p.m. Tuesday. Photographs, mounted, by six p.m. Thursday. Baked goods to the hall by eight a.m. on the morning of judging. One entry per exhibitor per class. Judging Friday, ten a.m. Judges’ decision is final.”

“Like the lifeguard,” said Marcus.

“Can you make a pie?” said Theo.

“No,” said Felix. He folded the sheet carefully in half, and in half again, and put it in the zipped pocket of his brown wallet, where the money went. “But Mrs Sixkiller can.”

“She won’t make it for you. That’s not entering. That’s cheating.”

“She won’t make it for me,” said Felix. “She’ll make me make it.” He looked out of the window at the sunset with an expression of tremendous resolve. “She’s a teacher.”

Frederick sat in the cold at the other window, with the taste of the fry bread still in his mouth, and the blue ink still on the back of his right hand, faint, two crooked characters, and looked at the flat country going by, gold and then red and then grey, and the first lights coming on in the farmhouses a long way apart across it, one by one.

Anything you made, he thought. With your own hands.

He looked at his hands.

He had made a cannonball, and a bed of salt on a T-shirt, and a moth on an Act of the Landtag of Hanover. He had made three ticks on a list, and half of another. He had carried a house, and a clock, standing up.

He did not know what he could make. He thought he had until six o’clock on Tuesday to find out.