Ribbons

Felix carried the pie down the gravel road at a quarter to five in the morning, in the dark, in both hands, the way Frederick had carried the clock.

Frederick saw him go. He had not slept much, and at half past four he had heard Felix on the stairs, the fourth and the seventh and the ninth, and the screen door, held so that it did not bang; and he had got up and gone to the window of the hot room under the tin roof and looked down into the yard, and there was Felix, going across it in the grey, in his shorts and a clean T-shirt, with nothing in his hands, towards the gravel road and the two miles to the blue door, where the kitchen would be as cold as it would ever be in August, and Mrs Sixkiller would be waiting with the lard.

He came back at half past seven with the pie.

He came up the gravel road very slowly, in the full light now, with the sun already hot on the road and the dust lying still on either side of it, holding the dish out in front of him in both hands with a cloth over it, at the height of his chest, and looking at nothing but the dish; and he did not look up, all the way from the bottom of the drive to the car, where Castellanos was waiting with the door open and the engine running and the air conditioning on, to drive him to Vinita with it by eight.

He stopped by the car. He looked up at last. He looked at Frederick, on the porch step, in his red STAFF T-shirt, waiting for the same car to take him to the bathrooms.

“Well?” said Frederick.

“She didn’t say anything,” said Felix. “Not one word. The whole time. She watched me do it from the door, with her arms folded, from five o’clock, and she didn’t say one word, and when it came out of the oven she looked at it, and then she looked at me, and she went and got the cloth.” He looked down at the dish. “And she put the cloth on it herself.”

He got into the back of the car with the pie on his knees, very carefully, like somebody getting into a car with a sleeping baby, and Castellanos shut the door on him without a sound.

---

The judging was at ten, and he was in GUYS.

He knew it was ten because he had the watch on, the one that went everywhere with him, and he looked at it with a yellow glove on, by the basins, at ten o’clock exactly, and thought: now. Now, in the exhibit hall at Vinita, fourteen miles away, under the fans, three people he did not know were walking along the long tables covered in white paper, with clipboards, looking at things with numbers on them. Fourteen pies. Nineteen birdhouses. Forty photographs on the wall. A castle and a cowboy boot and a box with a crooked roof made of a henhouse.

He did GALS.

Kaylee came at a quarter to eleven and looked behind the pipe, and there was nothing behind the pipe, and she said huh and went away, and he stood in the door of GALS with the hose in his hand and the water running down the drain, and felt for a moment the way he imagined you felt when a judge looked at your pie and ate a forkful of it, slowly, and put the fork down.

---

The telephone call came at twenty to twelve.

Bonnie Tackett came to the towel hut with her headset round her neck instead of on her head, which he had never seen, and said new guy, it’s for you, in the office, with a face that told him nothing at all.

He went to the office. The receiver was lying on the desk, under the eleven fish, beside the coffee tin, waiting.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” said Theo.

He could hear the fair behind him. Loudspeakers, and a tractor, and a lot of people talking at once, and a long way off the octopus ride going round with its music; and close to, very close, Theo breathing, as though he had run.

“Well?” said Frederick.

“I’m at the fair office,” said Theo. “They’ve got a telephone. The woman with the box of numbers said I could use it if I was quick.”

“Well?”

“I’m not telling you.”

Frederick held the receiver.

“Theo.”

“I’m not. I’m not telling you anything. Not Felix’s, not mine, not yours. I only rang so you’d know it’s done. It’s done. They’ve done all of it. It’s all got ribbons on, or it hasn’t.” Theo breathed. “And you have to see it. You have to come in after your shift and walk in the door of the hall and see it yourself, the way everybody else does. That’s the rule.”

“Whose rule?”

“Mine. I’ve just made it.” A pause. “Felix wanted to ring you. I wouldn’t let him. He’s sitting on the steps outside the hall with his head in his hands and Marcus is holding him by the back of the shirt.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“I’m not telling you,” said Theo, and rang off.

---

At six o’clock the whistle went three times, short, and the pool emptied, and Bonnie Tackett came out of the office with an envelope.

It was a brown envelope, small, the size of his hand, with a flap that tucked in, and on the front of it, in her quick round marker, HANOVER - WK 1; and she held it out to him across the counter of the towel hut, where he was folding the last of the day’s towels, in thirds.

“Week one,” she said. “Count it.”

He took it. It was heavier than he had thought it would be. He untucked the flap.

Inside there were notes, folded once, and some coins at the bottom, and a slip of paper, torn from a pad, with figures on it in Bonnie Tackett’s hand. He took out the slip first.

37½ hrs @ £8.00 = £300.00. Less snack hut at cost (5 × hot dog @ £1.20) = £6.00. Less 10 mins late from lunch Thurs (K.B.) = £1.33. TOTAL £292.67. B.T.

He looked at it. He read it twice. He read 10 mins late from lunch Thurs (K.B.) three times.

Then he took out the money, and counted it, there, on the counter of the towel hut, the way Tucker had shown him, out loud, under his breath: the notes first, the twenties, soft and grey and used, fourteen of them, and then a ten, and then the coins, a two-pound coin and a fifty and a ten and a five and a two. He counted it twice. It came to two hundred and ninety-two pounds and sixty-seven pence both times.

He stood at the counter with the money in front of him in a pile on the slip.

It was not a large amount of money. He knew that. He knew it the way he knew the pH of his own eyes; he had been told. He had been told, at fourteen, by the Keeper of the Privy Purse, in a room with a fire in it, what the Crown cost, and where it came from, and where it went, and he had understood the figures, which had had a great many noughts on the end of them, and had not felt anything about them at all, because they were not his, and were not anybody’s, and were the Crown’s. This was two hundred and ninety-two pounds and sixty-seven pence. One of the twenties had a corner torn off, like the one Royce Pettit had counted into his hand and taken back, and he decided that it was the same one, which was not possible, and which he chose to believe. It was the price of thirty-seven and a half hours of towels and bathrooms and the skimmer and the till and a frog, less five hot dogs and ten minutes on the telephone to Charter House; and it was his.

He put it back in the envelope. He tucked the flap in.

“Right?” said Bonnie Tackett.

“Right.”

“Good.” She put her hand in the pocket of her apron, and took out something small, and put it on the counter beside the envelope. “And that.”

It was a badge. A little white plastic badge with a pin on the back, like the other one; and on it, on a strip of label tape, black on clear, a little crooked where it had gone on, very long, so long that it went right to both edges of the badge and a little over, there was a word.

FREDERICK.

“It’s too long,” said Bonnie Tackett. “I said it was too long. I was right. It goes over the edges.” She looked at it. “You lasted the week.”

He took the NEW GUY off his T-shirt, and put it in his pocket, and pinned the other one on, on the left, where it went.

“Kaylee says you can keep the old one,” said Bonnie Tackett. “She says everybody keeps the old one.” She turned to go back to the office. Then she stopped. “She says you’re the first one in four summers who didn’t climb the chair when she went to the bathroom.”

He did not say anything.

“She knew,” said Bonnie Tackett. “She always knows.” And went into the office, and put her headset on.

---

He went to the Cove Café.

He did not go home first. He did not go to the fair. He rode the blue bicycle out of the resort car park at ten past six with the envelope buttoned into the pocket of his shorts and the car behind him at twenty yards with its hazards on, round the cove, along the paved road, past the Methodist church and the third house past it with the blue door, to the highway, where the road came round the bend above the water, and the tall old sign with the coffee cup on it and the arrow of light bulbs, half of them gone, pointing at the door. He leaned the bicycle against the sign.

The bell over the door rang.

The café was half full. Supper. The family from the booth by the window were not there, but other families were; and the two old men by the door were there, talking about rain; and at the counter, three stools down from the end, there was a man in a tractor cap, eating a piece of pie, who did not look up.

Darlene was at the till.

She looked at him in the door. She looked at the red T-shirt, and the badge with nine letters on it going over both edges, and his face; and he watched hers. It did not do the four seconds. It did not do anything. It simply knew, at once, why he was there, the way Mrs Sixkiller’s face knew, and decided nothing, because there was nothing to decide.

“Sit anywhere, hon,” she said.

He sat on the stool on the end. The same one. He put both hands flat on the counter, which was pale green with little gold stars in it, worn white in front of every stool.

“Biscuits and gravy,” he said. “And coffee. Please.”

Darlene turned the cup over in front of him with a flick, and filled it, and went away to the kitchen, and came back with the thick white plate, two enormous soft biscuits split open and drowned in the pale grey gravy with the sausage in it; and he ate all of it, slowly, and wiped the plate with the last of the biscuit, and Darlene, passing with the coffee pot, looked at the plate and filled his cup and did not say anything.

When he had finished she put the slip of green paper face down in front of him.

He turned it over. 6.85.

He took out the envelope. He untucked the flap. He took out one of the twenties, a soft grey one, and held it out across the counter.

“And the board,” he said. “Please.”

Darlene looked at the twenty. She did not take it at once. She looked at it, and at him, and then she turned round, and looked up at the small blackboard hanging on its nail on the wall behind the till, at the column of names in chalk, BEAVERS 4.50. ROWE 12.10. THE PASTOR 3.00. DUANE (BOAT) 31.75, and at the bottom of the column, in large clear capitals, HANOVER 6.85.

She took the twenty.

She opened the till. She took out the change, and closed the till, and turned to him, and counted it into his hand, slowly, the way you count change into somebody’s hand.

“Six eighty-five,” said Darlene. “And six eighty-five. Thirteen seventy.” She put the coins in his palm. “Fourteen. Fifteen.” A note. “Twenty.”

Then she turned round again, and reached up to the board, and put her thumb on HANOVER 6.85, and rubbed it out. Slowly. The whole of it, from the H to the 5, until there was nothing left on the board under DUANE (BOAT) but a pale grey smudge of chalk the shape of a word.

She looked at her thumb. She wiped it on her apron.

“There,” she said. “Now you don’t owe me.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, hon. You paid.” She picked up the coffee pot. “That’s all it ever was.” She filled his cup again, which he had not asked for, and looked at him over the pot, and something happened in her broad face that he had not seen there before, not on Sunday, not since, something that came up from a long way down and went right across it and stayed. “Number five.”

He did not trust himself to say anything.

Three stools down, the man in the tractor cap had finished his pie. He put his fork down on the plate, and put his cap straight, and got down off the stool, and went to the till, and put a note down in front of Darlene, and did not wait for the change; and at the door, with his hand on it and the bell above it waiting, he stopped, and looked back along the counter.

“Saturday week,” said Cecil Rowe. “Six in the morning. My dock. Bring the other three.” He pushed the door, and the bell rang. “And don’t eat breakfast.”

He went out into the evening.

---

The exhibit hall at Vinita at seven o’clock was full of people looking at ribbons, and three of them were waiting for him on the steps.

They stood up when they saw the car. Felix stood up last. He had been sitting on the steps with his head in his hands, and Marcus beside him with his hand on the back of Felix’s shirt, as though Felix might at any moment run away into the crowd and not come back; and Felix stood up, and his face was a colour Frederick had never seen on it, and he did not say anything at all.

Theo did not say anything either. He held the door of the hall open, and stood back, and made a small movement with his hand: in.

Frederick went in.

---

The pies were first, because they were nearest the door, on a long table under the fans, fourteen of them, on white paper, each with its card turned round to show the number and, now, the name; and he went along them slowly, the way the judges had, one after another, looking at each, and at the cards. Cherry. Apple. Pecan. Blackberry. Peach. Peach. Peach. He found it by the leaf. The slits in the top of it cut in the shape of a leaf, and the edge pinched into ridges like the edge of a coin; and a wedge cut out of it, cleanly, by a judge’s knife.

And on the card beside it, pinned through the corner, a ribbon.

It was red.

SECOND. OPEN CLASS, PIE, FRUIT, TWO-CRUST. 14 ENTRIES. And under that, where the number had been turned round, Felix’s name, in Felix’s careful capitals, with KETCHUM after it.

He had seen Felix’s name written down a thousand times, on the board at school, on lists, on the cast of a boy’s arm. He had never seen it on a card beside a thing Felix had made, with a ribbon on it.

He turned round.

Felix was standing behind him, at a little distance, with Marcus’s hand still on the back of his shirt, and his face still that colour.

“Second,” said Frederick.

“Out of fourteen,” said Felix. His voice came out very small and very high. “Fourteen.”

“Who was first?”

Felix pointed, without looking, along the table, to the next peach, two pies down, which had a blue ribbon on its card.

D. SHAW, KETCHUM.

“Darlene,” said Felix. He shut his eyes. “I came second to Darlene.”

---

His birdhouse was at the end of the row of birdhouses, beside the boot.

The boot had a blue ribbon. It deserved it; Theo had been right. It was a real cowboy boot, old, tooled leather, brown and red, with a hole cut in the toe and a little perch below the hole made of a spur, and a roof over the top of it made of a piece of the same leather, folded, and it was the most ridiculous and the most beautiful thing on the table, and it had been made by somebody called J. Coker, Langley, which he thought might be Rae-Ann’s grandfather, or her father, or Rae-Ann. The castle had red. It was a very good castle.

The box with the crooked roof had white.

He stood and looked at it.

A white ribbon. Third. Out of nineteen. Pinned to the card on its baler twine, beside the number, which was turned round now to show the name, HANOVER, F., KETCHUM, and the description, Bluebird house. Henhouse boards, and the place where he had crossed out 1923, with a single line.

And on the back of the card, which somebody had turned over so that it could be read, in pencil, in a small upright judge’s hand, there was a note.

Honest work. Correct hole for Eastern bluebird (1½”). Roof could be straighter. Nails through side should be pulled, not flattened. Will last. Third.

He read it several times.

Will last.

He did not know who had written it. It was somebody who had walked along nineteen birdhouses on a Friday morning with a clipboard and a pencil and had not looked at the name, because the name had been turned to the wall, and had looked at the hole, and measured it, and looked at the roof, and the nails, and had thought about it, and had written down exactly what was true, all of it, the good and the bad, and had given it third.

It was the first thing anybody had ever told him about a thing he had done that he knew for certain was not about who had done it.

He stood in the exhibit hall at Vinita under the fans with the white ribbon in front of him and could not move.

---

“Mine’s on the wall,” said Theo, behind him.

---

The photographs were on boards along the far wall of the hall, forty of them, mounted on grey card and brown card and black, in rows, with their cards below them; sunsets, mostly, over the lake, and cattle, and grandchildren, and a tornado, a real one, far off, a grey rope coming down out of a black sky over a wheat field, which had red. And in the middle of the second row, on stiff grey card from Marcus’s drawing pad, there was a photograph of a screen door at night.

He stood in front of it.

It was the moths. Dozens of them, small and brown and grey and white, hanging on the mesh, each one a small dark shape against the gold of the lamp behind; and the shadows of their wings on the mesh, faint, and the mesh itself, a grid of fine lines, sharp, every square of it, across the whole picture, like the lines of a map. And behind the mesh, behind the moths, out of focus, soft, gold, so that you had to look for a moment before you saw it, there was the kitchen: the lamp on the table, and the edge of the oilcloth, and the corner of the box fan, and, on the refrigerator door, white, a blurred rectangle of paper held up at one corner by a small dark shape that was the shape, if you knew it, of the State, with ten lines on it in four different hands that you could not read, and some small marks beside them that you could not read either, that might have been ticks.

SCREEN DOOR, KETCHUM, said the card. T. HARTIGAN.

And under it, pinned through the corner, a ribbon.

It was blue.

He turned round and looked at Theo.

Theo was standing behind him with his hands in his pockets, looking at the photograph, not at him; and his face was doing something it did not usually do, which was nothing. It was quite still. It was the face Theo had had on the porch on Tuesday night, kneeling at the screen door with the camera, waiting.

“You never said,” said Frederick.

“I didn’t know,” said Theo. “Till it was printed.” He looked at the photograph. “And then I didn’t want to say. In case it was only good to me.”

“It’s not only good to you.”

“No,” said Theo. He looked at the blue ribbon, and at the card under it, T. HARTIGAN, and Frederick saw his throat move. “No. I know. Somebody who didn’t know looked at it.” A pause. “That’s the whole thing, isn’t it. That’s the whole thing.”

Behind them, at the end of the hall, by the door, Felix was standing in front of his pie with Marcus, and Marcus was taking a photograph of him with it, on his telephone, for his mother, who would want one, and Felix was holding the card with the red ribbon up beside his face and trying not to smile and failing so completely that the woman beside him, who was looking at the pecan, started laughing too, without knowing why.

---

The premium sale was in the show barn at half past seven, and the whole of the county was in the bleachers.

They sat at the top, at the back, against the wall, the four of them in a row, with Castellanos at the end of the row in his blue T-shirt and Kimura somewhere below them that Frederick could not see and knew was there; and below them, in the ring, on the wood shavings, under the lights, which had come on, though it was not dark yet, the children brought their animals in one by one, and the auctioneer sold them.

He had never heard an auctioneer. He had not known that a man could talk that fast, or that it could sound like that. It was not words. It was a sort of song, high and quick and rolling, with numbers in it, going up, that you could hardly catch, two-hundred-two-hundred-now-two-and-a-quarter-two-and-a-quarter-who’ll-give-me-two-and-a-half, and in the bleachers people lifted a hand, or a card, or nodded, or touched the brim of a hat, and the song went up, and up, and stopped, sold, and a hammer came down on a board, and everybody clapped, and the child in the ring with the animal, a boy of twelve with a hog or a girl of fourteen with a lamb, went red to the roots of their hair and led the animal out.

The buyers were the businesses. The bank in Vinita. The feed store. The pharmacy. A man from a car dealer in Grove. Royce Pettit, who bought a lamb from a girl of ten for a sum that made the auctioneer stop singing for a moment and say well, Royce, into the microphone, before he went on. Bonnie Tackett, in her headset, which she had not taken off, who bought a hog for the Cove Point Resort and did not look at Frederick at all. Darlene, who bought another, in her apron, with the café’s name on a card, and sat down again, and folded her arms.

“It’s for college,” said Theo, beside him, low. “Mr Baggett said. They’re not really buying the animal. They’re giving the kid money for college, and calling it a hog.”

Frederick had the envelope in his pocket. He could feel it. HANOVER - WK 1. Two hundred and seventy-eight pounds ninety-seven, now, after Darlene.

“You could,” said Theo.

“I know.”

“You’ve got it. It’s yours. You could put your hand up.”

“I know,” said Frederick. “I know I could.”

He did not put his hand up.

He sat in the bleachers with the envelope in his pocket and watched the girl of ten lead her lamb out of the ring, red to the roots of her hair, with Royce Pettit’s money for college; and he knew that if he put his hand up, the auctioneer would see who it was, and stop singing, and the whole barn would turn round in the bleachers and look at the top row, at the back, against the wall; and that whatever he bought, a hog or a lamb or a steer, that would be what happened at the Craig County premium sale in 2029, for ever. Not the girl. Not the lamb. Him.

It was their sale. It was the same as the ribbon.

He kept his hands on his knees.

---

The grand champion steer came in last.

It was the black one. He knew it at once, even under the lights, even across the barn: the black steer the size of a car, blown dry, gleaming, its hair standing up in a soft dark cloud over the whole shape of it so that you could see, exactly, what the judge wanted to see; and leading it in on a halter, in a clean white shirt with a collar and his boots polished and his hair wet and combed flat, so that he looked about nine, the boy who had told Felix that they had to see the hogs.

Mr Baggett came into the ring after him.

He was in his white straw hat and his white shirt with the pearl snaps and the string tie with the steer’s head on it, and he had something over his arm. A ribbon. Purple. As long as an arm, as long as Mr Baggett’s whole long brown arm, a great rosette at the top of it as big as a dinner plate, with streamers hanging from it in purple and gold that reached nearly to the shavings; and he walked across the ring with it to the boy and the black steer, slowly, the way Earl drove, the way everybody in Craig County did everything, and stopped in front of them, and held it up.

The barn went quiet.

“Colt,” said Mr Baggett. He did not use the microphone. He did not need to. “Colt Haney. Bluejacket.” He looked at the steer. “I’ve given this ribbon twenty-three years. I gave it to your daddy, in 2008, the summer after the ice storm, when he showed with his arm in a sling.” He looked at the boy. “And I’m giving it to you.”

He pinned it on the steer’s halter, at the cheek, so that the great purple rosette hung by the steer’s eye and the streamers hung down past its jaw; and he shook the boy’s hand; and then he stood back, and took off his hat, and held it against his chest.

The barn stood up.

All of it. The whole of the bleachers, from the front to the back, every person in the county who was in that barn, stood up, and clapped, and somebody whistled, and somebody shouted Colt!, and the boy in the ring went a red so deep that it was nearly purple to match the ribbon and looked at his boots; and at the top of the bleachers, at the back, against the wall, Frederick stood up with them, and clapped with them, until his hands hurt.

Mr Baggett, in the ring, with his hat against his chest, looked up.

He looked up across the whole barn, over the heads of the whole county standing in the bleachers, to the top row at the back, against the wall; and found him; and looked at him for one second, under the lights, with his long brown face doing the slow thing it had done at the lemonade, the thing Earl’s face did, when somebody had asked a question nobody had asked before.

Then he put his hat back on, and touched the brim.

---

It was dark when they came out of the show barn.

It had come down while they were inside, all at once, the way it did here, the sun gone behind the flat country and the sky going from white to orange to a deep clear blue that had stars in it already, low, over the trees at the edge of the fairgrounds; and across the fairgrounds, at the far end, beyond the barns, in the field of trampled grass, the midway had come on.

He stopped on the step of the show barn and looked at it.

It was all lights. The swings, which had hung still on their chains against the white sky on Saturday, were going round and out, with lights all the way along every chain, white and gold, a great slow ring of light turning against the dark blue sky; and the octopus, its arms lit red and green, going up and down; and the carousel, gold, with the music coming from it across the grass, a waltz, tinny and sweet; and the giant slide, lit along every hump, with children going down it on sacks, screaming; and the booths with their bulbs in rows; and the noise of it, the music and the screaming and the bells and somebody’s voice on a loudspeaker; all of it, at the far end of the fairgrounds, across the dark grass, like a city that had come down out of the sky for a week and would go back up into it on Sunday.

“Something with lights,” said Marcus, very softly, beside him.

Frederick did not say anything. He looked at it.

Behind them, on the step, Castellanos had stopped too. He was looking at it as well. He was looking at all of it, the swings and the octopus and the carousel and the booths and the crowds moving between them in the dark, the way he looked at a room; and Frederick could feel him counting, the way Kimura counted bottles of water.

“Tomorrow, sir,” said Castellanos.

“I know.”

“The last night. Fireworks at ten.” A pause. “I’ve walked it four times. Sergeant Kimura has walked it four times. I’ve talked to the sheriff and to Officer Hummingbird and to the man who runs the rides. His name is Hollis. He has brought this midway to Vinita for thirty-one summers, and he goes round every bolt on every ride himself every morning with a spanner, and I have watched him do it.” Another pause. “I’m not happy, sir.”

“Are you happy enough?”

Castellanos looked at the swings, going round, slowly, against the dark.

“Tomorrow,” he said.