Families streamed through the gates as I walked toward the main barn, and Nolan flagged me down before I got forty feet.
Nolan Ruiz has run the beef barn for the 4-H since 2009 and he is not a man who flags anybody down.
There was a heifer down in stall nineteen. Bloated, left side up like a drum, and a fourteen-year-old girl sitting in the shavings with her holding the halter and not crying yet but working on it.
My son was at the front gate with a cash box and a lanyard.
I have been on those grounds at four in the morning for twenty years and it is not because I am any kind of saint. On fair week there are about sixty kids sleeping in those barns with their animals and roughly nine adults, and things go wrong at four in the morning.
We got a tube in her and got her up. Forty minutes, both of us and a neighbor, and the vet got there at the end and told the girl she had done everything right, which she had.
Then I went and got the coffee going, because nobody had.
Taped inside the barn office door at every one of those barns is a card. Index card, laminated, put up by the fair board in 2005 and never changed, three phone numbers on it under one line.
Barn emergency. Call these in order and do not worry about the hour. The first number belongs to a man who is already awake, and if he is not, he would rather you woke him than that you waited until it was polite.
The first number is my house. It has been my house since 2005 and nobody in my family knew it was on those cards, including me, until Nolan showed me one in 2011.
My son came and found me at eleven o’clock with his lanyard still on.
He had not taken those keys to push me out. He is thirty-eight, he watched me go up and down those aisles last summer with a bad hip, and he was scared, and he did the thing men in our family do, which is fix something without asking first.
I told him that. I also told him that a fourteen-year-old with a bloated heifer at eight in the morning does not care about my hip.
We open together now. He has the keys, which is right. He comes at four with me three days of the six and I do the other three alone, and neither of us talks about that arrangement.
There is a second number on those cards now. The board added it in February and it is his cell, and mine is still first because he asked them to leave it that way.
The girl in stall nineteen showed on Saturday. Reserve champion. She hugged me in front of the ring and I did not know what to do with my hands.
He told me I did not have to do it anymore, and he meant it kindly, and he was wrong for a reason nobody at that gate could see. Somebody has to be the man who is already awake.