Families lined the streets as I walked toward the main arena, and I was not in the parade. I was in the crowd, in a windbreaker, with a cardboard box of twenty-six years in the trunk of my car two blocks over.
Ruthanne Beeler found me by the fence. She has been the fair secretary since 1994, she is eighty-one years old, and she does not hurry for anybody.
She had a receipt book under her arm. Carbon duplicate, the kind with the blue sheet you slide behind the page. She has kept every one in a filing cabinet in that office because the state requires seven years and Ruthanne keeps everything.
She asked me to walk over to the arena with her. Then she went up the steps to the announcer’s stand, which nobody expected, and asked Merle for the microphone, and Merle gave it to her, because you do not tell Ruthanne Beeler no either.
She told two thousand people that she wanted to read some entry receipts.
Two hundred and fourteen of them. Twenty-six years. Market steer, market hog, market lamb. A different kid’s name on the front of every one, from Bushland and Vega and out past Canyon, families who could not put up a forty-dollar entry fee in a bad year and would have kept their kid home rather than say so out loud.
Paid in cash, every time, at the window, by me. And Ruthanne wrote the same thing on the memo line every time, because I asked her to the first time in 1999 and she never once varied it:
Entry fee paid. Do not tell the family who paid it, and do not tell the kid. Just let the kid show.
She read the memo line once, then read out fourteen of the names, and stopped, because four of the people she named were standing in that arena in their thirties with their own children, and one of them is a large-animal vet in Hereford now.
Then she said, plain, that she understood the livestock committee had gone in a younger direction and that she had no opinion on committees, but that she would like the record to show who had been paying the entry fees.
The fair director found me at the fence within ten minutes. He is not a villain. He is forty-four, he was handed a budget and a mandate, and he did what people do, which was fix the part that was easy to see.
He asked for the box back. I told him I did not much want the jacket with somebody else’s name on it, and he said no, sir, the box, and he had a new jacket in his hand by Friday with the stitching redone.
I am not on the crew anymore. My knees were done with the pre-dawn pens two fairs ago. There is a fee committee now, with a line item in the fair budget, and Ruthanne administers it, and last year it let nineteen kids show who otherwise would not have.
Twenty-six years of getting up before the sun does not fit in a cardboard box. It turns out it fit in a filing cabinet in the front office the whole time, and an eighty-one-year-old woman knew exactly which drawer.