The Summer Truman Saved For My Roof

The County Fair

The Sangamon County Fair falls in late July most years, and I have not missed it since I was younger than Winnie is now, so of course I took them both, Truman with the bag looped over one shoulder even as we walked the midway, even as we stood in line for the Ferris wheel.

“You can leave that with me while you ride,” I told him, holding out my hand for it the way I would have for a coat.

“I’ve got it,” he said, and climbed into the swinging car with the strap still crossed over his chest, and rode the whole loop that way, one arm hooked through it like it was a seatbelt nobody else could see.

We watched the tractor pull from the bleachers with grease and diesel smoke thick in the evening air, and Winnie fell asleep against my arm somewhere in the middle of the draft horse competition, worn out from a full day of funnel cake and the 4-H barn, where she had spent the better part of an hour admiring another girl’s blue ribbon rabbit and telling me, with real conviction, that she intended to raise one herself next spring. Truman spent that same hour at the exhibit hall, studying the canning entries row by row, the jars of green beans and peach preserves lined up under their little typed cards, more interested in something there than I understood at the time.

I bought them both corn dogs and a shared bag of kettle corn, and Truman ate his without once setting the canvas bag down on the bleacher beside him, and I remember thinking, not for the first time that summer, that whatever was inside it must be either very precious or very fragile, and never once guessing it might be neither, that it might simply be the plainest thing in the world: a plan, and the discipline of an eleven year old boy determined to see it through without help.