Pepper placed last in the class of eight. That was fair. The heifer class is judged on the animal, on her build and her structure and how she moves and how she is fitted, and you cannot win a heifer class with half the hair gone. Geneva knew that before she ever walked in.
She led Pepper out of the ring with her chin up and did not look at the bleachers.
I met her at the gate. “Last,” she said, and shrugged. “I knew she would be. Showmanship’s the one that matters today.”
Showmanship is different. In showmanship the judge is not supposed to be judging the calf.
He is judging the kid: how she handles the animal, how she sets her feet, how she keeps the calf between herself and the judge, whether she knows her animal and can answer for it.
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The fitting does count for some of it. How the animal is groomed and presented is part of the score, and I knew Geneva was walking in already down those points before she ever took a step. Everybody on that rail knew it too.
There were eleven kids in the intermediate showmanship class, and Jethro was one of them. He led his heifer in three behind Geneva.
His heifer was a nice red baldy with good bone, and he had her brushed up beautifully. I knew who had helped him with the legs the night before.
The judge had them walk the ring once, then line up head to tail.
Geneva set Pepper’s feet with the show stick in four touches, back left, back right, front left, front right, the way she had practiced in our lot about two thousand times.
Then she did the thing she always does that I had never really watched until that morning. She kept her eyes on the judge.
Every time he moved, she moved, keeping that heifer between herself and him, keeping her own body out of his line of sight, never looking at the bleachers once.
He went down the line and asked every kid questions. You could not hear most of it from the bleachers.
When he got to Geneva, he stood in front of Pepper for a long time, and then he asked her something, and you could hear her answer because the whole place had gone quiet to listen.
“What happened to your heifer’s hair?” he asked.
Every person on that rail was listening for it. I think a lot of them already knew.
Up on the top row, Kent sat with his elbows on his knees, staring at the sand. Geneva could have said his name right there and nobody would have blamed her.
“She got clipped wrong last night, sir,” Geneva said. “There wasn’t time to fix it. I didn’t want to cover it up, so I’m just showing you how I handle her.”
He looked at her a second longer. Then he asked her Pepper’s birth date, and she said March the ninth.
He asked her weight, and she said nine hundred and sixty-two pounds at weigh-in. He asked what she was feeding, and she told him the ration down to the mineral.
He moved them around the ring three more times. He pulled Geneva out and walked her across the arena and back, watching her feet and Pepper’s feet.
He put her back in line, then pulled her and two others out and lined them up at the front.