The ring toss sat near the far end of the midway, wedged between the funnel cake trailer and the Tilt-A-Whirl, with a hand-painted sign that said five dollars for three rings.
My son Mack had been waiting for that booth since the Fourth of July.
He was twelve that fall, and he had a way of deciding on one thing and then wanting nothing else in the world.
That night, the one thing was the big white bear on the top hook.
It hung there above the rows of glass pop bottles like a cloud somebody had tied down, and it was almost as tall as he was.
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He had twenty dollars of mowing money folded in the front pocket of his jeans.
He had earned every bill of it pushing our old Craftsman around the Hendersons’ yard and the church lot all summer long.
Mack has Down syndrome. People who do not know him see that first. People who know him see a boy who will practice one thing four hundred times without complaining, because nobody ever told him that four hundred was too many.
That summer the thing was rings. I had set a green pop bottle on the rail of our front porch right after school let out, and he had thrown canning jar rings at it every evening until the paint on the rail wore through.
So when he stepped up to the booth at the county fair outside Clinton, on the first cool night of late September, he did not throw like a kid at a carnival.
He threw like a boy who had done his homework.
He planted his toes on the line, the way we had practiced. He breathed out.
He tossed underhand, soft, with a little wrist on it, the way the YouTube man had shown us on my phone that July.
The first three rings bounced off. So did the next three. The man running the booth, a tired fellow with a gray mustache and a cowbell hanging from a nail, gave him a polite nod and took the second five.
On the ninth ring, one dropped clean over a bottle neck, wobbled once, and stayed.
For a second nobody believed it, least of all the man with the mustache.
Then he grabbed that cowbell off its nail and rang it like the barn was on fire, and the whole line behind us started clapping.
“Which one, young man?” he asked, and Mack pointed straight up without a word.
The man used a long pole with a hook on the end and brought the white bear down off the top of the wall.
Mack wrapped both arms around it and buried his face in its belly and laughed, the big honking laugh he has that makes strangers laugh too. A lady beside us actually wiped her eyes.