The Lamb Check She Gave Away

The Junior Fair Board

It did not wait until tomorrow, because Val Hartman found us first.

Val chairs the junior fair board. She raised three boys and about four hundred market hogs, and she runs the sale like a railroad.

She came walking up the trailer row with a clipboard about an hour after the lamb sale ended, and her face told me she was not there to congratulate anybody.

“Jo,” she said. “I need a word, and I need Garth for it too. You know the sale rule.”

I did know it. Every exhibitor’s family signs the junior fair rules in the spring. The exhibitor leads her own animal through the sale ring.

A parent or helper can step in only when the kid is hurt or the animal is out of control, and the ring man has to call it.

“Nobody called it,” Val said. “I asked Jerry at the gate and he said Garth just walked in. I’ve got a sale committee that wants to know why a grown man showed a nine-year-old’s lamb, and I’ve got three other families already asking why their kids had to do it themselves.”

My stomach went cold. “Is Juanita in trouble?”

Val’s face softened, but only a little. “The rule says the board can pull the sale money or put a note on the exhibitor’s record,” she said.

“Nobody wants to do either one to a nine-year-old. But somebody has to come explain it to the committee, and it isn’t going to be her.”

We found Garth at the hog gate. Val asked him to come up to the picnic tables outside the show office, under the big maple, and he came.

I think he knew. He took his cap off when he sat down, which I had seen him do maybe four times in ten years.

There were three people from the sale committee at the table. A retired ag teacher, a dairy farmer’s wife, and a young man from the extension office who looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. Val read the rule out loud off her clipboard.

“Garth,” the ag teacher said. “You’ve been on this sale committee eighteen years. You wrote half these rules. What happened in there?”

Garth sat with his hands folded on the picnic table. A wasp kept circling his cap and he did not swat at it.

I had never seen him look small before. He is a big man, wide through the shoulders from fifty years of throwing hay, and he looked small.

“The girl didn’t do anything,” he said. “I want that on the record, whatever record there is. She walked in like she was supposed to. I went in after her. I took the halter. That’s all on me.”

“Why?” the dairy farmer’s wife asked.

Garth opened his mouth and closed it again. “I thought I could get her a better price,” he said finally. That was all he gave them.

I knew there was more under it. I could see it sitting on him like a weight. But that was all he said.

They talked it over while we waited by the maple. When they called us back, Val did the talking. Juanita would keep her sale money and nothing would go on her record.

Garth was off the sale committee for a year, and he would not set foot in the ring next year for any reason, not even to run the gate.

Garth nodded. He did not argue. He put his cap back on, said “Thank you, Val,” the way you thank a doctor who has given you the bad news straight, and walked off toward the parking lot.

It was the first time in eighteen years that he left the fair before the hog sale ended.