The Pork Chop Supper on the Lawn

Nine O’Clock

We had the three of them loaded and the trailer pulling out of the lane by seven forty.

The fairgrounds are fourteen miles from our place, out past the edge of Rushville. Blaine drove five under the limit the whole way, and nobody in the truck said a word.

Moose went first. Two hundred seventy-one. Biscuit next, two hundred forty-four. Calvin walked each one onto that scale like he had been doing it for thirty years.

Then Pepper. Calvin waited until the man waved him up, and then he walked her in slow, the same way we had walked her out of the beans.

I stood at the rail and could not breathe. Calvin walked her up onto the platform, tapped her once on the shoulder with his show stick to square her up, and stepped back.

“Two twenty-two,” the man reading the scale said, and his partner wrote it down without looking up.

Two pounds over the floor. She had run off seven pounds in a bean field, she had stood shaking in the mud, and she had still made it by two.

Calvin did not jump or holler. He just reached down and scratched behind her ear and said something to her I could not hear.

Blaine put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed, and I knew he was trying not to cry in the hog barn.

That week Calvin showed all three. Moose placed fourth in his class. Biscuit did not place.

Pepper took second in the Spot class, and Calvin took third in intermediate showmanship, which for an eleven-year-old with a pig that spent weigh-in morning in a bean field, I thought was about as good as anything I had ever seen.

Sherri did not come to the barn. Not once all week. Clark came every day and sat on an overturned bucket by our pens in his seed cap and told Calvin stories about pigs he had shown in 1968.

On the last night of the fair, the pigs sold at the 4-H auction like they do every year, and Calvin walked each one through the sale ring himself.

The Rushville bank bought Pepper. Calvin held it together until the truck, and then he did not.

The Idea

I did not come up with the supper right away. For three days, honestly, I was just angry, the quiet kind of angry that sits in your stomach while you work.

On Thursday I was delivering out on the Hoffmans’ end of the road, and Trisha was standing at her box waiting for me, which she never does.

“How’s the boy,” she said, before I even had her mail sorted out of the tray.

“Third in showmanship,” I said. “Second with Pepper. And he cried all the way home after the sale.”

“Good for him,” Trisha said. “On all of it.” Then she leaned on the box. “You know what that was about, right? Monday morning?”

I said I figured Sherri thought Calvin was careless and wanted to scare him into being careful.

“Some,” Trisha said. “But mostly it’s Chance. Mostly it has been Chance for two years now.”