The Quartet on the Flatbed at the Gate

My brother told me on a Tuesday afternoon in late September, at the feed mill, with three trucks lined up at the scale and a load of cottonseed hulls waiting to be weighed.

He did not get out of his pickup. He rolled the window down, left the engine running, and waited for me to walk over to him like he was the one with somewhere to be.

“I’m going with a younger band this year,” Kirby said. “For the opening. I wanted you to hear it from me before the program comes out.”

I stood there in the dust with my clipboard. It took me a second to understand what he meant, because in my whole life the opening of that fair had only ever meant one thing.

Our dad, Lyndol Rountree, and three of his friends have sung the first song at the county fair every October since 1968. Fifty-eight years. Four men, four parts, no band, one pitch pipe.

“You mean Dad’s quartet,” I said.

“I mean the opening slot,” Kirby said. “The fair needs to look young, Cleve. We are losing the young families to the big shows in Waco and Stephenville. I have a band from Brownwood that plays the dances. They draw.”

“So put them on after Dad. Same as always.”

He looked out his windshield at the grain bins instead of at me.

Then he said the thing I have not been able to forget, and he said it calmly, like he had already practiced it.

“Four men in their 80s would look embarrassing, Cleve. Up there on that stage, holding on to each other. That is the first thing people see. I am not doing it anymore.”

The truck behind him honked. Kirby rolled his window up, put his pickup in gear, and pulled out onto the highway toward town.

I stood there holding the clipboard until one of the boys from the mill asked me if I was all right.

I said I was. I was not.

The Four of Them

I should tell you who the four of them are, because if you are from a small place you probably know four men just like them, and you know what it would mean to take this away.

Dad sings bass. He is 84 now, tall and thin, with white hair he still combs with water every morning.

He ran cows on our place outside Hamilton for fifty years and drove a school bus for twenty-two of them.

Haskel Pruett sings tenor. He is 86, carried the rural mail route for thirty years, and can still hit a high note that makes the hair stand up on your arms. He needs a cane now, and he hates it.

Orvin Speer sings lead. He is 82, farmed peanuts and oats until his knees quit, and keeps the pitch pipe in his shirt pocket the way some men keep a pocketknife. He has never once given the wrong note.

Burnis sings baritone. He is the baby of the group at 81, a retired welder with hands like leather, and he is the one who makes the other three laugh before they go on.

They started singing together in 1968 at a funeral, because the family wanted four voices and those were the four men who showed up.

After that, people kept asking. Churches. Revivals. Funerals all over three counties. Every county fair since.

They never charged a dime. When a family tried to pay them, Dad would say the gas money was already taken care of, and Orvin would quietly slide the envelope back under the sugar bowl on the way out.

My mother used to say she married Dad and got three more husbands she had to feed on Sunday afternoons.

She said it every time, and every time the four of them laughed like it was the first time they had heard it.

Mom died four years ago this past spring. I will tell you about that later, because it matters to how this ended.