The Quartet on the Flatbed at the Gate

Dad and Kirby

I watched from the back of the trailer. I could not hear them. I did not need to.

Kirby walked over to where Dad was sitting on the front hay bale, resting, with a cup of lemonade somebody had brought him. Kirby sat down next to him on the bale.

He talked for a while with his head down. Dad listened. He did not interrupt. He did not put his arm around him. He just sat close enough that their shoulders were touching.

When Kirby finished, Dad said something short. Then he took the pitch pipe Orvin had left on the bale and set it in Kirby’s hand.

Kirby turned it over in his fingers like he had never seen one before.

Kirby’s girl came and climbed up between them on the bale. Dad put his arm around her. Then, after a minute, he put his other arm around Kirby. Kirby leaned into it.

I have known my father fifty years. I had never once seen him put an arm around my brother in public. Not at a graduation. Not at a wedding. Not at Mom’s funeral.

Jewel came and stood beside me and slipped her hand into mine. She did not say anything. She did not have to either.

The Program

That night Haskel called me again. “Well,” he said, “I believe we came out of retirement.”

“I believe you did.”

“Tell your brother he’s got a good baritone,” Haskel said. “Burnis says he’ll fight him for it.”

The next morning was Sunday. The quartet sang the special music at our church like they always do on fair Sunday, and Kirby was there, in the pew next to Dad, with both kids.

He did not sing with them. But he sang in the congregation, and I heard him.

On Monday the men at the café did ask him about his empty bleachers, the ticket booth lady told me.

She said he stood there with his coffee and told them straight out that he had made a mistake, and that he was the only one who made it.

She said one of the old men at the counter told him the same thing the old rancher had. Took a while.

One Year Later

The fair programs came out again this October, second week of the month, on every counter in town.

Dad found his at the bank again, at the same counter, from the same teller. She slid it across to him, and she was grinning before he even opened it.

On the first page, at the top of the schedule, it said: Opening, 2 PM, main gate, the Rountree Quartet.

Fifty-nine years. Kirby wrote it himself. He put my name under it for the trailer.

So this year, on a sunny October afternoon, I hitched up at six in the morning and backed the flatbed in under the big live oak on the east side of the gate.

The boys from the mill came with sixty bales this time. Kirby brought the good sound system from his stage.

Haskel needed both hands and my shoulder again. He is 87 now. He did not say anything about it, and neither did I.

Orvin blew the pitch pipe. They started “Farther Along.” The first family through the gate stopped walking.

Kirby stood at the foot of the trailer with his badge around his neck and his radio on his hip, and on the last song, Haskel leaned to the microphone and asked him up for the low part, and he went.

His girl sang every word from the front row. Dad looked down at her, and at Kirby beside him, and this time his voice did not catch at all.