The Quartet on the Flatbed at the Gate

The Program

The fair printed its programs the second week of October. They put a stack on every counter in town: the bank, the café, the feed store, the post office, the hardware.

Dad found out at the bank. He was standing at the counter depositing his Social Security check, and the teller slid him a program and said she could not wait to hear the four of them again this year.

He opened it to the first page and read down the schedule. He read it twice, she told me later.

Then he folded it in half, put it in his shirt pocket, and thanked her for her kindness.

He did not call me. He did not call Kirby. He went home and fed his cows.

I found out he knew because Haskel called me that night. “Your daddy called me and said we’d been retired,” Haskel said. “He said it real cheerful. That is how I know it’s bad.”

I drove out to Dad’s place first thing the next morning. He was in the pens, forking hay to six head of black baldy cows in the cool before the heat came on. He saw my truck and kept forking.

“You heard,” I said.

“I read,” Dad said. “There is a difference. Hand me that bucket.”

I handed him the bucket. We fed the cows. A mockingbird was going in the live oak by the water trough, and Dad stopped to listen to it, the way he always does, like it might be sharp.

“I’m going over to his house,” I said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Dad, he cut you off the program without one word. He let you find out at the bank.”

Dad set the fork against the fence. He looked at me with that look he has had since I was five years old, the one that does not raise its voice and does not need to.

“Cleve. I am not going to beg my own son for a stage he does not want me on. And I am not going to have my boys fighting in the street over me. Promise me.”

I did not want to promise. I stood in that pen with my hands in my pockets, a fifty-year-old man feeling about nine.

“Promise me,” he said again, softer.

“All right,” I said. “I promise I won’t go after Kirby.”

He nodded. He picked up the fork again. And that was the end of the talking, as far as he was concerned.

The Thing That Was Mine to Do

I drove back to the mill and sat in my truck in the lot for twenty minutes. I could not fight Kirby.

I could not go over his head, because there was nobody over his head. The stage was his, and he had made his call.

But I kept thinking about one thing. The stage was his. The fair was not. And the gate certainly was not.

Every person who comes to that fair comes in one way: through the main gate on the north side, past the ticket booth, under the big live oaks where everybody parks and unloads their strollers and coolers.

I own a 24-foot flatbed trailer. I haul hay on it from June through September.

It sits three feet off the ground, flat and wide, with a solid wood deck my uncle helped me lay twenty years ago.

That evening at supper I told my wife about it. Jewel listened the whole way through without saying a word, and when I finished she set her fork down.

“You promised him you wouldn’t go after Kirby,” she said.

“I’m not going after Kirby. I’m going after a place to park.”

She thought about it. Then she smiled for the first time all week. “Then you’d better call the ticket booth before you call anybody else.”

The lady who runs the ticket booth has bought feed from me for twenty years.

She raises show goats with her grandkids, and she has never once paid a bill late. I called her that night.

I told her what I wanted to do. There was a long pause, and I thought she was going to tell me it was against some rule I had never heard of.

“The stage is your brother’s,” she said finally. “The gate is mine. You can park right under the big oak on the east side, out of the walkway. I’ve got an outlet in the booth. You bring your own cord.”

“You sure?”

“Cleve, I have heard those four men sing every October since I was a girl in pigtails. I am sure.”