The Quartet on the Flatbed at the Gate

Telling the Others

I told the quartet on Thursday afternoon in Dad’s carport, where they had practiced on and off since before I was born.

There is still a ring on the concrete where Orvin always set his coffee can.

I was afraid Dad would say no. I had promised not to go after Kirby, and I had kept that promise, but I knew Dad could see the line between the two things better than I could.

“A hay trailer,” Dad said, when I finished. “At the gate.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Son, nobody stops at a hay trailer. People walk past a hay trailer on their way to the funnel cakes.”

Burnis laughed. “Lyndol, we have sung in a feed store, a sale barn, a bowling alley and the back of a moving van.”

“We have sung to six people in a rainstorm,” he said. “A hay trailer is a step up.”

Haskel had not said anything. He was sitting in his lawn chair with both hands on top of his cane, looking out at the pasture.

“I have one more good fair in me,” he said. “Maybe two. I don’t want to spend it in my recliner listening to drums from across town.”

That settled it for him. Orvin did not say anything either. He just reached into his shirt pocket, took out the pitch pipe, and blew a note. The other three came in on it without being asked.

They sang “Farther Along” right there in the carport, the way they have opened every single fair since 1968.

I stood by the deep freeze and listened, and I had to look out at the cattle for a while.

Friday and Saturday Morning

Friday after work I pulled the trailer into the yard behind the mill and swept it clean of every scrap of hay.

Two of the boys who work for me stayed late without being asked and washed it down with the hose.

One of them, a big quiet kid who loads sacks all day, built a set of wooden steps with a handrail out of scrap two-by-sixes, so the four of them would not have to climb up the side like they were loading calves.

“Mr. Haskel uses a cane,” he said, when I asked him why he went to the trouble. “My grandpa does too. You don’t make a man like that climb.”

The other boy asked his dad, who runs a little hay operation south of town, and on Saturday morning they showed up at the fairgrounds with thirty square bales stacked in two pickups.

Jewel went to our church and asked the pastor if we could borrow the folding lawn chairs from the fellowship hall and the old speaker and microphone they use for outdoor Easter service.

He told her to take whatever she needed and bring it back Sunday.

I hitched up at six in the morning. It was already seventy degrees, with a clear sky and that dry October wind that comes across the cedar and smells like dust and somebody’s brisket smoker.

I backed the trailer in under the big live oak on the east side of the gate, right where the ticket booth lady had said.

She came out with a cup of coffee and watched me set the jacks.

“It looks like a stage,” she said.

“It looks like a hay trailer,” I said.

“It looks like a stage,” she said again. “Give it time.”

We set the bales in rows in a half circle, three deep, with the lawn chairs on the ends.

I ran a hundred feet of orange extension cord along the fence to her outlet and taped it down so nobody would trip.