The Quartet on the Flatbed at the Gate

Orvin took the pitch pipe out of his pocket and blew a note. It hung there in the warm air.

Then the four of them came in together on “Farther Along,” like they had in 1968.

The first family through the gate was a young couple with a baby in a stroller and a little boy about five.

The little boy stopped walking. The father kept going a few steps and then turned around.

They stood there for the whole first verse. Then the mother sat down on a hay bale and pulled the stroller up beside her, and the father sat down next to her, and the little boy sat right down in the gravel.

Then the next family stopped. Then two old men in feed caps.

Then a whole group of teenagers from the FFA barn, still in their show jackets, who had come out to meet somebody at the gate.

By the end of the first song we had maybe twenty people. By the end of the second, there were sixty.

A man I did not know went back to his car and came back with his own lawn chair and set it right in the gravel.

An old woman sat down on the front bale and took off her sunglasses. She held her husband’s hand the whole time.

I could see her lips moving on every word of “In the Garden.” She knew all of it by heart.

The Crowd

By the third hymn every bale was full. People were standing behind them, two and three deep.

Families who had come for the funnel cakes and the goat show were singing the chorus, the parents leaning down to teach it to their kids.

The ticket booth lady stood in her doorway with her arms crossed and tears on her face, and she sold tickets with one eye on the trailer the whole afternoon.

I stood at the edge of the trailer in my white snap shirt and straw hat, where Dad could see me if he needed me, and I could not have said a single word if somebody had paid me.

Between songs, Burnis told the crowd the story about the bowling alley, which he has told a thousand times, and they laughed like it was the first time.

Haskel told them about the pitch pipe, and Orvin held it up.

Somebody started counting heads around half past three. One of the FFA kids came over and told me they got to two hundred and something and gave up.

At ten till four I saw the bleachers over at the main stage across the midway.

I could see them clear from the gate, under the shade tent Kirby had put up. There might have been forty people in them.

At four o’clock, Kirby’s band started. We could hear the drums and the bass guitar all the way across the midway, loud and steady.

I watched the crowd on the bales to see who would get up.

Nobody got up.

Not one person. A few people turned their heads to listen for a second. Then they turned back around and looked at four old men in pressed shirts on a hay trailer.