The Quartet on the Flatbed at the Gate

Who Was Sitting Up Front

That was when I saw who was sitting in the gravel, right up front, cross-legged, between the little boy from the first family and the FFA kids.

Kirby’s two kids. His girl is ten. His boy is seven. Their mother must have brought them in through the gate and let them run ahead, and they had stopped where everybody else stopped.

His girl was singing every word. She knew the words because she has been going to church with her grandpa every Sunday since she was a baby, and he sings in her ear on the pew.

Dad saw them too. He was in the middle of the low part of “Precious Memories” when he looked down, and his voice caught on the low note, just for a second, and then it came back steady.

My sister-in-law was standing at the back of the crowd. She caught my eye. She did not look angry, and she did not look embarrassed.

She just put her hand over her heart and shook her head a little, like she was sorry.

I nodded back to her. I did not have anything against her.

I did not have anything against anybody on that whole fairground but one man, and I had promised I would not go after him.

As it turned out, I did not have to. He came to us.

Kirby Walks Over

At twenty after four, I saw my brother coming across the midway.

He walked fast, the way Dad used to walk when a calf got out through a hole in the fence.

Head down. Elbows working. He had his radio clipped to his belt and his stage badge on a lanyard around his neck.

He came past the funnel cake stand and the lemonade stand and stopped right at the edge of the hay bales, at the back of the crowd.

He was breathing hard. He looked at the people, and the trailer, and then at me.

I did not move. I did not say anything. I did not want to.

His daughter turned around on the gravel, the way a kid can feel her daddy behind her. She saw him and waved, big and happy. “Daddy! Papa’s singing!”

Everybody on the back bales turned to look at him.

Kirby stood there with his hand half raised to wave back. The drums from his band were still going across the midway, playing to about forty people in his shade tent.

Up on the trailer, Dad lowered the microphone. He did not look surprised.

He looked like a man who had been waiting a long time for something and was not in a hurry now that it had come.

Haskel leaned down to the microphone, and he looked straight at my brother over the heads of all those people.

But he did not ask him anything. Not yet. First Dad stepped forward.