The Quartet on the Flatbed at the Gate

Afterward

When it was over, people came up to the trailer for an hour. They shook Dad’s hand and Haskel’s and Orvin’s and Burnis’s, and a lot of them shook Kirby’s too.

An old rancher I know told him, “Your daddy raised you right, son. Took a while.”

Kirby laughed at that, the first time I had heard him laugh in a month.

When the crowd thinned out, he came and found me at the back of the trailer, where I was coiling up the extension cord.

He stood there with his hands in his pockets, the way I had stood in Dad’s pen.

“You could have come to the house,” he said. “Told me what you thought of me.”

“I promised Dad I wouldn’t.”

He nodded slowly. “So you parked a hay trailer at my front gate instead.”

“It’s the ticket booth’s gate,” I said. “Ask her.”

He almost laughed again. Then he looked over at his bleachers across the midway. The band had finished its set and was packing up. There had never been more than fifty people over there.

“I played to fifty people,” he said. “Fifty, and three hundred over here. On my first day of the fair. Everybody at the café is going to ask me about it Monday.”

“I expect so,” I said.

“I deserve it.” He said it plainly. Not feeling sorry for himself. Just saying it.

“Yes,” I said. “You do.”

He looked at me a long moment. Then he said the thing I think he had been carrying since he was a boy watching the kitchen clock.

“I was so tired of losing him to those songs, Cleve. Every Saturday. Every Sunday. And then Mom. I couldn’t even go in the room. I thought if I just didn’t have to hear them anymore, I’d stop feeling like that kid.”

I did not have anything wise to say to that. I put my hand on his shoulder, the way Dad had on the trailer.

“He’s right over there,” I said. “Go tell him.”