The Inspector
About one-thirty, the county health inspector came through. She was a woman about my age with a clipboard and a sunburned nose, and she walked right up to my steel table.
I had been waiting for her. I knew she would come. You do not fry outside on a fairground without the health department taking a look.
She looked at the pot. She looked at the thermometer. She looked at my cooler, my handwash station inside the trailer door, my gloves and my extinguisher and my bucket of sand.
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“What happened to your power?” she asked.
“Lost it this morning,” I said.
She wrote something on her clipboard. Then she leaned over and checked my thermometer herself, and checked the inside temperature of a corn dog with a little probe from her pocket.
“You’re fine,” she said. “Keep your table between the public and that oil. And keep that sand where it is.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
She bought two corn dogs on her way out and paid full price.
Lunch Rush
The real lunch rush came at noon and did not let up until almost two. The junior beef show had broken for lunch, and it seemed like every 4-H kid in Darcy County came straight to my table.
They came in bunches, three and four at a time, still in their show clothes. Pressed jeans, white shirts, green ties some of them, with their numbers still pinned on their backs.
Some of them had ribbons in their hands. Some of them did not. You could tell which was which without looking at the ribbons. The ones who placed talked loud. The ones who did not place talked very little and ate slowly.
A girl of about fifteen told Lacey her heifer had taken reserve champion in her class. Lacey shrieked and gave her a high five across the table, and the girl laughed and her whole face lit up.
Moms who had shown animals at that same fair when they were kids stood in line with their own kids. Some of them told me they remembered my grandpa. One woman said he used to give her an extra corn dog if she said please.
“He did that for everybody,” I said. “He just never told anybody else.”