The Tie That Binds (22 page)

“All I know is,” I said. “You’re getting flat unruly. That’s a fact.”

So we went to the parade all right. We did the entire opening-day program. Only we didn’t go alone. We drove in to town with the Goodnoughs in Lyman’s Pontiac. The
day before he had waxed it fresh for the occasion, and I figured the big back seat of that boat of his would be good for my wife. When we got to town that morning he parked the car on a side street away from traffic, then the four of us walked over to Main Street and found a place out of the sun in front of the Coast to Coast store on the east side of the street. There were already hundreds of people lining both sides. Some of the old-timers had arrived early enough to unfold lawn chairs along the curb, and there were kids everywhere, teenagers in shorts and little kids with balloons and cones of ice, and all the townspeople and area farmers. A little after ten o’clock the parade started.

The color guard came first. They came marching north up Main Street from the high school toward us, and everybody stood still while they passed, four middle-aged veterans stuffed into wool uniforms and sweating plenty. They were followed by some guys on horseback; then the school band was there playing some march or other while the band director hotfooted it along beside them; some more horses then; then the Holt County Fair queen and her two attendants rode up, each of them in new felt hats and bright cowgirl outfits and looking straight ahead without a smile when one of the girls’ horses raised its tail to drop road apples along the pavement in front of everybody; then some kids on decorated bikes; then a half-dozen boosters in convertibles and some more horses; then a float or two, the Future Farmers of America float with some high school boys dressed like Arabs smoking cigarettes in long holders; and the local implement company’s float consisting of an old manure spreader with a painted sign taped to it that said:
WE STAND BEHIND WHAT WE SELL
; then the candidates for county clerk waving and smiling from convertibles, acknowledging the folks of voting age and throwing candy to the kids, the kids all scrambling for it and their mothers checking to see that it was wrapped in wax paper; then
some old tractors and antique cars and still more horses. The city street cleaner with its spray of water and rotating brushes ended the parade. It was finished by eleven o’clock.

“Well,” I said. “That appears to wrap up any parade for the year. Now what?”

“I say we eat,” Lyman said. “Sis here got me up before breakfast.”

We all looked at Edith. “Oh, I don’t listen to him anymore,” she said. “Next thing you know he’ll want a tray in bed.”

“That’s the idea,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You want to be careful. One summer she brought me a tray of food out to the side yard every day and I just about died of bloat and discomfort.”

“Do you remember that?” Edith said.

“Sure. Every mouthful.”

“That was a long time ago. You were a nice little boy then.”

“I still am.”

“Of course you are,” she said. She patted my cheek. “Sometimes he is,” Mavis said. “But I agree with Lyman. I’m starving.”

The cafes in town were all crowded with people waiting to find places to sit down, so we drove out to the fairgrounds. Inside the gate a deputy sheriff waved us over toward the parking lots; Lyman parked his Pontiac at a chalked line and we locked the doors to his satisfaction, then we ate lunch behind the grandstand in one of the booths that had a lean-to roof built out over one side with wire screening nailed onto two-by-fours to keep the flies out. There were always a lot of flies during the fair. It tended to discourage some people’s appetite to see flies swimming in the mustard and pickle relish, so a couple of years previous the fair board had ordered screens put up. We each had a hamburger and something to drink; Mavis
ordered another sandwich and we kidded her about it. Afterwards we decided to see the exhibits and some of the livestock judging before the rodeo started.

When we got to the hog barn they were judging the January boar-pig contest. We sat down to watch the fun from the second row of the bleachers. In front of us was a good-sized enclosure of heavy fence panels with sawdust spread deep on the dirt floor. The 4-H kids had already run the pigs into the pen and were trying now to move the pigs back and forth in front of the judge so he could see the muscling. It was hard work. The pigs were tall, long, tough hided, independent. It was hot in there under the tin roof. The pigs were hot; a pig doesn’t have a very good cooling system, you know. They kept moiling, trotting off to look for mud. Their round eyes looked mean, heavy lashed; their big ears flopped the flies away while their squirreled tails twisted and switched as they moved, and they were all grunting and squealing up one hell of a pig racket. If anything, the kids looked hotter, more miserable than the pigs. The kids were red-faced from the strain, and nervous, dressed right for the show in new blue jeans and white shirts and wielding hog canes and racehorse bats in the attempt to keep those damn big pigs circling to the best advantage in front of the judge. It required considerable whacking and wielding of canes to do that.

Meanwhile the judge stood ankle deep in the sawdust and pig squirt in the center of the pen. He had his arms folded and he did not look happy. He was hired as pig judge; he took himself serious as Sunday. I believe a cold beer in a cool bar would have saved him. And all the time the 4-H kids were having a hell of a time of it: the pigs wouldn’t cooperate. They were either trying to dig out from under the fence panels with their tough snouts and
so get shut of that miserable hot business, or they were fighting, a bad racket then, a higher pitched squeal than before, if that was possible; it made your hat jump—the two pigs squealing, chewing at one another’s ears and jowls while the kids whacked at them, beat with canes and bats and called for the board—”Board! Board!”—until one of the men standing on the outside stepped over the fence and shoved a heavy sheet of plywood down hard between the screaming pigs and stopped the fight. Separated, the pigs would look sort of dumbfounded, like where did that other son of a bitch go, I ain’t finished chewing on him yet, and so it would all go on again as before.

Only towards the end there was a slight hitch in the routine, I remember: one of the pigs pissed all over the judge’s alligator boots. The kid who owned that pig was in trouble and he knew it. He began to kick sawdust onto the mess but it didn’t help a lot. The damage was done. Finally in pure hope he looked up into the judge’s face for mercy, for a sign of humor. But the judge apparently didn’t have any, or not enough anyway, because when it came time for ribbons the pig with the empty bladder didn’t win a thing. In the bleachers we were offended. The pig was our popular favorite. Edith and Mavis booed the judge for an idiot.

“Men,” Mavis said.

“Now you can’t blame that on us,” Lyman said.

“I do,” she said.

After the hog judging we walked past the sheep in the wood pens panting in the heat, and saw the quarter horses, their round-muscled butts shining smooth under the lights in the horse barn. Working our way down the alleys between the 4-H kids sitting on tack boxes in the cow barn we saw the show steers and fat heifers lying half asleep on clean straw. The cattle were all trim and neat; some of
them still had their ratted, puffed-up tails protected by plastic bags to be clean for the beef-feeding contests when the time came. The cattle were hot.

Outside again, we walked over to the exhibits in the home-ec. building. The county women had their quilts on display, and their artwork, flower arrangements, and pickles. When we got to the bread-and-butter-pickle department we found that Marvella Packwood had won it again. The out-of-town judge had hung a blue ribbon on her pickle jar, which amused Lyman and me a good deal. Everybody in the county knew that Marvella Packwood had just delivered her third kid without benefit of a single marriage certificate. There were folks who found that not only scandalous but excessive. It was the times, they said.

Mavis said, “Don’t you say a word, you two.”

“But that there was a woman judge,” Lyman said. “You ain’t going to complain about that?”

“She thinks like a man,” Mavis said.

“Looks like a good jar of pickles to me,” I said. “Look at that color. I probably ought to ’ve married her. I always did fancy bread-and-butter pickles with my dinner steak. Didn’t you, Lyman?”

“I couldn’t get any,” he said. “Not where I been. New York never heard of them.”

“See there?” I said. “Marvella’s doing Lyman and all of us a service. They ought to give her another ribbon.”

“Don’t be funny,” Mavis said.

“They could stick it to her belly.”

“Yes. And you’ve already got one girl eight months pregnant with child. Isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell yet.”

“Come on,” Edith said. She took Mavis’s arm and they started to walk away. “These men,” she said, “have been out in the heat so long they’re getting plain mushy. They’re not as strong as we are.”

To cool off after the pickle exhibits we went back to the food concessions and had cold drinks. Lyman and I each drank a beer. While the others stayed there in the screened-in shade, I went over to the ticket booths to buy reserved seats in the grandstand for the rodeo. People were starting to file in; there was going to be a good crowd. I stood in line to buy the tickets, watching the people dressed up western for the day in new boots and straw hats. Then Doub Ragsdale, a farmer I knew south of town who had irrigated circles of corn and was doing all right with them, came up behind me. “Hot, isn’t she?” he said.

“Ought to make the corn grow,” I said. “You can’t fault it.”

“Yeah, but it wants to rain.”

We moved forward a step.

“The wife and kids with you?”

“Over there.” He pointed towards the gate. Louise, his wife, was standing with their two boys in the sun in orange stretch pants and a flouncy blouse. She waved at me when she saw I was looking at her.

“Your oldest boy going out for football this year?”

“Maybe,” he said. “He’s still awful scrawny.”

“He’ll be all right. Just keep feeding him.”

“Yeah, he eats. That’s one thing he knows how to do. But he’s soft like his mother. Look at them orange pants. It’s not like when you and me was little shits.”

“No,” I said. “Some ways it’s worse.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t like it.”

That was always Doub. He had that big house and all that irrigated corn, but he complained worse than any wheat farmer will. A wheat farmer will tell you how he’s lost his crop five times to dust, flood, drought, hail, and rust before he finally admits that he’s harvested it. But I have never understood what Doub had lost. Maybe his perspective.

Anyway, I bought the rodeo tickets and went back to collect the others to go up into the grandstand. The seats were in the center section high up under the roof. We climbed up the aisle steps past all the people we knew, stopping to talk and joke some as we worked our way towards the seats. Edith, I recall, was especially lively that afternoon. It made her feel good to be among all the people, and everyone felt it, enjoyed seeing her, was glad she was happy; it was like she left a wide ripple of pleasure behind her. The women along the aisle took her hand, and the men slapped Lyman neighborly on the back.

When we reached the seats I settled Mavis and the Goodnoughs in their places with cushions to sit on, then I went back down to help with the calf roping. I had agreed to run the roping barrier, but that was all. I wasn’t going to rodeo anymore myself; at thirty-nine I was at least four years of marriage past the time when I still had thoughts of being a cowboy. Besides, I didn’t want to break my neck bucking off some horse or bull and leave Mavis to bury me. I had doubts about how much spadework a pregnant woman would do. The way I figured it, she would probably only plant me a foot under, then the dogs would dig me up and chew my toes and chase one another for my arm bones. The thought didn’t appeal to me. I was satisfied to watch somebody else break his neck while the people in the stands applauded.

The rodeo started as usual with the grand entry. A bunch of guys and girls galloped their horses in figure eights in the arena, then there were some introductions so the rodeo marshals and the fair queens and all the notables could spur their horses forward and lift their hats to the crowd. Afterwards, the national anthem was blared over the loudspeakers; the cowboys held their hats, and the people in the stands rose up and sang; then the invocation was given by the Baptist preacher, who found enough
cause to praise God for twenty minutes. When that business was finished, they all stampeded out of the arena and it was time for the first event, the bareback riding.

The rodeo went about as usual that afternoon. There were five or six pretty good young cowboys from different parts of the country, but only about two or three first-class horses. It was getting harder every year for a stock contractor to find good bucking horses; the horses weren’t as big—they didn’t have much of that raw plow-horse build anymore—so they weren’t as rank as they had been twenty and thirty years ago, which meant the scores weren’t as high, and I seem to recall only once when they had to open the gates and bring the ambulance into the arena. That was when this long-necked goosey kid from Valentine, Nebraska, stayed on his saddle bronc the full eight seconds. He was still on after the buzzer rang, riding with both hands now and hollering and still trying to hook his horse for some reason, while the pickup men kicked up beside him to take him off, but he didn’t seem to know how to grab onto one of them and get off. Then the trouble was they all got to racing too fast, and when they came helling up to the end of the arena the pickup horses knew enough to stop but the saddle bronc didn’t. He jumped the fence. I mean he tried to. I suppose he might have made it too, only there was a three-quarter-inch strand of cable strung along the top of the fence posts to discourage any steeplechasing or impromptu fence jumping; so at the last second the horse decided to stick his big raw-boned head under the cable like he thought maybe he could snake through that half foot of empty space between the cable and the top fence rail, like maybe he thought he was some form of circus lion doing the hoops in the center ring. He didn’t make it; he slammed to a loud, solid stop. Meanwhile, the kid from Valentine sailed headfirst over the horse’s neck and ran his face up against the steel cable.
The cable didn’t give a lot, but his face did. They called the ambulance in and rode him off to the hospital to rebuild his nose and sew up his cheek. Afterwards some of the cowboys were riding the pickup men pretty hard about losing a horse race that it appeared they were going to win. Until it came down to the wire, that is. The pickup men felt kind of foolish about it.