The Tie That Binds(55)

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.”