Swing Low

The Montgomery County fair puts the rocks in the old poultry barn. It is a long open shed of creosoted posts and tin at the low end of the fairgrounds in Mount Ida, past the quilts and the canning and the pie tent, and every October the gem and mineral club sweeps it out, sets up folding tables in two rows down the middle, and pretends nobody can smell the chickens. Verlie had a table there for thirty years. At sixteen I sat behind it on an upturned bucket handing out luck chips to children, and it had not once crossed my mind, until Birdie's truck rolled in at half past six on Saturday morning, that the club would give me her end of her row.

Birdie had been up since three frying pies for the Rockhound's booth by the Ferris wheel, and they rode in the truck bed in bread trays under dish towels, with the twins on guard and Deacon between them with his nose lifted into the smell. Since Monday night Birdie had brought me a coffee every morning on her way to open and set it on my counter and talked about the weather and the boys and the ice machine, and she had not said a word about the file in the paper sack under my register. When we passed the Bluff Mine's banner on the fairground fence, DIG YOUR OWN, she looked at it and then at me, and parked.

By eight I had my table laid out the way Verlie used to lay hers. Bluff points went on the left, on a strip of black felt, longest at the back, each with a price card leaned against it in my best printing. Clusters went on the right. Tumbled carnelian and rose quartz and Arkansas novaculite went in the middle in shallow bowls for children's hands, and at the front corner I set the luck jar, a pint jar of quartz chips with a card that said FREE FOR YOUR FIRST ROCK. My coffee can of desert stones sat at the back with a card of its own, NOT FOR SALE, because people ask. Deacon went under the table onto a folded feed sack with his chin on my boot.

Tobias Vance had the table across the aisle. He was round and pink and somewhere in his sixties, in red suspenders and a Razorbacks cap, and his table was all creek points sold by the pound out of galvanized buckets, with a hand-lettered sign that said DEALERS ASK. He came over before the crowd with a sausage biscuit in a napkin and set it on my felt.

"Verlie's end of the row," he said. "Well, now. Darlene Lindell's girl." He looked at my Bluff points without picking any of them up. "You're a little high."

"I'm about right."

"You're a little high for Mount Ida." He beamed at me. Doris Lamb had been right about his window; his fingertips were cracked and pink from the vinegar. He looked past me and out the open north end of the barn, where the fairgrounds ran out against the foot of the ridges and the slopes went up in pine and oak, the oaks turning bronze and the sweetgums gone wine-colored in patches. On the north faces, high up, the blackgums had already dropped everything, and their bare gray tops stood up out of the color like the bristles on a worn brush. "Mama used to say when the blackgums went bare on the north side, you'd best wash your sills. You setting out this year?"

"I'm working on it."

"Well." He looked at me, and then at the coffee can, and then at the first fair families coming in at the far end of the barn with strollers and paper boats of funnel cake. "Those desert rocks are real pretty," he said in a louder voice, and went back across the aisle to his buckets.

The morning came in families. Children went straight for the bowls and the luck jar, and their parents stood behind them and read my price cards and made the face Tobias had made. I explained that the red line in a Bluff point was iron from the clay it grew in, and that the creek points across the aisle were good and cheaper, and Tobias lifted a hand to me without looking up. A man from Glenwood bought a cluster. A retired couple from Little Rock bought six tumbled carnelians and asked whether I did readings, and I told them the carnelians were three dollars apiece, and the woman looked at the coffee can for some time before she let her husband lead her off.

Down at the far end of the row, under a vinyl banner the width of two tables, the Bluff Mine was selling day passes and buckets of mine run. Shelby was making change. Royce Dunagan stood in front of her table in a pressed western shirt the color of a robin's egg, talking to a family from Texas, and when he wanted them to look at something he pointed with the hand that wore the gold nugget ring, out the north end of the barn toward home and his hill. He laughed at something the father said, and the size of it carried to my end of the row. Nine of Verlie's letters were in a paper sack under my register twelve miles away with his ha in the margins, and I watched him lay his ringed hand on the Texas boy's shoulder and steer him toward a bucket, and I was as sure as I had been at seven on Monday morning.

At ten a girl of about seven came to the table in a pink sweatshirt with a funnel-cake sugar mustache. I gave her a luck chip, and she held it in her fist and looked at the felt for a long time, and then she put her other hand out and picked up a Bluff point from the second row, a three-inch point with a clean face and the iron line low in its base, and held it to her ear like a seashell.

"This one's singing," she said.

Her mother laughed and said Kaylee, put that down, and Kaylee put it down, carefully, exactly where she had found it, and they went on toward Tobias's buckets. I picked up the point and held it to my own ear and heard the fair: a loudspeaker calling a 4-H heifer class, a child crying somewhere, the Ferris wheel's motor grinding over at the midway. I turned the price card face down and put the point in the breast pocket of my flannel shirt and buttoned the flap over it.

At eleven Tobias came back across the aisle and offered to mind my table while I went and looked at the fair. "I'll sell your rocks at my prices," he said, "and give you the difference out of my own pocket." Deacon came out from under the felt and shook and went with me.

In the exhibit hall the quilts hung down the middle on wires from the rafters, so you walked between them in a colored hallway that smelled of cedar chests and mothballs. A Log Cabin pieced out of what were plainly a man's old work shirts had a white ribbon, and a card with the maker's name, a woman in Oden, and I stood looking at the plaid until Deacon leaned on my leg. Past the canning shelves, quart jars of chow-chow and fig preserves with the October light coming through them, the pie tent was set up just outside the far door, a white canopy over two long tables and a line of women in aprons.

Lorene was at the end of the near table with a pie server and a roll of paper towels. She had on a cardigan the color of oatmeal with a ribbon pinned to it that said JUDGE'S HELPER, and she was cutting slivers for the judges, three Baptist men in ties, and wiping the server on a fresh paper towel between each pie and folding the towel into quarters and setting it in a stack. She saw me and lifted the server.

"Honey! Look at you, out among people." She cut a sliver of something with a lattice crust and laid it on a paper plate for the middle judge without looking down. "Mama's table, Birdie says. Did you put out the chips?"

"I put out the chips."

"She'd like that." The paper towel went over the server and into quarters and onto the stack. "Mine's number fourteen, buttermilk, and don't you tell them. Hal's in the ag barn with his tomatoes, and he will show you every one of them, God help you." She cut. She wiped. "And Cody's out back of the cattle barn under somebody's stock trailer. You go say hey to him. He won't come up front." She laid a sliver on the third judge's plate and smiled at me over it. "He never would come up front."

The agricultural building was across a gravel lane from the quilts, a shed with long tables of pumpkins and gourds and okra pods the length of a man's forearm, and Hal Pace was standing beside the tomatoes in his cardigan with his hands behind his back, like a man beside a car he has just washed. His entry was five tomatoes on a white paper plate, deep red, a little cracked at the shoulders from the last of the season, and a red ribbon was pinned to the tablecloth in front of them.

"Darlene's girl," he said, and shook my hand. "Second. Fella from Norman beat me with a Cherokee Purple." He looked at the blue-ribbon plate down the table, five dusky tomatoes the color of a ripe plum, and shook his head. "I don't hold with a purple tomato. Lorene says it's sour grapes."

"Yours are prettier, Hal."

"They're the last off the vine. I picked them green ahead of that front and ripened them on the sill." He bent and rolled one of his tomatoes over with a fingertip so its best side faced the aisle. "Nineteen years I've brought tomatoes to this fair. Started the year Lorene made me quit the horses. A man has to have something to fret over of a Saturday." He laughed at himself, a slow, pleased laugh, and straightened up with his hand at the small of his back. "Lorene says I love them more than her."

"Do you?"

"In February I might." He looked down at Deacon, who had his nose at the edge of the tablecloth an inch from the okra. "He's welcome to a tomato. You tell him."

I told Deacon he could not have a tomato, and Hal looked disappointed on his behalf, and gave me one of the green-shouldered ones he had kept back in a paper sack under the table, for frying.

The cattle barn sat at the bottom of the grounds where the land went down toward the creek, and behind it was a gravel lot full of stock trailers parked nose to tail with straw blowing out of their open backs. Cody was under a gooseneck trailer with his legs out in the gravel and a trouble light hooked over the hitch, and a boy in a green 4-H jacket was squatting beside his boots holding a coffee can of bolts. Deacon went straight to the boy, who forgot the bolts entirely.

"Lorene sent me," I said.

"She sends everybody." He did not come out. "Brake lights. They'd have got a ticket on the highway, and Wade's out front writing them." A wrench turned. "Hand me that nine-sixteenths, Rock, it's by your foot."

I found it in the gravel and put it into his hand, and sat down on an overturned feed bucket, and listened to him work. The boy took Deacon off to show him a steer. A calf bawled inside the barn, and Cody tested the lights and swore at them and tested them again, and the second time they came on red against the trailer's dusty back.

I had not asked him in three weeks. I had not asked him at the shop with the door, or in his own bay on the creeper, or on the phone any of the twice I called him from Tucson in seventeen years. I had my hands on my knees, and the green tomato in my shirt pocket, and Verlie's Bluff point, and I asked him.

"What did you go to the Rockhound to tell her, Cody?"

The wrench stopped. He lay there under the trailer a while. Then the creeper came out across the gravel, slowly, and he sat up on it with his arms on his knees and the trouble light in one hand, and pulled his red rag out of his back pocket and began to fold it.

"Took you long enough," he said.

"I know it."

"I took six hundred dollars out of her cash box." He said it to the trailer tire. "The Saturday before. Twenties, out of the bottom of the box, under the tray. There was a man had the two bays out on the highway, where I am now, and he wanted first month and a deposit by Monday or he'd let them to a body shop out of Glenwood. I was twenty years old. I'd been under other people's cars since I was fourteen." He folded the rag in half. "She counted that box every Saturday night after close. She knew by Sunday morning. She didn't say a word to me all week, and I knew she knew, and I didn't say a word to her. So Thursday I went to the Rockhound to tell her I'd took it, and that I'd pay her back by Christmas, and she was already mad before I sat down. You know that part."

"She said she wasn't going to hear it from you too."

"She didn't, either." He folded the rag in half again. "She paid for her pie and got up. That much I told you true. I didn't tell you the rest. She went to the register and paid for my supper, too, and my coffee, and then she stopped at the door with her hand on it and turned around and looked at me across the whole cafe." The rag was down to a square the size of a matchbook. "And she said, 'Fuel pump.' And went out."

I sat on the feed bucket with my hands on my knees. At sixteen I had sorted chips at Verlie's counter on Saturday afternoons and listened to her give him twenty dollars for a fuel pump and forty for a set of tires, with a speech every time, and I could see her in the Rockhound's door with her braid down her back and her hand flat on the glass. Inside the cattle barn the calf bawled again.

"She'd let you off," I said.

"She called it a fuel pump." He unfolded the rag and shook it out. "That's the last thing she ever said to me. The other I told you was the last. It wasn't." He wiped his hands again. "Man gave me back the deposit the week of the funeral, when I told him I couldn't. It's in a Folgers can on the shelf over my desk. Six hundred dollars. I've moved that can twice and never took a dollar out of it."

"You never told anybody."

"Who'd I tell?" He looked at me for the first time. "I took money out of her box and had words with her about money in front of the whole Rockhound, and she was at the bottom of the Bluff in the morning. Rock, I'd have hung me." He put the rag in his back pocket. "Aunt Lorene's the only one in this county ever stood up for me, and she never asked me what I'd gone to say, either. I wasn't about to tell her I robbed her mama."

The boy in the 4-H jacket came back around the end of the trailer with Deacon and announced that the steer's name was Gravy. Cody told him that was a good name for a steer, all things considered, and the boy agreed. When he had gone off again to find his daddy I asked the other thing, because I had asked the first one and it was easier now.

"Where did you go, after?"

He looked at the brake lights, still burning red on the trailer, and reached over and switched them off at the plug. "Work," he said. He lay back on the creeper. "You want the rest of it, ask me some other day. I've done all my talking for one fair." The creeper rolled under the trailer, and after a moment his hand came out flat on the gravel, palm up. "Nine-sixteenths."

I put it in his hand. I sat there another quarter of an hour, handing him things, until the boy's daddy came with a twenty-dollar bill that Cody would not take either.

When I got back to the poultry barn at a little after one, Wade Tolliver was sitting on my bucket behind my table in his khaki uniform shirt with his hat on the felt beside the luck jar, and Tobias Vance was across the aisle watching him with deep interest. There were two fried pies on a paper plate at Wade's elbow, folded in wax paper with the Rockhound's grease coming through. He stood up when he saw me, and remembered the bucket was mine, and stood beside it.

"Man wanted that big geode for twelve dollars," he said. "I told him the lady said fifteen."

"The lady said eighteen."

"Well." He looked at the geode, and then at the card leaned against it, and took his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and put them on and read the card, and took them off again and folded them. "He got a deal." He held out the paper plate. "Birdie sent these. She said peach."

"I like apple."

"She said you'd say that," Wade said, "and to tell you it's peach."

It was peach, and it was still warm, and the crust broke in flakes down the front of my flannel shirt onto Hal's green tomato. Wade ate the other one standing, holding the wax paper under his chin, while a family from Hot Springs came along the table and their youngest son went straight to the luck jar. Wade looked at the card on the jar. Then he unscrewed the lid and held the jar down to the boy's level, very seriously, and let him take his time choosing, and screwed the lid back on.

"You do that every time?" he said to me.

"Every first rock."

"Verlie Odom gave me one of those," he said, "at this fair. I was about his size." He put his hands in his pockets, and took them out. "Lost it in the creek inside a week."

Across the aisle Tobias stood up from his stool, looked at the two of us with enormous satisfaction, announced to nobody that he needed to go see a man about a pump, and went off down the barn. Wade looked after him, and then at me, and I gave Wade the bucket and took Tobias's stool from across the aisle, and for most of an hour we sat side by side behind my table with Deacon asleep across both our boots. He held the jar down for every child who came, and he told a woman from Mena that the iron line was iron, which was true, and that the purple bowl was amethyst, which was rose quartz, and I let it stand. At two-thirty the radio on his belt said something about a fender bender in the Exhibit Hall lot, and he stood and took his hat off the felt.

"Ma'am," he said, and heard himself, and put the hat on. He did not take it back. He went off down the aisle at his slow walk, and the Bluff Mine banner was at the end of it, and Royce Dunagan called something to him and pointed with the ring, and Wade lifted a hand to him without stopping, and went out into the light.

The fair turns over at suppertime, and the gem and mineral club starts wrapping its stock at five because the poultry barn has no lights worth the name. I wrapped the Bluff points twice each in newspaper and boxed them. Tobias came back from wherever the pump had been and helped me fold the table and would not say who had bought his buckets. The Bluff Mine banner came down at the far end of the row, and Royce went out the north end with it rolled under his arm, and Shelby followed carrying the cash box.

I went up to the Lions Club barbecue pit by the entrance for two sandwiches while Birdie loaded her bread trays. The pit was a steel drum on a trailer with its lid propped open, and the smoke went straight up out of it into the evening without bending one way or the other. The flags on the fair office hung against their poles. While the man in the Lions apron was making change for me, air moved against the left side of my face, cool, out of the north, steady, and lifted the loose hair at my temple off my skin and held it there for as long as it took him to count my quarters into my hand. The napkins in their stack on his table lay flat. The smoke went straight up. When I had the change he handed me the sandwiches in foil, and the air was still.

Birdie had the truck backed up to the poultry barn with the tailgate down and the twins sitting on it swinging their legs, and she was leaning on the fender with her cap pushed back and her arms crossed, watching me come. Deacon went to the tailgate and was lifted in by four hands.

"Wade Tolliver," Birdie said, "sat at your table and handed out rocks to children like he was passing the collection plate. Doris Lamb's sister-in-law was in the quilt barn, so I expect it's in Hollis Springs already." She took the sandwiches from me and handed them up to the twins. "You going to tell me where you went at noon?"

"Cody's."

She looked at me. "And?"

"In the truck, Bird."

She kept on looking at me for a moment longer, and then she nodded once and went around to the driver's side.

I stood a minute at the open north end of the poultry barn with my hand over my shirt pocket, over the point and the tomato. Out past the cattle barns, toward the ridges, the midway had come up all at once, strings of bulbs along the game booths and the corn dog stand, the Tilt-A-Whirl spinning in yellow, and the Ferris wheel turning slowly against the sky with its spokes lit white and every car rimmed in red and green. Beyond it the ridges stood up dark in their trees. The sun had gone down off to my left somewhere past Oden, and the last of it lay along the top of the nearest ridge, on the bronze oaks and the wine-dark sweetgums, and was going up them, the red climbing out of the trees into the sky over the pines, while the fair lights came on one string after another below.