The shade cloth comes down
MARSHFIELD, Mo. — By Monday the Webster County Fairgrounds had the particular quiet of a place that has already spent its sentence. Tire tracks in two directions. A square of paler grass where a tent told forty sessions how to live closer to the ground. The roll of shade cloth that last Thursday slept across two sawhorses was gone, which is how you know a sermon has been delivered and the congregation has gone home to test it.
The ticket page now says the thing the goats already knew: this event is over. What the ticket page cannot say is whether anyone who bought a cheesemaking seat remembered the second water tub when the wind came back dry on Sunday.
Scoop walked the square because that is what field reporters do when the grandstand empties. The Bath Parlor was still the Bath Parlor. Goat milk does not take Labor Day off and it does not take Expo Monday off either. Twenty-one acres outside of town were doing the work the fairgrounds only advertised. Inkhorn, helpless in the presence of labeled bars, bought the unscented one on principle and called it research.
We will not invent a headcount. Last year’s papers talked about thousands and full rooms. This year’s papers have not yet handed us a certified number, and Professor Gruff’s grease pencil is allergic to invented crowds. What we will invent, because the record leaves it on the picnic table, is the ride home.
A family from somewhere with flatter dirt put a new fence tool in the back seat and argued, kindly, about whether the livestock-guardian-dog talk had been a class or a warning. A man who won nothing in the plucker drawing decided his old way of doing chickens was still legal. A woman who sat through rainwater collection looked at her own gutters the way a goat looks at a gate that used to work.
Forty sessions will teach a person how to live closer to the ground.
Monday will teach the ground whether anybody was listening.
The Nigerian Dwarfs on the edge of town did not attend. They never needed a wristband. They voted, as they did last week, for shade. The vote is still unanimous. The shade cloth at the fairgrounds can come down. The shade at home has to stay.
Inkhorn’s notebook has one line that survived the edit:
Marshfield did its job. The hills have the rest of September to grade the homework.