State Fair Read online

  Elvia reached over and tucked Sophie’s green and yellow Birds-inFlight quilt a little closer around her. My gramma Dove and I pieced the quilt the minute we found out Elvia was pregnant. “I just need to show up, make sure the smoked chicken sandwich platters are there and that there is plenty to go around. Then it’s back to the bookstore.” Elvia owned Blind Harry’s, San Celina’s only independent bookstore.

  “Did the decorators finish in time?” I asked, walking past the giant Ferris wheel. Before the fair ended, in memory of Jack, I’d have to ride it. “Did they take your suggestions? I’ve been so busy getting the folk art museum’s fair booth set up and helping with 4-H, I haven’t even been up to see it.”

  In appreciation for how well his business was going, Emory had donated half the money needed for the Booster Buddies’ new Western-themed hospitality lounge. The nondescript green building was located in front of the Sierra Vista Grandstand Stage and Arena where the most popular musical stars performed and where the country rodeo took place. The spacious and even more important during the fair, air-conditioned, hospitality suite was located on the second floor of the building. Not only was it a comfortable place for the Booster Buddies and their guests to relax, it also had some had some of the best concert seats. Located off the hospitality lounge’s balcony, the padded seats reserved for the Booster Buddies and guests had a dynamite view of the stage and arena. It was a small compensation for the thousands of volunteer hours members put in every year, not to mention the five-hundred-dollar per person annual dues.

  “Yes, they finished last week. It looks wonderful. I’m glad Emory reconsidered the Pendleton furniture and went with my suggestion to hang Pendleton blankets on the walls instead. Can you picture beer and wine stains on ten-thousand-dollar sofas?” She gave a horrified shudder. “We went with navy corduroy sofas from JCPenney.”

  I nodded in agreement. I’d enjoyed access to the Booster Buddies’ old hospitality suite for many years because my dad Ben and my gramma Dove were charter committee members. Twenty-seven years ago forty-two people formed a group whose primary reason for existing was to promote what was then called the San Celina County Fair. (A few years back the “powers that be” decided to fancy it up and rename it the Mid-State Fair, thus confusing folks ever after).

  The Booster Buddies now had 150 members. Membership was supposed to be purely altruistic, but like most groups it had its political side. A lot of deals, both pertaining to the fair and other economic concerns in the county, took place in that spacious room nicknamed appropriately “the Bull Pen.” Still, even with the wheeling and dealing, the primary activity in the hospitality suite seemed to be drinking too much, eating too many sweet and salty snacks and more than occasionally, exaggerating everything from the size of your cattle herd to the return on your favorite mutual fund.

  “Will I see you at the Bull Pen and concert tonight?” I asked. We’d turned around and were walking back toward the center of the fairgrounds. “Kathy Mattea is performing.”

  Elvia narrowed one dark-lashed eye at me. “Can’t we rename the hospitality suite something a little classier?”

  “Traditions are mighty hard to break round these parts.”

  She gave an exaggerated sigh, conceding the truth of my statement. “I’ll probably drop by tonight since it’s the only way I’ll get to see my husband before one a.m. Luckily, Sophia’s taken to the bottle almost as well as to me, so I can express some breast milk and leave her with Mama.”

  We parted ways at the hospitality suite. Amazed, I watched Elvia flip a few switches and turn part of Sophie’s stroller into a carrier. Holding the carrier on the crook of her arm like a purse, she punched the code on the locked door and headed up the stairs to the suite.

  My thoughts were on my upcoming breakfast when my cell phone rang—“Happy Trails to You.”

  “Ah, get lost, Dale,” I said out loud, fumbling through my leather backpack. I’d already started regretting the ease with which people could reach me on my cell phone. In the good old days, I could use being someplace like the fair as an excuse to be out of contact with people and their problems. But, since I was curator of the folk art museum, wife to San Celina’s often controversial police chief, with all its myriad and pain-in-the-butt social obligations, and granddaughter to Dove Ramsey Lyons, one of the busiest women in the county with her agriculture committees, homeless shelter and historical society meetings and way too many church activities, I felt obligated to be available.

  “She’s back,” the gravelly, old voice whispered. It sounded like a tin cup of rattling quarters.

  “Who is this?” I demanded. “Is this a prank call? How did you get this number?”

  The voice took on its normal, scolding tone. “I’m the woman who paid for all your fancy prom dresses with her chicken money, that’s who.”

  “Hey, Dove.” I smiled, knowing all along it was my gramma. “What’s cookin’, good lookin’?”

  “No time for jokes. She arrives this evening on the Amtrak and I’m thinkin’ about just leaving her at the train station.”

  I didn’t have to ask who “she” was because we’d been through this scenario countless times in the last thirty-something years since Dove moved in with Daddy and me right before Mama died of breast cancer. She was Garnet Louise Wilcox, Dove’s only sibling, with whom I and Sophie shared a middle name. Dove and Garnet got along, as Daddy liked to say, like two bobcats trapped in a burning outhouse.

  “You knew she was coming,” I said, waving at acquaintances every few steps. There was no such thing as privacy at the fair. “Why are you panicking now?”

  “I know she said she was coming, but I thought . . . well, to be honest . . . I prayed that she’d get sick.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks next to the red, yellow and blue Hot Dog on a Stick kiosk. A young girl in blue shorts and a tricolored jockey cap was making lemonade by vigorously pushing a plunger up and down in a large barrel. “You prayed that God would strike your sister sick? Dove, I’m pretty sure that’s not what Jesus would do.”

  “Oh, pshaw,” she said. “Just because Jesus was the Son of God, you can’t tell me his brothers and sisters didn’t annoy the heck out of him sometimes. It no doubt took great restraint on his part not to lightning bolt them once in a while. Besides, I only prayed that she’d get a head cold. Just a little sinus infection, not the bubonic plague. The Lord obviously didn’t answer me.” Her voice sounded more than a little put out.

  “Or maybe your answer is you’re supposed to entertain your sister like an angel unawares and show her a good time.”

  Her voice grew sly. “I think I’m getting a message from our Lord right now that you haven’t spent near enough time with your beloved great-aunt . . .”

  “What? What?” I yelled into the phone. “I’m losing our connection!”

  “Don’t you dare turn me . . .”

  “Out of range! Goin’ through a tunnel! Bye!”

  I hit the end button and shoved the phone deep into my backpack. I’d pay dearly for that little rebellious act later, but I wasn’t up to hearing her complaints about Aunt Garnet. Dove knew good and well my plate was full during the fair. Right now, I had no time to referee the contentious relationship of my gramma and her prim and proper sister. I’d worry about Dove’s sibling rivalry problems later, once I had a full stomach and finished my pig wrangling.

  It took me another twenty minutes to make my way over to the Kiwanis booth mostly because I was forced stop every few steps to shoot the breeze with someone I hadn’t seen in months. The fair was like a huge family reunion for San Celina County’s shrinking agriculture community. I’d been attending it since the early sixties when my family moved to the Central Coast of California from Arkansas. My daddy and mama, Ben and Alice Ramsey, bought our original five- hundred-acre ranch and started their dynasty with only one Hereford bull of dubious lineage and two healthy heifers. Right before Mama died when I was six, my gramma Dove Ramsey came out from Arkansas to l
ive with Daddy, the oldest of her six children, to help him run the ranch and raise me. She arrived in San Celina’s California mission-style train station armed with her favorite cast-iron frying pan, a stash of quilting fabric, her much envied recipes for cheesy corn bread and chocolate-coffee icebox pie and my twelve-year-old uncle Arnie, Daddy’s youngest brother. Arnie had long ago left San Celina for Montana where he now worked as a ranch foreman for their sister, Kate, but Daddy and Dove still raised cattle—232 head now, not counting my 58—and were a beloved part of the Central Coast agriculture community.

  I started walking toward the Livestock Show Arena with my eggs Kiwanis sandwich half devoured when I heard my named called for the umpteenth time. It was Maggie Morrison, my husband Gabe’s extremely capable assistant. Since it was Friday, she must have taken the day off from her never-easy duty of keeping Gabe’s complex schedule running smoothly.

  Maggie was a young African American woman who lived with her older sister, Katsy. They raised a small, but excellent herd of Herefords on a ranch outside the town of Santa Margarita, not far from the rough and rowdy Frio Saloon. She was twenty-six, twelve years younger than me, though so mature for her age, I often forgot our age difference. Gabe constantly sang her praises, claiming he’d drown in an ocean of paperwork and never get anywhere on time if it wasn’t for Maggie. She was organized, discreet and understood his often delicate position of being a minority in a powerful position in a county that was and always had been primarily Anglo.

  I’d known Maggie from the time she was nine and I was twenty-one. Her mother, LaWanda, an emergency room nurse at San Celina General Hospital, had been one of Dove’s closest friends. They’d bonded years ago when Dove brought one of our ranch hands into emergency to have his broken wrist set. Dove and LaWanda discovered their common Arkansas background and understanding of all things Southern, which they claimed rural Californians, who often had Southern roots a few generations back, never really “got.”

  LaWanda, a champion reined-horse competitor, died in a riding accident when Maggie was eighteen and Katsy was twenty-four. The two women still lived on the hundred acre ranch LaWanda had leased. With her insurance settlement, they bought the ranch and were trying to carry out their mama’s dream of a rural lifestyle.

  “Wait up,” Maggie called, quickening her step to catch up with me. She was taller than me by seven inches and had long, coltish legs that I envied with all my five-foot-one heart. She wore her hair in a close-trimmed Afro-style, complementing her oval face, and had almond-shaped brown eyes and skin the color of Karo syrup. She could have been Natalie Cole’s younger sister. Today, rather than in her normal business attire of a jacket, silk blouse and slacks, she wore tight blue Wranglers, a grass green snap-button Western shirt and black round-toed roper boots.

  “That sandwich looks killer,” she said. “I have to sneak over to the Kiwanis booth.”

  I held it out to her. “Want a bite?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” She took one, wiping a drop of mayonnaise off the corner of her mouth then fell in beside me. “Yep, that’s definitely my next stop.”

  “You left my sweet husband on his own today? I bet he’ll be crazy loco by the time he gets home tonight.” I popped the last bite of my sandwich into my mouth. “Thanks loads.”

  She laughed, waving a hand. “He’ll be fine. Jim’s there and Bambi can handle any photocopying emergency. There’s always my voice mail if he really doesn’t want to deal with someone. He won’t even know I’m gone. Thank goodness, the only thing that is really causing him any extra stress lately is that rash of stolen trucks and SUVs. I guess the thieves have moved into Santa Barbara County.”

  “Gabe told me. Glad my truck is purple. Bet nobody’s gonna want to steal it. I still can’t believe Gabe hired someone named Bambi.”

  She gave another deep laugh. “It’s even harder to imagine someone naming their daughter that. But she is superorganized and isn’t a bit rattled by any of the trash-talking cops, which is one of the most important requirements of our job. Don’t worry, I made sure that this would be a light day for Señor Ortiz.”

  “Smart lady. Fewer problems for you to handle Monday.”

  We walked into the swine building, already teeming with hundreds of nervous kids dressed in their white 4-H shirts, white Wranglers, bright Kelly green kerchiefs for the girls and neckties for the boys. Their chevron-style caps always reminded me of old-time gas station attendants. Adding to the melee were their equally agitated livestock and sleep-deprived parents and leaders trying to French braid hair, clean spots off white shirts or jeans, slick down cowlicks with parental spit and bring some kind of order to the whole crazy scene.

  Nostalgia enveloped me when I smelled the familiar scent of animal manure, fresh hay, toasty popcorn and a sharply sweet, medicinal scent I’d always associated with the fair—sort of a mixture of eucalyptus and cotton candy. The county fair—this county fair—had been a part of my annual schedule for as long as I could remember. Though I hadn’t shown cattle or sheep for over twenty years, I still looked forward to the fair—its crazy foods, its competitions, its familiar rituals. And, in the last few years, for the painfully sweet memories it brought of a more innocent time of my life.

  “What are you doing today?” I asked Maggie. “I’ve agreed to help wrangle pigs for Novice and Intermediate Hog Showmanship. Then I think I’m going to check out the new Bull Pen. Elvia says it looks like a million bucks.”

  “You haven’t seen it yet? God bless your rich cousin. Without him we’d still be sitting on plastic patio chairs and eating frozen pizza rolls.”

  I waved at Marguerite Zechiel and her now grown daughter, Laurie. Laurie had once been in Dove’s 4-H club. They sat behind a battered card table outside the large sawdust-covered pen filled with nervous nine- and ten-year-old youngsters trying to keep track of their squealing hogs.

  “C’mon,” I said, “it wasn’t that bad. Those old plastic chairs had a lot of interesting graffiti on them—kind of an oral history. Besides, he didn’t pay for it all himself. His donation just got the ball rolling. That hospitality suite has needed renovation for years.”

  “Grab yourself a pig board, girls,” Marguerite said, patting her silvery bob, her sky blue eyes twinkling with patient humor. “We need all the wranglers we can get out there.”

  “Ladies, choose your weapons.” Her slim, dark-haired daughter, Laurie, pointed to the pile of two-by-three-foot rectangular plywood boards painted green and designed with hand holds, sort of like a huge painter’s palette. They’d been spruced up by Marguerite and Laurie, both talented tole painters who belonged to the Artists’ Co-op. One side of the boards depicted bright pink pig faces, their snouts open in exaggerated screams. The other side boasted in large white letters—Swine Escort.

  Unlike lambs and cattle, there was no way pigs could be trained to stand still long enough for the judge to consider conformation and finer points of porcine excellence. Photos of pig judging were the ones that often made the local newspapers because there was a good chance something funny happened when you had twenty 4-H kids wielding “pig sticks,” twenty hogs avoiding said sticks and as many wranglers as you could, well, wrangle into being there to shove their pig board between two agitated pigs.

  “I’m taken,” Maggie said to Marguerite. “I have a two-hour stint as docent in the Family Farm exhibit building.” She turned to me. “Have you seen the exhibits yet?”

  I grabbed a pig board. “Haven’t seen anything yet. I’ve spent most of my time getting the museum booth ready.”

  “The judging’s been quite . . . uh . . . controversial this year.”

  “When isn’t it? I’ll come by when I’m through here.” I glanced over at Marguerite for confirmation. “When am I free?”

  “We should be done by noon,” she said.

  “See you later,” Maggie said, with a wave.

  I tucked the Booster Buddies all-access pass hanging from a lanyard around my neck inside my Josiah
Sinclair Folk Art Museum T-shirt and spent the next few hours doing enough aerobic exercise chasing after swine to qualify me for a couple more days eating off Mustang Sallie’s menu.

  After my hog-wrangling duty, on the way to agriculture building no. 1 where the Family Farm exhibits were displayed, I decided to check out the situation at the folk art museum booth. It was twelve thirty and the fairgrounds had been open to the public for a half hour. Since it was Friday, we expected a larger and hopefully more shopping-inclined crowd than on the fair’s first two days when a good part of the fair’s visitors consisted of frugal, retired folks or summer camp kids on field trips. The fair officially opened on Wednesday, so this was our first weekend night. Kathy Mattea’s long-anticipated concert would kick the fair into high gear.

  The folk art museum’s booth was located on Artisans’ Row, next to Bears Quilt Shop, a new quilt store that just opened in the seaside town of Cayucos. I took special pride in our museum and co-op’s booth because I’d talked the Booster Buddies and the city of San Celina into cosponsoring it. Most folk artists barely made enough money to eat and pay rent, so the expensive retail space at the fair was beyond their means. This access to the public both provided them a little more income and advertised our museum. Constance Sinclair, the wealthy, longtime resident of San Celina County who donated her family’s adobe ranch house and stables that housed the folk art museum, had given her seal of approval to my suggestion, thus convincing the city officials who held the purse strings that the money was being put to good use.