The Fair

One evening of late summer, in the first year of a new century, a man and a woman, the woman carrying a child, were walking toward the fairgrounds at Wendell County on foot. They were plainly dressed, and the thick dust that had settled on their shoes and their clothes from a long day on the county roads made them look shabbier than they were.

The man was big and dark, with a hard jaw and a way of walking that was more a statement than a gait. He carried a canvas tote over one shoulder, and from it stuck the handle of a hay knife and a coil of twine, the kit of a man who worked with his hands and expected to keep working. His wife kept a step behind him, holding the child — a girl of not quite three, in a cotton dress and yellow sandals — and she did not take his arm, and he did not offer it. They had not spoken in three hours. When the girl fussed, the mother whispered to her, and the child's babble was the only conversation the family had.

The man's name was Wayne Granger, and he was twenty-six years old. His wife was Ellen. The child was June, and she was everybody's business and nobody's.

They had come to the fair because the feed store where Wayne worked had gone under in the spring, and he had heard there was a man in Wendell County who hired hay hands for the autumn. The haying was done by then, which anyone could have told him, but Wayne Granger was not a man who listened to anyone's timing but his own. He had walked twelve miles that day with his wife and his daughter and his bad temper, and the dust was in his teeth.

At the gate, a woman in a faded apron stopped them and said, "You folks eaten?"

Ellen said they had not.

"Then come to my stand. Grain punch, sweet and hot. Best thing in the county for a long road." The woman was old, maybe sixty, with a face like a walnut and a white apron that had been washed so many times it was nearly transparent. Her stand was a tent of patched canvas, and inside it a great iron pot steamed over a propane burner. The sign above the flap said MAUD'S GRAIN PUNCH. "Two dollars a bowl. Nourishing after a hard day."

"I'd rather have a beer," Wayne said.

"There's a beer tent up the way," the old woman said, and she did not sound disappointed. "But the punch is better. Corn, milk, raisins, a little cinnamon. My grandmother made it in the old country. Put a spoonful of something in it, if you're that kind of man."

Ellen touched Wayne's arm — the first time in hours — and said, quietly, "Let's have the punch. June is tired. And you know what happens to you."

Wayne Granger looked at his wife with the particular deadness of a man who has been told the truth too many times and has stopped hearing it. "I know what happens to me," he said. "I'm the one it happens to."

They went into the tent. The punch was hot and sweet, and the old woman, whose name was Maud Trumbull, ladled it from the pot and kept the secret of the bottle under the counter. Wayne had three bowls. The first one warmed him. The second one loosened his jaw. The third one opened the door that had been locked in him since morning, and out came every grievance he had carried for six years of marriage: the money that was never enough, the work that never ended, the child who cried at night, the house that leaked, the future that had turned out to be just more of the past.

Ellen sat with her bowl untouched and watched him. The tent was loud around them — the county fair at the end of its second day, the livestock pens emptying, the midway lights coming on, teenagers shouting, a man on a small stage selling knives. Wayne Granger, who had never been drunk in front of his wife, got drunk in front of his wife, and the shame of it made him louder.

By the time the fourth bowl was gone, a crowd had gathered around the tent, because the big dark man at the long table was holding forth. He was telling the story of his life, which was the story of every working man in the county — the bosses, the banks, the weather, the luck that always went to the wrong people.

"Eight years I've carried that woman," he said, gesturing at Ellen, who sat perfectly still, June asleep in her lap. "Eight years of my blood in her child, and what do I get? A dead end in every town we stop in."

A trucker at the end of the table laughed. "Eight years is a long sentence, friend."

"It's a life sentence," Wayne said. "And I'd sell it back for a dollar and a hot meal."

"You'd sell her?" the trucker said, grinning. "I'd give you more than that. I'd give you five hundred and the rest of my load."

The tent went quiet. Someone laughed, nervous. Wayne Granger stood up, swaying, and looked at his wife as if he had just remembered she was in the room.

"Five hundred," he said slowly. "And the load."

"Six hundred," the trucker said. He was a big man too, younger, with the flat tan of a man who lived on the road. He stood up and took off his cap, and it was like watching a man take off his gloves before a fight. "Six hundred cash, and she comes with the little one. That's my offer. Take it or leave it."

Ellen Granger did not move. She looked at her husband, and in her face there was nothing at all — not fear, not hope, not pleading. That was the thing Wayne Granger remembered for the rest of his life, more than the shame and more than the money: that she looked at him the way you look at a road you have already decided not to take again.

"Done," Wayne said.

The trucker's name was Vince Trask, and he drove a semi out of Omaha hauling fertilizer in the summer and grain in the fall. He counted out six hundred dollars in cash onto the table — it was real money, twenties worn soft at the edges — and he picked up Ellen's bag with his own hand, and he took Ellen by the elbow, and she went. She did not look back. June woke and began to cry, and Ellen hushed her, the way she had hushed her every night of her short life, and they walked out of the tent and across the fairgrounds and got into the truck, and the truck drove away.

Wayne Granger sat down at the table with six hundred dollars in front of him and his hands shaking. The tent had emptied. Even Maud Trumbull had gone to the front flap to watch the truck's taillights disappear down the county road.

"Sir," she said, coming back, "you are the worst man I have ever served, and I have served some."

Wayne picked up the money and walked out into the night. He walked for a long time, past the midway, past the empty livestock pens, out to the edge of the fairgrounds where the floodlights stopped and the cornfields began. The air was cool and smelled of dust and diesel and, faintly, of the rain that was coming. He sat down on a fence rail with the money in his hand and his head in the other hand, and the night did not move around him, and the stars did not care.

Toward midnight he walked back into the fairgrounds, and he found the tent where Maud Trumbull was packing her pot, and he stood in front of her with the money held out.

"Take it," he said. "I don't want it."

"I don't want it either," she said. "It's tainted. You'll find it's tainted wherever you put it."

"Then what do I do?"

Maud Trumbull looked at him for a long moment, the way you look at a dog that has bitten its own leg. "You go home," she said. "You go home and you work, and you don't drink, and you don't lie, and you don't do this again. And if you're the man I think you might be, you'll spend the rest of your life being better than the man you were tonight. That's the only thing you can do with a night like this. You can't unlive it. You can only outlive it."

Wayne Granger stood in the light of her lantern with the six hundred dollars in his hand, and something in his face changed. It was not softening. It was hardening around a decision, the way concrete hardens around a post.

"I will never touch liquor again," he said. "Not for the rest of my life. I swear it."

"That's a good swear," Maud said. "Now get out of my tent."

He left the money on her table and walked out of the fairgrounds and down the county road, and by morning he was forty miles away, and he had not drunk, and he had not slept, and he had not once looked back at the town where he had sold his wife for six hundred dollars and a man's regret.