Then it was August 1967, and Mavis wasn’t working at the hospital anymore because she was eight months pregnant. Her stomach was swollen and hard, blue veined, tight. I could feel with my hand how the little beggar kicked and swam, did his half gainers and watery flips, like he was showing off for us inside his warm sac, like he believed he was nothing so much as a green frog cavorting for all the world in a horse tank. But I was a little concerned about it too. I knew at thirty-three that it was somewhat late for Mavis to be carrying her first baby, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She refused to let me worry. She had helped any number of babies get born at the hospital, and now she had all the confidence and all the equipment she needed to bear this one. I could stop worrying. So I did and we were both pleased about the prospect of having a little boy in the house. It would be a boy, we knew that. We were looking forward to it.
BUT AUGUST is also traditional Holt County Fair time, and 1967 was no different. It’s considered a big deal around here; everyone and his horse attends, able or not, one hoof in the grave or not. It gives us the opportunity—and the excuse too, I suppose—to visit with folks we haven’t seen for a year.
In the week before the fair is to begin the Lions Club rakes up the accumulated twelve months of trash at the fairgrounds; they burn the trash and the blown-in tumbleweeds behind the buildings, then they loiter in groups, eating Rocky Mountain oysters and potato salad and drinking beer from kegs. Meanwhile the 4-H kids in the county have begun to fit their steers for the judging by clipping the heads and ears of the animals and by ratting the tails into balls; the kids’ mothers and aunts and grandmothers choose their best bread-and-butter pickles for display; somebody begins to work up the racetrack with a disk for the horse races, and somebody else helps the stock contractor unload his bulls and bucking horses at the chutes across the arena from the grandstand. On the afternoon before it is all to begin the carnival people finally pull into town in their battered trucks. They’re usually a bad crew of greasy characters, appearing dog tired, looking as bored with it all as if they have seen it all, and maybe they have. Sweating and cursing, they establish the booths and rides in the fresh-mowed cheat weeds. So then it’s time. Opening day begins with a parade.
It’s not much of a parade. Just a hometown affair so as not to worry Macy’s, but we went to it that year anyway. This was despite Mavis’s eight-month condition. I told her we ought to skip it.
“We can go this afternoon,” I said. “We can walk around the booths and then you can watch the rodeo from the grandstand.”
“You’re not listening to me,” she said. “I have to get out of this house. I’m sick of this house.”
“All right. I can see that.”
“And you know I won’t be any more uncomfortable in town than I am here. Don’t you know that? But I’ll tell you what it is.”
“What?”
“It’s because you’re embarrassed to be seen with me. I’m getting too big.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “Vince, Junior, told me the other day when he saw us together—he told me you make me look skinny. Hell, he thought I must be losing some weight, and I told him to keep thinking like that.”
“So what are you talking about?”
“It’s just that I’m afraid you’ll get tired. That’s all. Then I’ll probably have to carry you around on my back and come damn near ruining myself.”
“I won’t get that tired,” she said.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. Now do we go to the parade together or don’t we?”
“All I know is,” I said. “You’re getting flat unruly. That’s a fact.”