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County Fair
by Phil Stong
Chapter 1
Of Fairs
When I was about six our Hired Hand had a race-horse; a good race-horse. Lea had saved two years to buy him; he cost $80. The horse, Walnut, was seven-gaited, an unusual number of gaits, but only two of them were forward. Walnut could trot to the right, rack or single-foot to the left, pace or stumble to the rear. His forward gaits changed so rapidly that only one of them was ever identified -- the Australian Crawl. Some said it was a breaststroke, but the technique of slow photography had not yet been perfected.
Walnut was a tantalizing horse. Sometimes he would start and sometimes he wouldn't. On occasion he would do a furlong with a vehemence that would leave him alone and contemplative as he came to the end of the first turn, at which point he would try to buy a program. The program boys were all up in the grandstand. Lea would bully him back into the course, where he would give his exhibitionism full play, amble about the track, sneer at everyone as only a horse can sneer, and, as an afterthought, tear after the field toward the end of the event, overtake it, pass it like a breeze and come in about two hundred yards ahead; which is to say, six furlongs behind.
Before I had ever seen a county fair I had helped to train this racehorse. We had a measured quarter-mile on the smooth, sandy River Road below the farmhouse where Lea conditioned and timed Walnut. I stood at the finish with Lea's big silver "turnip" and my cousin stood at the starting line with a flag made out of some old white rag to signal me the start.
Lea must have made an amusing figure, hairpin-bent in the wonderful sulky, his lean, solemn face strained with purpose and anxiety, his long legs kneed up at a tremendous angle so that his feet would not interfere with the horse's ears, his whip at the "ready". But it would have been irreverent for John or me to see any humor in this dramatic and serious business.
The whip was not to urge Walnut on, for he was the meanest horse that ever lived and always travelled furiously with the obvious and earnest intention of breaking Lea's neck sometime. The whip was to help keep Walnut's gait, for the big horse considered a trot a mincing and piffling style of travel, and at the slightest sign of inattention from the driver would break into a full gallop, or begin his incredible rack which waved the sulky like a flag.
About twenty seconds after I got my signal I would remember to look at the watch, and shortly thereafter Walnut and Lea would come roaring past at one gait or another. If that horse had been allowed eleven gaits in a trotting race he would have turned cartwheels to violate the conventions.
I would then decide on some figure that I thought would please Lea for the result, and announce it with surprise, but firmly. Lies, which give so many people difficulty, have always been very easy for me, and I have always been ready and anxious to tell them when they would give pleasure or do good. There wasn't a respectable country store in the county that didn't have over the tobacco counter a picture of the great Dan Patch and a list of his records. I merely divided the trotter's half-mile record by two and added a few seconds out of respect for his prowess.
Lea wasn't so scientific himself. He multiplied my figure by four, and reached the inescapable conclusion that if it weren't for the curves in county fair tracks he had the greatest miler in the world. If he had multiplied it by sixteen thousand he would have found that he also had the swiftest means of transcontinental travel, but he didn't.
Walnut eventually won a yellow ribbon in the Wapello County Fair at Eldon, Iowa, in, of course, a race of three horses. There was an insignificant purse in the mile, and nearly all of the owners were holding up for the important half-mile. Lea used his head, and, by holding back viciously on Walnut's jaw, persuaded him to trot twice around the track. He lost by five furlongs although he had twice passed on straightaways the horse that won -- once at the start and once just after he had been lapped. There were, of course, two laps.
Neither Lea nor we boys could ever understand why Grandpa smiled at the ribbon whenever he passed it in its honorable place on one of the barn posts. It was a perfectly good ribbon for a third place in the Wapello County Fair. Grandpa was and had been for several years the Superintendent of the Swine Division at the great Iowa State Fair, and we thought that he was becoming haughty and careless about ribbons.
It was a scandal with the women of the family that Lea spent all his Sundays working on his sulky. It had hard rubber tires which couldn't puncture, but they could come off. It had ballbearings that were always cracking or falling out, and things to tighten up, and painting and trimming to be done, and other failings and necessities. A sulky does not seem to me now to be a very complicated piece of apparatus, but a deep sense of the utter unreliability of all machinery was born in me of the difficulties of Lea with his sulky and the equal troubles of Ed Irish with his Velie, the first automobile in the adjacent town.
The women of the household talked of Lea's nonsense and foolishness and impiety from early July till the end of the Davis County Fair, but they were in the way of eternal perdition themselves, for though they gave up their endless baking, sewing, canning, preserving and so on on Sunday they sat in the parlor thinking about it and wickedly wishing the Sabbath were over.
We boys had all the best of Sunday, for it was ethical to read on that day, and we could go over and over the county paper advertisement of the grandstand features and the harness races and the list of bands which would play, and then sneak out to the barn and get a bit in the way of gymnastics and tight-rope-walking accomplished while discussing the ways and means situation.
The Western fairs have this advantage over those of the East and Far West: since the populations of most counties are predominantly rural or almost entirely so, virtually everyone in the community is competing with cookies, hickory-nuts or hosses; the excitement of the coming Fair Week and of the Fair itself transmits and magnifies itself through a social body made completely homogeneous, precisely according to the principles of those two great authorities on crowds, Le Bon and Everett Dean Martin.
Anyone saying, "Fair? What Fair?" would be taken from the bosom of his family and shipped to some great and unsympathetic city like Keokuk or Ottumwa and told to stay there. And there is another funny thing -- it is exactly the unsympathetic city folks who hanker most for Fairs, and turn out in crowds, and get the least out of it because they are so accustomed to seeing large numbers of people together, and can't feel that it is an occasion for fiesta, no holds barred and everything goes.
They think it is ridiculous to see some normally sedate, fat, farm matron riding in a milk-and-water roller-coaster and squealing at the top of her voice, whereas it is merely funny and natural. Then the same wiseheimers will go to the paddock and bet a dollar on a horse that should have been canned for the next world war, and scream themselves to death when it comes hobbling by.
The farm exhibits somewhat make up for the city man's social deprivations, of course, for there he can see -- or more probably, remember, from earlier farm days -- that corn actually does grow twenty feet high and punkins two feet across, that a thousand-pound hog is by no means a museum piece, that roosters get big enough to cuss St. Bernards, even though not their weight, that turnips, traduced by Mark Twain, are likely to take all kinds of original turns.
