Before their necks are broken they are beautiful. These chickens live under a tent for a week in July. The heat wraps up and around the sides of the tent and hangs thick in the middle. The day is hot but it is hotter inside the tent even with its shade. The bird cages are steel mesh wire. Not big, flimsy hexagons but little, tight squares less than half an inch across. At the places where the wires cross over each other the metal is built up. There is a matte coating over it that hides the welds. Slow, scaly feet move easily over the open-work wires but are careful, intentional.
The fans are humming. They are old and rattling—real metal fans that hang in four corners of the tent. The air is heavy and even these industrial fans are ridiculous against such weight. Smells circulate but air barely moves with the fans’ futility. It is so hot for the birds that someone, some thoughtful caretaker, brought a plastic home-use fan. Everyone has a fan like this. It’s the kind that sits on dingy golden carpet in hallways, by sunken couches in living rooms, on cherry veneer tables beside beds where love gets made, and on top of endlessly-flashing-noon-‘cause-no-one-knows-how-to-reset-the-time microwaves in disinfected kitchens. So, having seen such fans everywhere else, it’s not so strange to see one in the poultry tent. Someone has pushed the darkest brown button and pulled the white peg up so the fan will oscillate on top of the middle row of cages. As the fan directs and redirects its effort, pink, purple, blue, and white ribbons sing out, fluttering enough to draw attention to particular cages. Those wire rooms for the birds are lined up as a single-file perimeter around the sides of the tent and two deep back-to-back down the center. Observers flow as if channeled through thick-walled ventricles of a heart.
Feathers move slightly as the fans push the air. There are bits of feathers gathered down around the wooden stilt-legs of the cages on the limestone gravel. There are feathers in the fans. And feathers in the cages. And feathers in the taut fraying jute ropes of the tent. Just downy white and gray pieces mostly. The few good, big, pretty, golden feathers are picked up quickly and swept away to shaft-stroking wonderlands with the giggles of little girls.
The chickens pick up their bony, intentional feet and slow-dance, sometimes even with flapping wings. They turn and their feet seem backwards. Then, not forgotten, the bodies turn. With short jolts, their heads betray nothing held in confidence. The eyes focus and then turn away. Strangers read names of the owners out loud and point, showing each other whatever they see as important. We do it, too. “Come over here and look at this one.”
For twenty years my mother has taken me and my father to the fair. We go through the sheep barn. We go through the cattle barns, dairy and beef. We look up at the names painted on the rafters: names of friends, and brothers of friends, and fathers of friends. Green paint on old white paint. We remember our head, our heart, our hands, and our health. Sandals fill with dust as we walk down the missing-lightbulb midway. We eat something familiar because it’s only once a year. There is no anxiety for goldfish swimming through food-color-dyed waters in dirty bowls and no mortal fear for the cheap stuffed nothings everyone wants to win.
We wander slowly through it all. It is hot, July. We stop. I want to watch the boys throwing darts at a rainbow wall of slack balloons. Because there is no sense of impending doom for that child who paid for his three chances. He aims while my father crosses his arms over his chest and stares. We feel the imminent impact. We want the child to perform well, to win the biggest, best prize: the huge stuffed tiger. But who can really hope for so much? And what responsibility does this child have to our family? None. So. We don’t really care if the child bursts something nothing-filled. We don’t expect it. The first dart glances off the pulverized wooden board and drops into a metal collecting tray. He refocuses. Aims again. Then one, two steel darts pop big yellow flopping balloons as we cheer, congratulate, and smile. The child turns to us and smiles too. Dad walks on. We follow.
It cannot be that this will kill him. I look at my father, who stands with us eating a pork burger from the Rotary Club’s tent. He watches the people walk by. He speaks to the ones he knows. They don’t know yet, but we know. And still we smile and say hello. We laugh at the round-bellied kid in the little red t-shirt. And we ask the questions that you ask. But we don’t say, “He’s dying.” We will have to soon enough.
We walk through the barns where my projects once were. Barns I remember cleaning on cold spring days when you shouldn’t really use a hose yet. Barns I remember hiding in. At five and fifteen. They still smell the same. Hay. Dirt. Sunshine. Cement. And Time. No one savors moments like this, moments when you share personal speculations about who will probably win in all the baked goods categories. So. We wander over to the show ring.
The hogs fill up the arena. We laugh at the smallest children showing the comparatively huge animals. They rush around the ring in their little Wranglers, boots, and tucked-in dress shirts. But we don’t laugh at their age or stature. We laugh in appreciation of their competence. They know everything about showing hogs: shine them; tap them with the little whips; keep the hogs between their bodies and the judges; move the animals along quickly so their ears flop and their haunches bounce on coquettish trotting hooves; and always keep both eyes right on that judge.
We all fall in love with one tiny skinny boy in particular, because he’s so focused, so intent, so practiced, so self-assured, so competitive.
He will grow up here, that boy showing those hogs. Knowing how. But we all grew up here. Not Mom. Not Dad. But the rest of us. The woman leaning over the fence grew up here. The man sitting next to me grew up here. I grew up here.
And so I know everything that happens in this ring. There are auctions. There are dances. There are obstacle course races where greased-up kids hold greased-up watermelons and go under bales of hay, through kiddie pools of water, and shimmy around poles to ride scale-model tricycle-tractors towing stacked cinder blocks on skids. Fair Queen pageants go on here where girls win and girls lose. But today it is the hogs oiled up and glittered in the ring looking very good and showing off.
The judging is over and there won’t be anything else going on in the ring for a while. So we head back towards the car but stop. Mom wants to walk through the poultry tent. So we do. The birds are preposterous. They are amazing forms of life. They are beautiful and clean and cocky. Before their necks are broken.
She never asked to move here.
“The Buff Orpingtons are my favorite,” she says. She holds his hand. And she knows that he’s dying. And she knows the chickens are dying. And she was still careful to park in the shade in July.