He wouldn’t let Wayne do it anymore. He wouldn’t let Wayne get into his head.
Pop called out Diggy’s name from the back door. Joker echoed with a moo.
Diggy climbed back to his window.
He had nothing to say to Wayne while they ate breakfast or tended the steers. The kid acted like he was mad, when Diggy was the one with the right to it.
Diggy ended up not having anything much to say to Wayne for weeks.
He focused all his attention on Joker and getting ready for the State Fair.
IT WAS A RELIEF TO BE AROUND PEOPLE HE COULD BE HIMSELF WITH, AFTER SO many weeks of weirdness with Wayne. Diggy dumped his stuff in the fairgrounds dorm, generally known as the 4-H Hilton, and took forever getting down to the cattle barn, because every other person he saw coming and going was someone he knew and had to catch up with. He was such a smiling loon, his cheeks got sore.
His happy buzz dimmed when he neared the barn and saw Wayne at the washing area of the cattle annex, using all his weight trying to check Fang’s forward momentum.
Apparently the steer had faked his placidity since the dog attack. He did not like the people, the noise, or the other steers. Wayne finally got him stopped and used his show stick to scratch Fang’s belly. The steer shuddered, but he stood still.
Normally, the other kids would have helped to calm the calf or talk with Wayne, but Wayne had a look—all closed up and a little mean. Diggy wondered if smacking him upside the head would help. The fair was hard even with everyone’s support—the tension, all the things to remember, the various deadlines, and ultimately selling the steer. Wayne was making it a hundred times worse by isolating himself from the other competitors. Sure, they were competition, but they were friends, too.
Diggy reminded himself that he didn’t care about Wayne’s problems. That Wayne didn’t care about Diggy’s feelings when it came to his mom. But that reminded Diggy that Wayne’s mom had died this time last year. And that the guy had no idea what it would be like when it came time to give up Fang. Diggy wanted to be angry—he was angry—but he couldn’t help being sad, too.
Diggy went into the barn and headed for the Dodge County stalls.
He gave Joker’s rump a good scratch, pleased to see the steer excited but well behaved. Several kids stopped by to say how good the steer looked, a couple with that twinge of disappointment for their own prospects. Last year, Diggy would have been beside himself about the praise, but this year was too tangled up with Wayne.
He busied himself with tidying up their county’s section. The stalls weren’t actually boarded out. They were basically sections of tall wooden fences marked off into rows labeled with letters such as Q/R or S/T, then further delineated by county—Carlton, Kanabec, Goodhue—so that competitors could find their assigned spots. On either side of the fence, hay was stacked in flat, deep rows, building a floor for the animals on top of the concrete. Except at the far ends of the rows, there wasn’t anything to keep the hay in place. Using a flat board mounted on a push-broom stick, Diggy pressed animal-loosened hay back into squared-off edges to keep the stalls neat and the aisles clear.
There were dozens of aisles and a couple hundred heifers, steers, dairy cattle, and calves—and the barn wasn’t even large enough. The fairgrounds had an annex next door with four more long rows filled with cattle.
Having so many people and animals crowded inside was noisy, but it wasn’t smelly like the swine barn. Sure, there was poop and pee, but mostly the barn smelled like sawdust, straw, and only slightly of animal. The 4-H’ers were strict about scooping up cow patties and depositing them in the wheelbarrows at the end of every other aisle. And every animal itself was scrupulously clean.
The noise was soothing. Fans topped stalls at even intervals for air circulation. Blowers were in constant use. Clippers buzzed. Cattle grunted and mooed. Exhibitors discussed checklists and tips. The public shuffled through, mostly too shy to ask questions, only pointing at the animals or smiling at the exhibitors. Little kids made up for their grownups by asking anybody everything. Periodically the overhead speakers squawked a jumble of electronic syllables.
“Are we supposed to understand that?” Wayne asked, clutching Fang’s halter.
Diggy hadn’t noticed him coming back but easily could have picked him out of a crowd if he’d tried—the kid was green, and his eyes were huge.
“You get an ear for it,” Diggy said.
“You understood that?” Wayne squeaked.
Diggy shrugged.
“I’ll miss it! I won’t hear my name called. They’re crazy if they think we can hear that. That’s the worst speaker system I’ve ever heard!”
Diggy gaped. The kid was losing it. “Wayne, you’ve got to breathe.”
“Breathe?” Wayne said it without using any air, like breathing was a forgotten function.
“We don’t show until tomorrow,” Diggy pointed out.
“Moo!”
Wayne jumped a foot. Diggy was startled, too.
They turned to see a toddler standing at their stall, staring at Joker and mooing his guts out. He mooed with such force, his entire body tensed up, and he almost tipped himself over.
“What’s he doing?” Wayne wailed.
“I think he’s trying to get Joker to moo at him,” Diggy said, confused. Like everyone else’s cows, Joker’s head was tied at the fence. The kid mooed at Joker’s butt, even though Fang was only a few feet away in the aisle, face front. But the kid looked so excited and happy, like he was proud as heck he knew the sound a cow made.
A flash went off, and Diggy saw the mom taking pictures before hugging the little boy and leading him away. The public was crazy. Taking pictures of kids mooing at cows’ butts. Joker should have dropped a load. That would have been a picture worth taking.
He turned to tell Wayne the joke but stopped himself.
Wayne stared into the faces of the passing crowd as if they held the meaning of life and he wasn’t sure he wanted the answer. He glanced back at the signs with his and Diggy’s names, then returned his attention to the people in the aisles.
Diggy frowned. “You won’t miss Pop or your dad. They’re too tall.” The Vogls would come tomorrow for the competition.
Wayne blinked at him. Once. Twice. Then his face got all red and hard again. He tied Fang to his spot, then walked away.
Diggy threw up his hands. The guy was crazy.
July rounded up their 4-H chapter for dinner, checking that all of them had their meal vouchers. As much as Diggy loved fair food, he and the others didn’t have time to dawdle about the fairgrounds taking in the sights. No one particularly wanted to, either. Everyone spent every possible second with their steers, which meant that he didn’t recognize half the people he saw in line for food. Those were the swine, sheep, poultry, and horse kids, not to mention the ones who were there for the non-livestock stuff like gardening and baking and all the other thousand things 4-H’ers did.
Naturally, with so many, many opportunities to not sit alone, Wayne found a spot off by himself.
Diggy refused to think about him and sat with some kids from Goodhue County. They usually had the largest group at State. Several of them were from family farms dating back to the 1800s, and some of those with show steers had invested in cool rooms, the air-conditioned stalls designed to help steers grow great hair. In previous years, Diggy couldn’t help being a little jealous, but this year it reassured him to hear talk about Peace Pellets and Roto Fluffer brushes and the national shows the kids had already attended. These kids knew steers like he knew steers. And they loved their animals just as much.
He was finally beginning to relax when he saw Crystal and Jason walk over to Wayne. They sat with him awhile, and Jason did most of the talking, which never happened. Diggy lost track of the conversation at his own table. When Wayne dumped his tray and headed back to the cattle barn, Diggy headed over to where Crystal and Jason still sat.
“What was that about?” he asked.
“Hello, Diggy,” Crystal said, like she was correcting his rudeness.
“You’re my friends,” Diggy reminded them. He had worried when they started dating that things might change, but he hadn’t expected them to go to the other side.
“We know that,” Crystal said. “We wanted to—”
“This ‘we’ business isn’t helping,” Diggy snapped.
“I told him about the time when Grandpa was really sick,” Jason said. “It was when I was in Mrs. Graf’s class.”
Third grade was before the three of them became friends. Jason’s grandpa was in pretty good shape for an old guy; Diggy didn’t know he’d been sick.
“I think everyone was scared he was going to die, but I didn’t understand all that. I was mad that Mom was gone all the time.”
The idea of Jason mad was hard to imagine. Sheep fell asleep in the guy’s arms, at the fair.
“Mrs. Graf talked to me some, but mostly what I remember is how she explained that Grandpa is Mom’s dad.”
Diggy blinked. He knew what it was like when the seemingly obvious suddenly hit you—like when he had realized it wasn’t only Wayne’s mom who had died but Mrs. Osborn’s sister, as well—the same person, but different.
“Mrs. Graf helped me see that I wasn’t mad at my mom,” Jason said, “but scared she was going away. And that that was what my mom was scared about, for her dad.” Crystal put her arm around Jason’s shoulders. “Mrs. Graf was a really good teacher,” Jason finished.
She was. “But why tell him that now?” Diggy asked. It seemed like reminding Wayne about how great his mom had been would only make things worse for the guy.
“Because I don’t think Wayne is actually mad at anyone,” Jason explained. “Especially you.”
Diggy looked across the table at Crystal and Jason, looking back at him with the true friendship of people who cared enough to worry about him, and think about his problems, and find real ways to help.
He cleared his throat. “You two teamed up are like the Wonder Twins.”
“The girl was the one who could take the form of an animal, right?” Crystal asked. “I’m cool with that.”
Jason just shook his head, while Diggy and Crystal laughed.
Diggy joined up with a couple of other kids and ducked back into the dorms to get some things before heading back to their steers for the night. Not everyone slept in the barn overnight, but those with the best steers always did, and some of the others did because it was fun to hang out.
It wasn’t party time. A few grouped in twos or threes to talk quietly before trying for impossible sleep while stretched awkwardly in portable chairs. Others slept propped in the hay, leaning against their cows.
Wayne messed with the hair at Fang’s scar, making Fang more anxious than restful. The steer frequently looked over at Joker and mooed, as if to say, “He’s making me crazy.” Joker looked back, crunching feed, as if replying, “They’re humans. Who knows what they’re thinking?” Diggy chuckled at the dialogue he made up.
“What’s so funny?” Wayne said, jaw squared tightly.
Diggy sighed. “Nothing, Wayne.”
Wayne snorted. “I should have known you’d blow it in the end. You’ve spent more time socializing than working.”
“You can’t pre-poop the cow,” Diggy said.
While Wayne blinked at him, Diggy set up his canvas chair, pulled his baseball cap over his eyes, and pretended he might sleep.
AT DAWN, JULY WOKE HIM WITH A BOOT TO THE BUTT. SHE LISTED THE THOUSAND things he already knew he had to do, then repeated the same list to Wayne, who had heard it the first time but paid wide-eyed attention, seemingly afraid to forget anything. Diggy stretched and took a couple of minutes to wake up. He loved the barn first thing on show day.
There were a lot of cows, but there were even more 4-H’ers. They ranged in ages from eight to nineteen, almost as many girls as boys, and all of them were very busy already at dawn. Two cows were in the tiled shower at the far corner of the barn. It looked like a drive-in car wash, with the wand hoses hanging from the ceiling. It was too small, though, for the volume required this morning. Outside, one entire side of the cattle annex was outfitted with plumbing and hoses. Cows were shampooed and rinsed by kids dressed in rain gear, while more competitors and their cows hung around out of water-spray range waiting their turn. A few feet beyond the indoor shower, a girl held a steer near a floor drain while another girl squeegeed excess water off the freshly washed animal. Two older boys walked by wheeling barrels full of manure to deposit in the manure pit out by the loading dock.
More cows were already in the aluminum grooming chutes. A boy stood on a stool next to his steer and rubbed gloss into its hair. A few chutes over, three boys worked a cow with electronic clippers, going over and over and over the same spot, like they cut only one hair at a time. Across the aisle, a girl wiped fresh paper towels over her steer’s hair, checked them, then did it again in a new spot.
Many of the cows were black crossbreds, with deep-lagoon eyes that made Diggy feel very young and small when he looked back too long. Some cows were red like autumn leaves, others white like vanilla ice cream. All of them were beautiful.
Diggy spotted a kid sprawled half off a lawn chair, sleeping with his head twisted back under a baseball cap. The kid was too little to show so probably had been up half the night in order to get there early enough to help his brother or sister get the steer ready. Diggy grinned. The kid was so young, it probably helped his family most that he was asleep.
Pop, Graf, and Mr. Johnston passed the kid, nodding hellos to the equally drowsy parents.
“You two managing?” Pop asked, but he was looking at Wayne.
Diggy glanced over and saw that Fang was not cooperating with Wayne’s attempts to halter him. Plus, except for the black hollows of his sleep-deprived eyes, Wayne was as white as Fang was black. The kid was not holding up well.
July shouted, “Diggy Lawson!”
She was at the other end of the barn; he shouldn’t have been able to hear her from that far away. But he and everyone else turned and watched her gesture sharply toward the showers.
“She’s got some lungs on her,” Mr. Johnston muttered.
“Guess you’re not moving fast enough,” Graf snickered.
“Takes after her mother. Troops got to fall into line,” Mr. Johnston added.
Pop patted Diggy’s shoulder, wishing him a quiet good luck, then went to soothe Fang and talk to Wayne.
Diggy watched Pop hold Wayne’s shoulder, talking to him quietly and seriously, and knew that a few months ago, the picture they made would have ticked him off. Those feelings weren’t there anymore. Mostly, Diggy was grateful there was someone who knew how to calm Wayne down.
Diggy led Joker to the wash rack, getting in and out fairly quickly. After the blow-dry, he worked adhesive onto the head, tail, and legs, making the tailhead look square and deep and the head have a nice point. He worked mousse into the hair to make it pop and combed the leg hair to stand up so the legs looked nice and sturdy.
He kept thinking about his dream a while ago, when Pop was out checking the flamingo crop that swarmed behind him after he passed, close to overwhelming him. It didn’t make any sense that Diggy should remember it so vividly when he needed to focus on Joker, but he hardly had any room left in his brain to think about why he was thinking about it, because all he could think about were those pink birds with their black-tipped, hooked beaks.
It was a relief when staff started calling groups of competitors out to the staging area.
The steers were first judged by breed. The purebreds—Black Angus, Hereford, Shorthorn and Shorthorn Plus, Charolais, Limousin, Maine-Anjou, Simmental—were divided only by breed, not by weight, and went first. Then finally the crossbred divisions were called.
The excitement was for the crossbreds, because that’s where the Grand Champion of all Junior Market Steer usually came from. This year a total of about seventy crossbreds were ent
ered in the three categories of lightweight, middleweight, and heavyweight.
There was only ever one judge for all the steers, so he moved and spoke quickly. Once he got to the crossbreds, he couldn’t see all the steers of any weight category all at once—there were just too many. Instead, the steers were brought out eight at a time. The judge made the exhibitors line them up side by side so he could examine their shape for a straight back and well-structured legs. He’d sometimes run his hands across the back, over the ribs and the haunch, but not for every cow, dashing the hopes of that competitor in an instant. Then he’d instruct the kids to lead their steers in a large circle around the pen and studied how the steers moved, looking for agility. They stopped, lined up head to tail, and the judge pointed, organizing the steers from least to best.
Those pointed at first led their steers back to the curtained rail blank-faced, automatically positioning hooves at four square for their final side-by-side lineup. Their months-long efforts ended there. When they exited the ring, a “beef princess” met them, one of the girls each county selected based on her knowledge of the beef industry and involvement in the Cattlemen’s Association. She did other stuff during the year—teaching kids about where food comes from and parades and things—but at the fair she handed out ribbons as competitors left the ring, first reds, then blues. The ribbons were quickly stuffed into pockets or handed off to nearby parents, while losing showers managed their steers and their disappointment.
The boys or girls in the top two spots waited to the side and put some effort into appearing calm, but their nervous energy showed itself in a sudden need to comb the steer’s hair one last time or reposition the steer’s legs into a more attractive stance. When the top two of each batch of the weight class were culled, the judge had those chosen few do it all over again, line up and parade in a circle.
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