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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.

 
CONVERSATIONS IN SILENCE

    Do you wake up blaming an insidious enemy for your flailing
arms, blind aggression, and sweat? Do you wake up in a place unable
to cope, understanding that some enemies never show their faces,
would rather die than let you have a chance at a fair fight? I hate
these demented shadows we cast ourselves with paranoia, self-doubt,
and fear. I don’t know if we hide them or they hide us. You’re you,
Daddy, but where’s the dignity gone?
    We are combatants, but how?
Integrity, autonomy, and free will; my God, what transient jokes.
Those shadows cower even if we won’t succumb. There’s no definitive
mark of the divisions between us, between you now and who you once
were. I don’t know what you