The Green Ribbon Prize

I grew up on this farm, and I will tell you that an empty barn is a strange sound. My parents sold the dairy herd and most of the flock eight years back, and when I moved home last spring, the place had that hollow feeling you get in a church on a Tuesday. Eleanor heard it too, I think. She never said so, but she kept finding projects for me.

"Your uncle's shearing shed is still solid," she said one night in March, poking at my laptop with a pen like the thing owed her money. "You could fix it up. Store hay in it."

"It's a dispatcher's barn now," I said. "It stores my bad posture."

She threw the pen at me. Eleanor is twenty-eight, a vet tech at the county clinic, and she has a way of deciding what a man is capable of before he gets a vote. We had dated for a couple years back in college, drifted apart, and then found each other again at twenty-six over a mutual friend's terrible chili. She had been trying to get me back into farm work ever since, and I had been dodging it ever since, mostly because I was scared of finding out the skills were gone.

But she signed me up for the fair. That's the part I want you to understand. I came downstairs one Saturday and there was my name on the entry form, filled out in her neat handwriting, sitting on the kitchen table next to the coffee pot like a summons.

"The shearing contest," I said.

"The shearing contest," she agreed, sipping her coffee. "Entries close Monday. You grew up shearing. You'll remember it."

I hadn't touched shears in seven years. I said some things about that. She just raised an eyebrow and refilled my cup, and by Wednesday I was out in the old shed with a broom, sweeping up eight years of dust and wondering what exactly I had agreed to.

The barn came back to life easier than I expected. My uncle's old stands were still bolted to the floor. I oiled the gears on the handpiece until my fingers came away black, and Eleanor stood in the doorway watching me work with that look she gets.

"There he is," she said quietly.

"I'm just cleaning," I said.

"Sure you are."

* * *

The fair came in August the way it always does, hot and dusty and smelling of fryer oil. The shearing ring was set up behind the livestock barns, a slab of concrete with catching pens and a couple of hundred folding chairs that nobody would sit in until the last possible minute.

I got there early to walk the floor. That was a habit from my ranch days, and it surprised me that my feet still did it without asking. I was checking the grip on the shearing boards when a shadow fell across them.

"You're the Compton son," he said. "Dexter, right? Andy Markham."

He was thirty-two, built like a fence post, and he had the easy tan of a man who spent his life outdoors instead of in a dispatch center. I knew the name. Markham Ranch ran four thousand acres up the valley, and Andy had taken first place at this fair three years running.

"Dexter Compton," I said, shaking his hand. "You know my dad's operation, then."

"Knew it. Best wool in the county back when your old man ran it." He grinned, and it was a friendly grin, but there was steel under it. "So you're the competition this year."

"I'm the guy who signed up because his girlfriend filled out the form."

Andy laughed at that, a real laugh, and clapped me on the shoulder. "We'll see how the blades fall," he said, and wandered off toward his rig like someone who had already won and was just being polite about the wait.

Eleanor found me ten minutes later by the lemonade stand. With her was a woman I didn't know, short, dark-haired, wearing a florist's apron with the arms rolled up.

"Dexter, this is Alyssa Bader, Andy's girlfriend," Eleanor said. "She did the flowers for the judges' tent."

"Heard you're the dark horse," Alyssa said, shaking my hand. Her grip was firm, a working woman's grip. "Andy's been grumbling about an unknown entry all week. He loves an underdog and hates one at the same time."

"That sounds about right," I said.

Eleanor squeezed my arm. "You've been practicing every night for two months. Let him grumble."

She was right about the practice, mostly. Mostly it had gone fine. But there had been two nights where my hands had forgotten everything and I had nicked a ewe, and I had stood in the barn afterward feeling sixty years old instead of twenty-nine. I didn't tell Eleanor about the second nick. Some things a man keeps in his pocket.

The contest started at two. There were eleven of us, and they ran us in heats, four sheep each, judged on speed and on the fleece. I drew a pen position at the far end, which was fine by me, since it meant the crowd wasn't looking at me when my first sheep fought me for thirty ugly seconds.

But then my hands settled. I won't pretend to explain it. The animal stopped fighting, or I stopped fighting it, and something my father taught me at twelve came up out of the ground and took over. Blow by blow, the wool came off in one piece, the way it's supposed to, and I was standing there holding a fleece before I fully believed it.

Andy worked in the heat next to mine, and I'll admit I stole looks. He was fast. Not flashy fast, the way young guys are, but economical, every stroke doing two jobs. He finished his fourth sheep a minute and change ahead of me, and when he set his last fleece on the table he glanced over and gave me a small nod. Competitor to competitor. It meant more than a handshake would have.

* * *

They posted the results at four, taped to a plywood board with a green ribbon stapled to the top. Andy Markham, first. Dexter Compton, second, eleven points back. A twenty-year-old from the grange took third and looked like he had won the lottery.

The prize money was five hundred dollars for first, three hundred for second, handed over in cash in an envelope by a woman from the fair board who read our names off a clipboard and that concluded the matter. No speeches, no strings. Andy pocketed his envelope and I pocketed mine and we both shook the fair board woman's hand and it was done, business finished, clean.

"Not bad for a rusty comeback," Eleanor said, coming to find me. She was glowing harder than I was, if that's possible.

"Second place," I said. "Eleven points. That's one bad sheep."

"It's one bad sheep away from first, you mean."

Andy and Alyssa came over before we could pack up. He had his envelope folded in his back pocket and a beer from somewhere, and he offered me one out of a six-pack like we had planned it.

"Compton. Eleven points," he said. "I haven't been pushed like that in years. What the hell were you doing for seven years, sitting down?"

"Answering phones," I said. "Taking emergency calls about cows in ditches, ironically."

"Well, the hands are still there. That's the frustrating part." He took a pull of his beer and looked at Alyssa, and something passed between them, some private signal I wasn't meant to read. Then he turned back to me, casual as anything. "We're heading back to our place tonight. Steaks, cards, whatever. Eleanor, you're invited too, obviously. Come celebrate. Second place deserves a steak as much as first does."

Eleanor looked at me. I looked at Eleanor. Alyssa was already nodding along like the thing was decided, and to be honest, after eleven points and seven years of desks, a steak sounded like the best idea I had heard all year.

"We're in," Eleanor said.

We drove out to Markham Ranch in two trucks, mine following his up the valley road while the sun went down behind the ridgeline. Four thousand acres of it, Andy told me later, and half of it sheep pasture. The house sat on a rise with a barn below it and a yard full of equipment that all looked newer than anything my family ever owned.

Alyssa had steaks marinating and Eleanor helped her in the kitchen while Andy gave me the tour of the porch, which mostly consisted of handing me another beer and pointing at the valley.

"Eleven points," he said again, shaking his head. "Three years I've run this contest. Never had anybody within twenty of me."

"You're gonna jinx yourself talking like that," I said.

"Nah. I'm just saying next year you better show up, because I want a real race."

We ate on the porch, the four of us, and it was easy. Alyssa was funny in a dry way that caught me off guard, and Eleanor hadn't laughed that hard in months. Andy told a story about his first contest at twenty-three where he'd sheared a goat by accident, and Alyssa corrected three details of it while he was telling it, and he let her, which told me something about him.

After dinner he brought out a deck of cards and a bottle of whiskey and set both on the table with a thump.

"Five-card draw," he said. "Ante is a quarter."

"And what exactly are we playing for, when we're all out of quarters?" Alyssa asked, raising an eyebrow at him.

"Whatever we say we're playing for," Andy said, and there was that private signal again, passing between the two of them. Eleanor caught it too. I could tell because she looked at