Tim

I attended a county fair and watched a child sell a pig. The pig is worth, I am told, somewhere near four hundred dollars. I looked this up afterward because I did not believe what happened. The girl is twelve. She walked the animal into a ring wearing a white shirt and a numbered card. She had raised it herself, from a piglet, for nine months, which I confirmed, and she had a binder of records because the program requires one. The bidding began. Local men. A man from a bank. A man who sells tires. A woman who owns a restaurant I had eaten at the previous evening. It did not stop at four hundred. It stopped at three thousand two hundred. I turned to the man beside me and asked whether the pig was of exceptional quality. He said, "It's a fine pig." I asked whether it was worth three thousand two hundred dollars. He said, "No." I asked why the price was three thousand two hundred dollars. He said, "She's a good kid." I stood up. I could not remain seated. I said, out loud, in a metal building that smelled of animals, that a market which knowingly and deliberately misprices a good in order to put a child through a university, and does so every year, in the open, with an auctioneer and a microphone, is not a market at all but a rite, and that I have never seen a province conduct one so cheerfully. He said, "You want a lemonade?" I said that I did. Here is the part I had entirely misread. The men bidding against each other were not rivals. They were raising it together. The tire man bid, then the bank man bid, and the tire man nodded at him, and they were pushing the number upward on purpose, in public, in front of the girl. She knew. Everyone knew. The auctioneer knew. The rite requires that nobody says it. Afterward the girl shook every buyer's hand. She writes them letters later. That is also part of it. She writes letters. I asked the restaurant owner why she bids every year. She said, "Somebody bought mine." She is fifty-eight.