The County Fair

Every August, the county fair comes to the small town where Mateo Ramirez lives in Iowa. For one week there are rides, music, too much fried food and plenty of animal competitions. Mateo's grandparents came from Mexico to work on farms in the 1980s, and now his family has its own farm with corn, a few cows and a lot of pigs. This year, for the first time, Mateo was old enough to enter the pig competition.

His pig was called Chuleta, which means "pork chop" in Spanish. His little sister thought the name was too cruel, but Chuleta didn't seem to mind. Mateo had raised her since she was a tiny piglet. Every morning before school, he fed her, washed her and walked her around the yard so that she would learn to follow him. The judges don't only look at the pig; they also look at how well the young farmer can control it.

On the day of the competition, everything went wrong. First, the truck wouldn't start, so they arrived late and there wasn't enough time to wash Chuleta properly. Then it had rained all night, and there was so much mud around the barns that everyone's boots were brown up to the knees. And there was so much noise: a band was playing, children were screaming on the rides and somebody was testing a loudspeaker.

When Mateo led Chuleta into the show ring, the loudspeaker suddenly made a terrible high sound. Chuleta jumped, turned around and ran straight out of the ring. She ran past the cotton candy stand, under a fence and through the middle of a line of people waiting for the Ferris wheel. Mateo ran after her, shouting her name, with his father, two judges and quite a few curious children behind him.

They finally found her five minutes later, lying happily in a huge puddle of mud behind the food trucks. She was so dirty that she looked like a chocolate pig. Mateo sat down on a hay bale and nearly cried. "It's over," he said. "There's no time to clean her now."

But one of the judges, an old woman with a straw hat, had seen everything. "Bring her back," she said. "We're judging the animals, not the mud." Mateo walked Chuleta back to the ring. She was calm now, and she followed him perfectly, step by step, as she had done every morning at home. The crowd clapped.

Chuleta didn't win first prize. She came third, which was quite enough for Mateo. The judge gave him a special ribbon too, for "the best teamwork of the fair." That evening, his sister asked if they could finally change the pig's name. Mateo thought about it. "No," he said. "But she's never going to be anybody's dinner."