The year I moved away for school my parents bought ten land-locked acres with a red barn, all their own. In the shadow of the Appalachian mountains, my mother and father and sister and brother drive tractors. They spread sawdust. They tuck halters around wooly necks and walk their lambs around the farm, down the road, back to the barn, down and back again. When I come back each summer, this is the tempo into which I slip. I try helping with the animals—feeding, brushing, cleaning stalls—but they do not like when I help. I do not like getting dirty and do not own boots for working.

Most everyone at the Greene County Fair in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania wear boots with heels and steel toes and stained leather. Self-sworn hot-shots wear helmets to crash their cars in a pit of mud at the demolition derby. A traveling carnival folds open rusted novelties in a long gravel lot. Food trailers sling hot cooking oil and twinkle their lights. Sometimes there is a D-list country singer in the grandstands. Sometimes there is not. Apart from the amusements, farm folks cram the aluminum barn with live animals. My family are some of these farm folks. I think I am their witness. I show up with pink sandals and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life. College-young and ostentatious, I brought it with me for the sake of the title: Winesburg. Waynesburg. Nearly homonyms.

I met my family in a corner of the barn where they stored their show gear in a metal trunk. Ropes. Glitter. My sister spritzed hairspray onto the back of her lamb while the service dog panted at her heels. She turned to me, claimed I embarrassed her with my outfits and reading-in-public-hobby, told me to stay away from her and her dog. Tangentially, she said I bring her bad luck.

Perhaps I do. Perhaps I bring Dad bad luck, too.

Here is what happened: The lamb show began. Children like my brother and sister lined their bleating lambs up in rows around a sawdust ring to be judged. They had tended the lambs since winter—feeding them, walking them, naming them names of people. Sarah and Tony. Evie and Jack. My brother and sister gripped their lambs by the necks and trotted a circle for a judge who assessed what value each lamb might bring a butcher. Mom huddled at the release gate with other parents. Dad was pacing. I watched the whole thing from dusty bleachers, tasked with taking flashless aerial photos on Dad’s out-of-date cell phone.

When my brother’s lamb won his round and my sister’s won second over the whole morbid contest, my family huddled together for a photo on a real camera. I went too. They needed someone to clutch primary-colored ribbons and smile. A loud flash went off. Then another. My sister’s service dog became distressed. He was pawing us and twirling in loops like a service dog is supposed to do before their person’s collapse.

So we sat her down, my sister, on the bleachers, which made the dog sit panting in the middle of the concrete walkway. Mom got up in her face and so did Dad. She was checking her temperature. He was checking her pupils. Both were checking her pulse, holding her hands, concerned fingers latched around sweating wrists. I stood next to them with Winesburg, Ohio under my arm and I watched people file around the dog in his service vest.

Winesburg, Ohio is supposed to be a classic. I understood why, then. I had just read the part where the reverend got a splinter smashed out of his stained-glass window. I did not yet know the term voyeurism, but if I had, this would have been the time to use it. People stared. The reverend stared through open windows at cigarette-smoking Kate Swift reading a book of her own volition, her body exposed to his eyes. People stared at my sister, my family, my sandals.

My brother dragged his boots through dust, watching his junior high friends play show-ring dodgeball in the aftermath of the ovine pageant. A ball flew over the ring’s chain-link fence to scare the service dog who let out a yelp. My sister shut her eyes, drooped her head, let go of the dog’s leash. A man—startled by the flying ball—kicked the dog with steel toes, which made the nervous creature take off running out an open barn door. Everyone went quiet, even the doomed lambs.

One of Sherwood’s stories is about a lamb. The story is titled Terror. But how beautiful Sherwood describes that lamb, how faultless and how snowy. Together, Jesse and David, grandfather and grandson, take the seasonless, nameless, creature into the woods.

So Biblical, I wrote in my margins. I wrote, God-fearing.

Then Jesse takes out a knife to slaughter the thing.

But David thinks the knife is for him so he goes running, deeper into the woods and into the west. He takes a slingshot out and shoots his grandfather’s forehead with a rock and Jessie—he dies.

Although I am not a boy and have never used a slingshot, it feels like a memory I have lived through.

In the end, I do not know if the lamb dies. Sherwood never says. And I don’t know why the reverend can’t fix his window. I don’t know why every man in Winesburg lusts after Kate Swift or why no one will leave that listless place or why my sister is always passing out. No one does.

Mom shouted out Dad’s name which made him go running after the dog, into the carnival-bright night-light. Somewhere between clomping outside in his work boots and catching hold of the dog’s leash, Dad tripped and fell and his nose got mashed up on concrete.

He’s still holding it at the bridge to stop bleeding.

My sister has stumbled into a camping chair across the barn and slumps there, passed out. Our kid brother grips the leash of her service dog who is heaving and breathless and slobbering. My brother and sister’s champion lambs are in their respective pens, waiting to be sold and slaughtered and I wonder if they know what comes next, the lambs. I wish I didn’t I didn’t know; wish I wouldn’t be so curious to wonder.

In the distant occupations of my no-longer-teenage-girl-mind, I’m distracted. Someone says, In the hour of sin, you are saved. I write this in the margins with quotation marks and use a Splenda packet to mark the page. Maybe these words are my mother’s. Over a carpet of astroturf, she fields blunt questions. If my father’s nose is broken. If my sister seizes often. If either will go to the hospital. If the service dog has escaped us before. And will our lambs go to the pack house in the morning?

No. No and no and no and I think the lambs are crying. Their bleats echo into the rafters.

My brother cries as well, clutching hard to the leash because he will miss the lambs, he says, when they are gone. Already, the dog has calmed down on his leash and Dad tells my brother he’d better do the same. Calm down. Dry up. Stop crying.

Dad taps his toe, holds his wristwatch up above his eyes, says Come on, girl, to my sister who lies there, still limp, looking lost in some distant American dream. I hope she is dreaming. I look at the silk ribbon she won dangling on display next to her head. Then to my brother’s. My faultless brother, fists buried in his eyes, head down. Dad blows his nose into the turned-red cloth. It stops bleeding, but he is congested now and has a headache.

This headache will go on for weeks until the lambs are long gone, until we stop asking about his pain, until I go back to school in Philadelphia, far away, and maybe they will forget I was here with them at the lamb show, faded into the background of a winner’s photo. How we smile.

In the appendix of my Winesburg, Ohio, there is a letter from Sherwood addressed to a man named Arthur H. Smith in which Sherwood says he did not know there was a real place in Ohio called Winesburg. Smith—Winesburg, Ohio resident—apparently sent Sherwood a choice-worded note with a copy of his own book called History of Winesburg, Ohio and condemned Sherwood’s tales as cruel and grotesque and burlesque.

But Sherwood tells him Winesburg, Ohio is not burlesque. He means no harm with his words. He wants to write about what happens to simple, ordinary people. He asks for forgiveness. Amen.

Dad asks my brother if he thinks Mom will be ready to go home soon. He tells Dad the truth: probably not.

We watch Mom, using her arms for big gestures. She sports sad eyes. Forced smiles. Careful nods. My brother sniffles. Dad crumples the towel into the mesh cup holder of my sister’s chair and picks her up like he used to do with me when I was younger and smaller and asleep in public. Then he tells me to go with him. We’re taking her home.

I set my book on the lid of the cooler even though it is vulnerable to water stains and theft. If there were something I could say, I would. Instead, I open the doors for him.