The Pie War That Saved Our Fair

I want to tell you I was gracious. I was not gracious. I said, “Well, Vernon Stroud on my porch, that’s a sight,” and he said, “Don’t get used to it, Ozella,” and I said something about how his lattice crust in 2019 had clearly been store bought dough dressed up fancy, which was a lie I made up on the spot because I was nervous, and he looked so wounded I almost felt bad. Almost.

But we got to work, because that is what Hickory Flat people do when the alternative is losing something. We split the list Delphine wanted like a divorce settlement. He’d handle the Grange kitchen and the county inspector, since he’d wired half the buildings in this town at one point or another running Stroud Hardware. I’d handle recruiting, since I have sat on every committee this town has ever formed and know which women bake and which women only say they bake.

We went to the feed store first, because the fellow who runs it sponsors half the 4-H events in the county and I figured a little seed money for ribbons would go a long way toward persuading Delphine this was worth saving. Vernon did the talking, since apparently thirty years of arguing over hardware store credit accounts had made him a fair hand at negotiating, and I stood there in the doorway trying not to laugh, because Vernon Stroud negotiating is a man leaning very close and speaking very slow, like he’s explaining something to a mule. It worked, though. We walked out with fifty dollars pledged and a promise of feed sacks for the prize table.

Junie is Vernon’s granddaughter, seventeen, raised mostly by Vernon and his late wife Carline since Junie’s folks moved to Joplin for work when she was small. Junie has her grandmother’s hands, apparently, though I never knew Carline well enough to say so myself, just what Vernon told me one evening while we were scrubbing burnt sugar off the Grange stovetop. Junie wanted to enter the youth division that year for the first time, and she was scared to death of it, mostly because she was scared of disappointing Vernon, which struck me as about the saddest thing I’d heard all summer, because that man loves that girl the way some men love their trucks, which is to say completely and without a single word of it ever coming out of his mouth directly.