The Pie They Would Not Let Me Enter

Mama died in March, twelve years back now. I entered her pie that July with my hands shaking. It took the blue.

I drove straight from the fairgrounds to the cemetery in my good dress and stood the ribbon up against her stone and bawled like a calf.

So that is what the first one was. By the eleventh it was mostly a thing I did in July, like putting up beans. I would carry my pie in at eight, go get a lemon shake-up, and come back at noon to see the ribbon on it like a man checking his mailbox.

Buck came in for dinner at noon and found me still there, with nothing on the stove.

Buck Tate has been my husband for forty-one years. He is a big, slow-talking man who cannot stand to see a thing done crooked. I told him all of it. He listened with his cap on his knee.

When I got done he was quiet a minute. Then he stood up and put the cap on.

“Where are you going?”

“To have a word with Lowell.”

“Sit down, Buck.”

“Vernice, that is your mama’s pie.”

“I know whose pie it is. Sit down.”

He sat, but he did not like it.

“There are seven on that board,” he said. “You went to school with four of them. Darrell Hobbs has eaten at this table. You pick up that telephone and call around, and they will have that rule undone by supper.”

“I expect they would.”

“Then call.”

Now I will tell you why I did not.

I could have called. Buck was right, I could have had four votes by dark. But a blue ribbon you have to telephone for is not a blue ribbon. It is a favor. And if there was talk already, me calling in my friends on the board would be the very proof of it.

“I will not beg my way into a pie contest,” I said. “I am too old and the pie is too good.”

“Then what are you going to do? Sit home?”

“No. I am going to the fair. Same as every year.”

“With no pie.”

“Oh, I am taking pie.” I got up and tied my apron back on, because it was past noon and that man needed feeding. “Lowell said it could not be entered. He never said it could not be eaten.”

That afternoon I called Donna Odom.

Mrs. Odom has run the 4-H in our county for twenty-six years, and she has a voice that can stop a steer. Every fair week her club has a bake sale table on the concrete apron outside the exhibit hall door. The fair board signs off on it every spring. The money goes toward sending children to 4-H camp over at Dawson Springs.

“Donna,” I said, “how is the camp fund?”

She sighed down the line. “Vernice, it is pitiful. Camp is two hundred and forty dollars a child now. I have got two that want to go and cannot, and I have got about sixty dollars in a coffee can.”

“Which two?”

“The Sutton boy. And little Katie Burris, whose daddy got hurt at the quarry.”

I knew both of them. Danny Sutton is being raised by his grandmother on a fixed check. He showed a rabbit last year because a rabbit is what they could afford to feed.

“Would you have room at your table for some pie?” I said.

There was a pause.

“Your pie?”

“By the slice. A dollar a slice. Every dollar to camp.”