The Pie They Would Not Let Me Enter

“Vernice Tate.” I could hear her sit down. “I heard what the board did. Bobby told me at the feed store.”

“Then you know I have got some free time.”

She laughed, one bark, the way she does. Then she got careful.

“It has to be done right,” she said. “It goes under the club’s name. Fruit pies only. Nothing with cream or custard or meringue, not sitting out in July. The health department lets a bake sale alone, but they would not let that alone, and they would be right.”

“Blackberry and peach. That is all I would bring.”

“Bring a card table,” she said. “Ours is full. And Vernice?”

“What.”

“A dollar is not enough for that pie.”

“A dollar is what a child can pay,” I said. “That is the price.”

The fair opens on a Tuesday with the pet parade and the beauty pageant. The baked goods go in on Wednesday morning. Entries by nine, judging at ten behind a shut door, hall open to the public at noon with the ribbons already hung.

I started baking Tuesday at four in the morning.

My oven will take three pies at a time, fifty minutes a batch. I had blackberries I had picked the first week of July and frozen flat, a bushel of peaches from down at the Tennessee line, and lard from the hog we killed in January.

By dark Tuesday there were fifteen pies on every flat place in my kitchen. Nine went in the back of the Buick the next morning. Six stayed on the counter under cup towels. Those were meant for Thursday.

Buck carried the card table. I carried the red-and-white checkered cloth off the porch table, a pie server, paper plates, plastic forks, and a half-gallon pickle jar I had scalded.

And I made a sign. I am not a hand at lettering. I did it on the back of a feed-store calendar with a laundry marker. Pie, one dollar a slice. Every dollar goes to 4-H camp.

At the gate there was a boy in a folding chair with a roll of tickets and a cigar box. One of the Hobbs grandsons.

“Morning, Mrs. Tate,” he said, and waved us on.

I stopped. “How much is it to get in?”

“Five dollars. But you are an exhibitor, you do not have to…”

“Not this year, honey.” I took a five out of my pocketbook and laid it in his cigar box. “This year I am the same as anybody.”

Buck paid his five behind me and did not say a word, but I saw the side of his mouth.

We set up on the concrete to the left of the exhibit hall door. It is a long white-painted building with a tin roof, and by eight in the morning that tin is already ticking with heat. Donna’s 4-H mothers had their table to the right. Mine sat under the edge of the eave, in a strip of shade about as wide as a church pew.

I put on my sun visor. I tied my apron over my sleeveless blouse. I set out two pies, one of each kind, and left the rest in the coolers under the table with the lids cracked so they would not sweat. I leaned my sign up against the pickle jar.

And then I stood there, at a quarter past eight, and watched other women carry their pies past me through that door.

I will not pretend that was easy.