The Pie They Would Not Let Me Enter

There were four of them. Ann Ledbetter went by with her apple, which is a decent pie and always has been.

And a young mother I had never laid eyes on, twenty-three or twenty-four, thin as a rail, with a baby riding her hip and a blackberry pie balanced on the other hand in one of those shiny foil pans from the dollar store.

She had to stop and shift the baby to get the door. I went and held it for her.

“Thank you, ma’am,” she said. She was out of breath. “I have never done this.”

She looked at my apron, and my table, and then at me, and I saw her work out who I was. Her face went pink clear to the ears.

I looked at her pie as it went by. I could not help it. Thirty years of looking at pie.

The top crust was pretty. She had cut little leaves. But the pan was shiny, and the juice at the rim had a gray, wet look, and the whole pie had a kind of slump to it, like a porch with a rotted sill.

I knew before the door shut. That bottom crust was raw.

I sold my first slice at eight forty.

By nine there were six people. By half past nine the line ran down the side of the building and around the water spigot.

I had not counted on that. But word runs through a county fair like fire through broom sedge. Somebody told somebody that Vernice Tate’s blue-ribbon pie was a dollar a slice at the hall door, the same pie nobody but three judges ever got to taste, and here they came.

That was a thing I had never once thought about in eleven years. A fair pie gets one sliver cut out of it by a judge. Then it sits under plastic for four days so folks can look at the ribbon, and on Saturday night you carry it home and feed it to the hogs.

Eleven blue ribbons, and hardly a soul in the county had ever had a bite.

Old Mr. Wendell Crisp came through on his walker with his daughter. He is ninety-one. He ate his slice of blackberry sitting on the bench by the door, slow, and when he was done he said, “That is Opal’s crust.”

Opal was my mother.

“Yes sir, it is.”

“I took her to a pie supper in nineteen and fifty-two,” he said. “I bid three dollars on her box and your daddy bid four.” He handed his daughter the paper plate. “I have been sore about it ever since.”

His daughter put a twenty in the jar and would not take change.

That happened a good deal. I had priced it at a dollar so a child could pay, and children did. Grown folks kept poking in fives and tens and walking off.

At ten the hall door shut for the judging.

That morning there were five women waiting on the judging and thirty-some people waiting on me.

Buck had been cutting and plating beside me for an hour without being asked. He has hands like fence posts and he cut every slice dead even, eight to the pie.

“That is seven pies gone,” he said low. “I am going home for the other six.”

“Those are for tomorrow.”

“Vernice.” He nodded his chin at the line. “There is not going to be any left for tomorrow. I am going.”

He went.