The Pie They Would Not Let Me Enter

“Cold lard,” she said. “Hot oven.”

“Cold lard, hot oven. You could put that on my headstone.”

“And throw that shiny pan away,” Buck said, from down the table.

“Well, she ought to,” he said. He was plating peach and not looking up. “Shiny throws the heat back off. Forty years I have heard about it. Dull tin or glass.”

“He is right,” I said. “Glass is best when you are learning. You can pick it up and look at the bottom.”

Kayla laughed, a wet, surprised laugh. The baby laughed because she did. A few in the line did, too.

Then she held the blue ribbon out to me across the card table.

“This is yours,” she said. “It ought to be on a pie that is right.”

I took it. I looked at it. Blue satin, gold letters, first premium, same as the eleven on my wall.

And I reached across and pinned it on the strap of her diaper bag, because her blouse was thin and the baby would have grabbed the pin.

“No ma’am,” I said. “Three judges tasted four pies and yours had the best filling on the table. I could see from here that it set up right and you did not drown it in sugar. That is your mamaw’s filling, and that is the hard part, and you got it on your own with nobody to ask. All you are missing is a floor under it.” I patted the ribbon flat. “You keep that. And you earn the other half of it by next July.”

She cried then. Right there by the pickle jar. I gave her a napkin, and a slice of the blackberry on a paper plate so she would know what she was aiming at, and I would not take her dollar.

She ate it standing up with the baby reaching for the fork. She turned the last bite over and looked at the bottom of it for a long time.

“That is it,” she said. “That is how hers was.”

We sold pie through Saturday.

I baked every night that week until past midnight. My sister-in-law Carolyn and Judy Baker from church came to help, and between the three of us we turned out thirty-eight pies in four days, counting the first fifteen. Buck drove the Buick back and forth so many times that the Hobbs boy at the gate quit trying to wave him through and just held out his hand for the five.

Saturday night, after the demolition derby let out and the midway lights were coming down, Donna and I counted the pickle jar on her 4-H table under the pole light. Buck held the flashlight. Danny Sutton’s grandmother had come over to help fold up, and Donna made her sit.

Three hundred and four slices at a dollar. The rest was folks who would not take their change.

“Four hundred eighty-six dollars,” Donna said. She counted it again, out loud, the way she makes the children do. “Four hundred and eighty-six.”

“What is camp?”

“Two hundred forty apiece.”

“So that is two.”

“That is two, with six dollars over for the canteen.” Donna took her glasses off and wiped them on her shirt tail, which is as near as that woman comes to crying. “Mrs. Sutton, your boy is going to Dawson Springs. Him and Katie Burris both.”