The Saturday Cash Box at the Festival

At five o’clock on the Saturday of the Apple Butter Festival, my nephew Logan Bauer opened the gray metal cash box on our folding table and started counting out loud, the way I had asked him to count every bill for two days.

“Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred,” he said, licking his thumb the way his grandpa used to and laying the bills in stacks across the steel folding table.

Behind him, under the white canopy, his mother was scraping the last batch out of the kettle.

Tricia had her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her black apron was dusted gray with sugar and salt from ten hours of stirring.

Eight years she had never once stirred that kettle. Eight years the kettle was mine, and the cash box was hers.

This year I had turned that around, and I had done it on purpose, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

I stood next to Logan in my mustard-yellow flannel with my red hair coming loose from its bun, and I watched the stacks grow.

The sun was still on the courthouse lawn, and the maples on the square had gone the color of a pumpkin pie.

“Eleven hundred,” Logan said. “Twelve hundred.”

I knew roughly where he would land. I had known since July.

What I did not know was what his mother would do when he got there, and that was the only part I could not plan, and the only part that mattered.

To tell it right I have to go back to my kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon in July, with a plastic tub of tally sheets turned upside down on it and my husband standing in the doorway in his sock feet.

The kettle corn stand was my father-in-law’s before it was ours.

Walt Pryor built it out of a steel prep table, a big steel kettle, a propane burner, and a canopy he patched every spring with a roll of duct tape and a prayer.

For twenty years Walt worked the Apple Butter Festival on the courthouse square in our little southern Indiana county seat.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the second weekend of October, rain or shine. He never missed one until the year he died.

When he passed, eight years ago this fall, the stand went to his two kids, my husband Mike and his sister Tricia.

Mike is a lineman for the rural electric co-op, and October is when the wind starts knocking trees onto the lines, so he cannot promise anybody a whole weekend.

So it fell to me. I drive a school bus for the county school corporation, route nine, sixty-one miles a day, and I am used to early mornings and loud children and heavy things.

I took Mike’s place at the stand the first year and never gave it back.

Tricia and I split it right down the middle. Half the sugar, half the oil, half the propane, half the work, half the money.

That was the deal, and for a long time it was a good one, and I want that on the record too.

The work did not split as neatly as the money.

Somebody has to stir the kettle, and somebody has to run the box, and the first year Tricia said, “Daddy always had me on the box,” and that was the end of that conversation.