The Ribbon I Fought Her Thirty Years For

I picked six quarts of huckleberries that first August in the burn country above Willow Creek, scratched to pieces and happy as I have ever been, and I made Opal’s pie the best I could from what Bernard remembered of it, and I carried it into the Home Arts building in a dish towel and set it down on table nine.

I took third.

The blue ribbon went to a small woman in wire glasses whom I knew only to nod at in the Town Pump and at church. Her name was Hester Vold.

She was a little older than me, with forearms like a bricklayer’s, and she had cooked in the school cafeteria for twenty-six years, which meant she could turn out dough the way other people turn out sentences.

Her husband, Emmett, ran cattle on the far side of the valley. They had one daughter, Kaylene, just off to college.

I read my judge’s sheet standing at table nine. “Filling excellent. Crust tough.” I read Hester’s sheet, too, because she had left it face up beside her plate, and I read it upside down like a thief. It said, “Perfect.”

One word.

She came over while I was still staring at it. She looked at my pie, which the judges had cut into, and she said, kind as anything, “You work your dough too much, hon. Your hands run warm. Mine run cold, that’s all it is. Nothing to do with talent.”

She meant it as a gift. I am only starting to know that.

What I said was, “I didn’t ask.”

It was the first thing I ever said to Hester Vold that was not about the weather. She just nodded. “No,” she said. “You didn’t.” And she went to collect her ribbon.

I went home and told Bernard I would never lose to that woman again. He laughed at me from behind the sports page and said, “Ivadelle, it’s a pie.”

It was never a pie.

If you have never been in a small-town rivalry, I cannot easily explain how it takes root. It does not feel like hate. It feels like having something to do.

I won in 1997, and Hester took it back in 1998. A girl from Dillon with a peach pie surprised us both in 2004. Otherwise it went back and forth between us as steady as a porch swing.

When I tell you I won fourteen times, I can tell you she won fifteen, because I know it the way you know your own phone number. Bernard kept the tally in pencil on the inside of the pantry door, and after he was gone I kept it in my own hand. An H and an I, with a mark for each.

I was not a good winner and I was a worse loser. I never once said congratulations to Hester. Not once in thirty years. I said “Hester” and she said “Ivadelle,” and that was the extent of our manners, like two gunfighters.