The Ribbon I Fought Her Thirty Years For

She had put 22, which was the cream pie class. Her chokecherry was a double-crust fruit pie, class 21. It was the kind of mistake you make when you have not slept in four days. Anyone could see that.

Now here is the rule. A clerk who finds a mismatch before the judging can fix it with a pen and the exhibitor’s initials. Every clerk I have ever known would have done it and thought nothing of it.

Bonnie would have done it in her sleep, but Bonnie was across the grounds that morning sorting out the judges’ lunch. A clerk who does nothing leaves the entry to be struck, and a pie in the wrong class is scratched, no appeal. The book says so on page six.

I stood there with that tag.

I do not believe I thought, I will ruin her. I believe I thought, Rules are rules. That is how it is done, you know, when you are being small. You hide behind a page number.

I set the pie on the cream pie table. The judges saw a fruit pie in the wrong class and had it carried to the scratch table, where discarded entries sat until the end of the day to be thrown out.

I took the blue ribbon that year. The judge’s sheet on my huckleberry said, “Excellent.”

Hester arrived at two in the afternoon, driving straight from Missoula. She was wearing the same blouse she’d had on for two days, wrinkled across the shoulders, and her glasses were crooked.

She went to table nine, and then to the scratch table, and found her pie sitting there with a sticky note on it that said not judged, wrong class, in a clerk’s block letters.

I have always remembered that note, and I would give a good deal to burn it.

Hester stood a long time looking at the tag. I watched her figure out her own mistake. I watched it go through her face.

“What happened?” she said to me, because I was the clerk and I was standing right there.

And I said, “Rules are rules, Hester. Maybe next year read the entry book.”

I can still hear myself. The tone was just helpful enough to be deniable.

She looked at me for a very long time. It was not anger. I would have known what to do with anger. It was more like she was measuring the size of me.

Then she picked up her pie plate, and she thanked me, and she walked out of the building.

Emmett died that November. I read it in the Pintlar Courier, and I did not go to the funeral, and I did not send a card. I told myself she would not want me there. The truth is I could not have stood in that church and looked at her.