“I’ll say something about this one, if you’ll let me. A chokecherry pie is a hard thing to get right. This one tasted like somebody had paid close attention to it for a very long time.”
She looked at her sheet.
“I’d have given it a hundred, except the crust was a touch tough, and I’m a hard woman.”
The room laughed.
“The blue ribbon goes to entry thirty-one. Ivadelle Grubb.”
The building clapped, the farmers and the girls and the old women in their church dresses. Bonnie was crying and not even trying to hide it.
I walked up to the stage. My legs did it on their own. Bonnie held out the ribbon, the same blue ribbon I had fought over for thirty years, with the gold lettering and the little rosette.
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It was lighter than I remembered.
“You may say a word,” Bonnie said softly, and put the microphone in my other hand.
I had never in my life said more than thank you at that microphone. I looked out at the room. The microphone worked for once. It carried all the way to the back, higher and shakier than I wanted.
“I’m Ivadelle Grubb. Most of you know me. I have won this ribbon fourteen times.”
“Fifteen, now!” somebody called from the back, and somebody laughed.
“Fourteen,” I said. “I counted. Today’s isn’t mine, and one of the others isn’t either. I want to talk about 2011. Some of you remember it and some of you don’t.”
The building went quiet.
“That summer a woman’s husband was in the hospital in Missoula. She baked a pie at four in the morning, sent it to this building with a neighbor boy, and wrote the wrong class number on the tag. I was the volunteer clerk. I saw it. I could have fixed it with a pen and her initials, and I didn’t.”
Nobody moved.
“I put her pie on the wrong table. I watched the judges send it to the scratch pile. I told her to read the entry book, and I took the blue ribbon that year. Her husband passed that November, and I did not go to the service, and I did not send a card.”
Dorrie Pratt let her pie server clatter onto the table and did not pick it up.
“I am not telling you this to be kind to myself. I’m telling you because it happened under this roof, and this is where it ought to be said. Hester Vold’s chokecherry pie was the best pie in this county for thirty years, and I spent those years trying to beat it instead of saying so.”
I reached into my purse and took out a ribbon gone soft and pale at the edges.
It had hung on a nail in my kitchen for fifteen years. I had taken it down at five that morning, and the wall behind it was a clean square.