A Roaster of Chili at the Curb

“Chili’s got to have a roll,” she said. “That’s just Kansas.” She set the pans on the end of the tailgate without another word.

Someone set a cigar box on the corner of the tailgate. I never found out who. It had a slit cut in the lid, and I decided not to mention it.

Dollar bills started going in anyway.

“Is it really free?” an older woman asked me. She had a purse over her arm and a five dollar wristband, and she looked worried that she was doing something wrong.

“It’s free,” I said. “Take a roll.”

“But the cook-off tickets, they’re for the Post.”

“Then you’ve already given to the Post,” I said. “This is just lunch.”

She laughed. She took her cup and her roll and sat down on the curb with the rest of them, on the low brick wall in front of the insurance office and on the bumper of someone’s Buick.

The roaster went down fast. Macy kept her eye on the level, and around twelve forty she looked over at me with a question.

“Mom. I’ve got about two inches left.”

“How many cups is that?”

“Maybe twenty.”

I did not know what to do. I will be honest about that. Eighteen quarts of chili comes to about seventy five good bowls, and I had passed out better than two hundred little tastes in forty minutes, and now I had nothing left to give.

Then somebody tapped my shoulder.

It was Opal Kreger, who runs the Auxiliary. She is sixty seven years old, and she has been putting on this cook-off since before Macy was born. She had a pot holder on each hand and an expression I could not read.

“Jenny,” she said. “Pot number four has been sitting on the burner for an hour and a half with nobody to serve it.”

“Opal, I don’t want to take anybody’s”

“Pot number four is Merrill Teig’s. I just talked to Merrill.” She jerked her chin back toward the hall. “He says if Macy’s chili is out in the street, his can be out in the street, too. He’s bringing it now.”

I looked past her at the side door of the Post. A heavyset man in a feed store jacket was coming out with a stockpot in both arms, and behind him came a woman with a slow cooker, and behind her a boy I did not recognize carrying a covered roaster by its two handles.

I could not say a word. I stood there with a sleeve of paper cups in my hands.

“There’s room on the tailgate, Merrill,” Mike said. He said it in the same flat voice he used for everything. It cracked a little at the end.

By one o’clock there were five pots on the tailgate and two more on a folding table someone had carried out from the hall. Seven cooks stood behind them, ladling and talking and making change from nothing, and not one of the seven had been asked.

That left sixteen pots in the hall, and by the time the line went all the way around the block, most of the people were out on the street with us.

Gilbert came out the front doors at ten past one.