A Roaster of Chili at the Curb

The post commander came out at one twenty.

I did not hear the side door. I only noticed that the line had gone quiet from the front, the way a field goes quiet when a hawk comes over. People stepped back to either side without being asked.

Earl Dietz is sixty nine years old, a retired Air Force master sergeant who spent twenty two years on flight lines before he came home and bought the feed store. He has a white buzz cut and a gray mustache and a voice that carries over a loud room without ever being raised.

He wore his Legion cap and his blue Post 147 vest, and he had cobwebs on one shoulder from the basement. He walked right up to the tailgate and stopped.

He looked at the roaster. He looked at the seven cooks standing behind their pots. He looked at the line, which went around the corner of the bank, and then he looked at Macy.

“Young lady,” he said. “I came up from stacking chairs and found out my cook-off was empty.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Macy said. “We didn’t”

“Don’t be sorry.” He held up one hand. “What’s in the pot?”

“The last of it.”

“Then I’ll take the last of it.”

She scraped the bottom with the ladle and found two inches of chili, dark and thick, and filled a cup nearly to the brim. He took it in both hands.

He tasted it on the sidewalk in front of two hundred people. He chewed slowly. He closed his eyes.

When he opened them, he did not look at Macy. He looked toward the hall doors, up the brick steps, where I could see a shape standing behind the glass.

“I have judged chili at this Post for thirty one years,” he said quietly. “I do not need a clipboard to tell you what I just ate.”

He turned to the crowd, and I will keep his exact words in my head until I am old.

“That is the best chili on this street,” Earl Dietz said. “Wendell Brenner would be proud to stand beside it.”

Nobody clapped. It was too quiet for that. Harold Bauer, sitting on a bumper with a cup in his lap, only nodded once, slowly, with his chin trembling.

Earl handed me the empty cup. Then he put his hand on Macy’s shoulder, gently, the way you would steady a young tree in the wind.

“Miss Brenner,” he said. “I’d like to see that recipe card sometime. I won’t ask what’s on the back.”

She laughed, and it was the first time she had laughed all day. It came out wet and surprised.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

Here is what happened after that, because you deserve the whole thing.

Earl walked back into the hall and, with Opal beside him, tasted the sixteen pots that were left. It took them an hour. The blue ribbon went to Merrill Teig’s pot number four, the one he had carried out to the curb himself.

Merrill did not keep it. He came out to our tailgate at three o’clock, when we were wrapping up the last of the extension cords, and he pinned the blue ribbon to Macy’s apron.