I. Ten Sharp
St. George, South Carolina, is the Grits Capital of the World. This is not a boast but a finding. In 1985 a man from the Quaker Oats company, reviewing shipping figures, discovered that the town’s single grocery store sold more grits per capita than any other store in the United States, and reported this to the town council, which was not surprised, and which the following April held a festival about it. There has been one every April since. It has a parade and a Grits Queen and a corn-shucking contest and a thing called Rolling in the Grits, in which a child is weighed, laid in a kiddie pool full of cooked grits, allowed to roll for ten seconds, and weighed again, and the child who comes out carrying the most grits wins a prize and smells like breakfast until Pentecost. People drive from Augusta for it. People drive from Charlotte. Once, memorably, a man drove from Lansing, Michigan, rolled in the grits at the age of forty-four over the objections of the committee, and placed third.
And on Saturday morning at ten sharp, in a white tent set up on the lawn beside the old Southern Railway depot, the cooking contest is judged.
It has been judged since 1986 by Mrs. Hattie Lemacks.
She arrives at ten. Not at five till, not at ten past; the committee has learned not to watch for her, because watching for her is like watching for a kettle, and she is simply there at the tent flap when the courthouse clock strikes whatever it strikes, a small upright woman of some indeterminate age past seventy in a navy church dress and a navy hat with a short veil and white gloves, carrying a single tablespoon. The spoon is the kind that comes in a set from Sears. She tastes every entry with it, wiping it between tastes on a handkerchief she takes from her sleeve, and she does not speak while she tastes, and the committee ladies do not speak either, and for twenty minutes the only sound in the tent is the fairground outside and the small click of the spoon against the rim of each dish. Then she sets the spoon down beside one of the entries and says, “That’ll do,” and turns and goes out the tent flap, and by the time anybody thinks to walk her to her car she is not on the lawn, or on the street, or anywhere.
Nobody has ever seen her car.
Nobody knows where she lives. The committee has her on the clipboard as Hattie L., on a sheet that has been photocopied from a photocopy so many times the letters have gone soft and gray, and the clipboard has been handed down through four generations of committee chairs the way a church hands down a communion set. Nobody has ever sent her a letter, because there is no address. Nobody has ever paid her, because she has never asked. Nobody has ever asked her a question in forty-one years, because there has never seemed to be a right moment, and because the committee is made up of women who were raised in Dorchester County and know that certain things, if you ask about them, stop.
There is one other thing the committee does not discuss, and it is this.
The winner has a good year.
Not a lottery. Nothing anybody could point to. But in 1991 Earline Pruitt won with a cheese grits casserole, and in 1992, after eleven years of trying, she had a boy. In 2004 a man named Alvin Dukes won with a shrimp and grits that the committee ladies had privately thought was too peppery, and that summer the bank in Walterboro that had turned him down three times called him back about the loan for the feed store, which is still there. In 2016 a girl of nineteen from Grover won, a girl nobody had much hope for, and she is now a dental hygienist in Summerville with a husband and a Buick. Earline Pruitt, who is seventy-eight and has sat on the committee since Reagan, keeps a list. She keeps it in her Bible, which she considers a safe enough place, and she has shown it to exactly two people, and one of them was Marla Jenkins.
“I’m not saying anything,” Earline had said, in the paper’s office, laying the list on Bud Rawls’s desk. “I’m just saying that if I was a young woman in this county trying to have a baby, I would learn how to make grits.”
That had been six years ago. Marla had not printed it. It had gone in the drawer, with the other things.
On the first Monday in April, a woman Marla did not know came up the stairs on Parler Avenue and knocked on the frosted glass.
She was sixty or so, trim, with good gray hair in a cut that cost money and a quilted vest and the kind of athletic shoes people wear when they intend to walk for exercise rather than to get somewhere. She carried a leather folio. She introduced herself as Pam Gerlach, the new chair of the festival’s cooking contest committee, and said she had been appointed in February after Earline Pruitt’s hip, and that she was so glad to meet the editor of the paper, which she called the paper with the faint stress of a person who had grown up where there were several.
“We moved down from Columbus two years ago,” she said, taking the chair across the desk without being asked, which Marla did not hold against her. “Ohio. My husband passed the first winter, which was not the plan, and I’ll be honest with you, I have been looking for something to be useful at. Earline said the committee could use some organization.” She opened the folio. “And it could. Marla, I ran HR for a company with four thousand employees. I have never in my life seen a process run on a photocopied clipboard.”
Marla said she imagined not.
“So. A few things.” Pam Gerlach had a list. Marla had known she would. “One, I’ve built a scoring app. Very simple, iPad-based, the judges score each entry on five criteria and it tabulates. Two, I’d like to expand the panel. One judge is a liability, frankly, and I’ve reached out to a chef in Charleston and a food writer who’s been very kind and the extension office at Clemson. Three—” She looked up. “Three, I need to reach Mrs. Lemacks. She’s served for forty-one years and I think the committee should recognize that properly. A plaque at minimum. I’d like to send her a letter, and nobody on the committee seems to have her address, or her phone, or her first name, apparently, and when I ask about it everybody looks at the ceiling.” She smiled. “I thought the newspaper would know.”
Marla looked at her for a moment. Then she said she would check the morgue, and asked Mrs. Gerlach if she would mind coming back Wednesday.
When the footsteps had gone down the stairs she went to the third cabinet and pulled the volume for 1985 and opened it to February and found what she had known, in the way one knows a thing one has carefully never looked at, that she would find.
Mrs. Hattie Mae Lemacks, 74, of the Reevesville community, died Thursday, February 7, at her home after a brief illness. Mrs. Lemacks was known throughout the county for her cooking and for many years supplied the dinners at St. Paul Baptist Church homecoming. She is survived by a nephew, Roland Lemacks, of Walterboro. Services will be held Sunday at St. Paul. Burial will follow in the church cemetery.
February 1985. Fourteen months before the first festival. Marla sat with the ledger open and did the arithmetic twice, and it came out the same way both times, and she closed the book and put it back and sat down and looked at the drawer.
She had been in that county fifty-two years. She had been editor of the paper for twenty. She had, in the past six months, seen a barber cut the hair of children who had never been born and heard a bell ring under a river and watched a girl walk into the Edisto in a yellow dress. She had thought, honestly, that she was past being surprised. And she found now that she had been wrong, that there was a particular quality of surprise reserved for discovering that a thing you had sat across a tent from every April for twenty years had never once been a thing at all, and that the whole county had known, and had decided, as it decided most things, to pass the butter and not bring it up.
II. The Committee
The cooking contest committee met Tuesday evening in the fellowship hall of First Baptist, at the long tables with the brown folding legs, under a bulletin board advertising a youth lock-in that had taken place in March. There were nine members. Seven were women over seventy who had served on the committee since before the current pastor was born. One was a young mother named Brittany who had been recruited by Earline for her ability to make a Facebook page. And one was Pam Gerlach, who had brought a laptop, a projector, and a tray of lemon bars from a bakery in Summerville that the committee ladies examined the way a customs officer examines a suitcase.
Marla sat in the back with her notebook. She had been invited by Pam, who wanted the paper to cover the modernization, and had come because she wanted to see how the county would handle it, and because she had not yet decided what she was going to tell the woman on Wednesday.
Pam presented the app. It was, Marla had to admit, a good app. Five criteria, texture and seasoning and creativity and presentation and what Pam called “grits integrity,” each scored one to ten, the scores weighted and averaged and displayed on a screen with a bar chart. The committee watched the bar chart with the polite stillness of people watching a slide show of someone else’s grandchildren.
“Now, the panel,” Pam said, advancing a slide. “I’m thrilled to say Chef Darnell Rivers of Husk has agreed to come up. Melanie Baptiste, who writes The Carolina Table, has agreed. And Dr. Ann Kirby from Clemson Extension, who literally wrote the state’s publication on stone-ground corn.” She looked around the room with the open, pleased face of a woman who has delivered a win. “That’s three certified culinary professionals. Plus Mrs. Lemacks, of course, if she’s able. Four judges. Scores averaged. Nobody can say it isn’t fair.”
There was a silence of a very particular Dorchester County kind, a silence with furniture in it.
“Well,” said Earline Pruitt, from her wheelchair at the end of the table, with the hip, “that’s a lot of judges.”
“It’s a more robust process.”
“Mm.”
“Mrs. Pruitt, I’m not trying to take anything away from Mrs. Lemacks. I’m trying to give her some support. Forty-one years is a long time for one woman to carry the whole thing.”
“She’s never seemed to mind it.”
“Has anybody asked her?”
Another silence. Brittany, the young mother, looked at her phone with great attention. Mrs. Odessa Ayers, who was eighty-one and had once slapped a state senator at a fish fry, studied a lemon bar as though it had done something to her.
“The thing is,” Earline said carefully, “Hattie has her way of doing it.”
“I understand that. And I respect it. I’d just like her to have an iPad like the others so her scores go in with everyone’s.”
“She uses a spoon.”
“She can still use the spoon, Earline. The iPad’s for after the spoon.”
Earline looked at Marla. Marla looked at her notebook. There was a sound from somewhere down the table that might have been Odessa Ayers suppressing something.
“I think,” said Pam Gerlach, who was not a stupid woman, and who had run HR for four thousand people and knew the sound of a room that was keeping something from her, “that there is something about Mrs. Lemacks that the committee isn’t telling me. And I would really rather hear it now than on Saturday morning in front of a chef from Husk.”
Nobody said anything. The refrigerator in the church kitchen cycled on. Brittany put her phone face-down.
Then Earline Pruitt said, “Hattie will be there at ten, Pam. She always is. You’ll see for yourself, and then we can talk about the iPad,” in a tone that closed the subject the way a screen door closes, not hard, but with a sound you could hear from the road, and the committee moved on to the parking.
Afterward, in the lot, Pam caught Marla at her car.
“They think I’m the enemy.”
“They don’t.”
“They look at me like I’ve come to take down the steeple.” She stood with her folio against her chest in the light from the fellowship hall windows, and for a moment the HR director went out of her face and what was under it was a woman two years widowed in a subdivision where she did not know anybody, who had spent an entire winter looking for something to be useful at. “I’ve lived here two years, Marla. I’ve joined the garden club and the library friends and this. I bring lemon bars. Nobody has once asked me over. I’m not complaining, I know how it works, I know I’m from off. I just thought—” She stopped. “I just thought if I did something well, they’d see it.”
Marla, who had been from St. George for fifty-two years and had still, in some sense, never been asked over, said that it took time.
“How much?”
“Depends on the county,” Marla said. “This one, about a generation.”
Kirk’s was closed by the time she got to Main, but the lights were on and the shade was up, and Carl let her in and locked the door behind her. Ellis was in his chair. Tobias Quinn was in the third wooden seat with no magazine, which since the Weathers girl had become more usual than not; he sat now some evenings just to sit, and nobody remarked on it.
“Grits lady,” Carl said, before she’d got her coat off. “Earline’s already called Daddy.”
“Earline called me,” said Ellis. “Carl answered the phone. That’s a different thing.”
Marla sat down. “Ellis. You were here in ‘eighty-six.”
“I was here in ‘fifty-six.”
“The first festival. Was Hattie Lemacks judging it?”
Ellis took a sip of coffee and considered the darkened mirror for a while. When he spoke it was in the voice he used for the flood of ‘forty and the mule, the voice of a man who had seen the county’s whole life pass through a barber chair and had kept most of it.
“Hattie Lemacks was the best cook in Dorchester County from about 1940 until the day she died, and everybody knew it, and she knew it, and she never once in her life entered anything to prove it. Church homecomings. Funerals. If somebody died in Reevesville, Hattie’s chicken was on the table before the family got home from the hospital. When the town decided on the festival, back in ‘eighty-four when the Quaker man came, the committee sat down to pick a judge and there wasn’t anybody else to pick. They wrote her a letter. She wrote back one line. ‘I’ll be there at ten.'” He set the cup down. “Then she took sick in January and died in February, and the committee didn’t know what to do, and they sat around that fellowship hall arguing about it for a month, and finally old Mrs. Westbury, who was chair then, said, ‘Well, she said she’d be there,’ and they let it go. And the second Saturday in April at ten o’clock Hattie Lemacks walked in the tent with a spoon.”
“And nobody said anything.”
“Marla, what would they say? ‘Hattie, you’re dead’? She knew. Everybody in that tent had been to the funeral. Mrs. Westbury had brought a ham.” Ellis shook his head. “Hattie Lemacks never in her life missed a thing she’d said she’d do. That’s all it was. She’d said ten o’clock. Dying was a scheduling conflict.”
Tobias Quinn, from the third chair, said, “She fed my daddy for a week in 1961. Came to the house every day with a covered dish and never said a word to him about me. Just set it down and went.” He was looking at the floor. “I never thanked her. There wasn’t a way to.”
Carl was leaning on the counter with his arms folded. “What are you going to tell the Ohio woman?”
“I don’t know.”
“Earline wants you to tell her nothing. Let her see.”
“Earline’s seen a great many things in this county without having to be told,” Marla said. “Pam Gerlach hasn’t. She’s going to walk into that tent with a chef and an iPad, and I don’t know what happens then, Carl. I don’t know what Hattie does.”
Ellis chuckled, low, into his cup.
“I’ll tell you what Hattie does,” he said. “Hattie tastes the grits.”
III. What the Winners Got
Pam Gerlach did not come back on Wednesday. She came back on Thursday, at eight in the morning, before Marla had got the coffee on, and she came up the stairs fast and knocked once and came in without waiting, and she had a sheet of paper in her hand that Marla recognized from across the room, because she had printed it herself from the library’s microfilm reader four years ago for a piece on St. Paul Baptist’s bicentennial and had never gotten around to filing it.
“February seventh, 1985,” Pam said.
“Yes.”
“You knew. On Monday. You sat there and said you’d check the morgue.”
“I did check the morgue.”
“Marla.” Pam put the obituary on the desk and put her hand flat on it. Her hand was shaking a little. “I went to the library. I asked that nice girl for anything on a Hattie Lemacks and she went pale, she actually went pale, and said she’d have to look, and then she brought me this and would not meet my eye. Then I drove out to Reevesville. I found the church. I found the stone. Hattie Mae Lemacks, 1910 to 1985, and somebody’s been putting fresh flowers on it, Marla, there were gladiolas on it that could not have been two days old.” She sat down. “So I’ll ask you what I asked the committee, and I’d appreciate an answer. Is this a thing this town does? To people from off? Some kind of—I don’t know. Initiation. You all agree on a story and see how long it takes the Ohio woman to figure it out.”
Marla poured two cups of coffee and set one in front of her.
“Mrs. Gerlach,” she said, “this county does not play pranks. It’s too tired.”
Pam looked at her.
“Everything you’ve found out is true. Hattie Lemacks died in 1985. She’s buried at St. Paul. And she has judged the grits contest every April since 1986, at ten o’clock, with a spoon, and nobody has ever said one word to her about it, because she said she’d be there, and she is.”
“That’s not possible.”
“No.”
“Then—”
“I don’t know,” Marla said. “I’ve stopped asking what’s possible in Dorchester County. I’m going to tell you some other things now, and you can do what you like with them, and when I’m done you can call me a liar and go back to Ashley Preserve and nobody will think the worse of you.”
She got up and unlocked the bottom drawer of Bud Rawls’s desk and took out Earline Pruitt’s list, in Earline’s round Palmer-method hand on a sheet of Baptist Women’s stationery, and laid it in front of Pam Gerlach, and sat back down.
Forty-one names. Forty-one years. Beside each, in Earline’s hand, a line.
1986 — Mrs. Westbury’s daughter-in-law, Carol. Twins that October.
1988 — Deacon Hiers. Cancer went in remission in June, doctors in Charleston could not account for it.
1991 — Me. Jamie, born Aug. 3, 1992. Eleven years we tried.
1997 — The Horne boy, 20, who everybody had given up on. Enlisted in Sept. Made sergeant. Runs the Dollar General now and is a good man.
2004 — Alvin Dukes. Feed store loan.
2011 — Lurlene Bessinger, whose husband had walked out at Easter. He came back in August and has not left since and is, I am told, a changed man, though I would not have said that was possible either.
2016 — The Kinard girl from Grover. Dental hygienist. Buick.
2023 — Rev. Gaskins’s wife. The lump was nothing.
Pam read it to the end without speaking. Then she read it again. Then she put it down and sat looking at the window where the gold letters said THE COUNTY LINE backward.
“These are coincidences,” she said.
“Probably.”
“Forty-one of them.”
“Thirty-nine,” Marla said. “Earline couldn’t find anything for 1994 or 2009. She’s honest about it. She thinks maybe those two got their good year and didn’t tell anybody, which in this county is likely, or maybe Hattie just liked the grits.”
“Marla, I ran HR. I know what a selection bias is. Everybody has a good year sometime. If you go looking for it—”
“I know.”
“—you’ll find it. That’s not evidence, that’s a church lady with a Bible and a pencil.”
“I know,” Marla said again. “I’ve thought all of that. I thought it for six years with that list in my drawer. And then last October I watched a barber cut the hair of a little girl who’d never been born, and in the spring a girl who’d been dead since 1961 walked out of the Edisto in a prom dress and had a sandwich in the sheriff’s office, and I stopped thinking about what was evidence. I just started writing down what I saw.” She picked up her coffee. “Pam. I’m not asking you to believe any of it. I’m telling you what the committee wouldn’t, because somebody ought to, and because you’re going to be standing in that tent Saturday at ten o’clock with a chef from Charleston, and I think you’d rather know.”
Pam Gerlach sat for a long time. Outside, the eight-fifteen freight came through on the Norfolk Southern line, two blocks over, and the frosted glass hummed in its frame the way it had since 1891, and went still.
“What does she look like?” Pam said at last. “Mrs. Lemacks.”
“Small. Navy dress. Navy hat with a veil. White gloves. She carries a spoon.”
“Does she—” Pam searched for the word. “Is she solid?”
“She tastes the grits.”
“And then?”
“Then she picks one, and says ‘That’ll do,’ and leaves. You won’t see where. Nobody ever has.”
Pam looked down at the list again, at the twins and the loan and the lump that was nothing. Her face did something complicated.
“My husband was named Gary,” she said. “He had a good year once. 2009. He’d been laid off and he got the job at Nationwide in March, out of nowhere, and in May I beat the cancer, and in August our daughter got into Ohio State. We used to call it the good year. We didn’t know why we’d had it.” She folded the list very carefully along Earline’s creases. “Nobody up there makes grits.”
Marla did not say anything.
“I’m not calling the chef,” Pam said. “I’m not canceling the panel. I’ve got three people driving in on their own gas and I’m not going to tell them it’s off because a dead woman has it handled.” She stood, and put the folio under her arm, and her chin had come up in a way Marla had seen on Earline Pruitt and on Odessa Ayers and on every woman who had ever chaired anything in Dorchester County. “But I’ll leave her chair. At the end of the table. With no iPad in front of it.” She stopped at the door. “And if she comes, Marla, I’m going to ask her something. I don’t care what the committee does. Forty-one years and not one of you has had the decency to ask that woman a single question. I’m from off. I can.”
She went down the stairs. Marla listened to the sound of the athletic shoes going away, and then she sat for a minute, and then she went to the window and watched Pam Gerlach cross Parler Avenue toward the Piggly Wiggly, walking fast, like a woman who had somewhere to be.
She realized afterward that she had not asked what Pam had meant to buy there. It was two days before she found out.
Earline told her, from the wheelchair, in the lot at First Baptist on Friday, with the tent already going up on the depot lawn across the tracks.
“She entered,” Earline said. “Pam. Came to the house Thursday with a bag from the Pig and sat in my kitchen and asked me how. I showed her. Took all afternoon. She can’t cook, Marla, Lord, she can’t, but she can follow directions like nobody I ever saw.” The old woman’s face was unreadable. “Said she wanted to understand the process from the inside. Entered under her maiden name so nobody’d say the chair put a thumb on it. Steinmetz. Pamela Steinmetz, Ohio.” She let that hang. “I didn’t tell her the other reason people enter.”
“Which is?”
“Which is they want a good year,” said Earline Pruitt, “and don’t have anybody else to ask.”
IV. The Tent
Festival Saturday came up clear and already warm, with the smell of the funnel-cake oil drifting over from the midway before eight and the parade forming on Metts Street behind the fire truck. By nine the depot lawn was full. The committee had set the tent where it had always been, in the shade of the big live oak, with the judging table down the middle covered in a white cloth, and twenty-three entries in Pyrex and Corningware and one cast-iron skillet, each with a number on a folded card. At the head of the table were three chairs with three iPads. At the foot, by itself, was a fourth chair with nothing in front of it but a folded napkin.
The panel arrived at nine-thirty. Chef Darnell Rivers of Husk was a big, easy, handsome man in a chambray shirt who shook every committee lady’s hand and called them all Miss and was plainly used to tents. Melanie Baptiste of The Carolina Table was forty and sharp and photographed everything. Dr. Ann Kirby of Clemson Extension was a small sunburned woman in a fishing shirt who looked at the twenty-three entries with the expression of someone who had driven three hours to be disappointed and was prepared to be pleasantly surprised. Pam Gerlach got them seated and showed them the app and explained the criteria, and they nodded, and Chef Rivers asked who the fourth chair was for.
“Mrs. Lemacks,” Pam said. “She’s judged since 1986. She’ll be here at ten.”
“She’s not using the app?”
“She has her own method.”
Chef Rivers grinned. “Lord, I hope so.”
Earline Pruitt had been wheeled to a place by the tent pole where she could see the flap. Odessa Ayers stood beside her. The other committee ladies had arranged themselves along the sides of the tent the way they did every year, hands folded, not watching the entrance, and Marla stood at the back with her camera and her notebook, and found that her heart was going faster than it had any business going over grits.
Across the tracks the courthouse clock, which had not kept correct time since 1979 and struck whatever hour it felt like, struck ten. Its hands said twenty past six.
The tent flap moved.
She was smaller than Marla had remembered, or perhaps Marla had never before let herself look. A navy dress of a cut nobody had worn since Carter, with a white collar. A navy hat, round, with a short veil that came to the bridge of her nose. White cotton gloves. A pocketbook over one arm. And in her right hand, held the way a conductor holds a baton, a single stainless tablespoon from Sears.
She stood in the entrance a moment and looked down the length of the table, at the Pyrex and the Corningware and the skillet, and at the three strangers with their iPads, and at the empty chair at the far end, and at Pam Gerlach standing beside it in a linen blazer with her hands clasped in front of her so tightly the knuckles showed. Then Hattie Lemacks walked in.
She did not go to the chair. She went to entry number one.
There was a silence in the tent of a kind that even Chef Rivers, who had cooked for governors, seemed to feel, because he set down his iPad stylus without being told and sat back. Mrs. Lemacks lifted the lid on number one, a plain pot of stone-ground with butter, and dipped the spoon, and tasted, and stood a moment with the spoon in her mouth and her eyes on the middle distance. Then she wiped the spoon on a handkerchief from her sleeve and moved to number two.
Melanie Baptiste had raised her phone. Odessa Ayers, without appearing to move at all, reached over and lowered it.
Number two. Number three. The shrimp and grits at four, which she lingered over. The cheese grits at seven, which she did not. A thing at eleven with jalapeños and crumbled bacon that had been entered by a young man from Summerville and that she tasted and then, in the only departure from procedure anybody could remember in forty-one years, tasted again, and made a very small sound that might have been approval or might have been indigestion, and moved on. At fifteen, Dr. Kirby, who could not help herself, leaned forward and said, “Ma’am, that one’s a heritage variety, a Jimmy Red, it’s got a—” and Mrs. Lemacks turned her head slightly beneath the veil and looked at her, and Dr. Kirby stopped, and sat back, and said quietly, “Never mind.”
The clicking of the spoon went down the table. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two, a casserole with a crust that had slumped on one side, under a card that said P. Steinmetz, Ohio in a hand Marla recognized from the folio.
Hattie Lemacks tasted it. She stood with the spoon in her mouth for a long moment. Then she took it out and wiped it and did not move on.
She looked up the table at Pam Gerlach.
Pam had not moved since the flap opened. Her face had gone the color of the tablecloth, and her hands were still clasped, and she was looking at the small woman in the veil the way Marla imagined a person would look at a thing she had decided on Thursday morning to believe in and had not, until this second, actually believed. The chef and the food writer and the Clemson woman looked from one to the other. The committee ladies did not look at anything.
Mrs. Lemacks set the spoon down beside number twenty-two.
“That’ll do,” she said.
There was a sound from Earline Pruitt by the tent pole that was not quite a word.
And then Pam Gerlach, who was from off, and had run HR for four thousand people, and had told Marla Jenkins on Thursday morning that somebody in this county was going to ask that woman a question if it killed her, took one step forward and said, in a voice that shook on every word and did not stop, “Mrs. Lemacks. Why do you come?”
The tent went so still that Marla could hear the midway, and the parade two blocks off, and a child somewhere being told to stop it.
Hattie Lemacks turned, with her pocketbook on her arm, and looked at Pam Gerlach through the veil. It was a long look. It was the look, Marla thought, of a woman who had supplied the dinners at St. Paul homecoming for forty years and had fed Wendell Quinn through the worst week of his life and had never once been asked why she did any of it, and had not expected to be, and was not, perhaps, entirely displeased.
“Honey,” she said, “I said I would.”
She looked at the casserole with the slumped crust. Then back at Pam.
“You’ll do too,” she said. “Give it time.”
And she went out the tent flap into the April sun, and Chef Darnell Rivers of Husk, who was closest, was on his feet and through the flap behind her inside of two seconds, and stood on the depot lawn turning in a full circle with his hands on his hips, and came back in, and sat down, and looked at the empty chair at the foot of the table for a long moment.
“Well,” he said. “I’ll be damned.”
Odessa Ayers said, “Language, son,” and he apologized, and meant it.
V. That’ll Do
The panel scored anyway. Pam insisted, in a voice that had mostly come back, and the three professionals bent over their iPads and did their five criteria and their one-to-ten, and the app tabulated, and the bar chart went up on the little screen, and the winner by a wide margin was entry eleven, the jalapeño and bacon from the young man in Summerville, with the shrimp and grits at four a close second and the Jimmy Red at fifteen third. Entry twenty-two, the casserole with the slumped crust, finished nineteenth out of twenty-three. Dr. Kirby, who was honest, had given it a four for grits integrity.
The committee looked at Pam.
Pam looked at the bar chart for a while. Then she reached over and turned the iPad face-down on the tablecloth, and picked up the photocopied clipboard with Hattie L. on it in gray, and wrote on it, under the previous year, 2028 — P. Steinmetz (Gerlach), Ohio, and handed it to Earline Pruitt, and said, “I think that’s the process.”
“I think it is,” said Earline.
The young man from Summerville was given a special award for creativity that Pam invented on the spot and Chef Rivers presented with a handshake and his card, and the young man went home happier than if he’d won, and has since been hired at a restaurant on King Street. Melanie Baptiste did not write about the judging. She wrote eleven hundred words about the Rolling in the Grits and a very nice paragraph about the live oak. Dr. Kirby drove back to Clemson and told nobody anything, but she came again the next year on her own, without the iPad, and sat along the side of the tent with the committee ladies with her hands folded, and did not say a word when the flap moved.
The app was retired. Pam deleted it herself, that evening, at her kitchen table in Ashley Preserve. She told Marla it took about four seconds and she had expected to feel worse.
The paper ran the results on Thursday, as it had every year since 1986. Cooking Contest Winner Named at Grits Festival. It named P. Steinmetz of St. George, and the special award, and thanked the visiting judges by name, and said the contest had been judged, as in previous years, by Mrs. Hattie Lemacks, and left it at that, as in previous years.
On the Sunday after, Marla drove Pam Gerlach out to Reevesville.
St. Paul Baptist sat on a sandy rise under live oaks a mile off 15, white clapboard, with a bell in a little open belfry that did ring, on Sundays, and a churchyard behind it going back to before the Civil War. The Weathers plot was along the back fence, and Delia’s stone with the new third line was there, and forty feet from it, under a cedar, was a gray granite marker that said HATTIE MAE LEMACKS and the dates and nothing else, and there were gladiolas on it, fresh, in a Mason jar.
Pam had brought a Pyrex dish with a foil lid. She set it on the grass at the foot of the stone and took off the foil. Inside was the casserole with the slumped crust, or what was left of it, reheated.
“I know it’s foolish,” she said.
“Everybody does it,” said Marla. “Earline brings hers every year. So did Alvin Dukes till he died. The Kinard girl drives up from Summerville. You’ll see dishes out here all week, and the church ladies collect them Saturday and take them back to the fellowship hall, and nobody asks whose.”
“What happens to the grits?”
“I’ve never asked.”
Pam stood looking at the stone with her hands in the pockets of her quilted vest. It was a pretty morning, with the light coming through the cedar and the church bell going for the eleven o’clock, and somewhere out on 15 a truck was downshifting for the curve.
“Marla,” she said, “what am I supposed to do with this?”
“With what?”
“This. Her. The list. The fact that I asked a dead woman a question in front of a chef from Husk and she answered me.” Pam shook her head. “I’m an HR director. I’m from Columbus. I have a daughter in Dublin, Ohio, who thinks I’ve moved to a swamp and lost my mind, and I’m going to have to call her this afternoon, and I don’t know what I’m going to say.”
Marla thought about that. She thought about a drawer full of letters and a ledger full of names and a bell nobody had dug up and a boy who had sat on a swamp boardwalk and a yellow dress going under brown water, and about all the things she had seen in the past year and not written down, and about the fact that she was standing in a churchyard with the first person in fifty-two years who had ever asked her what she was supposed to do with any of it.
“Same as the rest of us,” she said. “You don’t notice.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. You go to the festival. You sit along the side of the tent. When the flap moves, you don’t look at it. When she says ‘That’ll do,’ you write the name on the clipboard. You bring a dish out here on Sunday and you don’t ask what happens to it. And when somebody from off asks you about Mrs. Lemacks, you look at the ceiling.” Marla smiled a little. “That’s the whole thing, Pam. That’s the county. It’s not that nobody knows. It’s that everybody’s agreed not to make a fuss. Hattie said she’d be there, and she is, and it would be rude to bring up the rest.”
Pam Gerlach looked at the stone for a long time.
“That’s the most Southern thing I have ever heard,” she said finally.
“Yes.”
“Gary would have hated it.”
“Most men do.”
“I think,” said Pam slowly, “I think I might be all right with it.”
She bent and straightened the foil beside the dish, so it would not blow, and stood up, and brushed off her knees.
“Give it time,” she said. “She said give it time.”
They walked back to the car under the oaks. At the gate Pam stopped and turned around and looked back across the churchyard, at the cedar and the gray stone and the Pyrex dish on the grass, and said, as if it had just occurred to her, “Who puts the gladiolas on it? There were gladiolas Thursday and there are gladiolas now.”
“I don’t know,” said Marla, who did, because she had seen Tobias Quinn’s truck turning out of the St. Paul lane early one morning in March, and had not noticed it. “Nobody’s ever asked.”
Pam Gerlach’s good year is not a matter for the newspaper, and Earline Pruitt’s list is in a Bible in a bedroom in St. George, and the paper does not print what is in people’s Bibles. But it can be said that in June the daughter in Dublin, Ohio, came down for a week and stayed for two, and that in August the garden club made Pam its treasurer without her asking, and that in October, when the Ayers family had their fish fry on the Edisto, Odessa Ayers called the house in Ashley Preserve and said, “Bring a dish,” and hung up, which in Dorchester County is as close as anybody has ever come to being asked over.
She brought the casserole. It had slumped on one side. Nobody said a word about it, and it was gone by dark.
The clipboard is in her kitchen drawer now, photocopied once more, gray on gray. Next April she will be at the tent at nine-thirty with the committee, along the side, with her hands folded. She has told Marla she does not intend to look at the flap. She has told Marla she will look at it anyway, just once, and that she has decided this is allowed, because she is from off, and the county will have to make an exception.
End of Dispatch.
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