The rules of Straight Face fit on one index card, and I wrote every word of them.
Rule one: every contestant is twenty-one or older and signs the waiver, in triplicate. Rule two: sixty seconds in the chair, timed by the town clerk. Rule three: sides and ribs only, over the shirt, with a feather or with fingers. Rule four: you lose if you laugh, smile, or squirm.
Rule five is the one people remember. If you want it to stop, you say "pickle," and it stops.
Not in a second. Not after a reasonable interval. Instantly.
I spent twelve years on the Juniper County circuit bench. I know what happens to rules that leave room for interpretation. People move into the room and start redecorating.
My name is Constance Vosburgh. I am forty-seven years old, and I retired from the bench two years ago. People in Larkin Falls still call me Judge, mostly at the hardware store, where it gets me nothing.
I left because I had stopped being surprised. My last case involved a goat, a mailbox, and two brothers who had not spoken since 1997. I ruled on all three in eleven minutes. Then I went to my chambers and realized I had seen everything a county could produce.
I was wrong about that. I had not yet seen my son-in-law sit in a folding chair.
Straight Face began nine years ago, when the roof of the Larkin Falls Volunteer Fire Department started leaking onto the fire engine. The department needed money. The town had already held a pancake breakfast, a chili cook-off and a raffle for a quilt. Nobody could face another quilt.
So I proposed a contest. Adult volunteers would pay twenty dollars to sit in a chair and keep a straight face while being tickled. Sponsors would pledge by the second. The fire department would supply the ticklers, and the Grange Hall would supply the chairs.
The town council approved it four to one. The one was Rhoda Merriweather, who runs the quilt raffle.
The safe word came from Earl Hobart. Earl is eighty-one and founded Hobart's Pickle Works in 1968, which still employs half the town and scents the other half. He pledged the first five hundred dollars on one condition.
"The stop word should be 'pickle,'" he said at the meeting. "For the brand."
"It's not a brand," Rhoda said. "It's a vegetable."
"It's a cucumber with ambition," Earl said. "Like me."
I wrote "pickle" on the index card that night. In nine years, nobody has ever said it. Not once.
People laugh at about second four, the way people do. Then they get up, pink and pleased, and collect a free pickle from Earl's bucket at the door. Nobody has ever needed to stop anything. But the word is there, and it works, and the ticklers know it the way they know where the fire hydrants are.
The contest grew. The second year, we had forty contestants.
By the fifth year, people drove in from Dunmore County, and the Larkin Falls Ledger sent a photographer. The trophy is a resin pickle, spray-painted gold, mounted on a block of walnut.
Earl named it the Golden Gherkin. I have asked him not to. He has declined.
For the first three years, nobody lasted sixty seconds. The record was thirty-eight, held by a long-haul trucker who claimed he had no nerves below the neck.
Then Dennis Kettering sat down.
Dennis is forty-five years old. He is the Juniper County property assessor. He is the man who comes to your house with a clipboard and decides what it is worth.
He has done this for eighteen years. As a result, almost everyone in Larkin Falls has stood in their own kitchen while Dennis looked at their cabinets.
He has two facial expressions. One is for funerals. The other is for everything else.
The first year he entered, I was presiding at the judges' table, and I did not know him.
I knew his reputation. He had once assessed the mayor's house while the mayor followed him from room to room shouting about property taxes. Dennis had measured the dining room, written down a number, and said, "Thank you for your time." The mayor reportedly lost his voice for two days.
Dennis sat in the chair in a pressed flannel shirt. Two volunteer firefighters stood on either side with ostrich feathers. Gloria Penhallow, the town clerk, raised her brass stopwatch.
Gloria is seventy-four. She has timed Straight Face from the beginning with a stopwatch she bought in 1968. She announces the seconds in a low, steady voice, like a shipping forecast for a very small sea.
"Begin," she said.
The feathers went to work on his ribs. The crowd leaned in. Dennis looked straight ahead at a point above my left shoulder. He looked at it as if it had recently sold below its asking price.
"Thirty seconds," Gloria said. "Conditions calm."
The firefighters switched to fingers, which was within the rules. Dennis blinked once. A man in the third row started laughing on his behalf.
"Sixty," Gloria said. "Contestant composed."
The room exploded. Dennis stood up, tucked in his shirt, and accepted the Golden Gherkin as if it were a parking ticket he intended to pay promptly.
He has won it five years in a row. Every year he sits in the same chair. Every year he stares at the same spot above my left shoulder. Every year, before he sits down, he asks Gloria the same question.
"Is the clock calibrated?"
"Since 1968," Gloria says.
"Thank you," says Dennis.
Four years ago, I married Walt Vosburgh, a retired large-animal veterinarian with kind eyes and a habit of explaining people by comparing them to cows. Walt is sixty-three. He came with a farmhouse, an elderly beagle and a grown daughter named Lydia.
Lydia is thirty-eight and directs the middle school band. She hums when she is thinking and hums louder when she disagrees with you. She came with Dennis, whom she had married six years before.
That is how I acquired a son-in-law two years younger than I am. I mention it more often than I should. Walt says I mention it the way some people mention a war injury.
"He's a good man," Walt told me the week before our wedding. "He's just a steady animal. Some cows go to the fence when you call. Some stand in the middle of the pasture and wait to see what you're about."
"Which am I?"
"You're the one who goes to the fence and inspects it," Walt said. "Then files a report on the fence."
We have Sunday dinner at the farmhouse every week. In four years, I have never heard Dennis laugh.
I have seen him smile twice. Once at a well-built porch. Once when Lydia's band played a march in tune.
"He laughs all the time," Lydia told me, that first summer.
"I have not observed it."
"Mom, you're doing the voice."
"What voice?"
"The courtroom voice. The 'I have not observed it' voice."
She hummed a few bars of something. "He laughs at home. He laughs at cartoons. He laughed at a sandwich once."
"What was funny about the sandwich?"
"Nothing. That's what was funny."
I looked across the table at Dennis. He was cutting his pot roast into squares of equal size. He looked up and met my eyes. Then he returned to the pot roast, having found nothing in my face that required a reassessment.
"Objection," I said. "Hearsay."
"Overruled," Walt said, and passed the potatoes.
That was how things stood the Tuesday before the ninth annual Straight Face.
The fire department had replaced its roof years ago. Now it needed a ladder truck. The old one had been built the year Gloria bought her stopwatch.
Lately it made the same noise Earl makes getting out of a car. The contest had raised eleven thousand dollars toward the new one. The department needed thirty.
I went to the town council meeting that night to reserve the Grange Hall. It is a formality. I have reserved it for the second Saturday of October every year for nine years.
The council meets in the basement of the library, under a water stain shaped like Ohio. Rhoda Merriweather presides. Rhoda is fifty-eight and has been council president for eleven years.
She brings her own gavel to every meeting, because she says the town's gavel is "too light to mean anything." Hers is heavier than mine. She has made sure I know it.
"Item six," Rhoda said. "Reservation of the Grange Hall for the Straight Face contest. Judge Vosburgh."
I stood. "The usual date, Madam President."
Rhoda did not pick up her pen. She picked up a manila folder. It was thick. It had tabs.
"Before we vote," she said, "the chair has received a formal complaint." She looked at me over her reading glasses. "It alleges that the Straight Face contest has been rigged for five consecutive years."
The basement went very quiet. Somewhere above us, a librarian dropped a book.
"Rigged by whom?" I asked.
Rhoda lifted her heavy gavel and set it down gently in front of her, the way you set down a winning card.
"By the champion's mother-in-law," she said.
Up next: Recusal
Continue to Part 2 →