In twelve years on the bench, I was accused of many things. Bias toward landlords. Bias toward tenants. Once, by a man who had driven his riding mower through a Dairy Bar window, bias toward windows.
Nobody had ever accused me of rigging a tickling contest.
Rhoda Merriweather opened her manila folder in the library basement, under the water stain shaped like Ohio. The complaint was nine pages long.
It had been signed by fourteen residents of Larkin Falls. I recognized most of the names. Several of them had lost the Golden Gherkin to Dennis Kettering. One of them had lost it twice.
"Exhibit A," Rhoda said, and held up a photograph from the Larkin Falls Ledger.
It showed Dennis in the chair at last year's contest. Two firefighters flanked him with feathers. His face was a closed bank on a public holiday.
"Note the champion's eyes," Rhoda said. "In every photograph, for five years, he is looking at the same location." She tapped the picture. "Directly above the left shoulder of the presiding judge."
"I'm aware," I said. "I've been under that gaze for five years. It's like being appraised."
"The complaint suggests he is receiving signals."
"From my shoulder?"
"From your general area."
Exhibit B was the ticklers. For nine years, I had assigned the volunteer firefighters to the chair. The complaint alleged that I gave Dennis "the gentlest firefighters available."
Fire Chief Ray Dombrowski stood up in the third row. Ray is fifty-two and built like a vending machine. He takes any criticism of his department as a personal insult to his mother.
"There are no gentle firefighters," Ray said. "We are all equally rough."
"Thank you, Chief," Rhoda said.
"Except Kyle," Ray added. "Kyle is gentle. But Kyle has never been assigned to Dennis."
"Noted," said Gloria Penhallow, from the clerk's table. She wrote it down. Gloria writes everything down. She once took minutes during a power outage, by flashlight, and they were the best minutes the council has ever had.
Exhibit C was Gloria's stopwatch.
"It was purchased in 1968," Rhoda read. "It has never been independently inspected."
Gloria looked up from her minutes. She did not say anything.
She simply removed the brass stopwatch from her cardigan pocket, wound it twice, and set it on the table. The basement listened to it tick. It sounded like a small, offended heart.
Rhoda moved on to Exhibit D.
Exhibit D was the marriage.
"In the fourth year of the contest," Rhoda read, "Dennis Kettering won the Golden Gherkin. In the fifth year, the presiding judge married his father-in-law."
She turned a page. "In every year since, Dennis Kettering has won again." She lowered the folder. "The complainants find this pattern troubling."
"He was undefeated before he was my son-in-law," I said.
"The complainants do not consider that relevant."
"It's the only relevant fact in the folder."
"Is that a ruling, Judge?"
It was, of course. It was the voice. I heard it come out of me the way Lydia always describes it, every consonant ironed. Fourteen of my neighbors had signed a document saying I could not be trusted, and I was answering them like a docket.
I sat down and folded my hands.
I thought about the goat case, and the mailbox, and the two brothers who had not spoken since 1997. They had both believed I was against them. I had not been. It had not mattered.
A judge who has to argue that she's fair has already lost the argument. She has just not been told yet.
I stood up again.
"Madam President," I said. "I recuse myself from presiding over this year's contest."
Rhoda blinked. She had prepared for a fight. She had a folder with tabs. She did not have a tab for this.
"Someone neutral should sit at the judges' table," I went on. "Someone with no family in the chair.
"Someone who has never liked the contest, so nobody can say she wants it to succeed." I looked at her. "I nominate you."
There was a murmur. Ray Dombrowski said, "Oh, boy," at a volume he believed was private.
Rhoda looked at her heavy gavel for a long moment. Then she picked it up.
"The chair accepts," she said, and brought it down.
It made a much better sound than mine. I hated that.
The meeting should have ended there. It nearly did. Gloria was capping her pen. Ray was reaching for his coat.
Then Earl Hobart stood up in the back row.
Earl had come, as he comes to everything, in a short-sleeved dress shirt and a bolo tie with a tiny silver pickle on it. He carried a quart jar of his own bread-and-butter chips, because he believes in hospitality and also in market penetration. He is eighty-one. Standing up takes him about as long as a council vote.
"I'd like to make a pledge," Earl said.
"We're adjourning, Earl," Rhoda said.
"I'll be quick. I'm eighty-one. Everything I do is quick now, except standing."
Rhoda sighed and gestured. Earl set his jar on a folding chair.
"That ladder truck," he said. "How short are you, Ray?"
"Nineteen thousand," Ray said.
"I'll put in ten," Earl said. "Ten thousand dollars, from Hobart's Pickle Works, straight to the fire department."
The basement made a noise I had never heard it make. It was the noise of a small town doing arithmetic.
"On one condition," Earl said.
Of course there was a condition. There is always a condition with Earl. The last one was a cucumber.
"Somebody makes Dennis Kettering laugh," Earl said. "This year, in the chair, by the rules.
"If he cracks, the fire department gets ten thousand. If he doesn't, the money goes back in my pension."
He picked his jar back up. "I'd like to see that boy laugh before I die. I'm not buying green bananas."
Dennis called me the next morning. He had heard by six-fifteen, which is normal for Larkin Falls. The Ledger comes out on Thursdays. The news comes out at the gas station.
"I understand you've recused yourself," he said.
"I have."
"That was correct."
"Thank you, Dennis."
There was a pause on the line. Dennis is comfortable with pauses. He leaves them in conversation the way some people leave their shoes by the door: neatly, and for later.
"I'd like you to know something," he said. "I won't lose on purpose."
"I would never ask you to."
"I know. But people will."
Another pause. "If I laughed on purpose, that would be fraud. I assess things at their fair value. That includes myself."
I wanted to say something warm. In four years, I had never quite found the right warm thing to say to Dennis. He received compliments the way he received the Golden Gherkin. He accepted them, then seemed to file them somewhere.
"Understood," I said, which was not warm at all.
"Thank you, Judge," he said, and hung up.
Walt was at the kitchen table, eating oatmeal and reading about soybean futures.
"He's going to hold," I said.
"Course he is," Walt said. "He's a steady animal. You can't hurry a steady animal. You can only make the fence interesting."
"Is that advice?"
"It's veterinary science."
By noon, the whole town knew about Earl's ten thousand dollars. By two, the Dairy Bar had a sign that said CRACK DENNIS, SAVE THE TRUCK. By four, someone had added a drawing of Dennis's face. It was a very good likeness, because it was a rectangle.
The Straight Face sign-up sheet lives on a clipboard at Kettering's Hardware. No relation. Every Larkin Falls family has a Kettering in it somewhere, and none of them claim each other.
Normally contestants sign up to sit in the chair. This year, under the rules Rhoda had issued from her folder, there was a new section. One challenger would be chosen to face the champion. Applicants were to list their name, age, and qualifications.
On Friday morning, I went to the hardware store to buy furnace filters. I told myself it was the furnace filters.
The clipboard hung on its nail by the register. It had been stapled to a second clipboard, and then a third. Forty-one people had signed up to tickle my son-in-law.
The pastor of First Methodist. Two of the firefighters, including Kyle. A dental hygienist and somebody's grandmother.
Ray Dombrowski had signed it twice and been crossed out once by Gloria, with the note "One per person."
The last name on the third clipboard was in small, careful handwriting, the handwriting of someone who had once written a great many report cards.
F. Mulroney. Age 66. Dunmore County.
Under "qualifications," she had written one line.
Two hundred and twelve people. No one has lasted twenty seconds.
Up next: The Larkin Falls Offensive
Continue to Part 3 →