The ninth annual Straight Face contest sold out by ten in the morning. The Grange Hall holds two hundred and forty people. Gloria counted two hundred and ninety, and then stopped counting and wrote "fire code" in her notebook with a question mark.
People stood along the walls and sat on the stage steps. Somebody had brought a cooler.
The Dairy Bar sign had been carried in on two poles and leaned against the back wall: CRACK DENNIS, SAVE THE TRUCK. Under it, someone had added a third line in fresh paint. TODAY.
Earl Hobart sat by the door with his pickle bucket and his bolo tie. He had brought an oversized check, made out to the Larkin Falls Volunteer Fire Department. The amount was filled in. The signature line was blank.
"I'll sign it when he laughs," Earl told everyone who walked past. "I brought two pens. In case one dies of old age before I do."
I sat where Rhoda had ordered me to sit: front row, left side, same as every year.
It felt different from the audience. For nine years, I had been at the long table under the stage, with the index card in front of me and my good pen.
This year, the table belonged to Rhoda Merriweather. She had brought her heavy gavel and a folder with fresh tabs. She had also, I noticed, brought a cushion for her chair.
Walt sat on my right. Lydia sat on my left, with a band folder she was not grading. She was humming. It was not in any time signature I recognized.
"Steady," Walt said, and patted my knee.
"I'm perfectly steady."
"I was talking to Lydia."
Behind the judges' table, high on the wall, hung the fire department's photograph from 1971. Twelve volunteers in front of a shiny new ladder truck, squinting into the sun. I had walked past it for nine years without looking at it once. Now I could not stop.
It was directly above my left shoulder. More or less.
The regular contestants went first. They always do. It warms up the room and the firefighters.
Every contestant handed Gloria a signed waiver, in triplicate, and showed a driver's license. Gloria checks every license, including Earl's, every year. Earl hands it over with great ceremony and says, "Still twenty-one, Gloria." Gloria says, "Noted."
Then the contestant sat in the chair, and a firefighter leaned down and asked the same question. "You know the word?"
"Pickle," said the contestant.
"Any time," said the firefighter.
Kyle asked his own version. "Is this okay?" Every contestant said yes. Several said it was the nicest thing anyone had asked them all week.
Pastor Lyle Amsel lasted four seconds. He laughed so hard he had to wipe his glasses. When he stood up, he raised both arms to the crowd and shouted, "Easter two thousand eleven!" Nobody understood it, and everybody cheered.
Ray Dombrowski did not last one second. He laughed before the feathers reached him. He said later it was the anticipation. Gloria wrote down "0.4" and underlined it twice.
Mrs. Trimble, at eighty, lasted thirty-one seconds, the best score of the morning. Her face never moved. When Gloria called time, she stood up and adjusted her cardigan.
"I raised four sons," she said. "You'll have to do better than a feather."
The crowd gave her a standing ovation. Dennis, sitting in the side row with the other finalists, clapped for her with real enthusiasm. It was the first time in five years I had seen him clap at the contest.
He wasn't looking toward the judges' table yet. I noticed that.
At noon, Rhoda lifted her gavel and brought it down.
"The championship round," she said. "Challenger, Faye Mulroney, of Dunmore County. Champion, Dennis Kettering, of Larkin Falls."
The hall made the noise a hall makes when two hundred and ninety people inhale. Somebody in the back said, "Here we go." Earl uncapped his first pen.
Faye walked out from the side of the stage. She wore a black concert dress, as if for a recital. She had taken off her fingerless gloves and folded them neatly on the end of the judges' table.
She flexed her hands once, then ran a scale down the back of the empty chair. The sound was soft and quick and very sure of itself.
Then Dennis stood up.
He wore his pressed flannel shirt. He had had another haircut from Sal. He walked to the chair at an even pace, stopped beside the clerk's table, and looked at Gloria.
"Is the clock calibrated?"
Gloria held up the brass stopwatch. "Since 1968."
"Thank you," said Dennis.
He sat in the chair. He put his hands flat on his knees. He looked up and found the photograph of 1971, high above my left shoulder.
His face closed.
I watched it happen. It was like watching a store pull down its shutters at five o'clock. One moment there was a man in that chair, a man who had laughed at a ghost in my courtroom eleven years ago. The next moment, there was only a property assessor, waiting to see what the room was worth.
Rhoda leaned forward. She asked the questions exactly as I had always asked them.
"Mr. Kettering, are you twenty-one or older?"
"Forty-five."
"You have signed the waiver?"
"In triplicate."
"You consent to sixty seconds, sides and ribs only, by the challenger's hands?"
"I do."
"And you know the word?"
"Pickle," said Dennis.
Faye leaned down beside the chair. "I'll stop the moment you say it," she said. "Not the next moment. That moment."
"I know," Dennis said. "I read the rules. The judge wrote them."
Gloria raised the stopwatch.
"Begin," she said.
I had expected Faye to be fast. She was faster than that.
Her hands went to his ribs, over the flannel, quick and light, like a passage marked allegro. They moved up a little, down a little, never stopping, never landing in the same place twice. The front rows laughed just from watching. A man by the cooler had to sit down.
Dennis did not move.
"Ten seconds," Gloria said, in her shipping-forecast voice. "Conditions calm."
Faye changed tempo. She slowed down, which was somehow worse. Someone near the stage made a sound like a kettle.
"Twenty seconds. Conditions calm."
Dennis's eyes were fixed above my left shoulder. His jaw was set. His hands stayed flat on his knees. He looked exactly like a man on a witness stand who has been asked about a ghost and has decided not to have an opinion.
Lydia gripped my arm. "He's going," she whispered. "Look at his left eyebrow. That means he's going."
His left eyebrow moved a sixteenth of an inch. Then it went back where it belonged.
"Thirty seconds. Conditions calm."
The room had stopped laughing. People were leaning forward, like spectators at the end of a close game. Earl had his pen in the air. Ray Dombrowski had both hands over his mouth.
And Dennis held. He held because of the photograph above my shoulder. He held because of a gray Tuesday eleven years ago, and a voice that said "This court expects dignity." He held because the judge had never once, in his sight, lost her own composure.
Twelve years on the bench, nine contests, four years of Sunday dinners. I had kept a straight face through all of it. I was the undefeated champion of this hall, and nobody had ever thought to tickle me.
I could not leave my seat. Rhoda had ruled on that, and she was right. I could not touch him. That was rule three, and I had written it.
But I had also written a notice. It still hung on the board outside the post office, initialed by Gloria. Jokes are permitted.
"Forty seconds," Gloria said. "Conditions calm."
Walt's heifer would not go through the gate while the farmer stood in it. But nobody had said the farmer had to leave. The farmer could just stop looking like a farmer.
"Forty-four seconds."
I stood up in the front row of the Grange Hall. Two hundred and ninety people turned to look at me. Rhoda's gavel rose an inch off the table.
And I did something I had not done in a courtroom in twelve years.
Up next: Rule Five
Continue to Part 6 →