Rule Five

At forty-four seconds, standing in the front row of the Grange Hall, I used the voice.

"Mr. Kettering," I said, every consonant ironed.

It carried to the back wall, the way it used to carry to the back of Courtroom B. "Is something about this proceeding amusing to you?"

Dennis's eyes came down from the photograph of 1971. They found me.

"Because I have one question for the county's witness," I said. "Did you include the ghost in your valuation?"

And then I laughed.

I had not planned it. I had planned the question. The laugh simply arrived, the way weather arrives in October.

It came up from somewhere I had not checked in twelve years, and it was not a dignified laugh. It was a honk. Walt told me later it sounded like a goose that had heard something shocking about another goose.

Two hundred and ninety people stared at the retired judge, honking in the front row.

Dennis stared, too. For one long second, his face stayed closed. Then I watched the shutters go up.

He laughed. He laughed the way a dam gives out, all at once, from the middle. He bent forward in the chair and put both hands over his face.

He made a sound I had never heard in four years of Sunday dinners. It was a high, helpless wheeze, like an accordion being sat on.

Faye's hands were off his ribs before the wheeze was finished. They were up in the air beside her shoulders, empty, the way the rules require. She stepped back from the chair and watched him with her head on one side. She looked like a teacher whose student had finally played the hard passage.

"Forty-six seconds," said Gloria. She looked at the stopwatch, then at Dennis.

"Conditions," she said, and paused. "Changeable."

---

The Grange Hall came apart.

People shouted. People hugged people they had sued.

The firefighters lifted Ray Dombrowski off the ground, for reasons nobody could explain. Somebody knocked over the cooler. Earl Hobart signed his oversized check with the first pen, which worked, and held it over his head with both arms. He was shaking slightly, though that may have been the standing.

Lydia was crying and humming at the same time. It was a march. It was perfectly in tempo.

Walt leaned over to me in the noise.

"Farmer didn't step out of the gate," he said. "Farmer turned into a goose."

"Is that veterinary science?"

"It is now."

Dennis was still in the chair. He had stopped laughing, mostly. Every few seconds it came back on its own, in a small aftershock. Each time, he looked at me and shook his head and lost it again.

Then he raised one hand.

"Objection," he said.

The hall quieted, slowly, in rings, like a pond.

---

Rhoda Merriweather had not moved during any of it. She sat at the judges' table with her heavy gavel and her tabbed folder. She was exactly as composed as a woman can be inside a parade.

"The chair recognizes the champion," she said.

Dennis wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. "The rules say sixty seconds, by the challenger's hands," he said. "Nothing in the rules says the champion's mother-in-law may ask about a ghost."

"I'm not the presiding judge," I said.

"You were," said Dennis, "for about two seconds. It was very convincing."

He was right, and I knew it. Rhoda knew it, too. There was a murmur. Earl lowered his check, very slightly.

Then Gloria Penhallow stood up from the clerk's table.

She reached into her cardigan pocket. She did not take out the stopwatch. She took out a folded sheet of paper, which she unfolded with great care and laid in front of Rhoda.

It was my notice from the post office board. Gloria had taken it down that morning. I learned later that she had done it at six-fifteen, "for the record." Her initials were still on the bottom.

Rhoda read it aloud.

"'Jokes are permitted. Rubber chickens are permitted. Hands are not.'"

She looked up. "Signed, H. Vosburgh." Then she turned to the chair. "Was it a joke, Mr. Kettering?"

Dennis thought about it with real care. He gave it the look he gives a cabinet.

"It was the best joke I've ever heard," he said.

Rhoda raised her gavel.

"Overruled," she said, and brought it down. It made a wonderful sound. For the first time, I did not mind.

---

There was one more piece of business. Rhoda turned to the tab at the very back of her folder.

"The chair also has before it a formal complaint," she said. "It alleges that the Straight Face contest has been rigged for five years by the champion's mother-in-law."

The hall went quiet again. Fourteen people looked at their shoes.

"Having heard the evidence," Rhoda said, "the chair finds that it was." She closed the folder. "In the other direction. Complaint dismissed."

Fourteen people laughed, a little sheepishly. Then everyone laughed with them. Mrs. Trimble laughed loudest, though her face barely moved.

Faye Mulroney accepted the Golden Gherkin. She held it in both hands and looked at it for a long time, the resin pickle on its block of walnut.

"Five years," she said, mostly to herself. Then she turned to Dennis. "You had me worried at forty."

"You had me at three," Dennis said. "I just wasn't allowed to say so."

They shook hands. She put her fingerless gloves back on and played a quick scale on the Gherkin's walnut base. The hall applauded her, and then him, and then, for some reason, Gloria's stopwatch.

---

Afterward, I found Dennis on the Grange Hall steps. He was holding one of Earl's free pickles and looking at it as if it had been assessed too low.

"You laughed," he said.

"I'm told it was a goose."

"It was a very good goose." He turned the pickle over. "In eleven years, I didn't know you could."

"Neither did I," I said. "Nobody ever asked me about a ghost."

He nodded. He did not say anything warm, and neither did I. We just sat on the steps and watched the firefighters carry Ray to his truck. It was the most comfortable silence we had ever shared.

---

The new ladder truck arrived in April. It is red and enormous and makes no noise at all getting out of a car.

The fire department took a photograph in front of it, with Earl standing in the middle holding a pickle jar. They hung it in the Grange Hall beside the photograph from 1971. It sits, I am told, directly above the left shoulder of whoever is presiding.

Next year, that will be me again. Rhoda has insisted.

"You're presiding," she told me at the March council meeting. "I'm entering."

"You'll last four seconds."

"I raised three daughters and ran this council for eleven years," Rhoda said. "I'll last sixty."

She tapped her gavel on the table, lightly. "And I want Kyle. He asks first."

---

We had Thanksgiving at the farmhouse that year. Walt made a turkey. Lydia brought two pies and no band folders. Dennis arrived at six exactly, in a pressed flannel shirt.

The clock over the stove was correct. Dennis had fixed it the Sunday after the contest, without saying anything. I noticed it a week later. That is apparently how we do things in this family.

Dennis laughs at dinner now. He laughs at Walt's cows and at Lydia's stories about the trombone section.

Once, he laughed at a dinner roll, and none of us could ever establish why. Lydia says that's what makes it funny.

Halfway through the turkey, Walt began to carve the second leg. He did it, in my opinion, incorrectly. I set down my fork.

"The court notes," I said, "that the joint is located approximately two inches to the—"

"Pickle," said Dennis.

I stopped. Instantly. Not in a second. Not after a reasonable interval.

The table waited.

"Rule five," Dennis said, very seriously. He picked up his fork. "The judge wrote it."

In nine years, nobody had ever said that word in the Grange Hall. Now it gets said at our table about once a week. It works every time. Walt carves the turkey wrong, and Lydia hums in perfect tempo, and my son-in-law laughs at the dinner rolls.

And I keep a straight face for about as long as Pastor Amsel.