Slow Dollar (6 page)

The small Ferris wheel was already turning and music was playing beyond the Agricultural Hall when I came skidding up at five past ten. I thought Dwight’s visit had made me late, but I soon learned that I’d confused the time of my event with the barbecue contest and wouldn’t have to face any yams till eleven. That gave me a chance to visit with Herman and Haywood and to see how they were faring in the blind tastings.

A dozen or more black steel cookers were lined up under the huge oak trees that shaded the rear of the hall. The big twins had been there since midnight, slowly grilling a hefty pig on their gas-fired cooker and taking turns catching catnaps in the back of Herman’s van.

“Just like setting up with a ‘bacco barn,” said Haywood, who really wasn’t quite old enough to remember those days when tobacco was cured with wood fires that had to be fed all through the night. He liked to think he was, though.

Two of my sisters-in-law, Haywood’s Isabel and Herman’s Nadine, were seated nearby in folding chairs. Herman’s an electrician here in Dobbs, so Isabel and my niece Jane Ann had spent the night with Nadine and her Annie Sue rather than drive back to the farm. Evidently, they’d brought breakfast for the twins because Herman was munching on a homemade biscuit.

“Where are the kids?” I asked.

“Oh, those girls were still talking when we went to bed,” said Nadine. “We won’t see them before noon.”

“What about Stevie? Didn’t he stay over, too?”

“He had laundry to do,” said Isabel with a comfortable chuckle for her un-motherliness. “If he wants to wear cotton shirts, then he’s gonna be the one to wash and iron them. Same with Jane Ann.”

“Just what I tell my kids,” Nadine chimed in. “You get good polyester and you can’t tell it from cotton ‘cepting you don’t have to iron it.”

She gave my chambray dress a critical look. “Is that cotton?”

“Well, I like cotton for my work shirts,” said Haywood. “You’n heat to death in them synthetic shirts. You got any more of them ham biscuits, honey?”

Isabel reached into a cooler at her feet and waved a somewhat depleted but still fragrant basket of cholesterol and carbohydrates beneath my nose.

“Don’t you want one, too, Deb’rah?”

Well, of course, I did—Isabel makes her buttermilk biscuits big as bear claws and she’d sliced the salt-cured dark red ham with an equally generous hand—but somehow I dredged up the willpower to resist.

“Just finished a big breakfast,” I said, hoping they wouldn’t hear my stomach growl in protest above the music coming from the midway. “I’ll be back for some barbecue later if there’s any left.”

“We’ll save you some, honey,” Haywood promised, biting into pure succulence before getting on my case.

Even though Herman’s still in a wheelchair, there had been plenty of opportunity between catnaps and hands of gin rummy for the big twins to visit the other cookers and catch up on all the gossip around the county. Haywood’s never seen a stranger and has never been shy about asking questions or giving advice and Herman’s not far behind him.

“Heard you was the one found that boy that got hisself killed,” Haywood said disapprovingly.

“Ought you to be doing such stuff and you a judge?” asked Herman.

“You need to remember to be a little more dignified,” Haywood said. “Don’t look good for you to be messing around with trouble like that.”

“I promise you it wasn’t something I’d planned on,” I told them.

Nadine and Isabel wanted to hear every detail, and they were disappointed at how little I could tell them. I gathered there were much more interesting speculations making the rounds of the cookers—“You know what carnival people are like. All them tattoos? Steal you blind if you take your eyes off ‘em”—and they were prepared to share those speculations with me, but Seth and Minnie arrived about then just as someone with a microphone called for our attention.

“The first round of tasting has been completed,” he announced. “The final four are numbers one, four, seven, and eight.”

There were whoops and cheers from the spectators and a couple of good-natured boos from the eliminated cooks.

“We’re number seven,” Haywood confided in a bass whisper that could’ve been heard in Raleigh if the music from the merry-go-round on the other side of the fence hadn’t drowned him out.

They had placed second last year, he reminded me, and while second “won’t real shabby considering the competition, this year me and Herman’s got us a secret ingredient.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, ma’am! This year we soaked some oak chips overnight in ginger ale and we sprinkled them on the bottom to get that extra flavor in the smoke.”

But for all his pretense of complacency, he and Herman watched closely as the judges sampled the four finalists and marked their scorecards. Then, after a whispered conference, they each went back for yet another taste of numbers four and seven. I saw Haywood’s big hand clench Herman’s shoulder.

A final huddle with the judges, then the list of winners was handed to the announcer. Honorable mention went to number one, a team of Shriners from Dobbs. To everyone’s surprise (and more than a little chagrin), third place was awarded to number eight, a couple of newcomers from Michigan who’ve really taken to our style of barbecue. Last year’s winners, the men’s Sunday school class of Mt. Olive A.M.E. Zion, started high-fiving each other, confident that they were about to carry home the blue ribbon again.

The announcer milked the suspense for all it was worth, then cried, “The red ribbon goes to number four, and number seven is this year’s blue-ribbon champion! Let’s give ‘em all a big hand, folks.”

Haywood grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and pushed it so fast across the uneven ground toward the announcer that Herman said later he thought he was taking a victory lap at Rockingham rather than accepting first place at a little old barbecue contest. “The way Brother Haywood was taking them curves, I needed me a seat belt.”

The other ribbon winners crowded around to congratulate them.

“What’d you say you soaked your oak chips in?” asked one of the Michiganites.

“Grape Nehi,” Herman answered blandly.

“Now, why’d you go and tell ‘em that?” Haywood scolded when they returned with their ribbon. “That’s liable to taste real good.”

Leaving the big twins to fasten that blue rosette to their cooker and bask in their glory, Seth and Minnie walked into the Ag Hall with me for the Some Yam Thing or Other contest. Seth is five up from me and the brother who’s always cut me the most slack. Minnie is my self-appointed campaign manager and she’s the one who volunteered me to judge today. She believes in keeping me in the public eye. (At least, she believes in keeping me there as long as there are only positive things for the public eye to see.)

Since last night’s murder hadn’t come up in front of her, I could safely assume she hadn’t yet heard of my involvement. I was hoping to keep it that way for the time being.

As I glanced around In hall, I noticed other family members and looked at Minnie suspiciously. “I thought we agreed that none of the kids would enter.”

“What makes you think they have?” she parried.

“Oh, come on, Minnie. Why else are Doris and Robert here? And there’s Jess, your own daughter. And Zach’s Emma.”

“Now, don’t worry about it, honey. There’s no names on anything. You just judge it like you would if you didn’t know they were in it.”

It was a good thing that I had two colleagues to help with the judging or rumors might have started that the fix was in.

“Yoo-hoo, Deborah!” my sister-in-law Doris called. When she caught my eye, she shifted her own eyes significantly from her grandson Bert to the table that held entries for the under-sixes.

“I saw that,” said Luther Parker. Luther is tall and gangly and looks sort of like a black Abe Lincoln without the beard. He’s Colleton County’s first African American district court judge and has a dry sense of humor. “No playing favorites, now.”

I looked around the hall and saw his wife Louise. We exchanged waves as a bright-eyed little girl ran up to her and tugged at her hand.

Luther and Louise’s first grandchild.

“May we assume Sarah’s entered in the first category?” I asked sweetly.

He gave a sheepish shrug.

“And what about you?” I asked our third judge, Ellis Glover, who’s Clerk of Court.

“I don’t have a dog in the first fight,” he laughed, “but my sister’s son’s in the six-to-sixteen bunch.”

“I probably have some nieces there, too,” I told them. “Shall we all recuse ourselves and go home?”

“Not unless you know which entries are which,” said Luther.

I admitted I didn’t and the same held true for Ellis and him, so we got down to it.

The object, of course, is to give out as many rosettes as possible to the younger children. Neither Bert nor Sarah won first, second, or third, but they each carried off one of the ten green ribbons for honorable mention and were too young not to be pleased with their success.

In the second group, I was pretty sure that the wagonload of yam children pulled by a remarkably horse-shaped yam was Jess’s entry. She’s crazy about horses and it would have taken something serendipitous like this for her to enter when I’d asked the family to skip the contest this year. Ellis and Luther had marked it as a possible winner on their first ballots, so I didn’t feel bad keeping it in the first round, too. The yam baby had a natural indentation that made it look as if it was bawling its head off.

It was cute enough to win a unanimous second place, but the blue ribbon went to a Hispanic boy’s tableau that featured space yams walking on the moon along with some yam aliens. When Jess bounced up to accept her award, we both pretended we didn’t know each other. Wouldn’t have looked good for a judge to hug one of the winners.

That didn’t stop Minnie and Seth, though, and while they were distracted, I slipped back to the pig cookers. The Ladies Auxiliary of Colleton Memorial Hospital had brought coleslaw, spiced apples, hushpuppies, and various desserts to augment the meat and were now selling plates of the donated barbecue to benefit the children’s wing. I asked Isabel and Nadine if I could have a foam take-out box of barbecue and another of slaw and apples.

“Not that you’re not welcome, Deborah, but what’re you going to do with so much food?” they asked me.

“I thought I’d take it over to the family of that boy that got killed yesterday,” I said. “They’d probably like something a little more substantial than corn dogs and elephant ears.”

That’s all I had to say. I don’t know if it’s genes or something in the water, but death or sickness always triggers the female impulse to provide food for the afflicted, and the next thing I knew, Nadine and Isabel were cutting into the serving line to fill more foam boxes with hushpuppies and banana pudding, too. They divided the boxes between two shopping bags and I set off down the midway like someone making a delivery from a Chinese restaurant.

When I reached the compound where all the carnival vehicles were parked, I saw Dwight standing beside the open back end of a tractor-trailer van with Arnold Ames and a couple of uniformed town officers. I didn’t have to ask him which travel trailer belonged to the Ameses. There was a small spray of white carnations wired to the lamp beside the door.