Ranger's Prize

The cottage sat at the far edge of the Harrison County fairgrounds, tucked behind the horse barns like something the fair had forgotten. Rodney parked his old truck next to it and sat for a minute, listening. Even out here he could hear the midway. Generators humming. A speaker somewhere announcing the hog judging. Music from a ride he couldn't see.

"Peace and quiet," he said to nobody. "Sure, Dirk. Whatever you say."

Dirk had called him in June, all enthusiasm. Rodney, my brother from another mother, I need a house-sitter for three weeks. Nobody will bother you. You'll have the whole fairgrounds to yourself. It'll be like your old fire watch towers, just with plumbing.

Rodney was sixty-five and retired from thirty-eight years as a park ranger. He had spent most of those years alone and had liked it fine. Mostly fine. He got out of the truck, unlocked the cottage with the key under the hummingbird feeder, and looked around. Small place. One bedroom, a kitchen that had last been updated sometime in the eighties, a living room with two chairs and a bookshelf. Out the back window there was a little garden gone half to seed, with a fence around it and a gate.

He set his bag down and made coffee. The announcement speaker crackled again. The pig contest was apparently a big deal.

"Great," he said.

The fair had been running two days when he finally walked into it. He told himself it was to buy groceries, since the nearest real store was twelve miles, but the truth was he was curious. He had spent decades watching people come into the parks and do foolish things, and county fairs were a reliable source of foolish things.

The midway smelled like fryer oil and manure, in about equal parts. He passed the rabbit barn, the quilting exhibit, a man selling knives to a crowd of other men. Then he saw the bake stand.

It was a proper wooden booth with a hand-painted sign. MABEL'S PIES. BLUE RIBBON, TWENTY YEARS RUNNING. Behind the counter stood a woman in her late fifties with gray hair pinned up and an apron that had clearly seen work. A line of people waited in front of her, and she was moving them through fast, taking money, boxing slices, joking with a kid who was maybe old enough to vote and not a day sooner.

There was a little card taped to the counter. WINNING PIE OF THE YEAR. CHERRY. $4 A SLICE.

Rodney didn't plan to say anything. He bought a slice because the line was there and he was hungry, sat at the picnic table beside the booth, and ate it. Then he walked back up to the counter to throw his plate away, and the woman at the register, not Mabel but a younger volunteer, asked, "Well? What'd you think?"

It was the way she asked. Like the answer could only be one thing.

"Too sweet," Rodney said. "Cherry's supposed to fight back a little. That tasted like sugar with a cherry problem."

The line went quiet the way a line does when somebody has just said a thing.

"You want to run that by me again?" The voice came from behind the counter. Mabel had stopped boxing slices. She was looking at him with her hands on her hips and her chin up.

"Too sweet," Rodney said. "Good crust. Crust is excellent, actually. Filling's candy."

"Candy." She came around the counter and up to him, and she was shorter than he expected but she did not seem to know it. "Twenty years I've taken the blue ribbon at this fair. Twenty years. And you're telling me my cherry pie is candy."

"I'm telling you it's too sweet, ma'am. The ribbon's yours, I'm not arguing with the judges. I'm just one man with one slice."

"One man with one slice," she repeated. "You some kind of baker?"

"Retired park ranger."

"A park ranger." She looked him up and down. He was a big man, six foot two, built like somebody who had carried packs up mountains for four decades, and his beard was mostly white. "And what does a park ranger know about cherry pie?"

"I know what a cherry tastes like. Yours doesn't."

The crowd at the picnic tables had stopped pretending to eat. Somebody snorted. Mabel's ears went pink, which was interesting, Rodney thought, because her voice didn't waver at all.

"Well," she said. "You know where the gate is, ranger. And you know what they say about opinions."

"They say everybody's got one. Usually they leave out the part where most of them are right."

That got a laugh out of the picnic tables. Mabel stared at him a second longer, then turned back to her counter and started boxing slices again, fast.

"Next," she called. "Next, come on, we've got pie to sell. Penny, take his money."

Rodney walked off with his plate. He did not feel bad, exactly. He felt like he had poked something and it had poked back, and it had been, if he was honest, the most fun he'd had at a fair in forty years.

* * *

The next evening he was carrying his coffee out to the back garden of the cottage when he found her.

Mabel was standing inside the little fence, holding her boots in one hand, wading barefoot through the gone-wild mint to reach the gate. She had a paper bag in her other hand. She looked up and saw him and stopped dead.

"This is Dirk's garden," she said. Not a question.

"Dirk's cottage," Rodney agreed. "I'm house-sitting. Rodney."

"I know who you are." She came through the gate and set her boots down on the path. "Dirk told me somebody'd be here. He didn't tell me it'd be the pie critic of Harrison County."

"I was going to apologize for that," Rodney said. "I've been rehearsing. It wasn't going well."

"Wasn't going well?"

"Every version I came up with had a but in it. I'm sorry your pie is too sweet, but. That's not an apology, that's just the insult wearing a hat."

Mabel looked at him for a moment. Then she laughed, a real one, short and surprised out of her.

"Well. Sit down then, ranger, and do it anyway."

They sat on the two wooden chairs by the garden gate. She opened the paper bag and it was full of green beans, which she started snapping into a bowl she had apparently brought for the purpose. Rodney drank his coffee. The midway noise was fainter back here, just a bass thump and occasionally screaming from the rides.

"Who taught you to garden?" she asked.

"The Army, sort of. Then Dirk. He's terrible at it, don't tell him."

"He is terrible at it. I've been sneaking over to weed this for him for four years. He thinks it does it itself." She snapped a bean. "You really a ranger? Thirty years in the woods?"

"Thirty-eight. Mostly fire lookouts and backcountry patrol. You really bake?"

"Twenty years at that stand. Since my husband passed. It pays for the farm and it keeps me around people, which my sister says I need."

"Do you?"

"She says I need it. I say I need it about as much as I need another cat." She snapped another bean, harder than necessary. "So. You go around insulting women's pies often, or was I special?"

"You were special. Mostly I don't talk to anybody at all. That's kind of the point of me."

"That's a lonely way to retire."

"It's a quiet way to retire. Loneliness is extra." He said it lightly and she let it go, which he appreciated, and which he also noticed she was not fooled by, because she gave him one long look over the bean bowl before going back to work.

Her eyes landed on the book beside his chair. He'd brought it out with the coffee, an old paperback on traditional woodcraft, whittling and split-wood baskets and the like.

Mabel reached over and picked it up before he could say anything.

"Traditional country crafts," she read off the cover. "Chapter six, making your own vinegar." She flipped a page. "Chapter nine, soap." She looked at him over the top of it. "Rodney. Retired park ranger. You sit out here reading about soap."

"It's a good chapter."

"You whittle too? You got a beard and a craft book. What else, you play the fiddle? You got a horse named something like Moose?"

"No fiddle. No horse. I can put up a mean shelf of pickles, though."

She laughed again, and this time it went on longer. "A softie. You're a softie under all that bark. Insulting my pie and then sitting in a garden reading about soap."

"Bark's structural," Rodney said. "It's what holds the tree up."

"Mm-hm." She put the book back on the arm of his chair, careful, and went back to her beans. "Well. Bark on a tree is dead, you know. It's the living part underneath that does all the work."

Rodney drank his coffee and didn't have an answer for that. She snapped beans and the fair thumped on in the distance, and after a while she said, "You going to be at that stand inspector's table Saturday? They put the public judging right out front, everyone can watch."

"Wouldn't miss it."

"Good," she said, and snapped another bean. "Bring your criticism. I like someone who fights back."

She stood, collected her bowl, stepped back into her boots, and was gone down the path toward the barns before he thought of a single thing to say.

Mabel came back the next evening with a jar of pickles she'd made herself and an opinion about everything in the garden.

"Dirk's tomatoes are a disgrace," she said, standing at the kitchen counter where Rodney had told her twice she could put her boots. "You need to stake them."

"He said they'd do it themselves."

"He says that about everything." She looked around the cottage, at the 1980s kitchen, the two chairs, the bookshelf. "It's smaller than I remember."

"He said it's a one bedroom. I'd say he was generous even on that."

She wandered, the way people do, and ended up in the bedroom doorway. Rodney followed with the pickle jar and stopped when he saw what she was looking at.

Dirk had left a set of leather straps on the top shelf of the closet. Rodney had found them the first day and put them back where they