Friday night lights shine high above the football stadium. Insects swarm in little visible clouds even as a cool wind whips through the air, driving up hot chocolate and coffee sales. Davey, Fifty, Mash, and I share a blanket, awaiting the halftime show, in which both Woods and Janie Lee will perform with the band, and I, along with Tawny Jacobs and Caroline Cheatham, will be recognized like homecoming candidates.
Seven minutes left on the clock.
Janie Lee helped me get ready. After Mr. Nix’s confusion, I was not surprised this afternoon when she showed up at my house with her overlarge makeup bag and hair accessories. My hair isn’t easy to work with. The left side is clipped short. The top is choppy, falling left to right in jutting sections that range from ear-length to chin-length. It’s snappy and smart if you’re not trying to be sophisticated. The plan is for me to take black dress pants and a blouse—hers, because she insisted—and change just before halftime. Spending an entire football game, on cold aluminum bleachers, with concession stand food, in dress clothes? No thank you. This way, I can be back in my jeans as soon as the ceremony is over.
Mash is painted up with school colors—orange and white—and has so much food in his lap that we’ll be seeing it a second time around. “Don’t eat all that, dude,” Fifty tells him.
“What?” Mash protests.
Fifty responds, “You’re as likely to throw that up as we are to walk Vilmer’s Beam.”
“Dude, let it go.”
“Do you like football?” I ask Davey while the other two duke shit out.
Mash speaks around the hot dog. “You played football at Waylan, yeah?”
Davey seems interested in something happening to the band. They’re assembling on the track, thirty feet below. I know better than to show him sympathy with Fifty around. He answers his cousin reluctantly, “Yes, and lacrosse.”
John Winters is on his way up the bleachers. Beneath the blanket, Davey squeezes my knee.
Halfway to us, John stops. “David.” He gives a quick wave.
“Can you see my makeup?” Davey asks me.
In truth, better than usual. Heavier eyeliner and a tiny bit of smoky gray shadow. That isn’t the response he wants. I uncoil fingers from my knee, and whisper the easiest truth, “He’s seen you in costumes before.”
“But not at football games,” Davey says.
Five minutes left on the clock before halftime. I need to go change, but . . . I need to be here more.
“David,” John Winters calls again.
Davey removes himself from the blanket and goes. He’s wearing a shredded band shirt, bright-blue skinny jeans, black Converse high tops, and more glue in his hair than a kindergartner after an art class. This outfit causes John Winters to frown, and then set his jaw with fury. John must decide he needs a better look at Davey’s friends because Davey returns to us under the arm of his father.
Before they arrive, Fifty says, “Dude’s a prick,” and Mash says, “You have no idea.”
John makes room for himself on our bench. We fall under his scrutiny. He nods at Mash and to the rest of us he says, “Hello, townie friends.”
No one speaks.
I assume he is a man used to pivoting around uncomfortable situations, because he gestures to the crowd and says, “What do you think of all this hubbub over a cornstalk?”
Four minutes left on the clock.
Fifty scratches a sideburn, answers, “We think it’s fucking delightful, sir.”
Oh my God, I love Fifty right now.
Mash chokes on his hot dog, and I slap him hard on the back. He spits hot dog and ketchup and bun all over my jeans. “God, I’m sorry,” he says to me, using a slimy napkin to remove the damage. If I’m going to change, I need to leave right now.
John folds robotic arms over his puffy chest, blocks the end of our bench. “David, I want to know what’s so fucking delightful that your friend here would say that to his elder.”
For Davey’s sake, I try to schmooze. “I believe Fifty is just excited because I’m on the ballot this year?”
“You?”
I start to stand, wiping at the smudgy places on my jeans.
“Your mother was on that stage once,” John informs Davey. Davey doesn’t react. It’s new information to me. They don’t put nominees on the Corn Dolly calendar, only the winners. John tells us, “I stood right over there and listened to Big Bad Tyson Vilmer read a paragraph on her worthiness. As if baking pies and planting flowers and nursing babies will get you anywhere. That’s when I knew I had to get her out of here.”
Three minutes on the clock.
We are all wriggling, no one more so than Davey. “You should have black-out under your eyes, not around them,” he tells Davey. “I talked to your lacrosse coach. He says if you come back to Waylan in the spring, he won’t penalize you for not starting the season with the team.” Davey says nothing at John’s continued commentary. “You can’t possibly want to throw away scholarship offers.”
This isn’t a conversation for public consumption.
Two minutes on the clock. Nominees are moving down the bleachers. The stage gets wheeled to the track. The band members have assembled at the urging of the director. I should go change right now.
John Winters fills the air with more arguments. “You seem pretty satisfied with all this nothingness. Which is why I told Thomas I’d trade him my Mustang if he got you to come back to Waylan.”
This is too much. “You didn’t,” Davey says.
“I’ve only got one son. And I’d like to see him make something of himself.” He licks his thumb, as if Davey is five, and makes a show of smearing Davey’s makeup in front of us.
Davey is stock-still.
I wrestle with not punching John Winters. Fifty might be too lazy to do most things, but he has no intention of backing down, elder or not.
“I don’t think anyone here has any interest in hearing you speak again,” Fifty tells John.
One minute on the clock.
I can’t keep myself from quietly asking Davey, “Would you really move back with him?”
He tells me, “I might have to.”
The clock ticks down. Halftime. And I am not dressed. And I have been spit up on. All of Otters Holt stands and claps as the Otters run to the locker room. The stadium is overfull and bubbling with anticipation. Every generation in town has turned up to see the halftime show: the Liars Table, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Corn Dolly committee, Corn Dolly winners of old (they have their own section and sashes), football parents, band parents, everyone. Even Mr. Nix and his nurse. They’re all on their feet. They’re all a force.
Only John Winters sits.
“You need to go, Billie,” Mash says. “They’re waving at you.”
While we’ve been having this chat, the band has taken the field, and two stages that were poised on the track have been wheeled to the fifty-yard line. Janie Lee and Woods are atop one, mic’d and ready to perform in conjunction with the band at the conductor’s command. Woods is wearing a sweater that does him no favors. Cable-knit. If it didn’t have the wooden toggle buttons, the whole thing could be repurposed for a rag, and yet he is still very good-looking. Janie Lee is even better still.
Fifty hollers, “Yeah, Woodsey! Yeah, Janie!”
The field commander climbs onto her box, flips her wrists. Brass and flutes and drums are everywhere. The first feat: Someone creative has ripped the explicit words from “Starships.” The second: The band has moves. The third: Janie Lee and Woods dance and sing on their stage as if they own the field.
“Damn,” Fifty says.
“Go,” Davey says. “I’ll be fine.”
He says this, but he’s drawn up, distant, other.
Mash nudges me. Nods at John. “What do we do about him?”
I say, “I. Do. Not. Know.”
We both wish Woods were here. But he is on the stage, right hand lifted in a final note. Around him, the color-guard flags slow to a stop. The band’s horns are all lifted and gleaming under the stadium lights. Everyone applauds. Woods and Janie Lee bow. The band breaks into the fight song to file off the field.
And now I must go. I can wait no longer. I have to entrust Davey to Mash and Fifty.
Tawny Jacobs and Caroline Cheatham stand, fidgeting and nervous, behind Ada May Adcock, Rebecca Carnicky, Wilma Frist, and several other committee members. They are all looking frantic that I’m not there. Here is what is supposed to happen: the mayor will say something about each of us and we will step forward and wave and then step back. It sounded very manageable when I read the mailed instructions from the mayor’s office. The same instructions that said Sunday-best attire was suggested but not required.
I perform a stadium check. Where is my dad? My mom? How furious will they be when I walk out on that stage in dirty jeans and an orange Otters Holt sweatshirt?
I reach Ada May and apologize. “I had an accident,” I have only managed to say when she whirls me around to face the crowd.
We are three women. Three generations. Who are supposed to be perfect specimens. Tawny in her pearls to my left. Caroline to my right in her diamonds. My competitors are draped in expensive clothes, are trimmed with et cetera, and I think, Women are made of et cetera.
Our mayor, a stout, well-respected man with a nose the shape of a lightbulb, holds the microphone. He reads about Tawny, long sweeping paragraphs about her financial generosity and kind demeanor that everyone knows is bullshit. Then he reads about Caroline, who is the poet laureate of Kentucky and a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army.
I’m next. Feeling ridiculous, I step forward, wave. He reads: “Elizabeth McCaffrey is the daughter of local minister Scott McCaffrey and local artist Clare McCaffrey. She is a third-generation McCaffrey to attend Otters Holt High School. She is the first teenager in the history of Otters Holt to be nominated for a Corn Dolly.”
That’s it. People are polite enough to clap. Including my parents, but they wear bewildered faces, either from his short paragraph or my clothes.
He didn’t mention rescuing Janie Lee from the water moccasin or the recent service projects. Perhaps because I was late. Perhaps because the person in charge of writing them isn’t my fan. Instead, I am a blazing example of why Woods put me on the guys’ side of the Hexagon. Hair tangled. Clothes rumpled. Hot dog chunks on my jeans.
He pets the air, begging the crowd to pipe down. “As you’ve probably guessed, with the passing of our benefactor, this year will be the last Harvest Festival. So the last awarded Corn Dolly will go to one of these ladies.” Whether it is planned for effect or he’s momentarily overcome, he pauses, keeps pausing, keeps pausing, says, “Let’s make sure it’s the best one yet.”
A pattering, polite as a golf crowd, moves through the bleachers. The mayor disappears like a referee after a terrible ballgame. The platforms are wheeled away by a high school crew.
The football team returns to a quiet stadium.