The Order of the Iron Ladle

The truck was still in the lot. Dale had heard it would be, from a woman at the dollar store who said so to the cashier and not to him. But, he hadn't believed it until his headlights reached the tailgate of Bobby Lusk's blue half-ton pickup, whose windshield wore three weeks of road dust and dead lovebugs.

He parked two spaces down. The lodge was a cinderblock box painted the green of a school nurse's office, windowless on the road side, with a steel door and a hand-lettered sign over it that read ORDER OF THE IRON LADLE, EST. 1983, MEMBERS ONLY, NO SOLICITING. Beneath that, in a white that didn't quite match, someone had added NO EXCEPTIONS.

Uncle Roy had held a seat in the Order for forty years without once mentioning, at Thanksgiving or bowling league or his own wife's funeral, what went on inside. When he died in April he left Dale a bass boat with no motor, a Crock-Pot with a cracked lid, a brass key on a shoelace, and a typed letter from the Order's secretary explaining that seats were hereditary, that attendance was not optional, and that Dale was expected on the second Tuesday of September at eight o'clock sharp, in slacks.

Dale was wearing slacks. They were the only pair he owned, bought for a cousin's wedding in 2019. Since then they had shrunk in a way that had nothing to do with the dryer.

He had not been close to Roy so much as trailed after him. From the fall Dale's father left until the fall Dale got his license, Roy drove him to every home game at Lyle County High in a truck that smelled of cigarettes and bait, bought him a paper boat of chili at the concession window, and never once asked how things were at home. Nobody had ever done anything kinder for him. Dale had spent twenty years meaning to say so.

He was halfway across the gravel when the steel door opened.

"You're Roy's nephew."

The man in the doorway was eighty if he was a day, bald, hatchet-faced, in a maroon satin robe with a ladle stitched over the heart in gold thread that had started to come loose around the handle.

"Yes, sir. Dale Tully."

The old man consulted a wristwatch with a scratched crystal for so long that Dale checked his own phone, which said 7:52. "Roy was never early a day in his life," he said. "Wipe your feet. I'm Harlan."

Dale wiped his feet on a mat worn down to the rubber. Harlan was still watching him. "Roy ever talk about us?"

The kind answer was right there, the one anybody would give an old man at his own front door, and Dale had never in his life been able to reach it. "No, sir. Not once."

Harlan seemed, if anything, pleased. "Good."

Inside, the lodge smelled of cumin and pine cleaner laid over something older, a scorched-pot reek that had soaked into the paneling. Folding tables stood in a horseshoe around a lectern. Along the back wall ran three shelves of trophies, forty-one by Dale's count, from a brass cup gone penny-brown at one end to a gold plastic cowboy stirring a gold plastic pot at the other, every one of them engraved LYLE COUNTY FALL FESTIVAL, CHILI, FIRST PLACE.

Past the kitchen door a compressor kicked on with a clank. In the hallway beside it a pallet waited under a blue tarp that had slipped far enough to show the corner of a cardboard case printed with half a boot and a spur.

Two other men sat at the horseshoe in matching robes. The nearer one, tall enough to duck the ceiling fan out of habit though it cleared him by a foot, worked a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other without ever using his hand.

"Vernon," Harlan said. "He does fire."

The second man stood to shake and stayed standing afterward, as though sitting back down required a motion from the floor. His robe had been let out along both side seams in two different colors of thread. "Mitch Albee," he said. "I'm sixty-one, so I'm the baby. Since August."

"Were," Vernon said around the toothpick.

Mitch did the math on his fingers. "Guess you're the baby now."

Harlan had gone to the coat closet. The robe he brought back over his arm was maroon, enormous, faintly sour with cigarette smoke; Dale knew whose it was before he had it over his head. The sleeves hung past his fingertips. Nobody offered to roll them.

"Before we start," Dale said, "is Bobby Lusk coming? His truck's out front."

The toothpick stopped. Out in the kitchen the compressor ran on. Above the lectern a moth that had come in with Dale kept knocking itself against the fluorescent tube, a dry tick every second or two that he would not have heard a moment earlier.

"Bobby's no longer a member," Harlan said.

"He quit?"

"He resigned."

"And left his truck."

"He walked home," Mitch said.

"Bobby lives out past Cattle Creek. That's nine miles."

Vernon moved the toothpick. "Big walker, Bobby."

Harlan let that stand for exactly as long as it took him to reach the lectern, where a three-ring binder gone soft at the corners lay open to the first page. "Let's get you sworn," he said. "Before the chili gets cold."

There was chili. Dale hadn't seen it come out, but a Styrofoam bowl now sat at his place with a plastic spoon standing upright in it, dark red, beanless, a skin of orange grease pooled at the rim. Mitch leaned over. "Last year's. We freeze a batch. Go on."

Dale went on. It was good, better than good, the kind that made him close his eyes before he meant to. For a second he was twelve again in the bleachers at Lyle County High, Roy's elbow against his, a paper boat of it on his knees while a Friday-night wind came off the field. He couldn't have named one thing in it.

"Huh," he said.

"Forty-one years," Harlan said. "Stand up."

The oath ran four pages. Dale repeated it in pieces as Harlan fed it to him, swearing by the Pot and by the Ladle and by the Low Slow Flame to keep the Recipe from all persons not of the Order, to attend the Festival in robes, to maintain the scholarship fund, and never under any circumstances to enter beans. Near the end Harlan's voice slowed down.

"And should I reveal the Recipe to any living soul," he read, "may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, and may my name be struck from the program."

Dale said it back. From the horseshoe, not quite under his breath, Mitch said, "It used to be longer."

"Mitch."

"I'm only saying it used to be longer. There was a whole part about the county line."

"We amended it in '97," Harlan said, "on account of it frightened the wives."

Vernon rose, which took a while. From under the lectern he brought up a green steel ammunition can whose lid had four hasps welded to it, each hung with a padlock. He set it in front of Dale with a gentleness Dale had only ever seen used on newborns.

"Four keys," Harlan said. "Four founding seats. Mine, Vernon's, Roy's." His eyes went to the shoelace Dale had wound around his wrist in the car. "And Bobby's. Dub's grandson."

From the pocket of his robe he took two keys on a ring.

Watching him work the first two locks, Dale realized he had no idea what Harlan had done for a living before he retired. He was not going to ask. When Vernon had turned his, Dale unwound the shoelace from his wrist. The brass key went in stiff. It turned with a gritty click, and when the lid came up the only smell was old canvas.

Inside the can was the purple felt bag a bottle of good whiskey came in, gold drawstring and all, and inside the bag, furred at the edges from handling, an index card on which someone had written in blue ballpoint capitals:

PECOS PETE'S CHILI CON CARNE (NO BEANS)

2 CANS PER GALLON

1 BEER

STIR

DON'T TELL ANYBODY

Dale read it twice. The bleachers came back to him, the concession window under the press box, the pyramid of dented cans on the shelf behind the Booster Club mom, each label printed with a cartoon cowboy in a ten-gallon hat licking his lips.

He laughed. It came out before he could stop it, one bark that flew up into the ceiling fan. When nobody joined him he did it again, smaller, to make the first one sound deliberate.

"It's canned," he said.

"It's canned," Harlan agreed.

"Four decades of this. There's a water tower."

"Thereis a water tower." Harlan lowered himself into the chair at the head of the horseshoe, the first time Dale had seen him sit. "Dub Carlisle entered two cans of Pecos Pete's in the fall of 1982 to settle a bet with the Methodist preacher, who had said, in front of witnesses, that he could tell homemade from store-bought blindfolded."

"Baptist," Mitch said.

Harlan looked at him.

"It was the Baptist preacher. The Methodist was the one with the lazy eye."

"The Baptist preacher," Harlan said, "gave it first place. TheLedger ran a picture."

"Front page," Vernon said. "Above the fold."

Harlan went on as if nobody had spoken. "By spring it was on a billboard out on Route 27, and Dub understood, too late, that there was no version of the truth left that didn't make the whole county look like fools, the preacher, the mayor, and his own mother included." He tipped his head at the trophies. "So he got three friends to keep him company."

"Fourteen kids went to college on that scholarship," Mitch said. "Two of them are nurses."

"Pete's went under in 2004," Vernon said. "We bought the last nine hundred cases out of a warehouse in Abilene."

Dale thought of the pallet in the hallway. "How many are left?"

"Two hundred and six cases," said Vernon, who did not have to check.

"There were some Christmas parties," Mitch said.

"So what happens when it runs out?"

Harlan took his time answering. "That," he said, "is a problem for the baby."

Mitch laughed at that, alone, and stopped.

"What happened to Bobby?" Dale said.

Nobody answered him. Vernon put both hands flat on the table to stand. When he was all the way up he said, "Come look at the kitchen," in the voice of a man offering to show you his tomatoes.

The kitchen was bleached down to the grout, every pot hung from its own nail in order of size. Bolted to the counter by the stove was a crank can opener so old its handle had worn through the chrome to bare brass. Vernon walked him past the six-burner range to the steel door of the walk-in, which opened with a suck of rubber gasket onto a breath of cold that smelled of cardboard. More cases of Pecos Pete's stood along one wall in stacks of five. Against the other, humming, was a white chest freezer.

Harlan had followed them in. He lifted the freezer lid himself.

Pork shoulders in butcher paper, a bag of ice gone to a single block, a sleeve of hamburger buns someone had meant to use, and, rising out of the frost at the far end with its sole to the ceiling, a brown leather work boot with the laces still tied.

Dale looked at the boot. He looked back through the walk-in door, across the kitchen, to the Styrofoam bowl still sitting at his place on the horseshoe with the spoon standing up in it.

"Is he in the..."

"Good Lord, son." Harlan let the lid drop an inch, offended. "What kind of people do you think we are? It'scanned."

"Bobby wanted to go to theLedger," Vernon said.

"He made a slide deck," said Mitch from the doorway. "It had transitions."

"It had to be unanimous," Harlan said. "It always has to be. Your uncle voted with us, back in March. I think he'd want you to know. Roy understood what it would do to this town." He nodded at the freezer. "Took the rest of us till August to work up to it."

Dale thought of the concession window, and Roy at it every Friday, paying for two.

"Did Roy..." Dale found he couldn't finish that one either.

"No. Roy had a stroke in the supercenter out on the bypass. That one was God." Harlan's mouth tightened. "We were all very upset about it."

The compressor cut out. For a moment there was nothing in the walk-in but the tick of the freezer settling and Dale's own breath going white in front of him. He stood in his dead uncle's robe with his hands lost in the sleeves. He had been a member of the Order of the Iron Ladle for forty minutes, and it was a lifetime appointment.

Harlan closed the freezer. "Now," he said. "Is there anybody you'd like to tell?"

Dale kept his eyes on the lid, on the thin line of frost where the gasket met the rim.

"No, sir."

"Good man." Harlan clapped him once on the shoulder, hard, through a double layer of satin. "Vernon'll show you the can opener. There's a trick to it."

#

The Lyle County Fall Festival fell, as it did every year, on the hottest Saturday in September. By noon the lovebugs had found the judging tent and were dying in pairs on the white tablecloths. Twenty-two entries sat in numbered slow cookers down the long table. The Order's was number nine. Dale stood behind it in Roy's robe with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, which nobody had offered to do and which he had done himself, while sweat pooled by the quart at the small of his back.

The head judge was Deb Marchetti from the Chamber of Commerce, who had judged for sixteen years and cried twice. She saved number nine for last, same as ever. When it touched her tongue, her eyes closed.

"You can always taste the love in this one," she said.

The forty-second trophy was gold plastic, a little cowboy over a little pot. Harlan accepted it with both hands to a round of applause that was mostly the Methodist Women's Auxiliary. Mitch took photographs on a tablet. Vernon, who did fire, had positioned himself well back from the table where he could see the parking lot.

Harlan had given Dale a single line for anybody who asked about the recipe. They had rehearsed it the whole drive over, because Harlan had heard about him. Dale ran the returns counter at the feed-and-seed out by the interstate. He had once talked a deputy into writing him a speeding ticket the man had already decided to let slide.

He was scraping the last of the pot into a to-go cup for a Boy Scout when a young woman stepped up to the table with a lanyard around her neck and a notebook already open.

"Kayla Brandt, with theLedger." She had a quick, pleasant, unimpressed face. "Congratulations. Forty-two, right?"

"Forty-two."

"Can I ask what the secret is?"

Dale opened his mouth for the line. What came out was "Pat," and after it nothing at all. His tongue had apparently read the oath and taken it at its word.

"Sorry?" Kayla's pen had stopped.

"Patience," Dale said, much too loud. "Low flame." His ears had gone hot to the rims.

She held his eye a beat longer than a chili question called for before she wrote it down. When she glanced up again, her voice had dropped. "Bobby Lusk emailed me a few weeks ago. Said the Order had a story I ought to hear. I haven't been able to reach him since." She waited. "You wouldn't know anything about that?"

Under the robe, on its shoelace around his neck now, the brass key lay against his chest, warm as skin. Across the tent Harlan had stopped talking to the Chamber people. He had the forty-second trophy in one hand, and he was watching the two of them with the mild face he wore to church. Kayla followed Dale's glance to him. Whatever she saw there, she kept the notebook open and her pen on the page.

Dale thought about the boot. He thought about fourteen kids, and two nurses, and two hundred and six cases, and a paper boat of chili balanced on his knees on a Friday night, Roy's elbow against his.

"No, ma'am." Nothing stuck this time. "It's just chili."