Elizabeth
While running the talent round, I have witnessed things I cannot unsee.
I have watched a grown man play the national anthem on a saw.
I have watched a pair of cousins perform what they billed as interpretive dance and what our insurance carrier would have billed as a liability.
I have handed the microphone to a ventriloquist whose dummy had a documented grudge against the mayor.
The talent round is where Sweetbriar comes to be brave and terrible in equal measure, and I love it more than almost anything the season does, and I had never once been nervous.
Tonight, I was nervous.
I stood in the wings behind the stage we build every fall against the big barn, a plywood platform with a string of café lights over it and hay bales for the front rows and folding chairs for everyone who came early, and I gripped my clipboard and watched the crowd fill in.
My whole family was out there, which did not help my nerves one bit.
My mother had claimed an end seat with her reading glasses on and the program held at arm’s length like she meant to grade it.
Gwen had all three kids in a row beside her, bribed quiet with kettle corn and pumpkin donuts.
Donna and Tiffany were working the cider table at the back and had every intention of watching between sales, and June had staked out a spot dead center with her phone already up and streaming, because if Matt so much as flinched wrong it would be online before he left the stage, and June’s followers do not miss a thing.
And down in front, in the chair somebody had hauled out special because you do not make Iris Starling sit on a hay bale, sat my grandmother, wrapped in a quilt, holding court, telling the people around her that she had personally predicted Matt’s success at the pie round and would be accepting her congratulations now or later.
“Breathe,” said a voice at my elbow. Matt’s Aunt Aggie, bundled in her good wool coat, a cider in each hand, offering me one. “You look like you’re about to freak out and run for the hills. Take a sip. Relax.”
I sipped frantically. It didn’t help. “He’s going to hate this. He’s going to freeze. Aggie, what was I thinking—”
“You were thinking he’s funny and nobody’s ever let him be.” She patted my cheek with her cold palm. “Now hush, honey. He’s got this. You’re up.”
I handed Aggie the cider she just gave me and walked onto the stage with my heart going like a jackrabbit, and my festival smile bolted on, and the crowd gave me the warm scattered applause they give a woman they’ve known since she was in pigtails riding the vending van, and I tapped the mic and let the feedback settle them.
“Evening, Sweetbriar. You know how this works. Every year one brave soul decides talent means something other than looking handsome and holding a gourd.” A ripple of laughter; June whooped from behind her phone.
“The next contestant needs no introduction, because most of you have gotten a warning from him. Some of you have gotten two.” That got a real laugh, and I felt the crowd tip into my hand, warm and willing, and I risked one look into the wings where he stood in his pressed uniform looking like a man about to testify.
He was nervous, I could tell. But he smiled, trying to reassure me, and in that second it nearly knocked the next line out of me.
“He’s protected this town for a long time.
Tonight he’s going to try to entertain it.
Please put your hands together, and welcome Officer Matt Hartford. ”
I got off the stage as fast as dignity allowed and slipped back into the wings to watch, because this was the only part of the night I couldn’t control, and it was also the only part that mattered.
He walked out in full uniform and stood behind the podium we’d put there just for him.
That was the first laugh, and he hadn’t said a word yet.
He’d worn the uniform—freshly pressed, badge, belt, all of it—to do stand-up at a harvest festival, and the crowd caught the joke before he reached the microphone, a ripple of delight going through the hay bales.
He stopped at the mic. He took it off the stand with grave care.
He looked out at the biggest crowd we’d drawn in years—every folding chair full, the hay bales packed, people standing three deep along the sides—with the face he uses to inform people their taillight is out.
He waited for the crowd to settle. Let it breathe, I’d told him, and the maddening, magnificent man had listened.
“Good evening, Sweetbriar.” Flat as a lake at dawn. “I’ve been asked to demonstrate a talent tonight. I’d like to state for the record that I don’t have one, and that I informed the organizer of this in writing.”
They laughed. He did not. He stood there without moving, still as a statue, letting the wave rise and crest and fall while he waited; the stone face was the whole point, exactly as I’d bet it would be, and I stood in the wings with my heart climbing my throat.
“So, it was suggested instead that I describe what it is like to be a police officer in a town this size. I reviewed a decade of this department’s records to prepare. I’d like to share some findings.”
He turned the first page with great ceremony.
“This town has an active neighborhood watch. It has a group chat. I am, against my will, in the group chat.” He looked up, already weary.
“In two years, the neighborhood watch has solved zero crimes and generated approximately nine hundred messages. Most of them concern a suspicious van that turned out to belong to the plumber.” He waited a beat with his eyebrows up.
“The plumber is also in the group chat. He has explained this. It has not helped.” Another pause.
“I muted it, which I believe is itself a crime in this town. I’ll turn myself in after the show. ”
The crowd was already going. He waited them out and turned the page.
“The group chat did, however, bring one genuine case to my attention. I’d like to speak about it tonight because I have not been able to close it.
” A long, grave pause. “For two years, garden gnomes have been disappearing from front yards across Sweetbriar and reappearing, weeks later, in different yards. Nobody will file a report, because nobody wants to be the person who called the police about a gnome. So, they tell me at the grocery store instead.” He turned the page.
“I now have a map. I have a timeline. I also have a few suspects.” He looked out at the crowd, and his expression did not move one degree.
“Some of you are laughing a little too hard right now. I’ve noticed, and I’ll be updating the suspect list expeditiously. ”
I watched half the front row stop laughing very abruptly, which only finished the back row off.
Down front, Rosemary pressed her lips together and lost the fight against a laugh, and then she leaned over and nudged my grandmother, and the two of them cracked up together like schoolgirls, Iris flapping a hand in front of her face, Rosemary holding onto her arm—two women who have been judging this town and each other since before I was born.
My grandmother caught me watching from the wings and pointed at Matt and then at me, back and forth, mouthing something I chose not to translate.
And I stood in the wings and felt something crack quietly open behind my ribs, because I knew what this cost him.
Nobody else could see it. I gripped my clipboard so I wouldn’t do something unprofessional like cry.
Aggie noticed and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “He’s doing great,” she whispered.
“People from the city ask if it’s boring, policing a place like this.
It is. I want to be honest with you.” He turned the last page.
“In ten years, this department has logged over three hundred noise complaints. Every single one was about the same rooster.” He shook his head.
“We knew his name. We knew what he did. He was never charged.” He let them have it, then delivered the rest like a man reporting a line-of-duty loss.
“That rooster has since passed of natural causes. The complaints continued for six months after. We’re looking into it. ”
The crowd was losing the ability to breathe. He set the pages down, squared them once against the podium out of what I can only assume was pure instinct, and delivered the last of it to a room already coming apart.
“That’s the job. A group chat I can’t leave, a gnome napper I can’t catch, and a rooster communicating with me from beyond the grave.
” He looked out at all of them, deadpan to the last. “Thank you. You’ve been a wonderful crowd.
I’ll be rejoining the group chat.” He crooked an eyebrow.
“The investigation into all of you is ongoing.”
The crowd was on its feet. Matt stood in the café lights with the whole roaring crowd on their feet for him, and he found me in the wings—found me first, before he took his bow, over all those heads—and he did not smile even then, but he looked at me, and something in his face came open just for a second, just for me, a door with the light behind it. I mouthed told you.
He shook his head once. You did this, he mouthed back, and then, before I could argue it, you. All of it.
After, the crowd wouldn’t let him go.
A town deciding to love someone happens all at once, out loud. He came off the stage and was swallowed. Becca reached him first, launching up to hang off his neck, hollering something that made him almost lose the stone face at last.
Levi pounded his back and pumped his hand.
Aggie had abandoned me for the front lines and was telling anyone within reach that when he was a boy he wouldn’t say ten words in a row, and look at him now. She was beaming with pride.
I stood back, at the edge of the stage, watching him while holding back tears. It was the best feeling I’d had in a season full of good ones.
He wrapped me in a hug when he finally made his way to me. “They liked me,” he said, out of breath and quiet, like he was reporting something he couldn’t quite believe.
“They love you.” I turned in his arms and looked up at him, this sweet, shy man the whole town had just roared for. “I’m so proud of you I might burst.”
He almost smiled. He came close. “Get me out of here,” he said, low, just for me. “I’ve shaken every hand in this town. I’ve been hugged by people I’ve arrested. If one more person tells me I should do this professionally, I’m going to walk into the corn and not come out.”
I laughed, and I took his hand, and because the whole farm was still roaring along without us—the maze full, the cider table three deep, June somewhere narrating all of it to twelve thousand strangers—nobody was watching the two of us slip around the back of the stage and out toward the field, where Jonas’s hay wagon sat idling at the edge of the light, half-loaded, about to make another slow loop out around the dark acreage and back.
“Room for two?” I called up.
Jonas looked at Matt. Looked at me. Looked at our hands, which I had not thought to let go of.
“You’ll want the back,” he said, and hauled me up before I’d finished asking. “Nice and dark. Nobody’ll see a thing.” A small grin crossed his face. “Same way nobody’s seen a thing for weeks.”
Matt swung up behind me, and we found a corner at the back on a bale away from the family with the little kids, and the wagon lurched, and pulled us out of the noise and the light and into the dark.
It got quiet fast. That’s the thing nobody tells you about a working farm at night—thirty feet past the last string of lights, the festival drops to a hum behind you, and the dark comes up soft and enormous, the corn and the trees whisper on both sides, the stars shining overhead, the mountain a paler black against the black.
The wagon swayed. Matt put his arm around me, and I put my head on his shoulder, and neither of us said anything for a while, and it was, after the roar of that crowd, the most peaceful thing I could imagine.
“Come home with me,” he said, into my hair.
“Not—I know we’re both worn out and have to be up before dawn.
I don’t mean anything by it except I’m not ready to say goodnight to you in a parking field and drive to an empty house.
I’ll make you an actual dinner instead of apple cider and a caramel apple. You can leave whenever you want.”
I lifted my head to look at him. The wagon rocked us gently side to side, the lights of the festival swinging back into view now at the far turn, small and gold and full of everyone else’s evening.
“Matt Hartford,” I said. “Are you asking me over for a sleepover?”
“I’m asking you over for dinner,” he said, with great dignity. “What you do after dinner is entirely your business.”
I laughed, and I kissed him, there in the dark at the back of Jonas’s hay wagon with the whole festival we’d built turning slowly past us like something we’d set in motion and were finally, for one stolen loop, allowed to leave running without us.
“Yes,” I said. “Feed me, Officer. Take me home.”