Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [26]
Since I was thirteen years old, the teacher let me help arrange the programs for the pie supper. I lined up all the talent, and I sang in the talent show. I was also in the beauty contest and in the cakewalk. I guess I was just about in everything because there weren’t that many kids in the school.
One of the biggest events was the pie bidding. Whoever bought a girl’s pie got to take her home. Well, I didn’t know how to bake anything and I was sure nobody would buy my pie.
When it came to the beauty contest, there was only me and four other girls. It was a small school. The way it was judged was that the audience would bid money on the girl they thought was the prettiest. One of the bidders was this boy I thought was a little toy soldier. He looked young because he was only about five feet, eight inches tall and weighed about 145 at the most, and he had this small face, like a cute boy. But actually, like I said, he’d already been in the war and everything. Well, he started bidding on me and, even though there was another girl I thought was prettier, I won the beauty contest.
Then it came to the pie bidding. I sat by my pie I’d somehow managed to bake. The fellow running this contest was the same little boy who helped me win the beauty contest. I knew I couldn’t bake too good, but this old boy started bidding on my pie and this other boy named Flop Murphy started topping him. They were bidding against each other pretty heavy. Old Flop would bid three dollars, and this other boy would bid three and a quarter, and so on, like that. Finally Flop Murphy got to four-fifty, and this other boy raps his hammer down real fast and says, “Five dollars and sold!” He bought it himself.
Well, the contest was over, and he won my pie. Now he had to try a piece of it. He should have known better because I got the salt can confused with the sugar can when I was baking it. Lord knows those cans looked alike. I cut the pie and took a piece for myself. My aunt was standing there and she was gonna try some, too. Well, the boy took a bite and looked like he was gonna start foundering. Then my aunt took a taste and said, “Loretta, you’ve used salt instead of sugar.” That was all the pie we ate for five dollars, which was a heck of a lot of money in those days and in that town, even for a good pie.
Then it was time for everybody to go home. The way we usually went home at night was to light pieces of pine wood or pine roots and hold them in front of us like a torch so we wouldn’t trip on the dirt path. But this boy, Doolittle, had this jeep he’d brought home from the army. He wanted me to ride in it, but I was scared to. I had ridden in the back of a pickup truck. But the jeep looked like something from Mars! So I said, “No, I ain’t getting into that thing.” He had to walk me up that path, holding one of those pine cones the way everybody did.
When we got to my house, he said, “Hey, come here, I’m gonna kiss you good-night.”
I was scared to death because I didn’t know how to kiss. I never kissed a boy before. Should my lips be wet or dry? What if we bumped noses? That’s the kind of thing that was going through my head. He kissed me right on the lips, and it was nice. The truth is, I fell in love right there. I can’t explain it, but it felt so nice to be kissed by this boy that I fell in love.
Well, he turned down the holler and said he’d see me soon. I didn’t know it, but as soon as he got below the yard, he bumped his head on a big fence post and bloodied his nose. He forgot his pine torch and he had to crawl on his hands and knees until he got to the schoolhouse. I always thought it was my kiss that knocked him down. But he said it was the fence post.
Anyway, I saw him leave and I went into the house singing away. Mommy asked me how the social went, so I told her I won the beauty contest and my pie brought five dollars at the bidding.