Chapter 14: The Town Feast
The feast began on a Saturday evening, three days after the arrest, when Al Torres announced that the diner was cooking for a thousand riders, and that nobody was paying, and that anyone who tried to pay would be handed a second helping. The town laughed, and the riders laughed, and June Parker laughed.
Nobody had planned it. It had started the way the best things in Winslow always started, with someone saying, "We ought to do something," and someone else saying, "Well, why don't we?" Al had said it first. June had said it second, because she believed that help deserved a thank-you. Ray Dalton had said it third, because Ray believed that gratitude was a debt. And so the town had come together, and the feast had grown.
The diner cooked all day. Al and June and the cooks made pot after pot of chili, tray after tray of cornbread, pan after pan of fried chicken, and more pie than anyone had ever seen: apple, cherry, peach, pecan, lemon meringue, and a chocolate cream pie June made herself, because it had been her mother's favorite. The townspeople brought food, too. The bakery sent bread. The grocery store sent vegetables. A rancher brought a roast pig. A man who had never cooked brought a bag of oranges, and June took them, and thanked him, and he went away looking ten years younger.
By six o'clock, the street was full of tables, borrowed from the church, the school, and half the houses in Winslow, covered with checkered cloths and more food than a thousand people could eat, though a thousand people were going to try. The riders sat with the townspeople, and the children ran between the tables, and the dogs wandered underneath, hoping for scraps, and the sun went down slow and gold, and the string lights came on, one by one, like stars.
June moved through the crowd with a tray, refilling coffee, clearing plates, stopping to talk to old friends and new ones. She stopped where Sarge told a story about a ride through a rainstorm in Wyoming, and the people around him were laughing. She stopped at a table where Doc was showing a little girl how to fold a napkin into a swan, and the little girl was delighted. She stopped at a table where Wrench sat with three old ranchers, arguing good-naturedly about the best way to fix a carburetor, and nobody was winning, and nobody cared.
At the head of the longest table, Ray Dalton sat with Al Torres, and they ate, and they talked, and they watched the crowd. "Al," Ray said, "I've been riding for thirty years, and I have never seen anything like this."
Al nodded. "Neither have I. And I've been feeding people for thirty-one."
"Your town," Ray said, "is something special."
"It's your town too, tonight," Al said. "You rode into it. That makes it yours."
As the evening went on, the stories came out. A rider named Tommy told the town about the time Ray had ridden through a blizzard to bring medicine to a stranded family, and the town listened, and Ray looked down at his plate, embarrassed. A woman from Winslow told the riders about the time June had stayed late to feed a trucker who had lost his wallet, and June blushed, and the riders applauded. A little boy stood up on a chair and announced that when he grew up, he wanted to be a biker, and his mother said, "Only if you're as polite as these ones," and the whole street laughed.
Reverend Amos, the club's chaplain, stood up after dinner and said a few words. He did not preach. He simply thanked the town for feeding a thousand strangers, and thanked the riders for coming, and said that a community was not a place, but a promise, and that Winslow had kept its promise that night. Then he asked everyone to raise their glasses, and a thousand glasses went up, coffee cups and water glasses and lemonade and one small cup of apple juice held by a very serious little girl, and they drank to Winslow, and to the Copper Kettle, and to June Parker, who had asked for help, and to the riders, who had answered.
June stood at the end of the street, with her father Earl beside her, and she watched the crowd, and Earl put his arm around her, and he said, "Your mother would have loved this."
June nodded, and she felt tears in her eyes, but they were good tears, the kind that come when something hard is over and something good has begun. "She would have been right in the middle of it," June said. "With an apron on, telling everyone to eat."
Earl laughed. "That sounds like her."
The feast went on until late. The band from the school played old country songs, and people danced in the street, riders and townspeople together, old and young, and the children fell asleep on blankets, and the dogs gave up hoping for scraps and went to sleep under the tables. The string lights swayed in the breeze, and the desert air cooled, and the stars came out, bright and close, the way they only are in the desert.
When it was over, when the last plate had been cleared and the last table folded, June stood in the doorway of the Copper Kettle Diner and looked out at the empty street, at the rows of motorcycles still parked in the moonlight, and she thought about the napkin she had slipped to Ray, and about the thousand riders who had come, and about the town that had fed them, and she understood something she had not understood before. A thousand headlights had come to Winslow because she had asked. But the feast had happened because the town had answered, too. And a town that answers together is a town that cannot be frightened, not by a developer, not by threats, not by anything.