The Honor Stand The Whole Road Kept Full

Forty years of a coffee can and a sign

To understand why I stood there crying by a folding table, you have to understand the stand.

My mother started it in 1986. My father had been gone a year. The farm was eighty acres of row crop and a big garden, and the garden was the only part she could still work by herself.

She grew more than two people could eat. So she set a card table at the end of the lane and put out the extra, and she did not want to sit there all day making change.

So she cut a slot in a coffee can and she painted that sign, and she decided the honor system was good enough for the people she had known her whole life.

My uncle told her she was a fool. He said the can would be empty by Friday and the vegetables would be gone by noon. He said people take what is free and never pay.

He was wrong for forty years.

Oh, some mornings the money did not match the vegetables. A dozen ears of corn would be gone and there would be two quarters in the can. But my mother never once chased it.

Pay what it is worth, she would say. To a man with a full wallet, that corn is worth a dollar. To a man who just lost his job, that corn is worth his children’s supper, and the worth of feeding his children is that I get to.

She talked like that. I used to think it was just country talk. I understand it better now.

She kept the stand through drought years and flood years. She kept it the summer she broke her wrist and ran it one-handed. She kept it through my father’s anniversary every August, when she would put out his favorite yellow tomatoes and not say a word about why.

People came from three towns over. There was a schoolteacher who stopped every Friday on her way home. There was a trucker who detoured eleven miles for her green beans and left a five every time, no change asked.

The can was never robbed. Not in forty years. My mother said that was because a thief has to look at that sign first, and it is hard to steal from the Lord when He is watching the can and not you.

I thought all of that was over. I thought it ended the day the cancer put her in the bed.

I did not know the road had other plans.