The Honor Stand The Whole Road Kept Full

What Delbert told me on his tailgate

I finally caught Delbert Haines because Delbert is not a quiet man and he came in daylight.

He pulled up around seven one morning while I was down at the stand restacking the corn he had left. He is a big man, seventy-some, in a seed-corn cap older than I am, and he got out slow and leaned on his tailgate and looked at the stand and then looked at me.

How is your mother, he said.

I told him the truth, because there was no point in anything else. I told him it would not be long.

He nodded for a while. Then he told me a story I had never heard.

In 1991, he said, he lost nearly his whole crop to hail, and he had three kids under ten and a note at the bank he could not make. That August he drove past Opal’s stand and there was a cardboard box on the table with his name on it, full of canned goods and a side of her garden and forty dollars, with a note that said the Lord had a good year even when the hail did not.

She never said a word about it, he said. Not then, not in thirty-five years since. I tried to pay her back a dozen times and she would not take it. She said I had paid it, every time I kept farming.

He looked down the road, toward all the places I could not see.

There is not a mile of this road, he said, that your mother has not fed at one time or another. The schoolteacher she gave tomatoes to, when the school cut her hours. The Yoder boy she hired to weed when his daddy got hurt. Half the funeral dinners in this township came out of that garden. You do not know the half of it, and you will not, because she never kept a ledger.

He slapped the tailgate.

So we keep the stand, he said. Nobody organized it. I just started coming, and then I saw Marlene’s truck one morning, and then there were more of us than there was room at the bend. Pay what it is worth, that sign says. Well. We are finally getting around to paying what it was worth, and I will tell you, the woman badly undercharged.

He got in his truck. Before he pulled off he rolled the window down.

Do not let her sell that back forty, he said. I do not know what the number is and I do not want to. But you tell me before you sign anything. You tell the road.

I did not know yet that the road already knew.