The Stand I Set at My Own Lane

The First Car

So that is how I came to be at the end of my own lane that cold Saturday with a card table, a river rock, and a sign in my own hand.

The first car that slowed was a blue Buick, and it was Marjorie Pifer, who has bought a shock off me every October since Reagan. She rolled her window down and looked at my little table and then up the road at Gary’s banner and then back at me.

“Eunice,” she said. “What in the world.”

“Morning, Marj,” I said. “Shocks are six dollars. Same as always.”

She looked up the road again. Gary’s stand had his price card out. Twelve dollars, it said, in marker.

“Twelve dollars,” Marjorie read out loud. “For a corn shock. Lord have mercy.”

“It’s a nice stand,” I said.

“It’s robbery with a roof on it,” she said.

“Six,” Marjorie said then, and she said it like a woman making up her mind about more than the price. She got out of her Buick in her church coat and she bought both my shocks and a sack of the little warty gourds I had picked that morning, and she paid me in ones and a five out of a change purse.

“Who’s running the big stand?” she asked, though she knew.

“Gary,” I said. “It’s a nice stand.”

Marjorie made a sound in her throat. She has known me since we were girls and she can read me like the back of a seed packet. She put the gourds on her front seat and she patted my arm with her cold hand.

“I’ll tell the girls,” she said.

She got halfway into the Buick and then she stopped with one foot still on my gravel and looked back at me.

“Your Virgil,” she said, “would be out here with you right now with that radio of his, and you know it.”

I did know it. I had to turn and fuss with the twine so she would not see my face do what it wanted to do. Marjorie let me have the minute and then she shut her door soft and backed out.

I did not know yet what a thing that was, that she would tell the girls. I found out by noon.

Hollis And The Coffee Crowd

My neighbor Hollis Barnett farms the ground across the road and down. He is seventy-four and he has buried a wife and he drinks his coffee every weekday morning at the Marathon station in town with the same six men he has drunk it with since the Ford plant closed.

Hollis came by on his Gator about nine, after Marjorie, and he stopped in the road and looked at my two empty shock-stands and my card table and the little bit of money in my cigar box.

“You’re out of shocks,” he said.

“Sold the last two to Marj.”

“Well,” Hollis said. “Tie me one.”

I told him I was out, that the rest were up at Gary’s. He looked up the road and his face did a thing I will not forget. Hollis and Virgil used to combine each other’s back forty. He knew exactly what he was looking at.

“Then I’ll wait,” Hollis said. He shut off the Gator. “Tie me one right here. I got time.”