The Stand I Set at My Own Lane

“Hollis, you’ve got a hundred acres of standing corn you could pull a stalk from.”

“Don’t want a stalk,” he said. “Want a shock. Tied by you. At your lane. You going to argue with a paying man?”

I was not going to argue with a paying man.

So I went to the barn and I pulled a fresh bundle of stalks and I carried them down to the lane and I tied Hollis a shock right there while he watched, three low and two high, tied off against the wind. He gave me ten dollars and would not take the change.

“That’s a six dollar shock, Hollis.”

“It’s a ten dollar show,” he said. “Cheapest entertainment I had all year.” And he put that shock in the back of his Gator and he drove it straight into town, through the middle of October, to the Marathon station where six old men were drinking coffee.

I heard later what he said. He set it against the ice cooler and he told them Eunice Nelson’s boy had took her stand and her money and parked her at the house, and she had set up a card table at the end of her own lane out of pure stubbornness, and her shocks were six dollars and the best in the county, and if any of them had a wife who wanted a shock they knew where the good ones were and where they were not.

Six old men. Each with a wife. Each wife with a telephone.

I did not plan that. I want to be honest with you. I did not set my table at the lane to shame my son or to start a thing at the Marathon station. I set it there because I could not stand to be inside and done.

But a county road has a memory longer than any of us. It remembered Virgil in his lawn chair. It remembered forty Octobers of my shocks. And when Hollis Barnett carried that one shock into town, the road decided for itself which Nelson it was going to stop for.

That is the thing Gary never figured on. You cannot build a stand that makes people drive past the woman they have been waving to for forty years.