The Stand I Set at My Own Lane

The little girl looked at her mother and the mother’s eyes went bright and wet, and the girl nodded, solemn as a judge.

So I taught a five-year-old named Ruthie to tie a corn shock, in the lane, while her mother watched and while my son Gary stood there watching too.

I put the twine in those small hands and I wrapped my old hands around them. We stood the stalks up and we married the tops and we wrapped the twine three low and two high, the way Virgil’s mother taught me the fall of 1979.

“Pull it snug, honey, so the wind can’t get it,” I told her. “There. Now it’ll stand all winter.”

The girl patted the top of it when we stood it up like it was a dog that had done a trick.

“I made a straw house,” Ruthie told her mother.

“You surely did,” Amber said.

“Grandma lady showed me.”

“I’m not her grandma, honey,” I said. “I’m just Eunice.”

“She showed me,” the girl said again, like that settled what I was to her, and maybe it did.

Gary watched his mother teach a child the thing he had decided she was too old to do. He did not say a word. But I heard him breathe out, long and slow, the way a man does when something he has been holding too tight finally gets away from him.

The Coffee Can Stays Full

Gary did not say sorry that day. Men like my son do not get there in a day. But he did not tell me to pack up the card table, either.

He went back up to his bright stand and he worked the rest of the afternoon, and that evening he did not come down with a grocery sack of money and a stack for my spending. He came down with nothing in his hands at all, which was the first honest thing he had carried in weeks.

He sat at Virgil’s table. He turned his cap around in his hands.

“The Marathon crowd came up to my stand this afternoon,” he said. “After they bought from you. Bought a couple shocks at my price just to tell me to my face that yours were better and cheaper and that my dad would have a word for what I did.” He almost smiled. “Hollis called me a name I won’t say in front of you.”

I put the kettle on. I did not say I told you so. Brenda from church would have wanted me to and Ruth would not have, and for once I came down on Ruth’s side.