The Sweet Corn at the End of His Lane

Elsie

Elsie Hollander had been my mother-in-law for eight years, and before that she had been the woman in the church kitchen who taught me how to roll a crust when I was fifteen and helping at a funeral dinner.

She was a small woman with strong forearms and flour in the creases of her knuckles every day of her life. She made pie the way some people breathe. She did not measure the lard. She said you could feel when it was right.

For thirty years she and Quincy had sold sweet corn at the end of their lane, at a long plank table under a maple tree with a hand-painted sign Quincy touched up every June. But anyone on that road would tell you the corn was not really the draw.

The draw was the pies. Every Saturday of summer Elsie set out a dozen pies on that table. Peach in July, blackberry when the berries came on, apple at the end of August. People drove from Kokomo for them. They were usually gone by ten.

You came for a pie and you bought your corn while you were there. That was how the stand worked, and everybody knew it except, I think, Quincy, who believed it was the corn.

Elsie had a stroke on the second Sunday in March. She was gone in four days. Sid held one of her hands and I held the other, and Quincy stood at the foot of the hospital bed in his good coat and did not sit down once.

After the funeral, Quincy quit coming to church. He quit coming to Sunday dinner. He spent his days in the machine shed with the radio on, and when Sid went over, Quincy would talk about the planter and the weather and nothing else.

He planted his sweet corn anyway in May, the same rows he always planted, as if planting it might bring something back. And in July he put the plank table out at the end of the lane, the way he always had. He did not put out pies, because there was nobody left to bake them.

I drove past his stand some mornings on the way to town. He would be sitting on his tailgate with the corn stacked high on the table and nobody stopped. Some days I saw the same pile I had seen the morning before.

I should have stopped. I see that now. I drove past.