The Sweet Corn at the End of His Lane

Sid

Sid came home from his shift a little before one in the morning. I was sitting on the porch steps in the dark, and he saw my face in the yard light and came and sat down beside me without going in.

I told him the whole thing. I told it plain, the way it happened, the bumper, the stakes, the forty dozen, the woman who drove off, Zeke on the porch steps with the coffee can.

Sid did not say anything for a long time. He picked at a splinter on the step. Sid is a quiet man, like his father, and when he is angry he gets quieter.

“I’ll go over there in the morning,” he said. “I’ll talk to him.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want you to.”

He looked at me. “Ione, he wrecked your wagon in front of our son.”

“He bent two stakes,” I said. “You can fix the stakes. And if you go over there angry, he’s going to say something, and you’re going to say something, and then you won’t have a father either.”

That sat between us on the steps a while.

“You could call the sheriff,” he said, finally. “It’s your property. It’s two hundred dollars of corn.”

“I know,” I said. “And a deputy would drive out, and Quincy would be embarrassed in front of the whole road, and none of that would make him stop hating my wagon.”

I had been thinking about it all evening, sitting on those steps. A deputy can write a report. A deputy cannot make a grieving man sit down at his own table and be glad to see you.

Sid rubbed his face with both hands. “Then what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I don’t want to fight him. I want my father-in-law back. I want Zeke’s grandpa back. I just don’t know how you get a man back from where he’s gone.”

The recipe box

The next morning I went to the cupboard over the refrigerator and took down the recipe box Elsie gave me at my bridal shower.

It was a green tin box with a hinged lid, and inside were a hundred and some cards in her slanted hand, some of them so spotted with lard and fruit juice you could barely read them.

Wrapped in a dish towel beside the box were three pie tins she had given me with it. Two were ordinary. The third had a deep dent in the rim on one side, like someone had stepped on it.

I remembered the story of that dent. Elsie told it at every Thanksgiving. In 1994 Quincy had been loading her pies for the Clinton County 4-H Fair, and he backed the truck up and set his boot right down on the tin while it was on the tailgate.

The pie inside had been a peach pie. It took a blue ribbon anyway, dent and all, and Elsie said she kept that tin because it was proof that a good pie can survive a careless man.

She always laughed when she told it. And Quincy always shook his head and said he’d been hearing that story for thirty years and it got worse every time.

I sat on the back steps with the box in my lap and the dented tin beside me, and I started to understand what the stand at the end of his lane had been to him. It had not been a business. It had been the place he got to stand beside her all summer.

And then I had gone and put my wagon two miles down the road, at a lower price, with her recipes in my cupboard, without asking him. He had not been fighting my corn. He had been fighting the idea that the road had moved on without her.

None of that made it right to put a bumper into my wagon. But it made it something I could answer.