The Sweet Corn at the End of His Lane

Della

On Wednesday Della Kessler stopped at my wagon. Della was seventy-three and lived in town, and she had bought pies from Elsie every Saturday for twenty years. She bought two dozen ears from me and stood on the gravel a while.

“I heard about Quincy,” she said. “Tim’s wife told me.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“It’s not all right,” Della said. “But I know why he did it.” She looked down the road toward his lane. “Nobody stops there anymore, honey. Without Elsie’s pies there’s no reason to drive out that far.”

“He’s got good corn,” I said.

“Everybody out here has good corn,” Della said. “It’s Indiana in August. You can’t throw a rock without hitting good corn.” She shook her head. “It was never the corn.”

Then she put her hand on my arm, just for a second. “You’ve got her recipes, don’t you? She told me she gave them to you. She said you were the only one who’d ever learned the crust.”

“I’ve got them,” I said.

Della nodded like that settled something, and got back in her car, and left.

I stood there on the shoulder a long time after she drove off. Zeke was on the wagon seat counting quarters into stacks of four.

“Mama,” he said. “Is Grandpa going to stay mad?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think Grandpa is sad, and it came out mad.”

Zeke thought about that. “Like when I broke the bird feeder?”

“Like that,” I said. “Exactly like that.”

Friday

On Friday I picked fifty dozen ears. I picked them in the cool before sunup, because corn picked in the heat turns its sugar to starch before you can sell it. Elsie taught me that too.

Then I came in and baked. Six peach pies and two blackberry, from her cards, with her crust, and my hands remembering what she had shown me in a church kitchen fourteen years before.

Indiana lets you sell home-baked fruit pies at a roadside stand if each one carries a label saying it was made in a home kitchen and not inspected by the state. Elsie had a roll of those labels in the recipe box. I used her labels.

The last thing I baked was not for sale. It was a sugar cream pie, the Hoosier pie, the one Elsie made every year for Quincy’s birthday and never once sold, because she said some things are not for strangers.

You cannot sell sugar cream pie at a roadside stand under the home vendor rules anyway. It is a custard pie and it has to stay cold. So I wrapped it in a towel and put it in the cooler with ice packs, in the dented tin.

Sid came out to the wagon before he left for his shift. He looked at the corn and the pie boxes and the cooler, and he understood without my saying.

“You want me to call in?” he asked. “I could come with you.”

“No,” I said. “If you’re there, it turns into the two of you. It has to be me and him.”

He kissed the top of my head. “If he says one wrong word to Zeke,” he said.

“He won’t,” I said. “But if he does, I’ll put Zeke in the truck and come home. I promise.”