The Sweet Corn at the End of His Lane

The first cars

The first car slowed down about half past seven. It was a young couple I didn’t know, and they bought two dozen from me and looked at Quincy on the tailgate and did not buy from him.

I put their twelve dollars in the coffee can in the middle of the table. Quincy watched me do it.

The second car was a man in a feed store cap who bought a dozen from Quincy’s table, and Quincy had to get up off the tailgate to take his money. He put the six dollars in the can. I saw his jaw work when he did it.

By nine there was a line. Not a long one, five or six cars, but a line, which Quincy had not had since last summer. People who had been going to my wagon two miles down saw it at Quincy’s lane and turned off out of curiosity.

Zeke got out of the truck and stood on a milk crate at the end of the card table and held up a dozen ears in a plastic sack with both hands. “Six dollars!” he yelled at every car. “Six dollars, picked this morning!”

A woman laughed and bought two dozen just from that.

Quincy got up off the tailgate for good after that. He started bagging. He did not talk to me, but he bagged for both tables, his and mine, and he did it fast, the way a man does who has done it ten thousand times.

Around ten, an older fellow in a pickup asked Quincy if he still had his wife’s pies. Quincy stopped with a sack of corn in his hand.

“No,” he said. “No pies anymore.”

And I reached under the card table and brought out the first of the pie boxes, and opened the lid. Peach.

The man looked at it and then at Quincy. “Well, there you go,” he said, and paid me twelve dollars for it, and I put it in the can.

Quincy did not look at me. He looked at that pie going into the man’s truck.

Della again

Della Kessler drove up a little after ten, the way she had every Saturday for twenty years, and she got out of her car slow, because of her hip, and came across the gravel to the table.

She looked at the long counter, my card table pushed against Quincy’s plank table, and the corn, and the boxes, and Zeke on his milk crate, and she looked at Quincy.

“Well, Quincy,” she said. “It’s been a while.”

“Della,” he said.

“I quit coming out,” she said. “I’m sorry for that. It wasn’t the same without her pies. I couldn’t stand to see the table without them.”

Quincy looked at the ground, at his boots, at the gravel. His jaw went tight.

I opened the second pie box and turned it toward Della, and she looked at it for a long moment. Then she put her hand flat on her chest.

“Oh,” she said. “That’s her lattice. That’s Elsie’s lattice.”

“It’s her card,” I said. “I just followed it.”

Della bought two pies, a peach and a blackberry, and she would not take her change. She folded the bills into the coffee can herself. And then she did something I did not expect: she walked around the end of the table and hugged Quincy, right there on the shoulder of the road.

He stood stiff as a fence post for about three seconds. Then he put one arm around her.