The Honor Box on Our Highway Corner

A grain truck went by on the highway and the porch shook a little, the way it must have shaken for fifty years.

“Thad sold sweet corn off a wagon right there at the end of this lane for twenty years,” she said. She pointed with her chin.

“A coffee can and a sign. You know how many times anybody shorted that can? Twice. Both times they came back.”

I laughed, and then I stopped laughing, because I saw what she was telling me.

“You’ve got a corner,” she said. “Where your road meets the highway. Everybody in this end of the county drives past it to go to town. You don’t need Rodney’s building, Marla. You need a table.”

I told Dwight about it at supper. I told him about Mrs. Wolter standing at the empty stall, and about the porch swing, and the sweet corn wagon and the coffee can. He listened the whole way through with his fork down.

“Honor box,” he said, when I was done. He said it like he was turning it over in his hands.

“You’d want it bolted to something. And you’d want a lid with a slot, so the money goes in and can’t come back out. Padlock on the side.”

“You think people would pay?” I asked him.

“Most would,” he said. “Out here, most would.” He picked his fork back up.

“And the ones who won’t, they’d have stolen a pie off your table at Rodney’s too. You just wouldn’t have seen it.”

The next morning he was out in the shop before I had the coffee made. I could hear the table saw from the house.

Dwight does not make speeches. He makes things, and when he’s made up his mind about something, you hear it before you hear about it.

By that afternoon he had a box built out of some white oak he had been saving since his dad tore down the old corn crib.

It was about the size of a bread box, with a hinged lid, a slot cut in the top, and a hasp for a padlock on the front.

He had sanded it smooth and rubbed it with linseed oil until it glowed. He built me a second, bigger oak box with a rope handle too, to carry the pies out and keep the dust off them.

On the inside of the lid, where nobody would see, he had burned our initials and the year with the little wood-burning tool Callie had gotten for Christmas when she was eleven.

“It’s a money box,” I said, when he showed me. “Dwight, you made it like it was a jewelry box.”

He shrugged and wiped his hands on a rag. “It’s going to hold your money,” he said. “Might as well look like it means it.”

Callie came home Friday and found our old farm table in the machine shed, the long one with the scarred top that had been in my grandmother’s kitchen.

Dwight hauled it to the corner on the flatbed, and they bolted the box to one end of it.

We already had a white canopy from Callie’s high school graduation party. It had been folded in the closet for a year and a half.

Dwight staked it down with tent stakes and a couple of cinder blocks, because the wind across those bean fields can lift a canopy clean out of the ground.