The Honor Box on Our Highway Corner

Callie lettered a chalkboard in her neat college printing. It said, “Pies, $15. Please put your money in the box. Thank you and God bless.”

She drew a little pie in the corner with steam coming off it, and then she wiped it off and drew it again because the steam looked like smoke.

I was up at four thirty that Saturday baking, and the first pies came out of the oven as the sky was getting light over the beans.

By eight o’clock I had fourteen pies boxed and stickered and lined up in rows on my grandmother’s table.

Cherry, apple, peach, blackberry from the bushes along our fence row, and three pecans. The clear plastic boxes caught the sun.

I stood there in my denim apron and looked at that table and thought I had lost my mind.

There was no shade on that corner except the canopy, and no building, and no Rodney, and no crowd.

There was the gravel road, the highway, the soybean field, and a stop sign with a bullet hole in it that has been there since before I married Dwight.

I had planned to set the table out and go back up the road to the house, the way an honor box is supposed to work.

I couldn’t do it. I sat in a lawn chair in the shade of the canopy like a woman waiting for a bus.

The first car that turned off the highway onto our gravel was Mrs. Wolter. She had driven the mile from her place.

She got out with her purse on her arm and walked up to the table and looked down the rows like she was reading a hymn board.

“I’ll take the cherry,” she said. She opened her coin purse, and then she closed it and opened her pocketbook instead and took out a twenty-dollar bill.

She folded it in half and pushed it through the slot in Dwight’s box.

“Mrs. Wolter, I’ve got five dollars change right here,” I said, and she waved me off with the back of her hand.

“That’s not change,” she said. “That’s rent. You’re not paying any, so I’ll pay it for you.”

She did not go home. She went back to her car and got out a folding lawn chair of her own, and she set it up under the canopy next to mine.

“I’ll sit a while,” she said. “Somebody ought to watch the box the first day. Not because anybody’ll take anything. Just so it doesn’t feel lonesome.”

I sold eleven pies that first Saturday. I knew most of the people who stopped. The Mennonite family from up the road bought two.

A boy I’d taught in Sunday school, grown now and driving a feed truck, bought a peach and ate a slice of it right there off the tailgate with his pocketknife.

Not everybody stopped. Some cars slowed down, read the chalkboard, and kept going. One fellow in a pickup honked twice and waved, and I never did find out who he was.

But eleven pies, at the end of a gravel road, with no building and no rent, felt like more than sixteen ever had at Rodney’s.

When Mrs. Wolter finally went home at noon, I opened the box with the little key Dwight had given me.

I counted it at the kitchen table. Eleven pies at fifteen dollars came to $165. There was $180 in the box.

By the end of August, I had stopped sitting at the table. The honor box worked the way Thad’s coffee can had worked.