The Honor Box on Our Highway Corner

I set the pies out by eight on Saturday morning, went back up the road to the house, and checked on the table every hour or so.

I kept a tally on the underside of the lid in pencil. How many pies went out, how much came back.

I’m a farm wife. I keep track of things. I wanted to know, if the box ever came up short, how short and how often.

It was never short. Not one Saturday. I want to say that plain, because people don’t believe it.

From the middle of August to Thanksgiving week, that box never once held less than the pies that had gone off the table. Most weeks it held more.

People left extra. A five folded into quarters. A ten with a note that said “for the blackberry, best I’ve had since my mother’s.”

One Saturday in September, a little girl left a dollar in quarters with a drawing of a pie on the back of a church bulletin.

Mrs. Wolter came every Saturday, rain or shine. When it rained, I covered the pies with dish towels under the canopy and she came anyway, in a plastic rain bonnet, and sat in her car with the window down and talked to whoever stopped.

She knew everybody. She had taught half the county to read. She would say, “Now, you’re Jim Ostlie’s boy, aren’t you,” and the man would turn red and say yes ma’am, and he would leave a twenty for a fifteen-dollar pie.

She did not ask anybody to do it. She just knew them.

The second week of September, I started setting one extra pie at the far end of the table, away from the others.

Callie made a little card for it. It said, “Free. For whoever needs it most. No money, please.”

I don’t know what made me do it. I suppose it was the Sunday our pastor read from Leviticus, about not reaping the corners of your field, and leaving them for the poor and the stranger. I went home and thought about my corner.

That free pie was always gone. Every Saturday. I never once saw who took it, and I didn’t try to.

Some weeks it went by nine in the morning. Some weeks it sat until almost noon, and then it was gone.

Once there was a note in the box in pencil on the back of a receipt from the gas station in town.

It said, “My husband is laid up after his surgery. The kids were so happy. Thank you.” There was no name. I kept it. It’s in my Bible now, tucked in at that chapter in Leviticus.

The first Saturday in October was the kind of day you’d keep in a jar if you could.

Bright sun, no wind, the soybeans in the field behind the corner just starting to go from green to gold along the edges, like a pie crust browning.

I was setting a cherry pie down on the table in my denim apron when Mrs. Wolter came up in her cardigan and leaned over the rows of clear boxes.

She took her time choosing, the way she always did. She touched Dwight’s little lockbox with one finger as she passed it, like you’d touch a church pew.

“I believe this is the best pie stand in Missouri,” she said, “and it hasn’t got a roof.” I told her it had a canopy.

She said a canopy wasn’t a roof, it was a hat, and she paid her twenty and sat down in her lawn chair.