The Pie

Christmas dinner was at our own table, because Della would not have it anywhere else. My uncle Delbert Quarles was our guest, as he was every year, and he was not my uncle. He kept the feed and hardware store and the post office box, and he had a way of standing in a doorway he did not own as though it had been lent to him by a larger institution.

The table was set at one. Della had been at the stove since six. Emmet had been sent out to the yard to stand with the men, and I had been sent out with him, where I was told three times in an hour that I would never amount to a row of pins.

Then Della came to the door with her hands wrapped in her apron and said the pie was gone.

Nobody moved. Uncle Delbert looked at the empty place on the sill as though it had insulted him personally, and then he looked at me. Everybody looked at me. In that hollow a missing pie did not require evidence; it required a boy.

I had eaten none of it. I had carried it two miles in a cloth and watched a man with a broken cuff eat it standing up in a ditch, and I had never been more certain of anything in my life, and I said nothing at all.

"You," said Delbert.

"I never touched it."

"Show me your hands."

I showed him my hands. He turned them over and looked at the palms, and found nothing he could call proof, which did not stop him. What stopped him was the window.

Two cruisers came up the ridge road without lights, and then a third, and behind them a flatbed with a steel cage on it. Men got out with rifles and a lead on a chain. Somebody in the road said they had taken one of them in the ditch below the Quarles place and were hunting the other in the culvert.

We all went out and stood in the slush to watch, because that is what there was.

They brought the man up the bank with his hands wired behind him and his jacket gone. He had been in the freezing water up to his chest and his lips were the color of the stone on the ridge. They had put the muzzle of a rifle against his ear to hold him still while they worked the chain, and he stood it the way a man stands weather — which is to say he did not dignify it.

The other one they brought up separately, a slighter man with a good coat and wet hair combed back, and he was saying something to the deputies in the voice of a man who has read a book about how to talk to deputies. Nobody was listening.

Then the sheriff asked, in front of all of us, who had fed them.

The big man lifted his head. He looked at me for exactly as long as it takes to blink.

"Me," he said. "I came up the ridge road night before last and took a pie off a windowsill and a sawblade out of a shop, and I ate the pie in the ditch below this bank."

"You were in the water before that."

"There's water in this hollow I've been in before." He said it flatly. "You'll want to put me somewhere dry, sheriff. I've got a chest full of this weather."

And that was all. Two men went into a steel cage on the back of a truck, in front of the whole hollow, for a pie I had taken, and one of them had married me to that lie in the space of a blink and never once looked at me again to see what I would do with it.

Uncle Delbert said it proved nothing, but he said it more quietly, and the pie was never mentioned again. Della beat the table with the flat of her hand once when we got home and then went to bed. Emmet sat up with me in the shop until it was very late, and welded a broken hitch pin he did not need to weld, and told me the price of things: what a length of chain cost, what a blade cost, what a man was paid an hour in Wheeling for honest work.

He did not ask me anything. I have wondered since whether he knew, and I have concluded that he did not need to know. He was teaching me the ledger, so that if I ever had to pay it, I would know the columns.