Six Dollars a Shock
Part One: Frost
Frost was still silver on the ditch grass when I carried the card table down the lane.
It was the second Saturday in October. Six-forty in the morning. The sun wasn’t up yet, but the sky over the Hendersons’ woods was going from gray to pink, and every blade of grass along the gravel was coated white. My breath smoked in front of me. My boots crunched.
The card table was the old one from the basement. Brown vinyl top, one leg that wobbles if you don’t wedge a matchbook under it. Virgil bought it at an auction in 1974 for a dollar and a half. We used it for pinochle on Friday nights for forty years.
I set it up at the end of our lane, right where the gravel meets the county road.
By seven o’clock, I had three corn shocks standing beside it.
Two from the barn. One I tied right there in the lane, with the bundle of stalks I’d carried down in the wheelbarrow and the twine from my coat pocket.
My hands were cold. My knees hurt. My back would tell me about it tomorrow.
I didn’t care.
I’m Eunice Albright. I’m sixty-eight years old.
I’ve lived on this farm on County Road 400 South, outside Pleasant Mills, Indiana, since I was twenty-one. I came here as a bride in a borrowed dress, with a suitcase and a cedar chest and a husband who had more corn ground than sense.
My husband, Virgil, poured the gravel in this lane in 1981.
Part Two: Virgil
He did it himself.
Borrowed a dump truck from his cousin Lyle. Hauled six loads from the quarry over by Decatur. Spread it with a shovel and a rake on a hot Saturday in July while I brought him lemonade in a mason jar.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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