MISQUAH — The corn was picked at six Saturday morning, as it has been on August Saturdays since 1966, and the stand on County 12 opened at the usual hour with Dale Paulson working the hayrack and his brother Kenneth carrying flats up from the truck. At eleven they hung a piece of cardboard on the post — BACK AT ONE — and drove into town in their good clothes for their father’s funeral.

First Lutheran was full. The Rev. Karl Lindholm, who has buried a good share of this town and married a fair number of it, kept the service to the length Arvid would have tolerated and said the thing everyone had been circling all week: that a man who sells sweet corn on the honor system for sixty summers is making a daily statement about his neighbors, and that the statement was, on the whole, borne out. Janet Ruud read from Ecclesiastes. The congregation sang “How Great Thou Art,” loudly, the way it does when it is trying to hold something up.

The grandchildren spoke briefly and mostly about the honor box — the coffee can with the slot cut in the lid, emptied each evening into a Folgers can in the kitchen, never once counted at the stand, and the source of the line the family has been hearing back from strangers all week: I know where everybody lives. Kenneth said his father meant it as a joke about half the time. Lunch followed in the basement, the Ladies’ Aid presiding, ham and buns and eleven varieties of bar, and the line for the guest book stayed long enough that Donna Skoglund quietly started a second one.

At one o’clock, the cardboard came down. Dale said his father had left instructions on the subject some years ago, and that they consisted of one sentence: People will want corn Saturday. The stand did its usual business into the afternoon and sold out by half past four, which is late for a Saturday and was, several customers noted, the point — nobody was in a hurry to leave. The honor box took in what it took in. Nobody counted it at the stand.

The family has asked that memorials go to the First Lutheran basement roof fund, now in its fourteenth year, a designation Kenneth said his father would have found extremely funny. The stand will run through the season. Dale intends to open at six.