The Mystery Pie

How Aaron came home one day to find a wild blueberry pie on his kitchen table. It was delicious, but where had it come from? Who had dropped it off?

This is a true story. More or less. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Aaron and his wife, Nancy, live just outside of town. She is a weaver and has a studio upstairs in their small cape. He works for the state.

In the spring, Aaron took up the bagpipes. He’d been to a Celtic festival and fallen in love. He hadn’t a clue as to how difficult the pipes were to play. After a couple of nights of it, Nancy told him to “take that friggin’ racket outside.” Her patience was tried.

So Aaron settled on playing outdoors. Weather permitting.

Now this is the country mind you so their house is situated a five-minute walk in either direction from the nearest neighbors on their road. Behind their house is a lawn and a rolling field that rarely has cows in it so Aaron chose a high point in the field on which to perch and play.

On the far side of the field is a stand of pines and hemlocks and brush that’s deep enough and thick enough to shield a house on the other side.

Each night after supper Aaron goes out and blows his pipes and, well, makes a racket. Scares the crows even. Luckily, the Palmers don’t graze the cows there anymore — too far from the barn.

Gradually, and by gradually I mean glacially, Aaron has begun to eek out some real live musical notes but it still is a god-awful thing to listen to. But he’s kept at it. And Nancy’s kept the windows shut.

One day last August Aaron returned from work hungry and tired and hot and hungry and there, basking in the late afternoon sun on his kitchen table, was a freshly baked, still-warm wild blueberry pie. Thinking Nancy had baked it, and being hungry and all, he cut himself a piece. He ate himself a piece. And then he stood up, wiped his mouth on his sleeve and went upstairs to his wife’s studio.

“Thanks for the pie, hon. It was delicious.”

“Pie?” she said. “What pie?”

They went downstairs. They stared at the pie. Nancy looked around for a note, a card, anything. Nothing.

Nancy sat down and had a piece. Ummm. Aaron afforded himself another sliver which wasn’t a sliver at all. And they agreed. That was the best wild blueberry pie they’d ever eaten.

But who? Why?

For a week, then two, they quizzed everyone they knew. Their neighbors up and down their road. People at market.

Aaron even stopped in at The Tavern. No one had a clue. One man at the bar asked if they still had the pie, he’d love to try a piece.

Nope the pie’s gone. Ate it right quick.

Soon Aaron’s and Nancy’s curiosity was quenched. Just one of life’s mysteries.

Then one day came a knock on the door. A neighbor, Sid Palmer.

“Hi yah. Understand you’ve been wonderin’ about a pie,” Sid said. They invited him in. And soon the tale was told.

Seems Caleb Washburn, who lived in the house beyond the field and pines and hemlocks and brush who, as they’d politely say, “kept to himself” and was rarely seen, appeared out of the blue three Sundays ago at the The Holy Mary and Jesus Baptist Church.

Few noticed as he stood in the back watching the parishioners alternately singing and swaying and chanting and responding and then sitting to mull their own transgressions, reminded as it were, by Pastor Bowditch and his blazing sermon that seemed to go on and on for what seemed like forever.

And then Pastor Bowditch got to the apex of his sermon, the highlight of the service, the Call for the Devil.

“Friends,” Pastor Bowditch shouted, waking up poor Maude Perkins whose hearing aids were on the fritz, as he cleared his throat and scanned the crowd and let silence settle on them for a bit. “I now call upon you to share any time of recent when the Devil crept into your thoughts, when you felt his presence, when you were tempted by his unholy as he tried to worm his way into your minds and hearts.”

There was silence. No one wanted to go first.

Then, from the back, Caleb Washburn boomed: “I have been visited by the Devil, Pastor.”

And that’s when everyone saw Caleb Washburn shuffle halfway down the aisle in his grimy jeans and sooty coat, hat in hand, his hair a tangle, his voice gaining volume.

“Yes. I was visited by the Devil himself, Pastor.”

Everyone was staring. Rev. Bowditch removed his glasses, polished them and put them back on, leaning forward to get a better look.

“You see, my neighbor decided in his infinite wisdom to take up the bag pipes. And he decided to take his unholy racket to the field behind my house. He’s there every afternoon. Every evening. And sometimes it is more than I can bear.

“One night, I confess, I could not take it anymore. And I could feel him, I could feel Satan enter my house and creep up behind me and I heard his voice, Pastor. And he told me, ‘Caleb Washburn. Go get that shotgun hanging above the mantel and take care of that abomination. Rid yourself of that cursed noise. Go, Caleb. Go!’

“And I stood at that mantel, and I could feel the Devil whispering in my ear, pushing me, making me want to lift my arms and get that shotgun and go outside and through the woods and across the field, but I fought him, Pastor. I fought the Devil, and I beat him back.

“And I said ‘No!’ And I thought of our sweet Jesus and I could feel him return to my heart and suddenly I knew what to do clear as day.

“So I went into my kitchen, and I baked that man a wild blueberry pie.”