The Pumpkin Patch That Filled a School Bus

“Grandma! Grandma, this is my grandma’s farm! This is my grandma!”

He hit me at the knees so hard I had to grab the barn door. He was telling everybody. He was telling the kids behind him, the bus driver, the barn cats, everybody.

Then Mrs. Becker, with a clipboard and a whistle on a lanyard and a look on her face like Christmas morning. Then two room moms I knew from church. Then the bus driver herself, who said she’d never been out this way and could she pick one too.

Then nobody, for a second.

Then a pair of clean white sneakers on the bottom step.

Courtney came down slow. She had on jeans and a nice tan jacket and those white sneakers, the kind you can tell were bought for walking around a mall. She stopped on the bottom step and looked out at the patch, the wet paths, the vines, the mud on the black-dirt end, and then she looked at me.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t smile at her in any kind of way that meant something. I just nodded, the way you nod at somebody at a funeral.

She didn’t have time to nod back. Brody had her by the hand.

“Mom. Mom, come on. I know which one. I already know which one I want, I saw it last time, come on.”

“Brody, honey, wait for Mrs. Becker,” she said, and he hollered back that Mrs. Becker said go.

Mrs. Becker had in fact just blown the whistle and said go, and twenty-four children went.

I have seen a lot of things on this farm. I have seen calves born backwards and a tornado take the roof off the old hog barn. I have never seen anything like twenty-four first graders turned loose in a pumpkin patch.

They ran. Every direction at once. They fell down and got up laughing with mud on both knees. They found the biggest pumpkin in the patch, a Big Max I’d been babying since July, and six of them tried to lift it together and couldn’t, and that was the best thing that had ever happened to any of them.

They found the warty ones and screamed. They found a garter snake and screamed louder. They found the white ones and decided they were ghost pumpkins and had to be carried very carefully.

A little boy in a camo jacket asked me if he could have two. A little girl asked if the pumpkins were for real free. A boy named Mason sat down in the middle of a row and just held his pumpkin in his lap like a puppy.

And Courtney stood at the edge of the wood chips in her white sneakers.

I watched her. I’m not proud of that, but I did. She stood with her arms crossed, not mad exactly. She just looked like a person standing at the edge of cold water. Every time a kid ran past her with mud flying off his boots, she took a tiny step back.

Brody kept coming back for her. He’d run out, run back, tug her sleeve. She’d say, “In a minute, bud.” He’d run out again.

The third time, he planted his feet.

“Mom. You have to come. It’s the one. You have to help me get it.”

She looked down at the mud between her and him. It was the soft end, where the chips were thin. She looked at her shoes.