The Lane I Lit With Sixty Pumpkins

Sixty Pumpkins

I called the Yoder boy who runs the pumpkin stand out on 95 and asked what he had left that he was going to plow under after the holiday.

He had a wagonload of the big field ones, the kind too lumpy and lopsided for the pretty displays, thirty-five cents apiece if I took the lot. I took the lot. Sixty pumpkins for twenty-one dollars and the loan of his flatbed to haul them.

My neighbor Carl ran them up the lane two Saturdays before Halloween and we rolled them off, one at the base of every fence post down both sides, thirty to a side.

Then I carved. Lord, did I carve.

I am sixty-two and my hands are not what they were, so I did it in the evenings, three or four a night at the kitchen table with the serrated knife and the big spoon and the little paring knife for the eyes.

Some I gave a gap-tooth grin. Some I gave round surprised eyes like Trey makes. Some I made mean and triangle-eyed because a boy wants a few mean ones. I cut a cat into one and a crooked moon into another.

My hands cramped by the third one most nights. I would set the knife down and run them under hot water at the sink and go back at it.

I thought about quitting more than once. Sixty is a foolish number for a woman alone. Ten would have made a porch look nice.

But every time I thought ten, I thought of Earl saying that barn or nothing, and I thought of a child in a new vinyl house with no tree in the yard, and I picked the knife back up.

Carl came by on the Thursday and found me at the table under a mountain of orange and he just shook his head and laughed. “Glenda,” he said, “you’ve lost your mind.” Then he sat down and carved eleven of them before he went home, and he is no artist, but a crooked face in a field pumpkin is still a face.

The seeds I washed and salted and roasted in the oven in sheet pans, and the kitchen smelled like fall the whole two weeks, and I ate them until my fingers were raw at the tips.

I did not tell Brittany. I did not tell Jeff, because he would have felt he had to help and he had no hours to give. I told Darlene, and I told Earl, and I told the Yoder boy, and that was the whole of it.

I bought the little votive candles by the box at the dollar store, two hundred of them, because a candle in a pumpkin on a windy Ohio night does not last the way you’d hope. That was nineteen dollars. I kept the receipts in a coffee can out of habit, Ray’s habit, and I did not quite know why I was keeping track except that it felt like building something and you keep the receipts when you build.

A field pumpkin does not keep like a store one. By the last week some of the early ones were caving in at the top, going soft at the lids, and I had to carve a second batch to replace the worst of them.

I went back to the Yoder boy for fifteen more. He would not take my money the second time. “Word’s going around town about your lane,” he said. “My mom heard it at the salon. You take these.”

So I carved fifteen more at the kitchen table with my raw fingers, and I did not mind. There is a kind of tired that feels like being useful, and I had not felt it in a while.

By the last week I had sixty jack-o-lanterns lined up in my barn, grinning in the dark when I cut the light, sixty faces waiting.