She had not. I had carved them for a quarter mile of dark and for a town that had lost its lit-up roads. But I did not correct her. A child should believe a thing was carved just for her. That is what a jack-o-lantern is for.
The skeleton, the older one, walked the whole line slow and counted them out loud, and when he got lost somewhere in the thirties he started over, and his voice carried in the cold the way a child’s voice does at night.
A family from the new houses came, the ones by the old Hoffman place, a father still in his work clothes and three children in costumes from a box store. The father stood at the foot of the lane a long minute before he drove up.
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“We just moved out here in July,” he said when he reached the porch. “My kids kept asking where the trick-or-treating was. I told them I didn’t think there was any, not out here.” He looked down the lane at all of it. “I was wrong. I’m glad I was wrong.”
His littlest, a girl maybe four in a cardboard crown, held up her bucket to me with both hands, and I dropped in two of the good chocolates, and she looked at them like they were coins of gold.
Working The Candy Bowl
I had not planned on help, but help arrived the way it does in a small place when word gets loose.
Darlene came with her husband and a folding chair and a thermos of cider she poured for the grown-ups out of the back of her van. Earl came and stood at the road end waving cars in with a flashlight like he was landing planes. The Yoder boy brought a second wagon of little pie pumpkins and set them out for any child who wanted one to take home.
“How’d they all hear?” I asked Darlene.
“I may have mentioned it at the salon,” she said.
“You may have.”
“And the elevator. And church.” She grinned at me. “And I put it in the Facebook group for the township.”
“The what?”
“Never you mind, Glenda. Just give out your candy.”
So I gave out my candy. A pirate. A princess. Two boys in matching cow costumes whose mother said they picked them because of their daddy’s dairy, and old Earl heard that and laughed so hard he had to sit down.
The cars kept coming. Not a flood like town, but a steady string of headlights off the county road, families who had heard at the diner or the elevator or the church that the old Dunmore lane was lit this year.