The Lane I Lit With Sixty Pumpkins

Children walked up between the pumpkins with their faces turned, pointing at the mean ones, laughing at the gap-toothed ones, their parents behind them with their phones down for once and just looking.

I stood by the hay bale and gave out the good chocolate and I watched more mothers than I can count stop halfway up the lane and go quiet, the way you go quiet in a church you did not expect to be beautiful.

“I grew up on a road like this,” one woman said to me, near crying, a grown woman with a baby on her hip. “I didn’t know there was anywhere left to bring her.”

An old fellow came up the lane with no child at all, just himself in a coat, and he stood a long time in the middle of the pumpkins. I went down to him and asked was he all right.

“My wife used to light our place,” he said. “Up on Dutch Road. She’s been gone four years. I just wanted to see a lane lit again.” He touched my arm. “Thank you, missus. You don’t know what you did.”

I did not know what I did. I was finding it out one car at a time.

By seven the first bag of chocolate was gone. Darlene sent her husband to the gas station for more and he came back with his arms full and would not take my money.

The cider ran out and Earl’s wife brought two more jugs from home. Somebody started a little fire in the burn barrel by the barn and the grown-ups stood around it warming their hands while the children ran the lane.

And I kept watching the road, because a grandmother always keeps one eye on the road, and I was watching for a car I knew.

The Last Car

It was near eight, the little ones thinning out, the candy down to the last bag, when a pair of headlights I knew turned in off the county road.

I knew the car. I had ridden in the back of it to the hospital the day Trey’s tonsils came out. It was Brittany’s.

It came up the lane slow, slower than it needed to, and I watched it pass pumpkin after pumpkin, sixty grinning faces lighting the windshield orange and then dark and then orange again.

It stopped at the top by the porch. The back doors opened before the engine was off.

Mason came out first, still in his costume from the barn, a black cape half off one shoulder, and he stopped dead and looked down the lane the way I had looked up it at dusk.

“Grandma,” he said. Just that. “Grandma, you did all of these?”

“Every one,” I said.

“By yourself?”

“Carl helped. And the town came.”

“How many?”

“Sixty.”

He said the number back to himself like it was too big to hold. “Sixty,” he whispered.

Trey was already running. He is eight and he does not stop to say a thing when he can do it instead, and he ran straight past the candy bowl, past the hay bale, and hit me around the middle so hard I had to catch the porch post.

Mason came right behind him. Both of them, their arms around me, and Mason with his face up saying did you carve them all, did you really, how many, can we light one, can we hand out the candy.

And over their heads I watched Brittany get out of the car.