The Trunk I Set at the Far End

Three pumpkins off the porch and six more I bought at the Haggard pumpkin patch out on J Highway for five dollars each.

Cornstalks I cut from the garden and tied with baling twine.

Dale rigged a plywood ramp off the tailgate so the little ones could climb up to the bowls themselves. He sanded the edges smooth with a block so nobody would catch a splinter.

He is like that. He does not say much, but he thinks three steps ahead of the thing in front of him, and he had already pictured a four-year-old reaching for a candy bar she could not quite touch.

I drove to the Walmart in town and spent forty-one dollars and change on candy, the good kind, the full-size bars for the end of the night and three bags of the little ones to start. Kyle was on a gravel haul to Sedalia and could not come, but he called and I put him on speaker and he told the kids to mind their manners and hand out candy like they owned the place.

“You do own the place,” I told Mick and Jo. “A little corner of it, anyway.”

Jo pulled her straw-stuffed sleeves straight and looked at me very seriously and asked if we were allowed. I told her the parking lot belonged to the Lord and the Lord had never once turned a child away from a candy bowl, and that was the truth as near as I understood it.

The Far End of the Lot

We pulled into Prairie Chapel at four o’clock, an hour before the thing started, and the near end of the lot was already filling up with trunks.

Shanna was in the center, right by the fellowship hall doors, in Marie’s denim jacket, directing cars like a woman who had earned the right to.

Her trunk was done up beautiful, I will say that.

A whole hay-bale scene, a scarecrow of her own, Marie’s orange lights looped twice around the open hatch.

She saw my truck. I saw her see it. She did not wave and she did not scowl. She just watched us roll past all twenty-two trunks to the far end by the cedar, and then she turned back to her cars.

I backed the Silverado up so the tailgate faced the lot. Dale stacked the hay bales into steps the way Marie used to, though I did not say so. We set the pumpkins along the bumper and leaned the cornstalks against the cab and I strung my orange lights across the open tailgate and plugged them into the little battery pack I keep for the ice shanty.