The Trunk I Set at the Far End

They lit up bright and even. Not one bulb flickered.

Jo arranged the candy bowls. Mick appointed himself the lookout and stood up on a hay bale with his cowboy hat pushed back, scanning the road like a man expecting cattle.

The sun went down behind the grain elevator and the lot got that deep blue October color, woodsmoke somewhere, a cold coming up off the gravel through my boots.

The near end glowed and filled with families. Headlights kept turning in off the county road.

And down at our end, by the cedar, it was just the four of us and a string of lights and nine pumpkins, a long way from everybody else.

Jo’s face started to fall. She is six and she wears everything right out in the open.

“Nobody’s going to walk all the way down here, Grandma,” she said.

“Some will,” I said. I did not know if it was true. “Candy’s candy. And ours is the good kind.”

The First Car

For the first fifteen minutes I thought Jo was right, and I will tell you my heart was in my throat for those children.

The families clustered up by the hall. The kids went trunk to trunk in a tight little school of fish, and not a one of them peeled off toward the cedar.

I kept my face easy for Mick and Jo and I prayed, the plain kind, the kind that is really just please.

Then a truck I knew came in off the road. It was the Boyers’ flatbed, old Earl Boyer and his wife Caroline, who farm the bottom ground south of us and who have known me since I was a bride.

They did not turn toward the crowd. Earl drove the length of that lot slow and pulled in right across from us, nose to nose, and rolled his window down.

“Brenda,” Earl said. “You’re set up clear out here in the weeds.”

“We like the view,” I said.

Earl looked at Mick on his hay bale and Jo in her scarecrow straw and the nine pumpkins and the lights that did not flicker, and he looked back at the crowd up by the hall, and old Earl Boyer is nobody’s fool.

He put it together in about two seconds.

“Caroline,” he said out his window, not quiet, “the good candy’s down here at Brenda’s. Come get your grandbabies.”

Caroline Boyer has a voice that carries across a forty-acre field. She got on her phone and called her daughter, who was already there with three kids, and inside of five minutes the Boyer grandkids came running the length of that lot with Caroline marching behind them like a drum major.

Jo handed the first Boyer boy a full-size candy bar because I had told her to start with the little ones and she forgot entirely, and his eyes went wide, and he ran back toward the crowd hollering that the big bars were down at the far end by the cedar tree.

You have never seen anything travel through a group of children faster than the news of a full-size candy bar.