Warner is my older brother. He is forty-one. When we were kids he was the one who taught me to drive the old Ford tractor, and the one who pulled me out of the creek the spring I was seven and went through the ice.
I need you to know that about him before I tell you the rest. He was not always the man on that four-wheeler.
Sylvia had planted that patch herself, Memorial Day weekend. It was her 4-H crop project, her first one, and she had picked it because her grandma used to grow pumpkins along the garden fence and Sylvia had decided she wanted to grow more than Grandma ever did.
Dad gave her the half acre at the back of the hay field, the low corner by the lane that never cut well anyway because it stayed wet in spring. He disked it for her with the old tractor. Sylvia did everything else.
She bought the seed with her own money. She had $112 left from the premium on her lamb at the spring show, and she spent every dollar of it on Howden seed, some starter fertilizer, and a long hose from the farm store in Lancaster.
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She planted three hundred hills. I helped her lay out the rows with baling twine and two stakes, but she put in every seed herself, three to a hill, on her knees, with a measuring stick she had marked with a Sharpie so she would get the depth right.
All summer she went out there. She hoed. She picked squash bugs off the leaves by hand and dropped them in a coffee can of soapy water. In the dry stretch in July she hauled that hose out from Dad’s barn every single evening.
By September the vines had run together into one big green mat, and under it were more pumpkins than any of us had expected. Sylvia had counted. She had a little notebook. Six hundred and twelve pumpkins, she said, give or take the ones she could not reach.
Her plan was to show her three best at the fair and sell the rest from a wagon at the end of Dad’s lane. She wanted the money for a second lamb next spring. She had it all written out, down to the price per pumpkin.
After Warner left, we walked out into the patch together.
The ruts went everywhere. Some of them were eight inches deep where he had spun the tires. The vines were torn up and wrapped in mud, and the pumpkins were split open, their insides spilled out pale and stringy across the black ground.
Sylvia walked to the spot where her three fair pumpkins had been. All three were gone. Not gone, exactly. They were still there. They were just in pieces.
She knelt down and picked up a piece of one. She turned it over in her hand.
“I was going to name this one,” she said.
That was when I almost lost it. Not at Warner. At the whole thing. At how small her voice was.
I need to tell you what I did not do, because people have asked me since.
I did not call the sheriff. I thought about it. I had my phone in my hand. But it was my dad’s ground, and it was my brother, and he had two boys at home who would have heard by supper that their father had been put in the back of a cruiser by their own aunt.