The Night Our Whole Road Carved Pumpkins

“There might be,” I said.

“Can we go look before school?”

“We can go look before school.”

So we did. We got up at six. It was cold, the first really cold morning of the fall, and there was a white fog lying low over the hay field. We drove out to Dad’s with two pairs of work gloves and Dad’s old flat wagon hitched behind his garden tractor.

Dad was already out there. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and he was walking the edge of the patch, looking under vines with the toe of his boot.

“There’s more than you’d think,” he said. “He mostly went through the middle.”

We went row by row. Sylvia lifted the vines and I carried. Anything with a crack in it, anything that was soft, we left. Anything that was whole, even if it was scarred or lopsided or had mud ground into the skin, went on the wagon.

It took us three mornings before school and two whole evenings after my route. Dad drove the garden tractor back and forth to the barn and stacked them along the wall on a tarp.

When we were done, Sylvia counted them. One hundred and forty whole pumpkins, out of six hundred and twelve.

None of them were fair pumpkins anymore. The good ones, the big round ones she had been watching all summer, had all been in the middle. What was left were the ones on the edges: small ones, flat-sided ones, ones with a scar across the face where a tire had rolled over and not quite broken them.

Sylvia sat down on a hay bale in the barn and looked at the pile for a long time.

“Nobody’s going to buy these,” she said.

“Some people might,” I said.

“Not for what I wrote down.” She had her notebook open on her knee. “Not for five dollars.”

“Maybe not,” I said.

She was quiet. Then she said, “Grandma used to give pumpkins away. Do you remember? She’d set them out at the end of the driveway with a sign that said free.”

I did remember. My mom passed two years ago this past August. Every fall of my childhood she had grown more pumpkins than she knew what to do with, and every October she put the extras out by the road for anybody who drove by.

And on the Saturday before Halloween she carved with us on the front porch. Warner and me and later our kids. She always bought the candles. A bag of tea lights from the hardware store in Bremen, the same brand every year. Nobody else was ever allowed to buy the candles.

“Mom,” Sylvia said. “What if we just give them away?”

“All of them?”

“All of them. To everybody on the road. And we could carve them. At the field. Like Grandma used to do on the porch, but bigger.”

I looked at her. Ten years old, mud still on her jeans from that morning, and a notebook with a plan in it that she had just thrown away.

“You’d give up your lamb money,” I said.

“I already lost it,” she said. “This way somebody gets something.”

I did not trust my voice to answer that, so I just nodded.

“Everybody on the road?” I said, when I could.

“Everybody,” she said. Then she looked down at her notebook. “Even Jacob and Corbin.”