They did not have to. It is a small road. Everybody on Coonpath had driven past Dad’s place in the last month and seen the ruts. And everybody knew whose four-wheeler had that rattle.
I did not say a word against my brother to anybody. I want to be clear about that. I just carried the mail and smiled and said yes, bring whatever you want, there will be plenty.
On the Friday before, Dad and I hauled hay bales out to the edge of the field with the tractor and the hay wagon. We set them in a long double row with their backs to the patch, so people could sit and carve with the ruined field behind them.
I asked Sylvia if she wanted us to clean up the broken pumpkins first. Disk the patch under, maybe, so it would not look so bad.
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She thought about it. Then she shook her head.
“Leave it,” she said.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” She looked out at the ruts. “It’s part of it now.”
Dad looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at me. He did not say anything, but I saw his eyes, and I knew he was thinking about my mother.
Saturday was clear and cool. By six o’clock the sun was getting low over the tree line at the far side of the hay field, and the light had gone gold across everything.
I wore my old red plaid flannel, the one Buck says makes me look like a lumberjack. I had cut my auburn hair short over the summer because it kept catching in the car window on the route. Sylvia wore her green hoodie and her hair in two brown braids, because she said that was her pumpkin carving hairdo.
The Fosters came first, at four-thirty, with the three little ones and a card table and a roll of paper towels. Then Mrs. Hensley’s grandson with the cider in two big orange coolers. Then Mr. Ankrom with his knife in a leather sheath on his belt.
By six there were more than forty people on those hay bales.
Families I had delivered mail to for nine years. The Pierces with their new baby in a car seat. The man from number twenty-eight who never waves, and his son, who is sixteen. They took the bales right beside Sylvia and me and carved with us. Old couples who drove down from the far end of the road just to sit and watch.
Sylvia had set out every one of the hundred and forty pumpkins in rows along the edge of the field. Little ones for little kids. The scarred ones she gave to the grownups, because she said grownups would know how to carve around a scar.
People took them and sat down and started to work. Kids were scooping seeds onto newspaper. Mrs. Hensley was showing one of the Foster girls how to draw a face with a pencil before you cut.
Mr. Ankrom was sitting on the end of a bale with his old knife, carving a pumpkin with a scar across one side, and he had turned the scar into a mouth. He held it up for Sylvia to see.
“Every pumpkin’s got a face in it somewhere,” he told her. “You just have to look.”
She laughed. It was the first time I had heard her really laugh since September.
Behind all of us, the field lay there in the last light. The tire ruts. The split orange shells gone soft and gray at the edges. Nobody looked at it, and nobody had to.