The Night Our Whole Road Carved Pumpkins

About six-thirty, Trudy’s car pulled in at the end of the lane.

She got out with Jacob and Corbin. Corbin is seven and he ran straight for the pumpkins. Jacob walked behind his mom with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground.

Trudy came up to me. She looked tired. She had on one of Warner’s old work jackets, too big for her.

“Patrice,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t call again.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t call back,” I said.

She looked out at the field and then at me. “He’s not coming,” she said. “I asked him. He said he couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”

“I think couldn’t,” she said quietly. “He’s been sitting in the garage most nights. He won’t talk about it. Jacob won’t talk to him.”

I looked over at Jacob. He was standing at the edge of the hay bales, not sitting, not touching anything.

Sylvia had seen him too. She got up from her bale and went into Dad’s barn without a word. When she came out, she was carrying a pumpkin with both arms, leaning back against the weight of it.

It was the biggest pumpkin left. Round and deep orange, with a good thick stem. She had found it in the far corner of the patch, under a tangle of vines he had missed, and she had hidden it in the barn for three weeks under a feed sack so nobody would take it by accident.

She walked it over to Jacob and set it down at his feet.

“This one’s yours,” she said. “I saved it.”

Jacob looked at the pumpkin. Then he looked at Sylvia. I watched his chin start to shake.

“My dad did that,” he said. He did not point at the field. He did not have to.

“I know,” Sylvia said.

“He did it because of the lamb show.”

“I know,” she said again.

Jacob’s face crumpled. He was eleven, trying so hard not to cry in front of forty people and a girl cousin who had beaten him at the fair.

Sylvia did not say anything else. She just sat down on the hay bale next to the pumpkin and patted the spot beside her.

After a minute, Jacob sat down.

She handed him a spoon. He took it.

I had to turn around and look at the tree line for a while.

Trudy stood next to me. She was crying a little too, and trying not to. “She’s a better person than any of us,” she said.

“She’s ten,” I said. “She hasn’t learned how not to be yet.”

The light kept going. By seven it was nearly dark, the sky gone that deep blue that comes right before dark in late October, and somebody pointed out what nobody had thought of.

“We’ve got all these pumpkins carved,” Mr. Ankrom said. “Anybody bring candles?”

People looked at each other. Mrs. Hensley had matches in her purse. The Fosters had a flashlight. Nobody had candles.

It was always Mom’s job. In all those years of carving on the porch, nobody else was ever allowed to buy the candles. And I had not even thought of it.

I was standing there trying to think whether the Dollar General in Bremen would still be open when Dad stood up from his bale.

He was looking down the lane.