The Pumpkin Wagon Wyatt Took Back

“Nine hundred,” Jordan Underwood said, and he did not even turn his head toward the wagon.

The ring at the produce auction outside Millersburg went so quiet I could hear a draft horse blowing outside the big sliding door. Wyatt’s mouth came open. He was standing on the wagon tongue in his canvas vest, one hand on the sideboard, exactly where I had told him to stand so he could see the benches.

My son is twelve. He is small for twelve, with his father’s ears and a ball cap he had brushed off twice that morning. He had been up since four-thirty washing mud off a hundred and eighty pumpkins with a garden hose and a rag, and he had not complained once.

A wagon like his, one hundred eighty Howden jack-o-lanterns, graded and stacked with the stems up, brings about five hundred and forty dollars on a good Friday in October. Three dollars a pumpkin. Maybe four for the biggest ones.

Nine hundred was not a price. It was a number somebody said out loud so that people would turn and look.

Every man on those benches knew it. I watched them know it. A grocery buyer in the second row lowered his card as if it had gotten hot. An Amish farmer in a black straw hat looked at his boots.

Jordan sat in the front row with his arms folded over his clean seed-company jacket. He is forty-four, my husband Aaron’s first cousin, a big man with a red neck and an easy laugh that people mistake for friendliness.

He has grown pumpkins on eleven acres for twenty years, and he has never once, to my knowledge, said a kind word about anybody else’s.

He turned and grinned at my boy.

“Let the kid feel like a man,” he said, loud enough for the whole building.

A few people laughed. Not many. I counted four. I have counted laughs ever since, the way you count stairs in the dark.

Amos Gingerich, the auctioneer, stood on his little platform with the microphone in his hand. He did not laugh. His mouth went flat under his gray beard. But a bid is a bid in that ring, and the rules there are older than I am, so he pointed his finger at Jordan’s number card and said the word.

“Sold. Nine hundred dollars. Number forty-one.”

Wyatt turned around on the wagon tongue and looked down at me. His whole face was lit up like a porch light.

“Mom,” he said. “Is that a lot?”

I want you to understand what I did next, because I have gone over it more times than I can count. I did not scream.

I did not climb into the ring and pull Jordan’s seed cap down over his face, though my hands wanted to. I looked at my son’s face, and I looked at the grin on Jordan’s, and I said the only true thing I could say.

“It’s a lot, honey.”

He smiled. He actually smiled, and my heart broke clean in half.

I should tell you how a twelve-year-old ends up with a hundred and eighty pumpkins, because it matters to everything that happened after.

My husband’s father, Garland Underwood, grew pumpkins behind our barn for forty-one years. Not a big patch.