The Pumpkin Wagon Wyatt Took Back

Two acres of sandy loam along the creek, planted the last week of May, picked in late September, hauled to the produce auction in the bed of a Ford pickup with a plank across the tailgate. It paid the property tax every year and bought the grandchildren their Christmas.

Garland died in February. He was seventy-nine. I will not say more about that, because this is not that kind of story, except to say that the week after, Wyatt went out to the shop and came back carrying a Folgers can.

Inside, wrapped in a paper towel with a rubber band around it, were Garland’s seeds. Howdens, saved from the best pumpkins of the last six years, each batch labeled in Garland’s square pencil printing.

“Grandpa said somebody ought to plant these,” Wyatt told me. He was holding the can the way you hold a baby bird.

So we planted them. I borrowed a disc and a planter from a neighbor. Aaron ran the tractor on his Saturdays. Wyatt did the rest. He bought the extra fertilizer himself with sixty-four dollars of lawn-mowing money, and he walked those two acres every evening after supper with a hoe over his shoulder, the same way his grandfather did.

It was a wet summer in Wayne and Holmes counties. Rot got into half the pumpkin fields in the county by August. Wyatt’s patch sat on high ground and Garland’s creek bottom drained like a sieve. He lost maybe a fifth.

When the vines started to die back in the third week of September, the pumpkins sat out there in the stubble like orange lanterns. I stood at the edge of that field one evening with my arms crossed and felt something loosen in my chest that had been tight since February.

We picked for three Saturdays. Wyatt stacked his first wagon, our old hay wagon with the plank sides, on a Thursday night in the barn light, stem up, biggest to the back, and I held the flashlight. By nine o’clock he had a hundred and eighty of them stacked and could not sit still.

“What if nobody bids?” he said.

“Somebody will bid.”

“What if it’s only a hundred dollars?”

“Then it’s a hundred dollars more than you had in May,” I said.

I did not know how right I was going to be.

Aaron was not at the auction that Friday. I want to say that clearly, because I know what you are thinking, and it is a fair question. Where was the husband?

He was on the county road crew, on a shift that ran until three-thirty, spreading gravel on a township road east of Wooster. The auction sold produce starting at one.

He had asked off and been told no, because two men were out sick, and he had stood in our kitchen that morning with his lunch cooler in his hand looking as miserable as I have ever seen him.

The night before, he had called his cousin. I know this because I was in the room. He stood by the back door and said, “Jordan, I know you and Dad had your differences. Leave the boy’s wagon alone, would you? It’s his first one.” And Jordan had laughed that laugh and said, “It’s an auction, Aaron. Every wagon’s up for grabs.”

Aaron hung up, looked at me, and said, “He’ll behave. It’s kids’ day.”

I believed him. That is a thing I have had to forgive myself for, and I have mostly managed it.