The Pumpkin Wagon Wyatt Took Back

So it was me and Wyatt, with our old green John Deere, pulling the hay wagon in through the sliding door at a quarter to one. I am a state-tested nursing assistant at a care center in Wooster.

I am thirty-seven. I had traded two weekend shifts to get the afternoon, and I felt like exactly what I was, a woman who has never once been asked to be bold.

The produce auction is a lovely, strange place if you have never been. Two big pole barns joined together, a concrete floor, a long ring in the middle where the wagons and pallets roll through one at a time, and tiers of bench seats on both sides full of buyers holding numbered cards.

Grocery men in store jackets, roadside-stand owners in work boots, and Amish families in black straw hats and white caps.

Outside, a row of buggies stood at the hitching rail. The whole building smelled like apples, wet hay and diesel.

Amos Gingerich has called the ring there for thirty-eight years. He is seventy-one, a thin straight man with a gray beard that reaches the third button of his vest. He talks in the fast sing-song of an auctioneer, a chant that sounds like a language of its own, but between lots he talks like your uncle.

Kids’ day is the last Friday before Halloween. Any child twelve or under who has grown a wagon of their own produce can roll it through the ring with a parent standing by. The buyers always make a little more fuss over those lots. Most of us never thought about why until that afternoon.

There were five children’s wagons ahead of us. A girl with two braids had a cart of Indian corn, and a boy of nine brought three crates of apples. When it was Wyatt’s turn I put the tractor in low gear and eased the wagon through the sliding door, and the benches turned and looked.

Amos said, “Next, a wagon of Howden pumpkins, a hundred and eighty by the grower’s count, grown by Wyatt Underwood, age twelve. First wagon. Who’ll start me at three hundred?”

I watched my son’s chin lift. Then the bids came fast. A man from a Wooster store opened at three-fifty, a roadside-stand man said four, and the price climbed the way it was supposed to climb, four-fifty, five hundred, five-twenty. Then Jordan said, “Nine hundred.”

And that was that.

The wagon rolled out the far door of the ring and into the holding lane, where the boys who work the floor chock the wheels and the clerk sends a runner for the buyer.

I killed the engine. Wyatt jumped down. He was still smiling, but he kept glancing back at the benches the way you check a stove you think you left on.

“Nine hundred dollars,” he said. “Mom, that’s more than the whole summer.”

“I know.”

“Can I get Grandpa a, like, a marker? For the cemetery? A real one?”

I put my hand on the back of his neck. “Let’s get the check first.”

The office at the produce auction is a window at the back of the south barn, with a counter and a pegboard and a woman behind the glass who has run it since before I was married.

Naomi Miller is Amish, sixty or so, with a face as round as a pie plate and a pencil behind her ear that she never seems to use.

Jordan was already at the window. He had walked straight there from the front row, which should have told me something.