The Pumpkin Wagon Wyatt Took Back

“Okay,” he said. “Can I stand on the front?”

“You stand wherever you want.”

I climbed up on the John Deere. My hands were not quite steady on the wheel, and I wiped them one at a time on my jeans. The floor boys pulled the chocks.

The big door slid open, and the sound of the building came in, four hundred people talking at once, the way a crowd does when it has just been told something is happening.

I eased the clutch out and the wagon rolled.

I have driven that John Deere through muddy fields, down county roads in January, and once across a creek I had no business crossing. I have never driven it as slowly as I drove it into that ring.

Wyatt stood on the wagon tongue with one hand on the sideboard, exactly where he had stood the first time. I saw him pull his cap down and push it back up. The benches were full. Nobody was talking now. I could hear the engine ticking and the gravel under the rear wheels.

Amos Gingerich was on his platform, hat back on, microphone in his hand. He waited until I had set the brake. Then he lifted the microphone and, for the first time in thirty-eight years, he did not use the chant.

“Gentlemen, ladies,” he said. His voice was plain and carried to the back wall. “This wagon sold once today, for nine hundred dollars, to number forty-one. The bidder has declined to pay. The rules of this auction say the lot goes back on the block, and so it does.”

A murmur went around the benches. Someone coughed.

“I will say one more thing, and then we will sell it. That bid was not made in good faith. Every man in this room knew it when he heard it. A pumpkin is worth what a pumpkin is worth. A boy’s first wagon is worth that and a little more, and I’d have thought you all knew why.”

He stopped. He looked down the length of the front bench. I think he was looking for Jordan, and Jordan was not there. The place where Jordan had been sitting was an empty folding chair with a seed catalog on it.

“I will take bids from anybody who wants to start,” Amos said. “A hundred and eighty Howdens. Stems up, washed. Look at the stacking, ladies and gentlemen. That is a boy who was taught right.”

Nobody moved for about three seconds. I counted. It felt like a week.

Then at the back of the second bench a man stood up. He was very old, with a white beard down to his belt buckle and a cane hooked over his arm, and he wore the plain black coat and wide-brimmed hat of the old order Amish.

He did not raise a card. He did not have one. He just stood, slowly, with his hand on the bench in front of him, until every head had turned.

“Five hundred,” he said, in a voice like a gate hinge.

I had never seen that man in my life.

Amos Gingerich said, very softly, into the microphone, “Levi Raber.”

And the building changed.

What happened next was like watching a field of corn lean in one direction because a wind has come up.