The Pumpkin Wagon Wyatt Took Back

The grocery man from Wooster raised his card and said, “Five-twenty.” A roadside-stand owner in the third row said, “Five-forty.” The man beside him said, “Five-sixty.” A woman in a white cap, who I think had come to buy a few pumpkins for her children and had no business being in the bidding at all, held up three fingers, and Amos said, “Five-eighty.”

It went up in twenties. Every bid was twenty dollars over the one before it, or close to it, clean and even and unhurried, and the men who were bidding kept their eyes on the ring and not on me.

At seven hundred somebody said, “Garland would’ve done it this way.” At eight hundred I heard a woman behind me say, “God bless that boy,” and it wasn’t a funny thing to say, and nobody laughed.

I could not look at Wyatt. I stood next to the tractor with my arms crossed over my chest, holding on to my own elbows. If I had looked at him I think I would have gone down on the concrete.

At nine hundred the grocery man dropped out and shook his head, smiling a little, the way you smile when you are glad to have lost. At nine-forty the roadside-stand owner dropped. It was down to Levi Raber and a younger Amish man, his grandson I think, standing beside him with a hand on his elbow.

“Nine-eighty,” the grandson said.

“One thousand,” said Levi.

“Ten twenty,” said the grandson, and then looked at the old man with his eyebrows up.

Levi Raber looked at him, and at me, and at the boy on the wagon. He sat back down very slowly on the bench with his cane across his knees, and he gave Amos the smallest nod.

“Sold,” Amos said. “A thousand and twenty dollars, to the Raber family, for the Pleasant Valley school pumpkin sale. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you, Levi.”

Nobody clapped. That is the thing I remember. It was not that kind of room. But four hundred people let out one long breath, and I felt it go across the ring like a cool wind in August.

Wyatt had not moved. He was standing on the tongue of that wagon with both hands on the sideboard, and his shoulders were shaking.

I did not run to him. I walked. I walked across the concrete in my good jeans and I put my arms up and he came down off the wagon tongue into them, all of him, a hundred pounds of boy with a ball cap and a face wet with something he would never in this life admit to.

“Mom,” he said into my sweater. “Mom, was that for me?”

“It was for you.”

“Why’d they do it?”

I did not have the words. I had not known the reason myself, not yet. But Amos Gingerich had come down off his platform, his hat in his hand again, and he stood in front of us.

“Wyatt,” he said. “May I tell you something about your grandfather?”

Wyatt nodded against my sweater. Then he stepped back, wiped his face with the heel of his hand, and stood up straight. He is Garland’s grandson. He nodded like it.

“For thirty-one years,” Amos said, “on kids’ day, your grandfather sat in the back row of the second bench. He never told anybody. Every child’s first wagon, corn or apples or squash, he would stand up when the bidding stalled and bid twenty dollars over.