The Pumpkin Wagon Wyatt Took Back

I had a whole speech ready, and I did not say any of it. I looked at him across the ring, and I nodded, once. Not a kind nod and not an unkind one. The nod you give a man at a bus stop. That was the whole of it. It was the only thing I had that was clean.

He put his cap on. He turned around. A moment later I heard his truck door shut in the gravel, and then the engine, and then the sound of it going away down the township road. It was not a long sound.

Amos Gingerich picked up his microphone and said, in the old voice again, the fast sing-song chant that sounds like another language, “Next, ladies and gentlemen, a pallet of Honeycrisp apples, who’ll start me at one hundred.”

And that was that. The thing was done. The rest of the Friday lots rolled through, one at a time, and the benches turned toward them, and nobody looked at us anymore. That was the kindest part of all.

Naomi Miller handed me the check through the window at 2:48. She had run the slip on a hand calculator, the way she always does, and she showed me the tape. A thousand and twenty dollars, less the association’s six percent commission, sixty-one dollars and twenty cents. Nine hundred fifty-eight dollars and eighty cents.

“Made out to Wyatt,” she said. “He’s the grower.”

Wyatt took the check in both hands. He read it twice. It was the first check he had ever held with his own name on it.

“Can I go thank Levi?” he said.

We found Levi Raber at the hitching rail, with his grandson hitching a bay mare to a gray buggy. Up close he was older than I had thought, ninety maybe, with eyes the pale blue of skim milk. Wyatt stopped in front of him and did not seem to know what to do with his hands.

“Mr. Raber,” he said. “Thank you for bidding.”

“I did not bid for you,” Levi said, in that gate-hinge voice. “I bid for the school. We have thirty-six scholars at Pleasant Valley and they carve three hundred pumpkins on the last day of October. Your Howdens are the best I have seen come through this ring in ten years.”

Wyatt’s mouth did something complicated.

“Also,” Levi said, and now he looked at me, “your grandfather bought my daughter’s first wagon in nineteen eighty-eight. A hundred bushels of sweet corn. She was eleven. She cried about it for a week.

“She is a grandmother now, and she still talks about the man who stood up in the back and said twenty dollars over.” He tapped his cane on the gravel. “I never got to thank him. So.”

He did not finish. He did not have to.

My son, who had cried in the ring in front of four hundred people and would deny it to his death, put the check carefully in the pocket of his vest and buttoned it. Then he reached up and shook an old Amish man’s hand with a grip I had not known he had.

“I’ll come back next year,” he said. “And the year after. And I’ll stand up in the back.”

Levi Raber looked at him for a long time.

“I believe you will,” he said.

We did not talk much on the way home. The John Deere pulled the empty wagon, and Wyatt rode on the fender with his hand on my shoulder, and the October light lay long and clear across the fields on either side of the township road.