by David Neal
Lumina opened her eyes and looked up to see Jack hit Peter. Then Peter hit Jack. The two were fighting for their lives. First trading blows, then tumbling and rolling in the wet earth. Lumina all the while was shrieking at Jack, trying to warn him, “Watch out!” But it was too late, Peter got the shovel propped against the scarecrow. He swung it at Jack and caught him hard. Jack went down. Lumina screamed and winced from what she saw. Jack’s face had been smashed. Now he was groping about in the mud, he seemed not to know what was still a part of his face and what was in the dirt. His jaw had been pulled from where nature had set it and hung bloodied now from a mouth limp and toothless. Peter struck again. Now part of his skull between his mouth and one eye were broken through—connected by a single fissure running up through both. Peter was standing over him. A moment later, the farmer’s muddy boot caught him in the ribs. Lumina, fearing getting too close to the shovel, could only watch. Peter struck Jack again, red-faced and howling, “What has become of her? The Devil has taken her from me! WHAT HAS BECOME OF MY WIFE?” as streaming tears mixed with rain. All the while, Lumina could see Jack as he writhed less and less—a series of raw ends and irreparable damages trying to stand. Peter’s shovel struck again, and with a shucking sound crushed Jack braincase, and his face into the earth—taking a great big chunk flesh and hair off with it. Jack was a mangled thing now. Death would be a mercy. Lumina closed her eyes as Peter brought the shovel down a final time. Severing her lover’s head from the neck clean through. With his life, out went Jack’s lantern and Lumina had fallen to the dirt wailing his name.
PART THE FIFTH
Lumina tried again to lift her heavy head and succeeded this time. She understood how this worked now. It had something to do with memory. Muscles could remember things. If the flesh had a memory the mind did not—could the Will, too?
Again then she sensed a presence in the room and felt the meek hand on that of her body. Peter’s.
His other hand steadied itself on her shoulder then leaned in. She felt a point of pressure of the flesh of her pumpkinhead. Felt the steel knife slide through the husk. Peter began to carve.
A series of incisions were made. There were three triangles. Two big ones and one little one and a zigzaggedly longways mouth exposing the pallid flesh inside.
It was then that Lumina peered out from the angular eyes and raggedy mouth to see the familar setting of her living room and her husband in life holding the knife just as he had on the night when he’d lost his temper.
She was looking upon her husband, now. Peter. He had made her a face. It had a smile—it was sweet. He wanted her to be happy.
“Ah—that’s so much better,” Peter said, “Look,” and handed her a mirror. Lumina did and agreed. She could see him now.
The pumpkinhead made it easier for Peter. Going back to the way things were. At last, he went to sit down and eat his soup. It had to be rewarmed, but Lumina was happy to do that for him. For the rest of the day she’d been all too happy to oblige him.
Peter still kept careful watch of Lumina. He didn’t want her going for night walks or rides. Especially not with the pumpkinhead. As a consequence, the couple, man and pumpkinseed wife, spent more time together.
But there was a problem.
Had the priest not said husband and wife were to be of one flesh? Yes. Until death do they part. Until death.
And was there not a barrier that still separated the two? Had death not come between them? Lumina knew what she had to do.
She gave Peter not what he deserved but what he wanted one last time. She’d made him winter squash soup and that night, she lay back and let him fill her dead womb with his worthless seed. Then, as he came, in his wash of bliss, she reached up with her arms, took his sweaty forehead in one hand and his chin with the other and began to twist Peter’s neck. In a split second came a crack signifying it was broken. Then, unsatisfied, Lumina’s body finished the job by wrenching Peter’s head clean off.
She looked at the body of her husband lying on the bed. His blood staining the white sheets. She thought of Jack.
Lumina was free. She’d done it—killed the bastard. She and Jack had talked about it for so long. She’d told Jack it was what she dreamed of—all she dreamed of.
Until now. She walked to the kitchen cupboard and put her pumpkinhead against one of the cabinet doors. She wanted to weep but she didn’t have tears. She went to wash her dirty hands in the sink.
Then she went out to Peter’s toolshed for a shovel.
PART THE SIXTH
Last night, Lumina had looked at her heap of rainsoaked clothing by the hearth. Peter, having freshly murdered her lover, was now stoking the fire. He’d stripped before it, changed into a spare pair of overalls, and begun hanging their clothes up to drip-dry.
Lumina was supposed to be making soup—a soup to keep them from catching death of cold. She stood next to the cast iron oven. It kept her warm.
Just like that all was supposed to be mended between them. Peter hadn’t mentioned anything about Jack since he’d carried her indoors. All she could do now was stare at her reflection in the knife. Her hair was a wet mess. She shuttered and cringed.
“Peter?”
The carving knife was lying next to the cutting board next to which the process of slicing up a pumpkin lay unfinished. If Peter noticed, he made no indication. He was still staring at that fire. Staring right through it. His eyes like coals.
“Peter, we have to make a decision.”
Peter, unresponsive, never answered her. He only picked up a stoker and began turning a log over and over in the fire.
“Peter?”
“I told you to make the soup…we’ll catch a death of cold if we don’t stay warm in this weather,” he said and didn’t say anything else.
“What are we going to do about Jack?”
Peter turned his head.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about Jack. My—”
“Who is this Jack you keep talking about?” It came out before she could finish her sentence.
“What are we going to do about him?” Lumina said, trying desperately to make sense of things.
“What are you talking about?” Peter said, “There’s no one out there.”
“Jack. My lover. The man you found me with.”
Peter looked at her bewildered.
“I’m talking about the man YOU MURDERED.”
“There is no Jack,” Peter said, and went back to stoking the flames, but he seemed to have more to say. After a bit, he did.
“For a time, I did think you had a lover. You left your bed at night. I followed you once or twice. You were just walking and talking to yourself. You wandered the fields, the path through the woods, but you were always back by morning. I began to think you were sleepwalking as some do, but then, you took the mare with you. Sometimes you took liquor along. I was so ashamed. My wife. Mad, drunk and rambling to herself like a vagabond.”
“You can’t just pretend this didn’t happen. You murdered Jack. You attacked him with the shovel. You cut off his head.”
You’re mad, woman—I did no such thing.”
“I found you lying in the pumpkin patch—lying in the mud like a hog or something worse—lying on your back there in the rain beneath the scarecrow. And what you were doing—you were—you were—”
“I was what?” Lumina said.
“That thing you were doing—touching—yourself in that way.”
He wouldn’t say it, so he said something else instead...
“An unwomanly thing. Wrong—ungodly—sinful. You’ve defiled our field.”
“I’ve defiled my own family’s field?”
“What kind of woman but a witch lies in the dirt like a pig and does such things?”
“You call me a witch? Don’t think I don’t have an idea of what you’ve been doing in that shed, Peter.”
Peter looked at Lumina now.
“I saw found that page you had. The one y
ou keep in your pocket.”
Peter’s eyes were wide.
“Where did you get it?”
Peter looked away ashamedly then back into the fire.
“You traded for it? Didn’t you? A fool who gave his cow for a few magic beans. Can you even read what it says?”
“I don’t need to. He explained it to me. I know what it says. The alchemist told me.”
“Do you? What did he say?”
Peter had no response.
“I’ll read it for you. If it hasn’t been ruined by the rain.”
Lumina went to Peter’s wet hanging overalls and removed the scrap of parchment. It was damp in her hands. She shook it out, carefully unfolded it and read it to him.
“‘That the sperm of a man be putrefied by itself in a sealed cucurbit for forty days...it will look somewhat like a man, but transparent, without a body. If, after this, it be fed wisely with the Arcanum of human blood, and be nourished for up to forty weeks, and be kept in the even heat of the horse’s womb, a living human child grows there from, with all its members like another child, which is born of a woman, but much smaller.’”
There was a silence.
“You were trying to grow a baby—without me, weren’t you?”
“The alchemist said he had seen it done. That anyone could do it.”
“I don’t know who sold you this or what they told you this was for, but it’s not a human child. You were tricked.”
Lumina felt such hatred for him. Watching Peter retreating into himself, just as his prick did as it had shriveled up—when cold, or emptied of its seed.
Peter stood looking at his feet. A silhouette against the roaring fire. Peter spent so much time trying to seem small—unimposing. But his shape couldn’t hide now. At last Lumina could see her husband because he was blocking the light in the room. A big, dumb brute.
“You thought it was me—you thought I was the reason we couldn’t bear a child. What have you been doing with those pumpkins?”
“I’ve tried everything in my power,” Peter said, “Can you say the same?”
“And what have you made? A puddle of goo in a melon. What were you going to do next? Slaughter our mare? How far were you prepared to go with this?”
“What else would you have me do?”
“Have you ever considered the alternative?”
There was another silence. Peter wouldn’t look at her. His eyes were wet.
Lumina walked up to the fire then and tossed the crushed scrap of parchment into it, then she went back into the kitchen.
“NO!” Peter shouted, trying to catch hold of it. He singed his hands only to discover it was too late. The paper went black at the corners, curled, then incinerated in the roaring flames.
Lumina looked into Peter’s face lit by the glow. His dumb turnip face. She wanted to bury it in the ground.
“You killed Jack because he was a better man than you.”
At last Peter turned and walked toward her.
“I killed no one,” he said, looking at his feet still. “When I saw you, I lost my temper and in my anger I split the scarecrow instead of you. That is God’s honest truth. Go see it.”
“You’re lying,” Lumina said. She realized then she was still holding the knife.
“If you go out in the field now you’ll find empty clothes and straw. Do you think I would just kill a man and leave a body lying around?”
“You’re the one lying,” she screamed, “You killed Jack!” But as Lumina said it, she knew it was true. She’d let her imaginary games get the better of her. Peter was right.
Lumina turned the carving knife toward Peter as he got closer—now it was pointing directly at him.
“My Jack needs a proper burial. If you call yourself a good Christian, you owe him that!”
In that moment, Peter’s gaze met hers. The wind blew through his dust-bowl eyes.
“You won’t deny my Jack a proper—”
“You are my wife...” Peter began.
In a flash, he had wrested the knife from her with his singed hands. “...and I am your husband,” he said, forcing her down and pointing the blade back at her.
“Peter! Stop! You’re hurting—” Lumina screamed, but found she could no longer speak. She could feel cold metal blocking her vocal cords from moving—even from coughing from the spittle she’d swallowed in surprise.
“You will never, ever, EVER THREATEN ME, AGAIN!” Peter screamed and seizing her by the lace-collar of her nightgown, forced it back into her neck—pushing her up against the cabinets. Lumina felt her head knock against the cabinet door. As it did she felt a kind of shockwave travel through her head and the object it had struck. She could feel the cabinet was hollow, yet hard, whereas her flesh—her life—was soft and fragile. She went for Peter’s shoulder with her long nails. Digging her nails into his collarbone flesh. She heard fabric rip and seeing him face wince, but he did not let go.
Peter wanted to show her how it felt. To listen to her insanity. To be accused of so serious a crime by a woman who at times he believed belonged in bedlam. He wasn’t looking at the blood running wild now—spraying from under her chin—to see how deep it had gone.
It was then he saw Lumina’s neck was grinning at him from ear to ear.
“Jezu Kochany!” Peter howled, yanking his hand away, falling backward against the floorboards and making the Sign of the Cross.
Now the hot red was gushing down Lumina’s nightgown—staining the white lace and silk a freshly-oxygenated sanguine.
He hadn’t known his strength, Peter tried to tell himself. He could still get her to a doctor—yes, but then he remembered how far the town was from The Campbell Lot. That was when he had the nerve to look at last upon what he’d done.
Lumina sank to her knees—coughing and sputtering, bubbling from her neck and jugular, her head tilted forward then back as it had been severed nearly clean-through to her cervical spine.
“Lumina! My wife! My god, what have I done?” Peter cried and began to weep.
Lumina tried to tell him exactly what he had done but merely bubbled and frothed as her mouth made shapes. The vital fluid coming from her lips. Running down her chin.
“I’m going to jail now,” Peter despaired aloud, burying his face in his bloodied hands. As much as he tried to practice saying, “She made me do this,” he could not believe his words. Not with his heart.
PART THE SEVENTH
Lumina’s body finished refilling the hole she’d put her husband down in and plunged the shovel satisfactorily into the field that was rightfully hers, but had been her husband’s property by law. With her work done at last, she climbed into her own hole, and began to scoop and pull the pile of dirt over herself. Lumina intended to shed her old body before it started to rot. It would join her husband’s in the ground where it might nourish the earth.
Pumpkins grow from a seed. In time, they change. Look at a pumpkin and its seed and you won’t recognize the relationship unless you open one up and see the other. Vegetables take on an entirely different oblong shapes as the growing season takes them closer to harvest.
People don’t change; they do grow, but that isn’t quite the same thing. For as long as they live they’ll always have the same roots. In life, there are things about them we can learn to forgive and perhaps, in time, even forget.
People don’t really change until they die.
For one year, Lumina slept. Again she dreamed of being the tiny woman-seed in the ground. Once again, she grew toward the sun.
Next year, Lumina arose from the dirt. This time her head was a white ghostpumpkin the color of moonlight. She had become something new. Not a woman. Nor a pumpkin. But Lumina Pumpkinhead.
Her new body was an assembly of green limbs—a vegetable marionette that listed its fingers and obeyed the Will—a twist of tightly woven vines resembling human musculature wound together like sinew. The leaves made it difficult to stuff them into clothes, but she managed. Then she carved herself a
face. There was no need for a candle to light her from within—the Will did that. How had her body reassembled itself—used the available materials to put themselves back together? It is a mystery. As was Jack’s return.
Lumina welcomed a fellow Pumpkinhead among the new year’s crop—risen as she did, from having nourished himself on bones. She carved him a face, too, gave him fresh clothes, and turned her back as he dressed—which was customary, even though with his body being made of vines as hers was he did not have reason to be modest anymore. The pumpkinhead man did not remember his name, or much about himself, so Lumina helped him—she told him his name had been Jack. He seemed to accept this.
“Now,” she said, “We’ve slept for a year—we have a lot of work to do.”
“Yes, pumpkin, dear,” said Jack Pumpkinhead.
EPILOGUE
Today, wild pumpkins still grow rampant on the abandoned Campbell Lot as the house mysteriously refuses to fall into disrepair. A neighbor man had taken to checking on the property sporadically but claims it mostly cares for itself. Once a year, he uses the grounds for an annual haunted hayride—it is a popular tourist attraction—as of this day the actual property remains unsold.
If Lumina and Jack indeed still walk the grounds, they’ve had the land to themselves for quite some time. What matters is the two are together at last. In the same flesh. It didn’t matter what kind. Or who they had been before. They spoke in a different language now. A language without words. They haunted the grounds all but one day a year when they merely waved from their house to the children singing “Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater” on their hayride.
Lumina discovered new pleasures—gardening for one. Another was frightening distant relations who came to claim the property or teenagers who dared to trespass on her lot to do the kind of things teenagers did. Lastly, of course, she and Jack begin to experiment. How did one produce another Pumpkinhead without a body to nourish it? They were determined to find out.
Would Lumina and Jack have a family together at last? Come next harvest, they would have to see. Until then, they watched the garden grow.