The Jack-o-Lantern Box
Page 21
After school on Monday, they went over to Karma’s house, and Jessy called her mom. Karma's dad had left the old-fashioned wooden-handled rakes out in front of the garage, for them to rake the leaves. Traditionally, it could take them a long time, because they kept rearranging and disassembling the piles, and jumping into them.
They walked outside under what was left of the leaves. It felt like they were already in the country, even though the town did sputter out a little beyond, with a few rambly businesses visible, like the auto parts place, and a couple of warehouses with big dirt parking lots, with old, gnarled trees swallowing them up.
At the far part of Karma's yard, it felt like being in a Trixie Belden book, where everyone had horses, and gardens, and there were plenty of creeks and caves and apple orchards to explore.
Somehow their small town wasn't anything like that. They had friends who lived in the country, on real farms, and came to school on the bus, but that was different: cornfields, stretches of ground with cows on them, corners where trees had gathered into patches of woods. They couldn’t just go out there and explore anything. Not only was the highway there, but everything belonged to somebody, and was marked off with wire. When she read the Trixie Belden books, Jessy imagined the country as being sort of like a state park, where you could wander around at will.
“I wish my parents would let me have a horse,” Karma was saying. Sometimes they played back here, walking their bicycles, pretending the bikes were horses, and cleaning the mud out of the tire grooves like they were using a pick on a horse’s hoof. Karma had all the Scholastic Book Club books about how to take care of a horse, and was always trying to prove how responsible she was to her parents, but they said it was too much work, and too expensive.
“My dad goes out to the farm every day,” she griped. “There's a stable right there. I’d go out there with him and take care of it, and I’d help him in the garden.”
“It would be great to have a horse,” Jessy agreed, imagining riding every day at the old farm. She’d never even been on a horse, although she’d seen them at kids’ farms, at birthday parties, usually just hanging around in a distant pen, taken for granted.
Karma suddenly gave Jessy a sly look.
“Maybe we could do a magic spell to get a horse.” They'd been preparing what kind of spells they were going to do on Halloween night.
“We’d have to do more research,” Jessy said. “There isn’t anything that specific in my book.”
The bent metal bands on the rakes scraped and caught on the earth. In some spots there were at least two layers, a drier, crispier one on top, each leaf with one papery side toward the sun, and then a softer, wetter layer underneath. When a rake ripped into one of those patches, the damp side turned over with a rich, mulchy smell.
Karma stopped suddenly.
“Let’s play Johnny the Hangman,” she said.
“Okay,” Jessy agreed.
“How should we start?”
They raked and pondered.
“It could start with Johnny stalking his first victim,” Jessy said.
“Who do you want to be?”
Jessy hesitated for a second. Then she said, “I’ll be Johnny.”
They started to act out a scene where Johnny watched the other kids, feeling left out, and then started stalking Karma, who was his first victim. An old rope clothesline was strung between two trees in the yard, with a loose end dangling from the knot, where it looped around the trunk. That would be a perfect spot to hang somebody.
Jessy stretched the rope end in front of Karma’s neck. It wouldn’t go all the way around, but she pantomimed like it did, and then acted out as if she were choking her. Karma really got into it, her body flailing around, gasping. Then she leaned against the tree, holding the rope symbolically in front of her own neck, stretching her head up, dead.
At first they pretended the garage was the caretaker’s house, and then it was the jail. The garage was overflowing with even more pumpkins, and other stuff Karma’s dad had brought in from the farm. The exposed wooden eaves were strung up with vegetables, vines hanging down in lanky blond strands, clumps of beans drying. A squat, old-fashioned barrel, made of round wooden slats grown thready and dry, sat in one corner, full of tomatoes. The card tables were stacked with summer squash, long and curved yellow; buttercup squash, pale and misshapen; and bulging green zucchini.
After a while they went back inside, and scrounged pieces of cloth from Karma’s mom, to make magical talisman bags with. Jessy’s was purple, like she'd originally thought, and Karma’s was pink. She was doing a spell for love, but she wouldn’t tell Jessy who it was for.
“I didn’t know you liked someone so much,” Jessy said.
“It doesn’t have to be for anybody specific, does it?” Karma asked.
She had actually had a boyfriend last year. He just asked out of nowhere if she wanted to be his girlfriend, and when Karma said yes, then she was. Sometimes when a whole group of them went to a movie, he sat next to her, and he bought her a pop, but that’s all it really meant. He never called her on the phone or anything.
After awhile, time passed, and it seemed obvious that they weren’t “going out” anymore. Karma had seemed kind of uninterested in the whole thing, so Jessy didn’t know why she wanted another boyfriend so soon, if she didn’t have someone in mind.
Karma’s mom stopped in, asking if they wanted a snack, and she had a surprise: a whole plastic bag full of real Tootsie Pops.
“I thought we could make lollipop ghosts,” she said. “And what we don’t use, we can give out on Halloween.”
The thought of candy put up in high cupboards, that nobody could eat until the end of the month, seemed wasteful. If it were up to Jessy, she wouldn’t wait to open her Christmas presents either. But it wasn’t a problem, because they could easily make a whole bagful of ghosts.
Each Tootsie Pop got a piece of Kleenex, which they put over the top of it, like a magician’s handkerchief over his wand in a magic trick. They pulled a few off with flourishes, just to joke. Then, with the Kleenex evenly in place, they tied the tissue with pieces of black yarn. The dangling sides created a floating cloak of little ghost-body.
While the girls dabbed little faces on them with a felt-tip marker, Karma’s mom unraveled some more black yarn to tie up the ghosts with.
“Where are we going to hang them?” Karma asked. She always made an effort to make her mom feel included.
“What do you think?” her mom asked.
They walked around inside the house, and paced in the yard, making bracket shapes with their hands and squinting, like they were looking through a camera. Then they decided to tie them up in the trees that had grown up tall on either side of the front door, drooping slightly over the steps.
They tied longer strings of black yarn to the ghost necks, and attached them to the bare branches of the trees. With luck, the color would fade into the darkness better at night, so the strings wouldn’t be so noticeable. Not that anyone was going to mistake them for real ghosts, but still.
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