“Make sure to pick out a few pumpkins for yourself,” Karma's dad said, while they were setting up his pumpkin stand. She and Karma walked around and around, picking some up, looking at them from all angles. Finally Jessy set a few aside. It was hard, because every pumpkin was beautiful in its own way.
Karma’s dad had made some corn shocks, not to sell, but to use as decorations, to prop up next to the “Pumpkins for Sale” sign. He also set up the scarecrow, or scaredeer, as he called it, that had been out in the field, but it wasn't very spooky looking. It was just some wooden sticks wearing an old plaid shirt, with a bleach bottle for a head. When Jessy tried to imagine it moving on its own, or coming to life, it didn't seem any creepier than it would be if the vacuum cleaner did.
Okay, maybe that would be creepy too, but it wouldn't be especially Halloweeny.
The girls sat together at the card table, a plastic red-and-white checkerboard tablecloth draped over it, with the metal cash box, and a sheet of paper with the prices written down. Pumpkins and squash spread out on more card tables, and in wood and wire baskets, and piled on blankets on the ground.
Most of the day was busy, although there was a lull around the lunch time. They took a break and ate baloney sandwiches with mustard, sitting by the scaredeer.
“I wonder why they call them shocks,” Jessy pondered.
“When I was little, I got lost in the corn field once,” Karma said. “That was a corn shock.”
They giggled at the bad pun.
“Really?” Jessy asked. “What happened?”
“It gets really tall, taller than you’d think. You start going in, and you can still see the houses and stuff, you can see through the stalks, so you don’t think anything of it. But if you go just a little further, then you turn back and all you can see is a forest of corn. It becomes a wall, and it all looks exactly the same, so you don't know where you are any more.”
“What did you do?”
“I kept going, looking for my dad. Then finally I guess I started to cry -- I was pretty little -- and I hollered for him, and he found me. They were pretty mad, though. They told me a million times not to go near the corn.”
Jessy didn’t ask why she had, because the answer was so obvious. Of course she had to go into the corn; she had to see for herself. That’s why Karma was her best friend.
She rolled the word around in her mind. Shock, shock, shock. Like a “tic, tock,” but with a whispery “Sssshhh” on top of it, like the sound the wind made, rushing through dry leaves. It was the perfect word for what it meant.
Throughout the day, people came up to the table and bought pumpkins. The sky was blue and clear, and the few remaining leaves were a perfect canary yellow, poised against it, like they were showing off. Everything smelled like earthy vegetables, like the smell when the pumpkin stalk was cut off from the vine.
It was dusk, and overcast, when they drove Jessy home. Karma's dad helped her carry in her pumpkins, and a bag with some clumps of shellacked Indian corn from the farm. A few of them were for her dad, to use as decorations when he exhibited his furniture, when he finished it. Jessy had already picked out the best one, a big cob covered with shiny black corn, and she hung that on the inside front door. She took a thick one, with mixed-up patches of red and yellow, and put it on Twyla's door, over the top of a decoupage sunset.
Her mom had gotten out the good candy dish, and tumbled and mixed together a bag of candy corn and a bag of the small candy pumpkins. Jessy nibbled a little chunk out of the tiny pumpkin, while Twyla and her mom wrangled over which knives they’d use for jack-o-lanterns. They ended up with the big kitchen knife for the main cutting, and steak knives for the details.
“Be careful with those,” their Mom said.
The sky was almost fully dark when they went outside to work on the jack-o-lanterns. Jessy lingered for a minute on the front steps, watching the lonely hanging man twist slightly on his bare branch. The air was scorched with the smell of leaves burning nearby, and Jessy looked around, wondering where it came from.
Next door, something orange and black flicked in the Andrums' backyard. They had one of those old, chunky stone structures in their yard, like a fireplace that was missing a house. From a distance, they looked like stone huts, big enough for dwarves to live in. Jessy wished they had one in their yard.
She and Twyla spread old newspaper all over the picnic table. Then they selected their victims, setting them down purposefully, and drew pencil outlines of soon-to-be faces on the pumpkins' grooved surfaces.
Jessy's first pumpkin had a vaguely heart-shaped face. She tried to dig its guts out with a big spoon, but orange slime kept sticking to her hand. The smell of the innards had a sharp bite to it. Once she had it scraped down to the rind, she reached into the hollow and slowly pushed out the triangular chunks of eye. Little cut slits extended from each sharp angle, where she’d overshot with the knife, leaving narrow wounds, slashes in the corner of each eye. Her finger traced one, bothered by the flaw.
“No one will notice,” Twyla said.
“Really?”
“All that matters is how they look in the dark.”
Jessy made that one smiling, with big crooked teeth.
Twyla's first pumpkin had a wide “O” for a mouth, with matching rounded eyes. Jessy could never cut circles that well.
“This is going to be the scary one,” Jessy said.
“Mine too.”
They ended up with slanting eyebrows and angry, jagged mouths, ready to bite.
Jessy carried the bag of guts back to the garbage can, past the thornier bushes, and the short trees with empty branches. She paused. In a story, she thought, that's the point when she’d hear an owl hoot, or see a shadow rush toward her, from the alley.
Turning back toward the house, the pumpkins looked good and spooky on the steps. The flickers of candle were like small, dark flashlight signals, Morse code. Maybe because they were in the mouths, it seemed like they were trying to speak. If a jack-o-lantern cleared its throat and spoke, that would definitely creep people out. And what language would a pumpkin speak, if it did?
It was starting to get cold. Jessy thought about hayrides and hot apple cider, and bobbing for apples, but without the murder. She didn’t really have a clear picture of hayrides, except that horses pulled wagons, and people sat in them, on top of hay bales. It sounded vaguely like the barn dances they had in old books, which she guessed were the same as any other kind of dance, only in a barn. She’d never heard of one happening around here, even from kids who lived in the country.
Reading books, it always sounded like people used to have more fun, but if that were true, she didn’t understand why they would stop.
If she were a grown-up, and had a place like Karma's, she'd have an old-fashioned hayride and barn dance. In real life, though, it would be all the same people she knew, the same kids from school. Somehow that wasn't the way it was, when she thought of those stories.
Come to think of it, that seemed like it would be a good setting for something spooky to happen, in a barn lit by jack-o-lanterns. People would come expecting to be pretend-scared, but then they’d get scared for real. Like a horse and buggy, trotting along, slowly, and suddenly in their path there'd be a body, hanging from the darkened branches. Kids would scream …
Back by the house, Twyla was sitting on the picnic table, watching the eyes and mouths glow. Jessy sat down next to her.
“When I’m rich,” Twyla said. “I’m going to buy a haunted house.”
“What kind of a haunted house?” Jessy asked.
“A real one. A big one. With a real ghost.” She stretched and leaned back a little. “You can come stay with me, at least part of the time.”
“Would you be able to see the ghost?”
“I guess it depends on what’s on the market at the time. Preferably one with a visible ghost, floating up and down the staircase. But I guess I could settle for mists and, you know. Creaking sounds. If I have to.”
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The Jack-o-Lantern Box Page 29