by Alison Stine
And maybe it felt that much colder in the trees, in the darkness cast by their laced bare branches—I noticed for the first time how the trees felt like a trap, a closing net—or maybe the temperature really did drop again. Maybe it was constantly dropping. Maybe we were sliding, swiftly, into a total winter, forever winter, the world riding an ice chute straight to a bottomless well. But I could not get out of the woods, away from the Pumpkin King, fast enough. I said the only thing I knew that would shut him up.
“How much?”
“What you have on your farm.”
“I don’t have it with me,” I said.
Maybe he didn’t know that the outdoor harvest had failed last year, that I hadn’t even attempted one on my own. Maybe he didn’t know that I was late with the new crop. It seemed not to matter urgently anymore. A lot seemed not to matter.
“Well, of course,” the Pumpkin King said. “Come back here. Get it and come find me tonight. My trailer’s just over that’a ridge.” He waved vaguely at the woods behind him.
I hadn’t known anyone lived in those trees. No trailer was in sight. He wrote something on a torn piece of brown paper, folded it, and passed it to me.
I shoved it in my pocket without reading it.
“That’s the IOU,” he said.
“And the seeds?”
He removed from underneath his coat a small leather bag on a string. He opened the leather pouch, and put the seeds from his pocket inside. One, two, three, four. He pulled the cords of the bag shut.
“There were six seeds,” I said.
“I gotta keep something for myself.” The Pumpkin King handed me the pouch. The leather was soft. “Put it on. For safety, under your clothes.”
I must not have moved swiftly enough because he took the pouch out of my hand. Then, before I could yank away, he touched my collarbone, pulling at the collar of my coat and flannel shirt, and dropped the leather bag over my neck. The pouch disappeared down my shirt. The leather felt cold and greasy, dirty as hands.
The Pumpkin King zipped my coat up tight. “There,” he said. He patted my chest, the space of bone where my heart was beating desperately. “Can’t see a thing. Keep it that’a way.”
The leather smelled like the animal it had been. I couldn’t forget it was there, even if nobody could see it. His fingers had been cold. “My friend is waiting for me,” I said.
“One last bit of advice, little girl.”
I looked back at him. His eyes had an emptiness, dull as dirty silver. And he had wildness about him that I knew well. Meth, maybe. Or opioids. He moved as if he was jerking his limbs awake, dragging his body through a haze thicker than blood, forcing himself to move. I figured he had been napping when I showed up in the trees. He might fall asleep the moment I left, maybe in the middle of talking to me.
Or maybe he was in pain. Maybe he walked haltingly because his joints hurt him; his bones stiff, or injured years ago. Maybe he was only hurting, with his rolling eyes, heavy limbs. His finger, knobby as a wand, was meant to point at me—little girl—but really, it was trembling at the trees.
“Don’t plant all the seeds now,” the Pumpkin King said. “Plant a couple. They’ll take. Plant two seeds, maybe. Save the others as currency.”
“Currency?” I pulled the pouch tight, till the cord cut into my skin.
“Trust me. Seeds will be more valuable than gold, and the one who can grow them? She’ll be a queen.”
5
Grayson had managed to get one of the last tanks of propane. But the sky was darkening by the time we loaded it into the truck. Sunset was coming: a cold surprise. Dusk fell earlier and earlier, unnatural and white. Snow was in the future like a distant, glowing city.
One more night, I promised Grayson. He could sleep on the couch in my shack. I would spend the night packing up, leave first thing in the morning, drop him home on the way.
We went back to the farm. I tried to tell him about the Pumpkin King, but the words stuck in my throat. The man had scared me, and I was ashamed to be scared. I was not sure I could name or explain what had happened.
Cleaning up after our meal of wizened apples, eggs, and fried potatoes—Grayson had cooked, better him than me—I washed the plates and set them in the rack. I scraped the burned bits of potatoes into a bowl, wondering how to best to describe what I had seen at the market: the knives and chickens for sale, the woman in the stinking fur coat, the man with a pouch of seeds.
Every evening, I would dump the bowl of kitchen scraps and eggshells into a bucket beside the back door. When the bucket was full, I would pitch the contents onto the compost heap near the farmhouse. It had always been this way.
But, thinking about the market, my hand froze on the spoon. Why was I wasting my time doing this? Collecting food waste, keeping it in a pile, carefully turning it, and monitoring the temperature—that was what my mama and Lobo had done. That was what they had taught me to do. We had used the compost for growing vegetables. But nothing was growing in this ground. Nothing would sink its roots into this rich soil.
“We should just pitch this shit in the woods,” I said. “Give some animal a chance at a few more days.”
Grayson was fiddling with his ham radio, trying to tune in the president’s speech, and didn’t answer me. I hoped he never got that thing working. I didn’t want to hear her say she didn’t know. I didn’t want to hear her apologize again.
I was still wearing the Pumpkin King’s pouch. I set the spoon down, reached for the string around my neck, and removed the pouch from beneath my shirt. Inside the leather bag, the seeds looked as if they were cupped by weathered skin, a farmer’s palm.
“What is that?” Grayson asked.
“Pumpkin seeds.” I looked down at them. I could add apple seeds to them, from our dinner. “They’re for planting, not eating. And there’s only four.”
“Where did you get them?”
“At the flea market.”
“Were they expensive? As much as the apples? Wil?”
I didn’t even know. I dug in my pocket for Pumpkin King’s note. He had written his IOU on a torn bit of grocery bag. I unfolded it to see there was a phone number. And one word.
It was not what I expected.
It was not weed. It was worse.
Grayson looked over my shoulder. He read it. “Lights?”
I crumpled the IOU.
* * *
My flashlight swung wildly in my hand, casting trees and bush and bits of the old barbed wire fence that lined parts of the driveway into sudden, stuttering light. The driveway was pitted and uphill. In mud season, when the creek had flooded, parts of the driveway would be washed away unless we dug out drainage ditches.
When I saw the slope of the farmhouse roof appear on the hill above me, I felt dread, more than the usual anxiety I had about the house. I could sense the darkness of the basement room. The logs from my last wood-chopping afternoon were scattered around the yard like bones. Grayson stopped behind me, his hands on his sides, trying not to pant.
“I forgot about your foot,” I said. I had dragged us up here without even thinking about him. “Are you all right?”
He looked at the boot, shifting his leg in the darkness. He didn’t answer me about it. “Are you going to tell me what that IOU meant? What does lights mean? What lights?”
I opened the farmhouse door. The house smelled dusty, stale, with an undercurrent of ash. It was also cold. I shuffled past the dark, extinguished stove, not looking closely at anything—not the empty coat tree, not the mirror on the wall, which showed my face.
I had grown to love this house, in a way. I had wanted to be here, with my mama. I had grown to love the remoteness and wildness of the farm. I was forbidden to bring friends to this house, not to the big house, and never around harvest. This would have been a busier time of year—fall—a dangerous time, in a w
orld where spring had come, in a world where there had been enough light and heat to make a harvest.
I walked straight to the wall under the stairs. I opened the small basement door. “Come on,” I told Grayson. “Downstairs.” We ducked our heads, and he followed me. I heard the dull clunk of his cast striking the wall. “Be careful.”
I switched on my flashlight again, illuminating the narrow steps. The ceiling felt very close. The light shone straight down to the bottom: a concrete floor and another closed door. Usually—almost always—this door pulsed with light. Bright white leaked around its seams, a glowing rectangle, like some kind of clean room. I would push open the door into heat, the thrum of the fan, the thick and heady plants, the room teeming with life. And my mama.
It was a magic world behind the basement door. To come into this world in the dead of winter, to find her, surrounded by life and light—and danger—cast a spell.
We would grow fifty plants, sixty, sometimes as many as eighty, shoulder to shoulder, brushing my waist, turning greedily toward the lights on the ceiling. I thought of their leaves, sharp and pointed as daggers. As a child, I both loved and hated coming here. Each time I felt a rush of danger and love, overwhelmed by heat and the smell of the plants: the spicy, dark musk of them. Each time I thought I would faint from it.
My mama was just as involved as Lobo, more so because it turned out she was even better than him with the plants. She had a knack for it. It was in my blood, as the Pumpkin King had said. She sang to them, that was my mama’s secret.
As an adult, it was hard to forget that feeling, to overcome it every time I opened the door. To stop expecting my mama to be behind it. I didn’t sing to the plants as they grew. I had nothing to say to them. Thank you for giving us money for food. Thank you for taking my mama from me. Thank you for ruining my life.
The door at the bottom of the stairs was dark now. No light leaked around its edges. I shoved my shoulder against the wood to free the tight door from its frame. I switched off the flashlight, and fumbled on the wall for the switch.
“Brace yourself,” I said.
“For what?” Grayson asked.
Then light pulsed through the room, blinking back to life from the hanging fluorescents strung low, at my chest, a height that would be just hovering over the plants when they were grown. Light also came from the bulb on the ceiling. And light came back from the very walls. Reflective silver panels shot the light across the walls and floor, back onto the plants, which devoured it.
There were no plants now. Only a few scattered buckets, some dirt on the floor I had neglected to sweep. A handful of dead yellow leaves. And the lights were diminished. Grayson shielded his eyes from the glare, but it was only half-strength, I knew. Five fluorescent lights hung on the ceiling, strung from a complicated nest of extension cords and wires—not the usual ten. Lobo and Mama had taken half when they left for California.
“These are the lights,” I said, tugging on the one nearest me so it bobbed up and down on its wire like a mobile. “This is what the Pumpkin King wants.”
“The Pumpkin King? Jesus. Is that really his name?”
I bent to the light, working to unfasten it.
“Wait a minute,” Grayson said. “You aren’t actually going to give them to him, are you?”
“It’s a trade. People do that now.”
“But lights for seeds? That doesn’t seem like a good trade.”
“Help me for a second.” I had Grayson hold a light while I unhooked it. We lowered it to the floor, and I wrapped the cord around it. “These grow things even in dark, closed spaces with no sunlight. Even in basements.” I looked at the light on the concrete floor. “Especially in basements.”
“Can we get more?”
You could buy them in town at the hardware store, but you had to be careful; you couldn’t buy too many at once. You had to talk loudly about tomatoes—that was what Lobo did. You could buy them on the internet, but you should probably buy orchids at the same time. “I don’t know if you can buy them now,” I said. “But I should pack them up, get them ready, anyway. I should take them with me.”
Grayson looked at me over the light. He wanted to know. He had been dying to ask. He had been patient, but I felt the questions coming; I knew they would come. “Did you do a lot? Did your folks make you?”
“They didn’t make me,” I said.
“What did you do? Make deliveries?”
“It’s not like that. It’s just farming.” That was how I felt about it.
That was how they had explained it to me.
In fifth grade, the drug dogs came. The confident deputies, with their bellies and their holsters, had talked to us about bad men, and things that looked like candy. We had had the bad-men talk before. The Earth was full of bad men. They walked amid the holler, as populous as apple trees, studded with acne and cursing without control. Bad teeth tumbled in their mouths. In their clothes lived the devil. But this talk was different. It concerned what we might smell or see at home, and if we saw the plants—brittle, innocent—or the pipes, smoky blue glass, we should tell someone. Tell them.
I told Mama. She told Lobo. They set me down and explained the sheriff would take me away if he knew about the plants in the basement. He would want them for himself. He would take the money, kill the last farm dog who hadn’t yet run.
There was nobody to come for me. We hadn’t heard much from my real daddy since he left. The phone calls had petered out, like water in the old house when we hadn’t paid the bill. The plants were a secret, but not a bad secret, Lobo and my mama explained. It was a treasure we couldn’t give away. It would deliver us, deliver me. There were promises—horses and bicycles—that never materialized. If only I would keep the secret.
I came to see the plants as the only magic, an end in themselves. They grew so quickly, they were sprinkled with golden dust, they made the ones who were supposed to take care of me transform back into children: selfish, stunned, and mewing for more. This was the marvel in itself, this plant grown from clones or seed. That we could do that: give something life.
How could I explain that to Grayson? Dirt settled in the cracks of my hand like it belonged there. I mounded seeds into the ground, patting them with a promise: I’d come back. They could depend on me, though I had no one to teach me how to love or be loved. The tender way seedlings sprouted, thin as hair. I ended each day coated in a sheen of grit. I had strange tan lines. I went to bed each night exhausted, achy, then got up early and did it all again. Alone with the earth. It had a kind of song. There was no way to explain it.
“I can make things grow,” I said. “Even in a basement. But for that we would need lights.”
“We’d need power, too,” Grayson said.
“We have power. So far.”
“I thought the world would just get warmer.”
“Well, we were wrong. It got worse.”
Grayson looked at the lights. “We can’t give these away. Not even for seeds.”
“We traded. I promised him.”
“You didn’t know what you were promising. Did you?”
“No.” I had thought the Pumpkin King had wanted something else. Just weed. What everyone wanted from me. To have a good time. To forget. To feel good. “But you don’t understand,” I said. “It’s different out here in the country. Things have a way they’re done in the holler. You keep your word. You take your payback, when it’s needed.”
Maybe what everyone wanted was changing. Not just to survive, but to live.
“We’ll bring one light,” I said. “And see if we can barter.”
* * *
If the flea market was filthy during the day, at night—closed up and empty—it was menacing. Sleet started on our drive into town, and ice patched the lot by the time we arrived. The pink glow of parking lights were spaced far apart, gaps of black pavement and bla
cker night between. Anything could be in those gaps. Anyone.
The roller rink looked dark and hulking, its neon sign, missing most of the letters, as dim as a jumble of scaffolding. When was the last time that sign was lit? There was no one around. I parked the truck. In the distance, we could see the lights of the gas station: a glow above the trees, hazy yellow like an egg.
“There’s a giveaway,” Grayson explained. “Tonight at the gas station. They’re passing out bottled water.”
“Why?”
“People’s pipes have frozen. Someone told me about it when we waited for propane.”
“Why are they doing it so late?”
“That’s when the water truck comes.”
“Let’s hurry,” I said.
I had stashed the grow light in a duffel bag and we each hefted one of the handles. Lugging the light between us helped warm us up. It felt like we were moving music equipment, setting up for some band. Or maybe moving a body, cut up into bones. As soon as I had this thought I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I slowed down for Grayson. He shuffled to keep up, his boot scrapping the asphalt. I felt better once we had stepped into the trees, into cover—that was in my blood, the impulse to hide, to sneak. If you keep secrets for a living, you start keeping them all the time. You keep secrets for practice, for no reason at all.
We went a little deeper into the woods, to the base of the rise where the Pumpkin King had placed his wares. Their orange glow would have lit up the darkness at least a little, but I didn’t see anything, not a single pumpkin. He had taken his stuff home, or sold it. We rested the duffel bag on the ground. Grayson bent to adjust his boot.
“How’s your foot?” I said.
“It’s fine.”
It was fine every time I asked.
“Where is he?” Grayson said.
I looked around. Shadows fell into a ditch, rocky with ice and an old tire. I checked my phone. There was no reception, of course. “I’m going to look at the top of that hill,” I said. “He told me to find his trailer around there. You stay here with the light.”