Squashed (17 page)

“Do you want me to go with you?” he asked.

“I need to go by myself.”

The mum plant seemed heavy as I carried it past the rows of headstones to Mother’s, which was by an oak tree with leaves just beginning to color. It was three o’clock. By this time tomorrow Harvest Eve would begin, the Christmas lights along Marion Avenue would light, spotlights would shine on lawn decorations, baking smells would pour from houses and shops.

Mother had died in November eight years ago, three weeks after the festival when Nana had won the blue ribbon for her upside-down rhubarb cake and cinched the best-all-around baking entry. Nana wasn’t entering this year because she wanted to enjoy herself and not get crazy waiting for the judges to stop chewing and announce the winner. I put the basket down by
Mother’s stone and sat in the grass as tears burned my eyes.

“Well,” I finally said, “I’m having a pretty tough time.” I’d never talked out loud at Mother’s grave before, but this felt right.

“I have some stuff I need to talk to you about.” I was crying heavy now and couldn’t talk. I hung on to her stone and let the flood come. Nana said I’d cried like this at the funeral. I didn’t remember. I was too busy shutting it out. I had screamed at the men who carried Mother’s coffin out of the church to bring her back. They didn’t.

Memories washed over me. I could see Dad’s face when we came home that day—stony, cold, and gray—like he was dead, too. I remembered sleeping over at Jo Ann’s and watching her mother kiss her good night—I wanted her to kiss me, too—she was small and warm and smelled like flowers, but she patted my arm instead. I could see Nana pruning Mother’s rose bushes to keep them full, teaching me how to cut back each stem with her clippers. When Dad and I moved Nana said she’d replant the roses in our new backyard, but Dad said no. It was too hard to remember.

A squirrel sniffed the mum. I was crying less now and tried again: “I know you were never much for competing, Mom, because Nana told me. I remember the roses you grew, though, I remember just about everything you grew, and I think if you’d tried to compete with them, you could have won.”

The tears were coming again and I wiped them on my sleeve: “What I remember most about you, though, is how you loved the garden—how hard you worked to keep it beautiful. You always enjoyed it—whether it was a good year or an average one. I think I’ve lost the
part about growing that I loved so much, Mother. The part I got from you and Nana. I’m so caught up in the winning, in being famous, that I’m not seeing too clear.”

I said I was hurting and scared and didn’t want to let anybody down. Winning had become so important it was making me sick. I was crying hard when Dad walked up beside me. His face was still.

“I decided,” said Dad, “that I wanted to be here with you. Is that all right?” He handed me a handkerchief and sat on the grass. We held each other for a long time. I did most of the crying, but Dad got in his share.

“God, I miss her.”

Dad whispered it and held me tight, and gradually we drew strength from each other, like Max pulled nourishment from the earth. It made me feel locked into Dad, like a little pumpkin growing from a big vine. I handed him back his handkerchief.

“You have more of your mother in you than you know, Ellie,” he said finally. I shook my head. I couldn’t see it. “Yes, you do,” he insisted. “And it’s a wonderful thing she gave you.”

I sniffed.

“You can find quietness and beauty in difficult times. You have an amazing love and dedication to growing, although I know you think you’ve lost that. You haven’t, honey.”

“Yes, I have.”

“You’ve done something fine with Max, and you should be terribly proud. You can’t stop now. Your mother would tell you that because it was her favorite speech to me.” His face went soft, like he was remembering something precious.

“I don’t feel I’m…worthy…you know? All the attention doesn’t seem—”

“Justified?”

“I feel all messed up, Dad.”

Dad put his arm around me. “You are,” he said, “the toughest person I know. You have fire and life and courage. You and Max have captured the heart of this town with talent and raw determination. If anybody deserves to win, it’s you.”

I wiped my eyes. “You think I deserve to win?”

“Yes, I do.”

“You don’t think it’s wrong to want to win this bad? Or that I’m too young and should have suffered more?”

Dad laughed. “I think you’ve suffered enough.” That was good to hear. I didn’t think I could take much more.

“I just want to interject here, Dad, that I might not win. Cyril’s pumpkin is as big as Cleveland.”

“And Max,” Dad said, “is as big as Cincinnati.”

I smiled at this great truth as Mother’s yellow mum stretched to grow.

“Stand up,” he ordered. “You inherited my stubbornness.”

I stood, sensing Dad’s unmovable drive. I took the handkerchief back and blew my nose.

“I reject all past negative programming,” Dad boomed.

“I reject all past negative programming,” I said back.

“I believe in myself,” we said together, but I stopped. This didn’t seem right.

“I can’t, Dad. I don’t feel those words like you do.” He was quiet. “I’ve always tried to say them when you wanted me to, but—”

“I’ve seen this work, Ellie—thousands of times….”

“I need to find the courage myself.”

The Circleville Bell Tower struck five and echoed through the quiet cemetery. I looked hard at Mother’s grave. Dad looked, too, and heaved a sigh so deep you’d think he’d dropped a piano.

“All right,” he said finally. “I respect that.”

There was something in those words that broke new ground, like a seed growing shoots and pushing through topsoil. A peace floated down and covered our hearts. We waited for a while, then Dad took my arm and we walked to the car together like a real family.

Back home, Dad and I measured Max from stem to nose horizontally around his fattest part. He had pushed out 8
¹
⁄
₂
more inches in the past three days, which I estimated was good for another 35 pounds. This put him over 600 big ones, a champion in anybody’s book. Nobody had even seen a pumpkin over 500 pounds before 1984, and here we were in the big time within spitting distance of colossal. Max could have snagged a hundred pumpkin contests if it hadn’t been for Big Daddy hiding in the shadows. Max had been gaining good weight, just like Wes told him. His skin was darker, too—a clear sign he was ripe and ready for cutting.

I missed Wes. He was supposed to help me cut Max off the vine, and now I’d have to do it alone. He called, sniffling and coughing, to report his fever had finally broken, but Dr. Buntz said his sinuses still looked like Jell-O and pronounced the curse: He was stuck in bed till Friday. No Weigh-In. He’d miss it all. By Friday the
world would know whether I was a winner or just a flash in the patch. Dr. Buntz had the soul of a turnip. Wes said he was thinking deep thoughts in Max’s direction, which, I told him, were absolutely working. He said he’d gotten my note.
He said he missed me
and sneezed twice. I told him I missed him, too, and hung up shaking.

He missed me. That meant I was missable. Like the lady in the perfume commercial whose smell sticks in the guy’s head as he pictures her running along the beach barefoot. I wondered how Wes thought about me. We hadn’t been to the beach yet and wouldn’t be going until I lost ten more pounds. The last time I ran on a beach barefoot I stepped on a broken beer bottle and had to get seven stitches. Probably he remembered me patting compost around Max’s belly. Not exactly commercial material, but for a grower, it would do.

Spider came up and licked my hand. Richard was returning him to the Ankers tomorrow, a new dog, if I did say so myself. He’d stopped barking at absolutely everything and only shrieked when the noise had it coming, like when the raccoon that drove Mrs. Lemming crazy was out behind her garbage can making a racket. In less than two weeks Spider had become a sophisticated dog of the world. We had taught him to sit, sort of, we had introduced him to gourmet food and classical music. We hadn’t killed him.

Spider stood by the door watching the patch, his head cocked in disbelief. I looked outside and saw a true miracle. I moved to the porch to get a better look and still couldn’t believe it. There knelt Old Abe in the dirt, tape recorder in hand, next to Max.

“Max,” Dad began, “I’m about to play you one of the greatest inspirational pieces of music ever written,
filled with triumph and greatness. I want you to rise up when you hear it. Rise up and achieve your full potential! Is that clear?”

A wind blew Max’s leaves, and Dad stood triumphantly. Music! I’d never thought of that! He pressed his tape recorder, and the sounds of Handel’s
Messiah
filled the patch.

“Yes!” Dad shouted, turning the volume louder. The sopranos were going at it, hitting all the high notes. Spider was howling with the altos. The basses were doing whatever basses do against the melody. “And he shall reign forever and ever!” they sang. It was just like a movie. I half expected Moses to come down from a mountain and part the Rock River, but given its size that wouldn’t have been much of a trick. Max filled with splendor as the million choir voices rang “Hallelujah!”

“Reach for it!” Dad cried.

“Yes!” I shouted.

“Reach for it!” Dad cried again.

I reached for it, tripped over Spider, who was yelping at my feet, and landed facedown in a mound of pearlite.

I
slept badly
—a total of two hours and seventeen minutes, typical for Harvest Eve. A small shaft of light had hit the sky and was trying to break through to dawn. It was quiet and still, like a church on Monday morning. I listened for the October wind stirring in the patch and felt an old sadness. I picked up my thickbladed cleaver and walked outside to wait for Nana and Richard and something else I didn’t want to think about.

It was time to cut Max off the vine.

Ordinarily, this was a big moment for a grower. Gloria Shack said it was like cutting a baby’s umbilical cord and watching it start life on its own. Ha! A baby’s got years ahead of it. A squash cut off the vine won’t last more than eight weeks and starts losing weight the same day. It was the beginning of the end, that’s all.

I sat in the patch trying to imagine what it would be like without Max. He was so much a part of
me. My friend. My vegetable. You can’t just turn that off. Max’s stem was fat and dry and beginning to wither: He was perfectly ripe. I hid my cleaver behind my back as a sparrow sang a funeral march in a nearby elm.

Nana and Richard pulled up, and the procession began. Dad came out in his bathrobe, Richard carried his mitt out of respect. Nana held something in a Ziploc bag close to her chest. They walked solemnly toward Max. I produced the knife.

“This is going to sting a little.”

Richard gasped. The sparrow gave me a dirty look. I lifted it high—Ellie the Ripper—and hacked through his stem with three smooth swipes, leaving four inches intact. Max’s vine flopped on the ground. I rubbed his cut and bowed my head at the injustice of agricultural death.

Phil Urice, dressed in his pumpkin suit, and his three-hundred-pound brother, Bomber, backed a pickup covered with orange flags and flapping harvest streamers into the patch.

“Gonna give Cyril a run for his money with this one,” Phil said, fixing a rubber pad the size of a blanket under Max. The four men grabbed a corner. Bomber pushed, his muscles bulged, Dad shoved, Richard pulled, Phil sweated. “Here she goes!” hollered Phil, and with a grunt, Max was lifted onto the truck—a liberated squash. I climbed in beside him and tucked a blanket around his base. It was a great honor to ride to the fair with the official Rock River Dancing Pumpkin, and I figured Phil’s clout could only help my chances. Nana threw the Ziploc bag in my lap.

“A present,” she announced. The bag had a clump of moist soil inside. Nana crossed her arms and looked
at me hard. “Four generations of Morgans worked that soil to get it how it is, sweating themselves silly in the field, and I don’t want you messing things up by thinking that winning today is more important than that.”

I gulped and nodded.

“You grew your first pumpkin in it and your father tilled it when he was a boy even though he hated every minute. It’s going to be here long after all of us are gone, and if you think one Weigh-In makes a whale of a difference to who you are, then you’d better think again, that’s all. Any questions?”

This was not the supportive farewell I had expected. And as for questions, I had plenty. Beginning with how you turn off winning when you want it so bad and how come nobody seemed to have an answer for
that
? I stared at the bag. “No questions,” I said.

“Well, then, off you go.”

Phil backed out of the patch real easy. Nana’d calmed down and was grinning like a true blue-ribbon champion, Richard and Dad waved good-bye as the truck rolled down the driveway. I didn’t have the heart to tell Max that a pumpkin was not forever, tucked the Ziploc bag under his blanket, and settled in for the ride to town.