The Pumpkin War Read online

My trick for catching walleye is to throw my line out three times, pull it in slowly to wake the fish up and let them know I’m there, and then count to ten and throw it out a fourth time with a really fast retrieve. That means you wind up your line as fast as you can so that the walleye has to fight for his dinner.

  Before he knows what’s hit him, he’s in your net, ready for gutting.

  Pretty soon, I had seven nice-sized walleyes scooped up in my net.

  Sam snagged my attention when he said, “Einstein said that if you could travel faster than the speed of light, you could go back in time.”

  If I could go back in time, I’d change what happened between Sam and me on the lake last summer. I’d win and he’d lose, and everything could go back to the way it was.

  I did the math to see what my chances were.

  According to Ms. Bagshaw, the speed of light is 186,282 miles per second, and the fastest a real person has ever traveled is about 7 miles per second, and that was on a spaceship returning from the moon.

  So I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be going back in time.

  Which meant no matter how hard Sam tried, our friendship was as dead as the driftwood we used to pile up for bonfires down by the lake.

  Marylee wanted to hunt for gold on our way back, so I made a quick stop at her favorite beach, where you can scoop up a handful of sand and find tiny flecks of garnet and topaz and gold. The gold is just plain old mica, but I didn’t tell Marylee that.

  When we got back to the dock, Sam’s boat was tied up in front of Grandma’s diner. As I came through the door, I saw Grandma counting out crisp dollar bills. Sam’s bucket of trout was on the counter.

  “Grandma, what are you doing?”

  “Buying some fish.”

  “You said you wanted walleye.” I walked up, my bucket hitting against my leg with each step.

  “Did I?” she said, all innocent.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You did. You said walleye. Not trout. Those are trout.”

  “I think your grandma knows the difference between a walleye and a trout,” Sam said pleasantly.

  “I’m not talking to you,” I said.

  “Technically speaking”—Sam tilted his head—“telling me you’re not talking to me is talking to me.”

  I ignored him. “You’re my grandma, not his,” I said, glaring at her. “I get your fish for the pierogi.”

  “I told you walleye,” Grandma said. “I told Sam trout. You know what they say: variety is the spice of life.”

  Sam stuck his hands into his pockets and looked down at his shoes, all fake humble. I saw the edges of his lips curl up.

  I banged my bucket onto the counter, then slammed the screen door on my way out.

  * * *

  When Marylee and I got home, no one was awake, even though the sun had been up for hours. Before Joey came, my dad would have been grating zucchini for zucchini pancakes and squeezing oranges for fresh orange juice while he sang off-key.

  At least Joey wasn’t crying.

  Marylee flopped down on the living room couch while I jerked open the fridge and peered inside. I saw watery cottage cheese, two kinds of wrinkly sour pickles, three kinds of vinegar, slimy-looking moldy cheese, stale bread, and apples that were so bruised, they looked like they’d been in a fight.

  That’s when I heard footsteps padding down the stairs.

  “Morning, honey,” Dad said as he nestled Joey into his little sling seat on top of the kitchen table. “Can you give Joey his bottle?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Thanks, sweetie.” He disappeared back up the stairs.

  I looked at Joey. He stared back at me.

  I filled his bottle, then propped it up on his chest with a dish towel. He sucked noisily.

  I dug deeper into the fridge, but I didn’t find any hidden bonemeal. Just some sad-looking grapes that were well on their way to becoming raisins.

  I looked over at Joey. His face was turning red and splotchy.

  I slammed the fridge shut and ran to him. He smacked the bottle away with a jerk of his hand, and it skidded across the floor, leaving a milk trail on the linoleum.

  He looked like he was holding his breath. His face was getting even redder.

  “Dad? DAD!”

  Marylee popped off the couch. She took one look at Joey and turned and pounded up the stairs.

  “DAAADYYYYY! JOEY’S CHOKING!” she yelled.

  I could feel my throat getting all tight, like when you’re about to cry. Just as I leaned in to pick him up, a ribbon of slimy, warm milk shot out of Joey’s mouth.

  My face stopped it.

  I wiped my eyes and rushed for the sink, then splashed cold water onto my face. I dried off with a dish towel that smelled like an old sponge, and I looked at Joey. Now that he’d cured his indigestion, he was as happy as could be.

  “DAD!” I yelled.

  “What!”

  “Joey threw up!”

  “Well, clean it up!”

  I looked at what was dripping down the side of the table.

  “THAT’S YOUR JOB!” But I grabbed a wad of paper towels and wiped up the milk.

  “I’ll be right there!” Dad yelled.

  As soon as he came down the stairs, I threw the soggy paper towels into the trash and said, “I’m outta here.”

  “Where’re you going?” Marylee said, her voice rising in a whine. “I want to come with you!”

  “No, you don’t.” I headed for the door.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I’m going to help Cami with her chores.” Marylee liked cleaning out llama stalls even less than she liked being left behind. She puckered up her lips, twisting them to one side, thinking. “Have fun,” she said.

  I slipped out the back door and took off running. I slid under the fence at the edge of our farm, scuttling on my elbows. Then I popped up and darted through drifts of milkweed, which were almost as tall as me, before running across the hot blacktop road that separated our farms.

  I found Cami and Turtles in their barn, mucking out the llama stalls.

  “Didn’t we just do this?” I said, reaching for my shovel, which was leaning against the wall exactly where I’d left it two days earlier.

  “News flash,” Cami said. “Llamas eat a prodigious amount, which leads to a colossal amount of waste.”

  We shoveled pile after steaming pile of stinky llama “waste” into our rickety wheelbarrow. When we had a mountain of you-know-what, we wrangled the wheelbarrow out of the barn and headed up the hill. The front wheel was almost flat, so it was slow going up the long, gravelly driveway, across the blacktop, and over the bumpy snake of a trail zigzagging through the meadow. Turtles trailed behind us, feeding bits of Oreo cookies to Hector. She’d take a bite, then give him a bite.

  We finally made it up to my pumpkin patch. We pulled on our work gloves, stiff and caked with mud, and spread the llama poop around each seedling. I tried not to breathe too deeply, because what comes out of the rear end of a llama doesn’t smell like perfume.

  As soon as we finished, Cami and Turtles headed home while I jogged over to the bee yard. As I rounded the side of the barn, I saw Sam walking down the hill, his hands stuffed in his pockets. This time, he didn’t vault over the fence. He just slid between the slats, then jogged over, until we were face to face.

  “I’m sorry about the fish,” he said. “Your grandma asked me to bring her some. I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

  He sounded like he meant it. But how could I trust him?

  We turned at the same time, to stare out over the water.

  “Are you going to harvest the honey today?” Sam asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I could help you pull out the frames.”

  Sam knew I could barely lift the fram
es when they were dripping with honey.

  “I don’t need your help.”

  “I know,” he said. “Just trying to be a good neighbor.”

  “You’d be working for free, because I’m not sharing the money.”

  “Deal.”

  Sam couldn’t pull on his bee helmet fast enough.

  He grabbed the smoker from the side of the barn. It looked like a foot-tall stainless-steel thermos with a pointy tin hat. He stuffed it with old newspaper while I grabbed the matches. It took a few tries before I could get one lit and stick it into the smoker.

  A flicker of flame spread to the crumpled newspaper. Sam pumped the miniature bellows bolted to the side of the smoker, which shot air in and fed the fire.

  I slipped on my bee helmet and lifted the tops off the first two hives.

  In one box, I spotted a worker bee doing a wild jig, wagging her rear end this way and that, to let all the other worker bees know exactly where the best nectar was.

  Sam pumped the bellows into both hives, wafting smoke over the dancing bees. If you shoot smoke into a hive, bees fall into a trance and forget how to use their stingers. Like magic, the bees stopped moving.

  I hated to think how upset my bees would feel when they woke up and realized all their liquid gold had been stolen.

  “Did you know the ancient Egyptians believed your soul flew into a bee when you died?” he said.

  “Going from a human being to a bee doesn’t sound like an upgrade,” I said.

  Sam was curious about everything. And he loved sharing what he learned. Nearly every day, he’d bring me a piece of the world, wrapped up in a random fact.

  I mean, he used to. In the old days.

  We pulled on rubber gloves and started yanking the wooden screens out of the hive boxes, each one dripping with bees. I gently brushed fat clumps of buzzing bees back into the hive, leaving the comb exposed, fat and thick with honey.

  We pulled out the frames from the first two hives and lugged them to the barn. Inside, we sliced open the combs and stuck the frames into the extractor, which is like a giant salad spinner. Once we got the frames lined up like the spokes of a wheel, I flipped the switch. The metal drum started spinning faster and faster and faster.

  While we watched tiny rivers of honey run down the sides of the extractor into the big tub below, Sam launched into a whole speech about the meaning of E = mc2, Einstein’s most famous equation. He explained that E stands for “energy” and m stands for “mass” and c stands for the speed of light, and how Einstein figured out that mass has energy, and energy contains mass, so they’re kind of the same thing. And when mass travels superfast, it creates a lot of energy.

  Whatever.

  But I couldn’t help listening.

  After we gathered the honey, I flipped off the spinner and pulled out the frames. Sam started filling recycled jam jars with honey from the catch basin. After I washed down the frames, I headed outside to put them back before we grabbed more frames from the other hives.

  Out in the bright sun, the air was thick with bees.

  “SAM!”

  Sam came running out of the barn. He knew instantly what was happening. The rich smell of fresh honey clinging to a gentle breeze was an invitation to every bee on Madeline Island to come to a wild bee party. While the party might be wild, it’s not fun, because the host hive will fight to the death to protect their honey. And once bees start robbing a hive, it can take days for everything to settle down.

  Unless we could stop it.

  We slapped on the hive covers while a dark swarm of bees swirled above our heads.

  “This is your fault!” I yelled. “You didn’t put the tops back on!”

  “Neither did you!”

  “When am I going to get it through my head that bad things happen when you’re around?”

  Even though the air was alive with buzzing bees, Sam ripped off his bee helmet and threw it onto the ground.

  Our eyes locked.

  I saw two dark pools of anger staring at me.

  I turned away and watched the guard bees fighting at the entrance of the two hives we’d opened, trying to save their food. As the invaders shot out of the hive, they dipped in the air, their bodies fat and heavy with stolen honey.

  I watched as they stole more and more of my liquid gold.

  What did Sam have to be angry about?

  He’s the one who ruined our friendship.

  I had half as much honey as last year, but it still took Cami, Turtles, Marylee, and me all morning to get it into jars the next day.

  We had to strain the honey through a big metal sieve that kept getting clogged with bits of honeycomb. After the honey made it through the sieve, we warmed it up in a homemade hot box so it could squish through cloth strainers I’d gotten at the hardware store. Before we bottled the honey, we scraped foam off the top, which dissolves in your mouth like cotton candy and tastes like water.

  Later that afternoon, we headed for the lake, the honey jars settled into cardboard boxes lined with newspaper.

  When we got to the dock, I went slowly over the old, warped boards so my jars wouldn’t break. I came to a stop in front of Biscuits & Bass.

  Grandma had already set up my so-called honey stand, a rickety old table with one leg shorter than the other three, and millions of dried-up fish scales stuck to the top like a shiny varnish.

  Each honey jar was wrapped in brown burlap. We used homemade bee stickers on the lids for labels, and Marylee colored in all the wings. As a finishing touch, Marylee tied a purple ribbon around each jar, since the Wisconsin state flower is the wood violet and she wanted my honey sales to take advantage of our Wisconsin state pride. I taped a handwritten sign onto the table so that the wind wouldn’t steal it: HONEY $5.

  That’s when Grandma poked her head out of the diner window.

  “Hi, sweetie,” she said, smiling.

  “Are you making faworki?” I asked. Faworki is the Polish name for the crisp cake rings that look like bows you could wear in your hair.

  “That’s on my list. Where’s Sam? You always sell the honey together.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “But it was his idea in the first place,” she said.

  “No, it wasn’t.” Even as the words shot out of my mouth, I knew they were a lie.

  Grandma looked long and hard at me while Cami fidgeted and Turtles melted away to the end of the dock.

  “From the day you were born, I have felt only minawaanigwad,” she said.

  I knew minawaanigwad meant “happiness,” but she didn’t sound happy.

  “Today, I feel the agajiwin you should feel.”

  A funny feeling started in the middle of my chest, right by my heart.

  It was shame.

  Agajiwin.

  But I had nothing to be ashamed of. Sam was the one who should have been ashamed, not me.

  Grandma’s words were still hanging in the air between us when Mayor Philby walked up.

  “Hello, Ziggie,” he said to Grandma, with a big smile above his foot-long white beard. I hardly ever saw him smile, which was a good thing, because his teeth reminded me of little yellow Chiclets.

  “John,” she said flatly. Mayor Philby had a crush on her, and she didn’t want him to get his hopes up.

  “You hear about that high school kid down in Milwaukee who got in trouble for launching a porta-potty a hundred feet up in the air with sugar rockets?”

  I knew about the flying porta-potty. Everyone in Wisconsin knew about it. It had landed on the roof of the local police station. I didn’t want to think about what happens when a porta-potty lands on your roof.

  “How’re your pumpkins coming, Billie?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Course, we’re barely into July,�
� he said. “A lot can go wrong between now and race day. Mr. Jenkins from up on the other side of the island told me a bunch of hungry moles and nasty mites spent the weekend snacking on his pumpkin vines. Lost half his crop.”

  My hand froze, and I stopped straightening the rows of honey jars.

  I’d been so busy getting my honey ready to sell, I hadn’t checked on my pumpkins. Mother Nature was famous for letting you think everything was right with the world, then bam! A bunch of moles and mites turned your garden into their playground.

  I didn’t want to get knocked out of the race before it had even begun.

  * * *

  Cami, Turtles, Marylee, and I were panting by the time we rounded the barn and zipped through the bee yard to my pumpkin patch.

  From a distance, everything looked good. But you didn’t know for sure until you got down in the dirt and looked closely.

  I dropped to my knees and started flipping over leaves, looking for eggs. Cami, Marylee, and Turtles did the same thing a few rows over.

  “You see any?” I asked.

  “Not a one,” Turtles said, checking the longest runner.

  “We got lucky,” Cami said.

  “This time,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief.

  After checking for the squash bugs, we spent an hour putting sunshades over my fastest growers.

  We were starving by the time we were done. When we went inside, Dad was pulling homemade pizzas out of the oven. We scrambled to the sink and washed our hands, then jammed in around the table. Turtles picked off a glob of cheese for Hector. Then she ate her pizza rolled up like a burrito, which she claimed was how Italian people ate pizza. She’s never been to Italy, so I don’t know how she would know that. While we ate, my dad made German potato salad for the picnic before the fireworks.

  “Why are you making German potato salad when you’re Irish?” I asked, reaching for another piece of pizza.

  “The Irish know how to brew beer, but the Germans know how to make potato salad that doesn’t taste like potatoes,” he said.

  “If you don’t want potato salad to taste like potato salad, why make it in the first place? Why not skip the potato salad and just make chocolate chip cookies that taste like chocolate chip cookies?”