The Pumpkin War Read online

  “Hi, Mommy,” I whispered.

  She sat up and squeezed my hand. Tears pooled in her eyes, and I saw how deep and big and strong and forever her love for me was.

  She reached over and brushed my hair from my face.

  “Is Grandpa going to die?”

  She didn’t answer right away.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Before I knew it, my chest was heaving with sobs. Mom climbed into the bed with me and wrapped her arms around me. Snot was spewing out of my nose. I couldn’t keep up with it, so Mom just kept handing me tissues until the room was quiet again.

  We lay side by side for a long time, with my mom stroking my hair and her arms wrapped all the way around me like I was a baby.

  It felt good.

  “I could’ve died,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “But you didn’t.”

  “How did they know to look for us?”

  “Sam called the coast guard.”

  “Sam?”

  “He saw you headed down to the dock. When the weather changed, he got worried.”

  I started to cry again. Mom just held me a little tighter. I knew she wouldn’t let me go until I was ready.

  * * *

  I got to go home the next day. The doctors told me a hundred times that I was “one lucky girl.”

  Grandpa wasn’t as lucky as me, because he had to stay in the hospital a little longer. But the good news was that the doctors said his heart had finally remembered how to beat the right way without being hooked up to machines.

  Kids weren’t allowed in the ICU unless they were patients, so Marylee and I didn’t get to visit him. While Grandpa was in the hospital, my dad turned the pantry off the kitchen into a tiny bedroom. It was cozy, with bright yellow paint and a window overlooking the meadow.

  Five days after I got home, the doctors said Grandpa could come home. Mom left early to go to the hospital to get him because Dad had to fish.

  Dad didn’t want me to go out on the water with him, so I spent the morning in my patch. My pumpkins weren’t doing very well. They got drenched during the storm and probably sucked up too much water. And I lost two of my biggest contenders when their stems tore away from the vines.

  That meant certain death.

  It was all my fault.

  I hadn’t positioned the pumpkins correctly. And I had two badly sunburned pumpkins. Their sunshades had blown off during the night because I hadn’t tied them down properly. I was just waiting for the cracks to show up. I’d gone from seven contenders to three. After almost a hundred days of growing, the odds were suddenly turning against me. Not great timing, since the growth cycle slowed down as the days got shorter and the nights got longer at the end of summer.

  After I finished checking my vines for any sneak attacks, I sat by the edge of the garden and waited for Mom and Grandpa. Across the meadow, Sam was sprawled in the hammock he’d tied up between two pine trees, his nose in a book. Probably about Einstein.

  When I saw Mom’s car turn onto our road, I hopped up and ran down the hill. By the time her wheels crunched to a stop in the gravel by the house, Marylee and I were standing on the porch next to Grandma, waving our homemade Irish flags.

  It was Grandma’s idea. We spent the night before cutting and sewing together strips of orange, white, and green cloth.

  Just as Mom pulled to a stop, Dad’s truck came chugging up the drive right behind hers. He’d been fishing all morning, because the trout were running.

  Marylee rushed over to the car, and Grandma followed with Joey in her arms, but I held back. As Mom helped Grandpa out of the car, Dad climbed out of his truck. Grandpa looked so pale and skinny, you could practically see right through him. He hugged Marylee.

  When his eyes found mine, I started to cry. I really hoped I wasn’t turning into a giant crybaby.

  Using a new wooden cane, Grandpa walked over to me, carefully planting each foot. When he reached me, he slowly leaned over so we were eye to eye.

  “I’m—I’m glad you didn’t die,” I sputtered.

  “Me too,” Grandpa said.

  I saw my dad shove his hands deep into his pockets.

  “Daddy made you a room,” Marylee said as she walked over to Grandpa. “You’re lucky because it’s the room closest to the cookie jar in the kitchen.”

  Grandpa looked at Dad. “Did he, now?”

  Dad shrugged. “Been plannin’ on it since the girls were babies.”

  “Come in,” Mom said.

  Dad turned and walked toward the door. “Are you coming?” he asked. Then he disappeared inside.

  “That’s good enough for now, don’t you think?” Mom said. Grandpa looked at her and sighed, nodding.

  As she led Grandpa inside, a flash of movement caught my eye. It was Sam, watering his garden.

  We stared at each other across the meadow.

  Until he turned away.

  I took a deep breath. I knew I had to talk to him.

  My heart was pounding as I slowly trudged up the hill. By the time I reached the top, Sam had finished watering and was sitting at his picnic table, poring over a pile of dog-eared science magazines next to a stack of Einstein books.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He didn’t look up.

  “What’re you reading?” I asked.

  He stared down at the page so long that I wondered if he was going to talk at all.

  “I just found out that the big bang only created hydrogen and helium,” he said.

  “And?” I said.

  “You can’t make a world from just two elements.”

  “I’m made of six elements, right?”

  “Well, ninety-nine percent of you is made up of six elements. One percent of you is made of potassium, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, and sulfur.”

  “So where did the other elements come from?” I asked.

  “Supernovas. They’re like element factories.”

  From Ms. Bagshaw, I knew that a supernova was an exploding star.

  “Does that mean we’re all made of star dust?”

  “Exactly.”

  The words we were saying reminded me of the old days, except they didn’t sound playful anymore. He looked over, and our eyes met.

  For as long as I could remember, Sam Harrington had one look that was just for me. He even had it when I was being mean to him.

  That look was gone.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  Why was I there?

  There it was again.

  That trickle of agajiwin.

  Shame.

  I looked away. My eyes landed on the stack of Einstein books. “Have you figured out the stumper?”

  He shrugged.

  “I haven’t even started the assignment,” I said.

  “Do you want to borrow one of my Einstein books?” he finally asked.

  “Okay.”

  He grabbed one from the middle of the pile and handed it to me.

  The silence stretched out longer and longer, but our eyes held.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Not for the book,” I said. “For saving my life.”

  “I knew what you meant,” he said.

  When August gave way to September, the air was thick and muggy, which made the hot days seem even hotter. Time moved in slow motion, weighed down by the weather. When my dad started ranting about the threat of global warming, it was hard to listen, because I was usually busy avoiding dive-bombing mosquitoes trying to suck my blood.

  Luckily, Mother Nature was on my side. After more than a hundred days of growing, my last three contenders were coming up on a thousand pounds each. But unlike the year before, I didn’t hover over my pumpkins. I watered
them and threw on some liquid fertilizer, but not much else.

  Cami and Turtles would come to see me, but I’d send them away. Ever since I’d almost died out on the lake, I hadn’t been in the mood for company. More and more, they’d just cut across the meadow and help Sam weed and water his patch, while I stuck close to home.

  My world got very small.

  Sometimes I’d lie in the hammock for hours and just watch the clouds drift by, occasionally cracking open the Einstein book I got from Sam. Now that the summer was almost over, I figured I’d better get the homework done.

  So I started reading, trying to figure out what he was doing the day he died.

  Einstein said if you want to know anything about anything, you have to learn everything about everything.

  Like that’s even possible.

  But since he was the most famous scientist in the world and I wasn’t, I kept reading.

  I read about Euclid, the father of geometry, and Galileo, the father of science, and Isaac Newton, the father of physics.

  What’s with all the fathers? Aren’t there any mothers of science?

  Meanwhile, all Grandpa wanted was words. He ate like a bird, but he gobbled up words. And not just any words. Poems. And only poems written by some Irish guy named Yeats. I said I’d read to him. Which turned out to be a bad idea because ol’ Willy B. Yeats wrote more than four hundred poems.

  And I read all of them. More than once.

  I read to Grandpa every morning and every afternoon, and after a while he suddenly started saying the words along with me and I realized he knew them all by heart.

  “If you already know all the words, why am I reading them to you?”

  “I like hearing your voice,” he said. “And words feed the soul just as eggs and toast feed the body.”

  “I’ll stick with eggs and toast,” I said.

  Speaking of food, all of a sudden Dad started cooking up a big Irish feast every night. Colcannon was my favorite, even though when he first told me what was in it, I said, “I’m not eating parsnips and cabbage and leeks and parsley all squished together with mushy, boiled potatoes.”

  Dad just smiled and said, “You’ll be eatin’ your words and my food soon enough.”

  He whipped it up without a recipe like he’d been making it his whole life, and forced me to try it. I couldn’t shovel it into my mouth fast enough. Dad even cooked meat because he knew what Grandpa liked to eat. He made a bunch of recipes I’d never heard of, like shepherd’s pie, and corned beef and cabbage, and Guinness pie. Marylee wouldn’t eat any of it, but she didn’t make a fuss when everyone else did. One day, Dad made blood pudding for breakfast. It looked like the batter for red velvet cupcakes. When he said it had real animal blood in it, Marylee and I almost gagged.

  Grandpa loved Dad’s cooking so much he began eating more like a pig. Pretty soon he was up and walking, without his cane. At first, he could barely make it to the picnic table by the barn. He’d hook his arm through mine and shuffle along, walking a little farther every day.

  Grandma helped, too. She’d show up after work with some special herbal concoction for him. When Grandpa had a little cough, she made him a mint poultice for his chest. When his fever came back, she made him black willow tea. When the gash on his forehead was slow to heal, she mixed witch hazel and water together and dabbed it on the cut.

  September couldn’t decide if it wanted to be wet and rainy or hot and sticky. Either way, the pink slowly drifted back into Grandpa’s cheeks.

  Just days before the race, I crawled out of bed before the sun was up and headed downstairs. I wanted to take a shower, but if I turned on the water, our clanky pipes would wake everyone up, so I decided to take one outside. Everyone was still sound asleep, so I grabbed a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and pulled them on as I tiptoed down the hallway.

  I peeked into Joey’s room. I thought he was asleep, until I saw his fat little baby arm through the slats of his crib prison, jerking this way and that like he was conducting his own private orchestra.

  When I peered into his crib, his eyes met mine and he smiled at me. It wasn’t gas, and it wasn’t a muscle twitch, and it wasn’t teething pain, because he didn’t have any teeth.

  It was a real smile. Just for me.

  When he cooed, he sounded like a white-throated sparrow, with four little silky warbles. I leaned over the crib and picked him up. I waited. He just kept smiling, so I carried him downstairs.

  In the kitchen, I made him a bottle. I decided not to warm it up in the microwave, because I didn’t want to make it too hot and burn his mouth. I held it while he sucked away, like a hungry little guppy. When I told him about the pumpkin race, he hung on my every word, his big hazel eyes tracking my every move. When he was finished, I carried him outside.

  We walked up the hill and around the barn, where I laid Joey on the ground near the shower, wrapped in my towel. He lay on his back and kicked his legs like he was riding a bicycle, while I ripped off my nightgown and jumped under the nozzle. I turned the rusty knob, and a cold blast of water hit my body and made me shiver. I scrubbed myself with a stubby piece of soap that had a tiny bit of life left in it. Pretty soon, I smelled like jasmine.

  When I cranked off the water, I realized I didn’t have a towel, since I’d wrapped it around Joey. Usually there was a pile of faded towels in an old milk bucket by the shower, but today it was empty. I scooped him up in the towel and walked across the yard, covered in nothing but goose bumps, just as the sun peeked up over the lake.

  All of a sudden, I stopped, stark naked under the basswood tree.

  Sam once told me that human beings are stuffed with about thirty-seven trillion cells, and every cell contains about a hundred trillion atoms. And each atom contains electrons. And at that second, I swear I could feel them all spinning wildly, full of life.

  My breath sounded loud in my ears, and I could hear my heart pounding. I waited and watched and listened.

  I heard the trill of two purple martins before I spotted them high above my head, darting between the branches of our basswood tree.

  I smelled the sweet scent of the black-eyed Susans, the clingy sweetness of the daylily, and the rich odor of the chicory that lined the edge of my pumpkin patch.

  Everywhere I looked, there were swirls of color: the red of the scarlet bergamot, the purple of the bellflower, the orange of the blanket flower, the white of the crowfoot.

  I looked around at the only world I’d ever known, a world I knew like the back of my hand, and I felt like I was seeing it for the first time.

  How did all this happen?

  Sam said Einstein first got interested in science when his dad gave him a compass.

  His world was never the same.

  Because Einstein couldn’t figure out what made the compass needle move. That’s when he realized there must be two worlds.

  There was the world he could see and the world he couldn’t see. In the world he couldn’t see, magical and mysterious things were happening that made the world he could see what it was. Einstein wanted to know how that invisible world worked.

  I wondered if it was like that with people.

  Could friendships be mysterious, too?

  Take Sam and me.

  There was the part I could see, but there must be a part I couldn’t see. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have stayed mad so long.

  I wanted to figure that part out.

  That’s when I remembered I was standing naked in the middle of the backyard, and I ran back inside.

  It was a perfect day for the annual Madeline Island Pumpkin Race. Bright and cold and clear, with warm sunshine bathing my world from ninety-two million miles away.

  When I woke up that morning, Marylee was perched on the top of the ladder, staring at me.

  “You’re gonna win,” she said, all excite
d. “I can feel it.”

  Last year, I’d counted down the days and minutes and seconds until I’d heard the crack of the starter pistol.

  This year, I just wanted to get it over with.

  I was surprised to find Cami and Turtles waiting on the back porch, since they’d been hanging out with Sam. Cami must’ve read my mind, because she winked at me and said, “You ready?”

  I nodded.

  She made friendship look so easy.

  Outside, the grass glistened with silvery slivers of dew in the morning light. When we reached my patch, I walked over to my three pumpkins. They were all just under a thousand pounds. And none of them were too long or too round or too flattened out from lying on the ground. Which one should I choose? As I examined them, I caught a glimpse of Sam up the hill doing the same thing.

  After nearly four months of battling Mother Nature, it was time to cut the vine and get my pumpkin ready. Cami and Turtles and Marylee watched solemnly as I inspected each pumpkin, walking around them, running my hand over the tough orange skin and the long vertical ribs. I tapped the first one. Then the second. Then the third. I held my cheek against each one as I tapped, listening for a solid, hollow sound. You don’t want to race a soggy pumpkin.

  I made my choice. I picked the biggest one, because the really big ones float better and capsize less.

  I slowly leaned over and cut the thick, twisty vine of my pumpkin.

  We were ready to gut it.

  I looked toward the house and saw Dad and Grandpa headed toward us. They had the same easy stride. They walked fast, but they didn’t hurry. Dad disappeared into the barn to grab his electric saw.

  “You ready?” Dad said, walking up. His eyes were still crinkly with sleep.

  Holding on to a bucking saw to hack off the top of a giant pumpkin was a dangerous job, which was why it was the one exception to the “do it yourself” rule. Except, Dad still wanted me to do it, so he stuck close by to make sure that the electric saw didn’t get the better of me.

  First, he gave me a Sharpie pen. I drew a black line around the pumpkin, closer to the stem than the middle, like you would with a jack-o’-lantern for Halloween, just big enough for a kid to slip into. Then Dad made me put on plastic goggles that were so scratched up, it was like someone smeared Vaseline all over them.