Pumpkin growing wasn’t something that Nana knew much about, but she learned it real quick when I showed an interest. Like Mother, Nana could make anything grow, and she passed that on to me. Every flower that could root in Iowa soil was in her front yard. Come midspring people started driving by Nana’s house just to get a look at that garden. She had tulips, daffodils, and big, stocky snapdragons; a huge bed of bloodroots, marsh marigolds, roses, petunias, and lilies of the valley growing three deep along her stone path just waiting for elves to give them a shake. One year a whole busload of Japanese students on their way to Des Moines stopped and were squatting on the lawn, taking pictures. Nana made them old-fashioned limeade and served it on the porch in plastic cups.
My father could make anything die just from passing by it. He didn’t have a sensitive grower’s soul, and the plants knew. I’ve seen petunias give up when they saw Dad coming. So growing pumpkins was a good bet for me living with a man like that. I wouldn’t think of laying in chervil or kale or sugar snap peas, because Dad’s vibes would dry them right up. I had wildflowers that a crazed hog couldn’t kill in big clumps around the house and a bumper crop of New Jersey tomatoes. When Dad watered the lawn I just let natural selection take over. Some tomatoes croaked, and some got tough. The true test of any vegetable is how it fares in the face of adversity.
I wondered how Cyril’s pumpkin got so orange living as it did in that environment. I began to think that Dad’s vibrations were worse than I’d figured. Clearly, Max was at risk. It was going to take a lot of ice cream to keep Dad mellow.
Richard said to talk to Mr. Greenpeace, Rock River High’s most sensitive teacher, who contemplated on weekends and taught beginning philosophy and track. He had an album of gentle sound effects like waterfalls and ocean waves that could reprogram Dad’s vibes. Mr. Greenpeace didn’t give a rip about protocol, so everyone took his classes, even track, and learned to become “one with the road.” He got tenure before he became sensitive, he often said, and everyone was glad about that, except the other teachers, the principal, and the members of the School Board.
He let me borrow the album because he said he’d never seen anyone become as “one with the road” as me. Richard became one with his bat, glove, and ball and didn’t care much about what was below. Being a grower, I understood the ground and its virtues. I carried the album home, dimmed the lights, threw coconut, sugar, vanilla, and heavy cream into the ice cream maker, shoved a chicken with rosemary and lemon in the oven, and waited for my father.
He was boiling when he came home, and I could feel Max shudder in response. I had read another article in Seventeen about parental tension and was prepared for any outburst. I found the “Waterfall/Soft” portion on the record, pointed the speakers in Dad’s direction, and let ’er rip.
“Glad to see you, Dad,” I cooed. “Welcome home.” The article said not to ask too many questions or make any demands upon a parent’s entrance. Really throw him.
“Well,” he grumbled, surprised, “you’re the first person today who’s been glad to see me.”
“Oh?” I said. This is the open invitation to talk, but it is in the parent’s court. Open, caring, not pushy.
He slumped in his chair away from the speakers, which I now repositioned with my foot. “It was like a bad dream,” he groused. “Frederika double-scheduled me for the second time this month. I had to cancel with Iowa Federal, and they were furious, of course.”
“Of course…” I agreed, building camaraderie.
“You would think that after all these years, she would have learned!” He rose and walked to the window, glaring out at nothing, but Max was in his view and growing paler. Bad, bad vibes. I steered him back to his chair as “Waterfall/Soft” gave way to “Waves II.”
“I have this sudden impulse,” he muttered, “to get near water, Ellie…I—”
“Just relax, Dad,” I cooed, arranging him in his plaid BarcaLounger, putty in my hands.
“I am so terribly relaxed, Ellie,” he whispered. “I just can’t tell you.”
Now, I could have gotten a raise in allowance from him just then, a car, my own MasterCard, but I had Max to consider. Perhaps a small cash settlement, I thought…but no! Max was being infested with conflict and hostility. I would not sell out.
“You asked him for nothing?” Richard shrieked the next day, incredulous. “Not even five bucks?”
“I felt that would have been unethical,” I explained.
“You trick your father into relaxing and you’re talking about ethics?”
“I didn’t trick him, Richard. I reprogrammed his environment.”
“But he could have popped for something!” Richard railed. “I mean, it sounds like you really had him, Ellie. Movie tickets…jeez, I don’t know….” He examined his old fielder’s mitt, scowling. “A new glove…”
“I don’t play baseball, Richard.”
“Then it wouldn’t have been an unethical request, you know?”
As a partial baseball star, Richard approached life differently than us mere mortals. He was always looking for ways to make the play. Richard felt if three men were in the outfield the smartest one would make the play even if it meant running into another’s territory and knocking him down. This did not bring Richard, the center fielder, favor with Howie Bucks or Farley Raker, the left and right fielders, but the fans loved it, and Mr. Soboleski, the coach, smacked Richard hard on the back like coaches do and shouted, “Way to go, Awesome Ace!” Richard felt every team needed a star and it might as well be him.
We stopped at Nana’s after school because I was out of compost mixture for Max and I wanted to talk to her about Cyril’s pumpkin. Nana was a multiple blue-ribbon winner at various fairs and knew the pressure of competition.
I couldn’t spend much time because I had a five-hundred-word essay due tomorrow for Miss Moritz’s world history class on “Churchill’s Dilemma.” This was Miss Moritz’s first year of teaching and she was on a mission from God to fill our minds with enthusiasm for world events. Churchill faced many dilemmas, she cried passionately. Who could name some? We came up with Hitler, who was enough dilemma for anyone. Burma, Malaya. Miss Moritz scrunched up her face and said that was the point of the exercise. The list went on and on. Pick the dilemma we found most intriguing. I decided to go for the long shot and outlined a sensitive discussion of Churchill’s weight problem that I felt deserved five hundred words and my time.
This was risky, since Miss Moritz was quite thin and possibly unable to identify with the dilemma of obesity as it applied to World War II. But weight was my forte, and thinking about Hitler all night would have soaked the house in bad vibes. I had enough problems.
Nana made limeade and put out her soft fudge cookies. The three of us sat outside stuffing ourselves and swatting bugs. From Nana’s back porch you could look out past a large vegetable garden to the fields and a painted fence that seemed to end at the sky. Being a farmer, she kept one eye on the land where her heart was, even if she was talking to you real serious. Nana’s place always gave me hope because I knew I was on good soil that hadn’t failed. Dad started sneezing whenever he got close to the barn.
I could talk to Nana about anything, and I did now, fears rushing off my tongue about Cyril’s pumpkin, which was already as big as Cleveland and my rotten luck. Richard ate cookies and squished a bee in his glove as Nana rocked back and forth, full of her special wisdom.
“One of the saddest things in life,” Nana began, “is to take something that gives you joy and let it get ruined.” She poured more limeade and looked at me like she had a microscope.
“I’m not doing that, Nana. It’s Cyril Pool. He’s—”
Nana held up her hand and looked at me hard. “Ellie,” she said, “as long as you’re watching Cyril you’re going to miss the point—”
“But—”
“The point,” she continued, pointing to her heart, “starts here.”
“I know that, Nana.”
“Well, then you’ve got to act like it, that’s all.”
This was Nana’s favorite speech, and she had cut it down considerably since I was a child. I knew it from memory. It was about how true winning starts and ends in our heart. Blue ribbons come next—maybe, maybe not. I figured Cyril was a definite challenge to this rule, since his heart was full of rot and he had all those first-place sashes.
“But what about Cyril, Nana? He’s going to win again and—”
“Maybe,” said Nana, watching the sky. “Maybe not.” She leaned back in her old wicker rocker and brushed a ladybug off her housedress. I knew what she was thinking, and she was right as usual. She handed me two bags of compost mixture.
Richard had finished the fudge cookies and was brushing the crumbs off his glove. “Guess we’d better go,” I said, rising. “I’ve got a squash to tend.”
“I guess you’d better,” Nana echoed, and hugged me so hard that her whole body shook. Whatever Nana did she did with her whole self.
Richard went home to eat with his mother. He figured she needed company every so often, and I was fixing diet salad, which he said could really mess up his game. Dad was the keynote speaker at Sommerset Electric’s annual meeting and wouldn’t be home till late. Motivating electrical people, Dad groaned, always took time.
I dug around Max and patted Nana’s compost evenly around the roots. Pumpkins need well-drained, fertile soil, and I wasn’t taking any chances. Big vine types like Max were heavy feeders and drank lots of water. I poured the water slowly around him, waiting as it soaked down to the feeding roots two to three feet underground. That’s the secret to watering, and it separates the great growers from the hacks. Most people just dump the water on, since they’ve got better things to do than hang around and wait. My feeling is if you’ve got better things to do, you shouldn’t be growing pumpkins. It takes patience, that’s all. Grow cactuses if you don’t care, buy plastic plants and silk flowers. I watered carefully away from the foliage. Wet leaves can cause disease, and that’s all I needed. Max had been bug-free all summer, and I wasn’t about to get sloppy now.
I poured my secret booster solution into a steel dish and adjusted the wick I’d positioned in a slit in Max’s vine. There was still enough light to begin my second draft of “Churchill’s Dilemma,” which I aptly subtitled, “The Weight of World War II.” Max drank the solution happily. My stomach groaned from starvation. I wrote and rewrote, creating a Churchill few had considered. “Perhaps,” I penned in my final summation, “the greatness of Winston Churchill lay not only in his ability to bear the weight of much of World War II, but in his ability to bear his own considerable weight as well.”
Dad’s voice broke my creative cocoon. “Ellie!” he yelled. “Do you know what time it is?”
I didn’t, but guessed he would tell me.
“It’s ten o’clock, young woman, and you’re out here sitting with…vegetation.” He said “vegetation” like what he really meant was “lepers.”
And Winston Churchill, Dad. A highly motivated individual and world leader who only thought great thoughts and reached his full potential. My father stood at the screen door and held it open. There was no defying him. I sighed, gathered my work, and lumbered inside.
“I was doing my homework,” I said.
“With a vegetable in the dirt—”
“With an award-winning squash in the moonlight.”
Just once, could he try to see what I see? But I knew the answer: I saw Max; Dad saw pumpkin pie.
Dad let out a slow, sad sigh. I was determined to make contact and punched his arm playfully. “Did ya motivate ’em tonight, Dad? All those boring electrical people?”
Old Abe turned and managed a grin. I loved it when he smiled, because it healed his whole face. “Expect big things from Sommerset Electric in the months to come, Ellie.”
I nodded. “Like better electricity?”
“Unquestionably,” said Dad. “They bought sixty-seven success tapes and thirty-one books.”
“Ah,” I said. “And did they feed you at this thing?”
“Grilled ox. Well done.”
I groaned, sliced a hunk of my famous whole wheat Irish soda bread, and slathered it with plum preserves. He dug in as Max gleamed in the moonlight. I lit a candle on the kitchen table for peace, and wondered if motivational therapy worked on squashes.
I got a C minus on my “Churchill’s Dilemma” essay, which I thought was stingy, since it brought my grade average down, but it was typical of a sneaky, skinny person like Miss Moritz. She said: “Your writing is imaginative, Ellie. If you had picked a less unorthodox approach…” I felt if she’d picked an approach that students could relate to or been hired by another school none of this would have happened. Richard said new teachers couldn’t help themselves, having been filled with all that poop in college. It was up to each student to wait them out until their enthusiasm died.
It was outside Miss Moritz’s class that I first saw Wes, the new boy, and I felt like I’d been bonged in the head with a Crenshaw melon. He was tall, a plus since I was five-seven, not gorgeous, you understand, but okay-looking and not too thin. He had dark glasses and wavy black hair and a great laugh that seemed to start in his stomach and work its way up.
I knew a few things about him, too. He was a grower. Not just a grower, the president of the Agricultural Club at Gaithersville High before his father got promoted to national sales manager of Wycliffe Feed and Grain and transferred up here to the big city. And if you were a grower and knew the ropes like me, you knew that Gaithersville had a heavy Ag Club.
Wes grew sweet corn—a perfectly reasonable vegetable—not showy, but nice. Iowa, after all, was called “the land where the tall corn grows,” which got people’s hearts thumping if they were into corn and didn’t do much for anybody else. He’d grown a lot of it in Gaithersville and was going to plant some here in early spring. He was going to be a farmer and attend Texas A&M which was next to heaven. I knew all this because Grace McKenna was his cousin, and Grace never left anything out. Where Wes was concerned, I wanted to know everything.
First off, it’s important you know I am not boy-crazy. I don’t flirt and bat my eyes like Sharrell Upton and the rest of the squealing cheerleaders. Most of the boys I know, except Richard, who doesn’t count, don’t care about growing, and that’s where we part company. I’m not going to spend my time with a brain-dead male who doesn’t know the difference between a Big Max and a begonia.
Grace told me that Wes was brokenhearted about moving and having a hard time adjusting to Rock River’s fast Des Moines-area pace. He had a girlfriend back in Gaithersville (bad news) who he still saw on weekends (worse news), but Grace didn’t think it was exactly love. Anyway, it had been raining like a monster for the past five days, and getting to Gaithersville in this weather wasn’t worth it no matter who you had waiting down there. I had lost six of the seven pounds I gained from all that worry and butterscotch swirl ice cream, and had twenty-one more to go. Grace said Wes and I were perfect for each other. I was glad to hear that because this diet was getting to me.
Max, being a pumpkin, was not crazy about the rain, and if it didn’t stop soon I was going to have to take drastic action. Cyril had already covered his Atlantic Giant with reemay cloth, a light, gauzy blanket that kept bugs and frost off pumpkins. I always felt waiting longer than Cyril was wise, since the man was technically a sludge and didn’t know the first thing about making an informed decision.
How a pumpkin ever grew on its own is beyond me, because keeping one going is an everyday fight. Any soft place on the skin was the kiss of death in this weather. Absolute doom. I’ve seen giants that could have gone all the way just cave in, full of rot inside because their growers couldn’t read the weather and didn’t know when to fight back. I tapped Max’s skin and inspected his leaves and stem carefully for any signs of rot, beaming healthy, fat thoughts through his vine. He was clean and solid and I planned to keep him that way. He knew it, too
.
Richard heard Cyril had another woodchuck problem in his patch. Good news for me, especially if the woodchucks were eating Big Daddy. He was shooting them and cussing them at night, lighting flare guns, and making terrible threats. It was just like Cyril to climb into a tank to fight against woodchucks instead of just putting up a fence. If it wasn’t loud and in bad taste, Cyril wouldn’t try it. Nana said Cyril was blessed with good soil to make up for everything else God didn’t give him. Everybody wanted to beat Cyril real bad, but nobody wanted to as much as me.
Growers are driven by their insides and aren’t afraid of hard work. Mr. Warnock began the fine art of giant pumpkin growing back in 1900. The man had great vision and great vines. His 403-pounder from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair wasn’t beat until 1976. That’s the kind of competitor you want to go up against. He makes the whole process a clean challenge. It bugged me that Cyril turned competition into a hateful thing. Nana said it was because he had so much nastiness inside.
This rain was beginning to worry me, and I had a plastic covering ready to throw over Max if need be. Most growers had a bigger patch of land than me and could grow several giants at once, so losing one wasn’t so bad. Dad didn’t want a lot of land because he’d sold his soul when he left farming. Raising an only pumpkin took guts because you had no fallback position. I just put all my eggs in one basket and killed myself trying.
I was thankful Dad never managed to leave Rock River. He and Mother were going to live in California after they got married, but Grandpa fell off the barn roof fixing a hole and needed someone around to help. Dad stayed, but Nana said it was tough going: “Biggest mistake your grandpa ever made was insisting your father love farming.”
I looked at Max and knew he was feeling the barometric pressure. The rain kept coming, and that sky just sat there looking dark and mean. Another day of showers could make the difference between a blue ribbon and pie filling.